From my perspective, today is a good day to preach. As a preacher, all I ask of the readings is one good story; just one interesting story to pray over and explore and I am off and running. Today we have two. Gone are the Easter readings from the Gospel of John where Jesus says something like “I in you and you in Me and I in the Father and the Father whom you have known, but not known, except in Me, but you don’t know Me, so I will send another to you and the other will be in Me and in you and from the Father.” That kind of lesson does not set on fire my homiletical imagination. But today is a different story, or stories. We have a brooding, pathetic king, a over-bearing murderous queen, and an upstanding religious authority hosting a meal where a woman cries on the feet of Jesus. Now this is some interesting stuff, so let’s dive in.
I suppose there are many threads which connect the two stories. Let me focus in on one: the notion of blessing.
In the reading from the Old Testament, King Ahab wants to take over the vineyard of a person by the name of Naboth. This vineyard sits right next to one of Ahab’s many palaces and he comes to believe his life will be enhanced by owning it. It is a tale as modern as our consumer society. But when Naboth refuses to sell, Ahab goes into a deep funk, similar to what many of us might feel if we are turned down for a loan on a shinny new car or fancy new boat. We want it, we need it, we have to have it, we can’t live without it, but we can’t buy it. That is Ahab’s predicament.
What is interesting here is that Ahab can afford to buy Naboth’s vineyard outright. He can also trade with Naboth by offering more land and better land at that. The problem is that Naboth won’t budge. He simply will not play ball. And why? Because this is the land of his ancestors. Sentimentality runs deep in some people, doesn’t it. But this is much more than that. Naboth has a connection to his property that is deeply spiritual. We may not see it in the text, but every Hebrew of that era who heard the story would have understood it implicitly.
Do you know how Naboth’s ancestors came to own this particular piece of property? The answer is found in the Book of Numbers, chapter 26, beginning at the 52nd verse:
The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: To these the land shall be apportioned for inheritance according to the number of names. To a large tribe you shall give a large inheritance, and to a small tribe you shall give a small inheritance; every tribe shall be given its inheritance according to its enrolment. But the land shall be apportioned by lot; according to the names of their ancestral tribes they shall inherit.
In Hebrew thinking, God gave a family its land, or portion, through the drawing of lots. The 78th Psalm, which is a lengthy retelling of Israel’s salvation history, says this:
God drove out the Canaanites before them
and apportioned an inheritance to them by lot; *
he made the tribes of Israel to dwell in their tents.
Psalm 16 reflects a typical expression of gratitude for God’s generous gift:
O Lord, you are my portion and my cup; *
it is you who uphold my lot.
My boundaries enclose a pleasant land; *
indeed, I have a goodly heritage.
So, to the outside observer, Naboth might appear to be foolish. From a business perspective his refusal does not make sense, nor is it particularly wise to resist the king. When Don Corleone says, “Let me make you an offer you can’t refuse”, well, it is best not to refuse. But Naboth is neither stubborn nor is he foolish. He response is deeply rooted in the belief that God’s portion and lot is to be guarded and kept. One does not do like Esau and trade your birthright for a bowl of porridge. Nor does one trade up or sell out the land that has been given by God. It is a blessing that must be cherished. It must be treasured. It must be valued. And it must be respected by all people (did you notice how, when he reports to Jezebel the source of his sadness, Ahab says only that Naboth refuses to sell his vineyard, leaving out the detail that it is his ancestral lot?).
That vineyard was foundation for Naboth. It was the ground on which all of God’s blessings rested. He knew it. He believed it. And he refused to sell it. What are the foundational blessings in your life? What is the ground of your being? A spouse, a parent, a child, family, a few close friends, an inheritance, this church, your health, your faith? Here is what I observe in my life and in our modern world: that which is most essential to me – call it God’s blessings in my life – tends to become what I take most for granted. I assume that these blessings will always be and therefore have a lower sense of urgency about them. Yes, sometimes there is a direct offer to sell my blessings or to trade them for something else, but most often the temptation is much more subtle than that.
We expect that a building’s foundation, once set, will stay strong and firm for a long time with little or no attention. The same thing is not true about our own lives, though I for one often act as if it is. In reality, the foundational blessings of our life need to be nurtured, guarded, and protected lest we think that the adornments and less-essential aspects of life are what give life its true meaning. Naboth is for us a symbol of this. He is a figure who knew what really mattered in his life and would not let anything else supercede it.
