Of One Hundred Years

This Sunday we will celebrate the centennial of All Saints Parish, four to five generations of a people of faith who have gathered Sunday to Sunday at the corner of Government and Ann streets. The people of All Saints have experienced two world wars, economic depression, the invention of weapons of mass destruction, humankind's venture into space, the invention of computer technology, immunization, movies and television, civil rights reform, the advent of feminism, birth control, the poetry of Eliot, Dickinson, Hughes and Stevens, the prose of Faulkner, Steinbeck, O'Connor, Morrison and McCarthy, the art of Wyeth, Warhol and O'Keeffe, the music of Barber, Gershwin, Ellington and Bernstein, the plays of Williams, O'Neil and Miller, presidents...hurricanes and lynchings and jubilees and kings and queens and balls and despair and joy and life and death and many seasons...change and the naming of change...the making and remaking of our world....the universe expanding.

And what of the next one hundred years? The effects of global warming, over population, new wars and rumors of wars, the decline and fall of nations, perhaps our own, new birth, and our own very deaths....the continued rubric of change and transformation...the continued making and remaking of the created order, which is no order at all but the blossoming forth of possibility and potential bearing the mystery of being on ahead...the potential of future borne in the present and past, hope its talisman....birth pangs and surprise and regret and joy...It shall be much the same and so utterly different.

What is our place in this grand procession of being? We are to point the way as best we see it; we are to name the truth of the matter as best we apprehend it; we are to enact the light of goodness that sets right exponentially this process of becoming. We are the people who have chosen and choose conscience; we are they who point to the way; the way of mercy and compassion and justice and peace: alchemical rudiments of transforming the leaden dispossession of our world into golden dignity, the commonweal of grace ordained in the beginning... And one more thing: We are to praise the God who inhabits this marvelous becoming...we are to sing the song of creation in both minor and major key; we are to prayerfully and passionately pay attention...at least for the next one hundred years...at the very least.

Of Days of Heaven

We are reading Job in the Hebrew Scripture portion of the lectionary right now. We had the option in year B of reading Genesis and Amos and Isaiah, but we chose the enigmatic Book of Job. The Book of Job offers a theological critique, a theological challenge to the dominant Deuteronomistic theology of Hebrew Scripture, the theology that pervades the Law and the Prophets. The theology goes like this: If the people Israel are loyal to Yahweh, worshipping only him, then they will receive blessing; if the people of Israel are disloyal and stray in their devotion to the worship of other gods (yes, there were many in ancient Palestine and in Jewish culture) then God would curse them...the quid pro quo of the Covenant.

Job is a good man, loyal, faithful, pious and dedicated to Yahweh. He is the archetype of Israel keeping Covenant...and yet all manner of pain and suffering and loss is visited upon him...and Job won't take it lying down. He becomes Everyman demanding an answer of his God to the time immemorial question as to why, as Rabbi Kushner puts it, why do bad things happen to good people. For some thirty five chapters Job demands not just answers but he demands that God show his face and stand face to face with this loyal but suffering soul, and fess up as to this profound paradox called creation.

And then God finally speaks...this, the longest soliloquy that God has in the whole of scripture. God begins to describe the wonders of creation found in the natural order...full of God-enthusiasm, God gets carried away, almost ecstatic, exulting in God's own artistry, an artistry that is random and playful, an artistry that even sets God awestruck...Can't you see it!? God lovingly asks Job.....Can't you see the divine in this heaven that you call earth? And the climax of this legend is that Job does see at last...Job sees God face to face within the mysterious beauty and genius of God's artifice we call Creation. To experience God's genius is to experience God....Dogma won't do it...beauty and mystery will.

We would do well to look well...for our God is all around and among us...We only have to look to the slanting light among the live oaks...the cobalt of the sky...the splash of the pelican...the music of the seasons...the cool of Fall...the miracle of eggs...the warmth of human touch....the gift of forgiveness...It is in beauty in her myriad manifestations where we will encounter our Creator who is enthusiastic to a fault still about the prospects of creation...It is in beauty...God's very genius, and ours as well, that we will know the days of heaven right here in earth...Just look and you will see.