The unnamed woman in the gospel reading is not guarding a blessing, but seeking it. She brings who she is – a sinner – and what she has – an alabaster jar of ointment, and her pain and brokenness and her shame and her bitter tears and her darkness and her despair – and presents it all before Jesus. Jesus’ host, a Pharisee by the name of Simon is one who, as Paul writes, has every right to boast in his goodness based on the Law. The woman, on the other hand, has no shade in which to hide from the Law’s searing condemnation of her messed up life. And yet she, as Paul says, is justified by her faith. She is blessed not because she deserves it, but because she desires it above all other things. Her deep desire enables her to break through all that might hold her back from coming to Jesus, and make no mistake, what holds her back is stronger than any chains could ever be.
Of the two – Naboth and this woman – I would rather stand up and die protecting the blessings that I have than to be in a position of having to crawl before Jesus in utter, absolute brokenness. I would rather suffer for doing the right thing than own up to having done the wrong thing. I see this not only in myself, but in a lot of people, especially good church folk. It seems to me that the more faithful a person is in church life when things are good, the more difficult it is to be at church when your life has fallen apart, especially if that falling apart is in large part your own doing. There is a tendency to avoid God and God’s people when you have not lived up to the works of the Law. I guess the idea is that if you got yourself into this mess, you will reemerge after you have gotten yourself out of it. Shame is a terrible tyrant. It isolates us from the foundational blessings of our lives.
The woman in this reading is for a symbol of courage in the face of personal failure. She fights through all that might hold her back and presents herself – unworthy and broken open to the core of her pain – to Jesus. It is an astonishing act, not because she does not “deserve” God’s love, but because she desires it so deeply. She is like a person trapped under water whose last breath barely enables her to push to the surface to inhale life-giving oxygen. And whereas Simon might respond to this kind of reaching by citing the Law – the long list of who she is, but should not be – Jesus simply embraces her with the love born of God’s love for each one of us. And in that love, the woman finds the blessing she so desperately seeks.
What are the blessings in your life which need to be guarded, protected, valued, and cherished? What are the blessings that you need to seek? What holds you back and prevents you from accepting God’s deep, abiding love for you?
Monday, June 14, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Trinity Sunday: Broken into Me
From the New Testament reading:
We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.
I mentioned last Sunday that I really enjoyed my week at the CREDO Conference in NC. It proved to be far more beneficial than I ever would have expected, hoped for, or imagined. I came away with much, but today, let me share this one facet: after just two days I realized that every participant (and there were 36 of us) and every faculty member (there were 8) had experienced some deep pain or wounding in life.
This reality began to emerge at daily worship where a different faculty member offered a reflection each day. On the first morning, a priest related how years ago (and this is a memorable line) his “wife went away to that place where unhappy women go and never return”, leaving him alone to raise their children. That led to a period of deep depression followed by alcoholism, which in term cost him his job, his bishop shunned him, and he ended up homeless for some period of time. Another day another member of the faculty described how one of his children, younger than two, was diagnosed with a rare form of spinal cancer and died six retching weeks later. That too was years ago… I can only begin to imagine the heartache.
Talking with fellow clergy I heard stories of professional pain and personal struggle. The priesthood, I thought, exacts a huge toll on its ranks. But I know that we are not alone. I know from sharing in your lives that it is not just one career path which is singled out for challenge and that no one is immune from the worst that life has to offer. We all have known pain. We all have known suffering. For the most fortunate among us, the experience is largely in the past. For some, it is an on-going reality.
Since the beginning of the War on Terror in 2001, 1,085 members of our Armed Forces have lost their lives in Afghanistan; 139 so far this year. Over that same period, 4,400 American servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq: 30 this year. Whatever Memorial Day will be for many of us, it will be something very different for those who have lost a son or a daughter, a husband or a wife, a brother or a sister, an uncle or an aunt, a neighbor or a friend. For them, this weekend will highlight their loss, their emptiness, their suffering.
According to the version of the bible we heard read this morning, Paul says that we ‘boast’ in our sufferings. Boast is probably not the most useful choice of words. Other translations put it “we rejoice in our sufferings” or “we celebrate in the midst of suffering.” While rejoicing and celebrating focus the sense of what Paul is saying, it still sounds foreign. None of us should want to seek out suffering for suffering’s sake.
Paul’s great contribution here is the belief that suffering is not pointless. If we embrace the pain of life, rather than flee from it, deflect it on to others, or internalize as our own fault, something redemptive can take place. We learn how to endure (or, as another bible translation puts it, ‘persevere’). As we endure we forge a new identity that is rooted in character. From this emerges the hope that all we experience – all that is good, all that is bad, all that is mundane, all of it – when lived authentically and lived in God becomes the kingdom of God at work in and through our lives.
But this transformation is neither automatic nor guaranteed. For some, the experience of suffering is paralyzing, leaving the person lost and frozen in place. I thought about this when I came across a poem by Adelia Prado titled Divine Wrath:
When I was wounded
whether by God, the devil, or myself
- I don’t yet know which –
it was seeing the sparrows again
and clumps of clover, after three days,
that told me I hadn’t died.
When I was young,
all it took were those sparrows,
those lush little leaves,
for me to sing praises,
dedicate operas to the Lord.
But a dog who’s been beaten
is slow to go back to barking
and making a fuss over his owner
- an animal, not a person
like me who can ask:
Why did you beat me?
Which is why, despite the sparrows and the clover,
a subtle shadow still hangs over my spirit.
May whoever hurt me, forgive me.
If I am correct in assuming that every person knows some great suffering or loss or pain in life, I wonder for how many does Prado’s poem ring true. For how many has suffering led not to hope but to numbness or despair? Perhaps that is where it has taken you, but I imagine that those of us who are here in this house of worship have found at least some small way to boast or rejoice or celebrate. We know, at least in part, the experience of God’s love being poured into our hearts at the time and in the place that we needed it most. If you have received such grace than you are truly blessed, because, as Prado reminds us, it is not a given. I wonder how many people who ‘don’t dark the door of the church’ used to sing childhood operas to God at the sight of a sparrow and the smell of the clover, but now, like a dog beaten by its owner, don’t know what to say to God so they just say nothing.
During a reflection at the CREDO Conference, one speaker took a small clay pot and threw it to the floor, causing it to break into multiple pieces. “That was me,” she told us. “That was my life when our son came home from Iraq and then disappeared without a word.” Once or twice he called, agreeing to meet his parents in Chicago or Seattle, but then never showed. Finally, after several years she was reunited with her son. To dramatize the experience, the speaker took a second clay pot, one that had been broken but now was glued back together, and set it on a table. A candle was burning inside the pot and because not all of the broken pieces fit neatly together light was shinning through the cracks. “I am like this pot,” she told us. “My life was broken, but it has been put back together and God’s love shines through the suffering I have experienced.”
I pondered that image for some time in the silence of our worship and began to sense how I have been “broken into me.” It is a theme of have touched on before (like when I say the most important degree I have been awarded in life comes from the School of Hard Knocks). Who I am is part and parcel with what I have suffered. I could not and would not be who I am today without the pain I have known. Did God visit it on me? I don’t think so. Did the devil? No, I don’t think that either. Did I do it to myself? Sometimes. But for the most part most of it is just life. I focus not on the curse of the bad things, but on the blessing of how it has been redeemed by God.
Ponder the suffering in your own life. The good news of Gospel is not that God shields the faithful from bad things; for if this were true it would mean that none of us who have suffered is faithful. No, the good news is that out of the brokenness – somehow and over time – something emerges in us that becomes a welcome and indispensible part of who we are. It is made possible only as God’s love is poured into us. It is of this that we boast and we rejoice and we celebrate.
We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.
I mentioned last Sunday that I really enjoyed my week at the CREDO Conference in NC. It proved to be far more beneficial than I ever would have expected, hoped for, or imagined. I came away with much, but today, let me share this one facet: after just two days I realized that every participant (and there were 36 of us) and every faculty member (there were 8) had experienced some deep pain or wounding in life.