Of a Matter of Life and Death

About six weeks ago a dear friend of mine who lives in Dothan was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I talked to him this morning. His disease is in an early stage, and his prognosis is less dire than most, but in all likelihood he won't live past five years. Today was his first day back at work, and he remembered a time some fifteen years ago when I went to his office to console him as his marriage had fallen apart. I remember it now...the light in the room...He remembered that day fifteen years past, and called me to talk about death and faith and hope and love.

He said he had just returned from M.D. Anderson and he said he thought that the way he was treated there, not just by the doctors, but the nurses, staff, the waiters in restaurants, the taxi drivers, store clerks, hotel employees, was the way the kingdom of God might be; and that he has returned home with hope and peace and an unbridled joy at the way he has been loved. I told him that he was seeing the kingdom already in its becoming; that in his paying attention, living prayerfully, (prayer, the art of paying attention) he is seeing the world as it really is...he is seeing the world as God knows the world to be, a world in which death is no enemy...but sacred as life is sacred....one process of a perfecting universe.

Jack Spong asserts in his new book that organized religion chiefly came about in order for us self-conscious humans to cope with the reality of death, even to escape it, and I think that is true to a certain extent. But in facing death honestly and imaginatively, whether imminent or distant, I believe we are able to see life the way it is meant to be; the way life really is.... that peace and hope and joy come inevitably, in spite of any circumstances; we see the value of community which is the means of God's gracious commonweal bearing love that is, in truth, stronger than death....love that is, in truth, stronger than fear....the love light present in the room.

I will continue to pray for my dear friend, and I will give thanks for his faithful witness to the truth of the matter; that his days in God's peaceable kingdom are marked by love and life and hope that vanquishes fear and despair, and that at the last he will find rest for his soul. That is a prayer for all of us is it not?...all of us mere sojourners in the profound sweet shortness of the days of heaven in earth.

Of Rest and Labor

One of my favorite pieces of music is John Rutter's Requiem. On September 11, 2001, my first day of seminary, in our liturgical music class, instead of a lecture, we went to the chapel and simply listened to Rutter's Requiem in homage to the dead killed by terrorists on that day. The last piece of the Mass is the Lux Eterna, that begins in pristine unison and broadens into four part harmony making the claim that the dead "rest from their labors." Rest from what? I thought. Rest from life's difficulties; rest from pain, from anxiety; rest from burden?

No, I mused, we rest from the labor of bearing God's life to the world. That is our vocation. That is the sole work for which we exist, for which we were made; and it is work that we share, work that is collaborative, mutual; work and the fruits of which, that are greater than the sum of its parts. This is the work of creation, shouldering the artful process of making and remaking the world according to God's vision of it. This labor is hard and requires our attention and intention and courage and perseverance:....the making of justice up and against the intractable injustices in our world....forgiving and forbearing each others' faults....practicing the art of healing our wounds and illnesses....feeding the hungry...caring for our planet...hard work....and we don't abdicate that work to an aloof deity who operates on his own; there's no such God...Our God graciously inhabits and empowers this work in us...we the means of God in earth; we God's very flesh and blood; God's hands and feet and heart.There is no other way. There's no other choice.

The reward is rest...something in our culture that is in short supply...rest and its accompanying peace and satisfaction and meaning and enlightened perspective...no small thing as reward for our bearing God's life to the world...and this rest doesn't only come in the end...It comes as gift along the way. Labor and rest, our life cycle, and when we give ourselves to this our true nature, our true calling, then life is rife with meaning and purpose and beauty... and fear is banished....that's a promise to us from our wise forbears. Go then with joy into the workplace of creation for there you will find sacred rest for your souls and you will be fully alive beyond all imagining; and the world God loves, the better for it.