This reality began to emerge at daily worship where a different faculty member offered a reflection each day. On the first morning, a priest related how years ago (and this is a memorable line) his “wife went away to that place where unhappy women go and never return”, leaving him alone to raise their children. That led to a period of deep depression followed by alcoholism, which in term cost him his job, his bishop shunned him, and he ended up homeless for some period of time. Another day another member of the faculty described how one of his children, younger than two, was diagnosed with a rare form of spinal cancer and died six retching weeks later. That too was years ago… I can only begin to imagine the heartache.
Talking with fellow clergy I heard stories of professional pain and personal struggle. The priesthood, I thought, exacts a huge toll on its ranks. But I know that we are not alone. I know from sharing in your lives that it is not just one career path which is singled out for challenge and that no one is immune from the worst that life has to offer. We all have known pain. We all have known suffering. For the most fortunate among us, the experience is largely in the past. For some, it is an on-going reality.
Since the beginning of the War on Terror in 2001, 1,085 members of our Armed Forces have lost their lives in Afghanistan; 139 so far this year. Over that same period, 4,400 American servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq: 30 this year. Whatever Memorial Day will be for many of us, it will be something very different for those who have lost a son or a daughter, a husband or a wife, a brother or a sister, an uncle or an aunt, a neighbor or a friend. For them, this weekend will highlight their loss, their emptiness, their suffering.
According to the version of the bible we heard read this morning, Paul says that we ‘boast’ in our sufferings. Boast is probably not the most useful choice of words. Other translations put it “we rejoice in our sufferings” or “we celebrate in the midst of suffering.” While rejoicing and celebrating focus the sense of what Paul is saying, it still sounds foreign. None of us should want to seek out suffering for suffering’s sake.
Paul’s great contribution here is the belief that suffering is not pointless. If we embrace the pain of life, rather than flee from it, deflect it on to others, or internalize as our own fault, something redemptive can take place. We learn how to endure (or, as another bible translation puts it, ‘persevere’). As we endure we forge a new identity that is rooted in character. From this emerges the hope that all we experience – all that is good, all that is bad, all that is mundane, all of it – when lived authentically and lived in God becomes the kingdom of God at work in and through our lives.
But this transformation is neither automatic nor guaranteed. For some, the experience of suffering is paralyzing, leaving the person lost and frozen in place. I thought about this when I came across a poem by Adelia Prado titled Divine Wrath:
When I was wounded
whether by God, the devil, or myself
- I don’t yet know which –
it was seeing the sparrows again
and clumps of clover, after three days,
that told me I hadn’t died.
When I was young,
all it took were those sparrows,
those lush little leaves,
for me to sing praises,
dedicate operas to the Lord.
But a dog who’s been beaten
is slow to go back to barking
and making a fuss over his owner
- an animal, not a person
like me who can ask:
Why did you beat me?
Which is why, despite the sparrows and the clover,
a subtle shadow still hangs over my spirit.
May whoever hurt me, forgive me.
If I am correct in assuming that every person knows some great suffering or loss or pain in life, I wonder for how many does Prado’s poem ring true. For how many has suffering led not to hope but to numbness or despair? Perhaps that is where it has taken you, but I imagine that those of us who are here in this house of worship have found at least some small way to boast or rejoice or celebrate. We know, at least in part, the experience of God’s love being poured into our hearts at the time and in the place that we needed it most. If you have received such grace than you are truly blessed, because, as Prado reminds us, it is not a given. I wonder how many people who ‘don’t dark the door of the church’ used to sing childhood operas to God at the sight of a sparrow and the smell of the clover, but now, like a dog beaten by its owner, don’t know what to say to God so they just say nothing.
During a reflection at the CREDO Conference, one speaker took a small clay pot and threw it to the floor, causing it to break into multiple pieces. “That was me,” she told us. “That was my life when our son came home from Iraq and then disappeared without a word.” Once or twice he called, agreeing to meet his parents in Chicago or Seattle, but then never showed. Finally, after several years she was reunited with her son. To dramatize the experience, the speaker took a second clay pot, one that had been broken but now was glued back together, and set it on a table. A candle was burning inside the pot and because not all of the broken pieces fit neatly together light was shinning through the cracks. “I am like this pot,” she told us. “My life was broken, but it has been put back together and God’s love shines through the suffering I have experienced.”
I pondered that image for some time in the silence of our worship and began to sense how I have been “broken into me.” It is a theme of have touched on before (like when I say the most important degree I have been awarded in life comes from the School of Hard Knocks). Who I am is part and parcel with what I have suffered. I could not and would not be who I am today without the pain I have known. Did God visit it on me? I don’t think so. Did the devil? No, I don’t think that either. Did I do it to myself? Sometimes. But for the most part most of it is just life. I focus not on the curse of the bad things, but on the blessing of how it has been redeemed by God.
Ponder the suffering in your own life. The good news of Gospel is not that God shields the faithful from bad things; for if this were true it would mean that none of us who have suffered is faithful. No, the good news is that out of the brokenness – somehow and over time – something emerges in us that becomes a welcome and indispensible part of who we are. It is made possible only as God’s love is poured into us. It is of this that we boast and we rejoice and we celebrate.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Pentecost Sunday: A Living Together in Conversation
I have not had cable TV since moving to Suffolk and, for the most part, I have no missed it at all. More than anything else, it is most refreshing not to be exposed to cable news ‘talk’ shows; you know those broadcasts where the screen is split in half or, even worse, into quads and each person on the screen represents a different end of the spectrum of the particular issue and they all talk – loudly – at the same time. Every one is yelling, no one is listening, and no one is learning.
From its root origins, the word ‘conversation’ means “a living together,” “a manner of behaving,” “a keeping company.” Most talk shows are not conversation – a living together – but are ideological battlegrounds. And, from my perspective, the irony is that as the speakers speak without ceasing all at the same time, we the listeners are not persuaded. Oh, sure, we may become impassioned and even enraged, but no body – and I mean no body – is persuaded to change their mind by listening to the incessant babble. Rare indeed on the public airways is conversation; people with differing backgrounds and experiences and perspectives keeping company with one another in a way that enriches our common life.
Conversation is a challenge, even if the participants seek to understand one another. I was reading an account of a retreat where people where exploring the church’s history. At one point each person was asked to visualize an image they associated with the word ‘tradition’. The responses were varied and surprising. One person had an image of confronting an immovable fortress, threatening and ominous. Another image was of an ocean liner moving carefully but persistently through a turbulent sea. Someone else described encountering a compassionate sage, withered and wise. Another participant described tradition as being like wandering in a graveyard. Still another visualized climbing on the limbs of a giant tree that is alive, strong, and protective. Each person on the retreat had a very different association for the exact same word. Meaning what we say, saying what we mean, not having another have it mean something entirely different from what we anticipated, and actually listening in a manner which is open and engaged with what is being said are just some of the major challenges to authentic conversation.
Our first reading this morning is one of those brief, big stories from the Old Testament. The Tower of Babel draws on several themes. At one level it is a cautionary tale about urbanization over and against the value of a rural, agrarian society. It has an anti-technology bent while being firmly rooted in a desire to maintain the status quo. But more than any other theme, Babel tries to make some sense as to why there are so many different cultures and languages. It ponders why conversation – living with and keeping company – is so challenging. Through the story, the ancient Hebrews derived several powerful theological assertions. Perhaps the most forceful is the notion that God wills cultural and ethnic differences. Chief among these differences is language. God institutes this divide specifically to keep peoples apart and distinct. The story asserts that attempting to bridge these differences is a kind of dangerous overreaching, a laying hold a territory reserved only for God. The story paints the picture of a God who actively works to frustrate conversation among and between people.
While this theology sounds foreign in our day, it makes sense for a time when a small tribe of people is concerned with maintaining its distinctive culture, heritage, and religious beliefs. As this people blends into the multi-cultural environment they call the Promised Land they need a strong theological framework that will keep their identity in tact. The notion that God creates the differences among peoples and actively frustrates tribes from coming together serves such a purpose.
Today’s reading from the Book of Acts functions as a kind of bookend to the story of the tower of Babel and a new theology emerges from it. The Gospel event of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is so central to all people in all places and times that God enables the Church to converse about it in every language. God, who had been the author of the language confusion, is now the source for overcoming it. No longer is God to be associated with just one specific ethnic group and heritage. God is now to be associated with the Church and the Church is to be broad and diverse, gathered together under the banner of Jesus Christ. Our new guiding theological understanding is that God fosters conversation amongst all peoples through the work of the Church.