Of Creation and Purpose

Last week in this space I reflected on Bishop Spong's new book on Eternal Life and a new religious consciousness beyond traditional theism. I appreciate Spong's bold iconoclastic approach to matters of faith, and, as I said, Spong has given us fresh and mature language with which we are more able in a post-modern context to speak of the life of faith unfettered by literalism and superstition; he has given us language by which we are able to speak intelligently about Christianity with an integrity that does not cease to be passionate and spiritual. That is not to say that I agree with everything Spong says. He still struggles with his own ego-centrism and with his lifelong battle to escape his literalist roots; all the while acknowledging both.

Spong makes the bold claim early on in Eternal Life... that the purpose of the universe is not life. He hasn't yet referred to some other, or some grander or transcendent purpose, but the implication is that perhaps in the randomness of the origins of the universe, there is no purpose whatsoever...that the universe just is....no telos (no ultimate direction)...no meaning....just random iterations and reiterations of gas and metal and carbon chains and water....of unimaginable heat and unfathomable cold...and loneliness and fear.

The fact of the matter is...there is purpose everywhere....where there is illness, the purpose is healing...where there is despair, the purpose is hope...where there is hunger, the purpose is to nurture...where there is injustice and indignity, the purpose is to set things right, to restore what we know is meant to be...What is right? What is meant to be?...Oh, don't bother to ask, for we know don't we...this knowledge, this genius contained in the DNA of the stars...this mysterious helix of truth and goodness and sacrifice, spiraling towards a mysterious perfection amid a randomness... a randomness that we dare trust and praise as divine.

Could it be that as the universe becomes still.... that purpose becomes still...the chief symbols of this becoming: change and adaptation and transformation and evolution...the cosmic musical refrain....Perhaps at each intersection point of this transformative process, this assaying of the universe.... new purpose is engendered, fiery birth of implicit necessity...the new vocation of the midwife bringing into life that which inevitably becomes...for example, it would have been unthinkable three hundred years ago to say that global warming threatens our existence...but now it is a pressing reality...Certainly we must be purposeful towards restoring the sustainability of our planet...a new purpose heretofore unknown...but known now...Who knows what purpose will become amid the Creation's becoming, who knows for what purpose to which we will be called, that which will evolve three hundred years from now, and again and again. The cosmos rife with purpose...purpose engendered by change and empowered by love, yes love a rudiment as well.

The imperative for us people of faith is that as community we must pay attention, we must think critically and imaginatively; we must seek and work toward being enlightened so that we may artfully and skillfully apprehend the purpose to which we are called....purpose that comes as we speak, ever changing, ever becoming, and we dare not miss its coming...this the Creation in its very becoming, imagining in transcendent proportions the purpose at hand....The clue for me in this process, is that wherever there is sacrifice for the greater good; wherever there is the work towards restoration...there we will apprehend a purpose, truth itself, that we can't deny to be true...and therefore we name it as divine....and celebrate.

Of Eternal Life

The Beth Murray Sunday School Class at All Saints is beginning study of Bishop Jack Spong's latest and perhaps last book entitled Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. I'm really excited about the book, so I'm sitting in on the class. In some religious circles Spong is considered a heretic. I beg to differ. Spong's legacy is that he has given thinking Christians (no, that's not an oxymoron) fresh and intelligent insight into ways of thinking and speaking about the true nature and practice of the Christian life. His is a sane voice amid the cacophony of literalism and superstition in what passes for Christianity in a culture that eschews the art of critical thinking. Spong's work not only makes Christianity believable, but he also makes it livable. He has given us new and helpful ways of thinking ( scripturally based) about the so-called miracles, virgin birth, Jesus as human and divine, resurrection, ascension, and in this his new book he explores the illusive concept of eternal life and the speculation of life after death.

I have read just the first few chapters of Spong's new book, but that's got me thinking ahead. So here are some of my reflections on eternal life, before we read Spong's take on it: The Eternal is found in truth and beauty...that's my starting point. And Eternal life is not just about the future; it finds its way into the present as well as the past. Through the imaginative memory, individual and collective, eternal life can be found and named in past events, some of which we barely noticed when they actually occurred, but in memory we see the truth of the matter to which this often mundane event points....And we see it in the present, the truth of the matter...in the dynamic of life and death in the delta...the flashing trout...the wheeling gulls...the fading sedge...the taste of salt in the wind...the northeastern squall...all outward and visible sign of the profound divine that pervades the universe....In art: Picasso's Guernica, Shakespeare's Tempest....Dickinson's images of death,....it goes on forever, these ways into the eternal.... and eternal life pervasive among the human community...in every act of mercy....in every gesture of kindness...in each locale of bestowing justice and dignity...where there is hope...where love is imaginatively engendered, Eternal life is surely self-evident....a quality, an aesthetic of the divine that is seen, heard, felt and tasted by the imagination, the essential midwife of the eternal.

And of the future? Science tells us that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We humans now sojourn for a season in earth as self conscious beings; perhaps there is a consciousness far beyond that which we know: a transcendent consciousness of matter and energy, things animate and inanimate, dancing within the song of the universe...We know in string theory that the ultimate rudiment of the universe is tonality, sound waves, music. The song will forever be, and we forever in it and of it...forever a part of the creation's becoming, forever alive in the creation turning towards its perfection always apprehended in the sacramental common things of creation....starfish and star dust.... forever singing in high celebration of a high consciousness beyond all reckoning that perhaps waits in hopeful joy for us all...Imagine that.

Of Good and Evil

Theologians have pondered forever the problem of evil in our world. The great problem is of course, "Why would a God whom we say is loving allow bad things to happen in the world God loves?" It's a good question to which there are no easy answers. The escape route is to say that it is the presence of free will thus shifting the blame to humankind's proclivity towards wrong choices. That's a weak answer and egocentric to say the least, because there's plenty of mayhem and violence in the natural order itself. No, there is more mystery to this reality.

Some of us just watched at All Saints the movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a visually stunning but emotionally disturbing depiction of a cruel and hard world along the Mexican American border filled with betrayal and lies and pain and violence. The characters include a Texas cattle rancher, the vaquero (cowboy) Melquiades, a young overly zealous border guard and his wife, Mexican families along the border trying to migrate into the U.S., the promiscuous waitress at the diner who insists that she loves her husband, the crooked sheriff, the border patrol; the abuse of power, a character unto itself. One of the group commented during the discussion time after the movie that none of the characters were redeemable; that they all were at some level or another depraved.

And yet redemption comes in a very powerful way at the end of the movie; it came with tears, and it comes in the midst of all this depravity. How could this be so, we asked? After all, this is just a movie. What about the real world? Is there truly any hope for us? The evil that surrounds us is so very real and undeniable. Are things really any better than they ever have been? Perhaps things are getting worse. Where do we look for answers? Where do we look for hope?I would suggest that we would do well to pay attention to our artists...art forever the window onto the truth of the matter....we would do well to trust the imaginative word.

In spite of all the characters being participants in the world's evil in the movie, goodness and redemption comes inevitably. It comes through friendship. It comes through sacrifice for each other. It comes through simple acts of hospitality. It comes through compassion and mercy. It comes through welcome and bestowing dignity, and it comes through justice in the midst of injustice. Perhaps the evil in our world is that essential component of creation against which the good struggles and finds its life and thrives...evil a foil, a contrast against which we may apprehend the profound and transforming good that takes gentle root around us. Perhaps Goethe is right in Faust in which the protagonist even after selling his soul to the devil is redeemed; that the redemptive good will ultimately have its way in the end...the unscrupulous good using even evil for its purposes.

Indeed such alchemy is held up in the gospels, more imaginative word...Mercy and justice and compassion and goodness and welcome and hospitality and inclusion transforming a world that feels hard and unjust. All these the means of opening God's commonweal to all of earth, so that forever God and we the people of God, and the created order entire, can look upon all the world in the birth pangs of its becoming and dare to call it very good.