For the Church this means that we are in the business of helping people understand one another. Listening carefully, being attentive to one’s own unique perspective, and speaking clearly are holy acts for which we seek God’s help. A collect we use in Morning Prayer asks God to guide us so that the Gospel may be truly preached, and truly heard. It is a prayer that taps into God’s deep desire to foster conversation.
As someone who engages in the act of public speaking on a weekly basis and who participates in multiple conversations each and every day, I am aware of how easy it is to misunderstand and to be misunderstood. I have been involved in numerous conversations where it seemed like the participants simply were not hearing what each other was saying. I have witnessed more than one conversation where the speaker did not understand what he himself was saying. But I think about those glorious times when a group of people, fogged in by their inability to understand different points of view, suddenly and miraculously were able to hear and comprehend the diverse perspectives of others in the group. Perhaps you have never thought of it in this way, but this is the work of Holy Spirit. It is always a mini-Pentecost when true conversation occurs, when people keep company and live with one another.
From its root origins, the word ‘conversation’ means “a living together,” “a manner of behaving,” “a keeping company.” Most talk shows are not conversation – a living together – but are ideological battlegrounds. And, from my perspective, the irony is that as the speakers speak without ceasing all at the same time, we the listeners are not persuaded. Oh, sure, we may become impassioned and even enraged, but no body – and I mean no body – is persuaded to change their mind by listening to the incessant babble. Rare indeed on the public airways is conversation; people with differing backgrounds and experiences and perspectives keeping company with one another in a way that enriches our common life.
Conversation is a challenge, even if the participants seek to understand one another. I was reading an account of a retreat where people where exploring the church’s history. At one point each person was asked to visualize an image they associated with the word ‘tradition’. The responses were varied and surprising. One person had an image of confronting an immovable fortress, threatening and ominous. Another image was of an ocean liner moving carefully but persistently through a turbulent sea. Someone else described encountering a compassionate sage, withered and wise. Another participant described tradition as being like wandering in a graveyard. Still another visualized climbing on the limbs of a giant tree that is alive, strong, and protective. Each person on the retreat had a very different association for the exact same word. Meaning what we say, saying what we mean, not having another have it mean something entirely different from what we anticipated, and actually listening in a manner which is open and engaged with what is being said are just some of the major challenges to authentic conversation.
Our first reading this morning is one of those brief, big stories from the Old Testament. The Tower of Babel draws on several themes. At one level it is a cautionary tale about urbanization over and against the value of a rural, agrarian society. It has an anti-technology bent while being firmly rooted in a desire to maintain the status quo. But more than any other theme, Babel tries to make some sense as to why there are so many different cultures and languages. It ponders why conversation – living with and keeping company – is so challenging. Through the story, the ancient Hebrews derived several powerful theological assertions. Perhaps the most forceful is the notion that God wills cultural and ethnic differences. Chief among these differences is language. God institutes this divide specifically to keep peoples apart and distinct. The story asserts that attempting to bridge these differences is a kind of dangerous overreaching, a laying hold a territory reserved only for God. The story paints the picture of a God who actively works to frustrate conversation among and between people.
While this theology sounds foreign in our day, it makes sense for a time when a small tribe of people is concerned with maintaining its distinctive culture, heritage, and religious beliefs. As this people blends into the multi-cultural environment they call the Promised Land they need a strong theological framework that will keep their identity in tact. The notion that God creates the differences among peoples and actively frustrates tribes from coming together serves such a purpose.
Today’s reading from the Book of Acts functions as a kind of bookend to the story of the tower of Babel and a new theology emerges from it. The Gospel event of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is so central to all people in all places and times that God enables the Church to converse about it in every language. God, who had been the author of the language confusion, is now the source for overcoming it. No longer is God to be associated with just one specific ethnic group and heritage. God is now to be associated with the Church and the Church is to be broad and diverse, gathered together under the banner of Jesus Christ. Our new guiding theological understanding is that God fosters conversation amongst all peoples through the work of the Church.
For the Church this means that we are in the business of helping people understand one another. Listening carefully, being attentive to one’s own unique perspective, and speaking clearly are holy acts for which we seek God’s help. A collect we use in Morning Prayer asks God to guide us so that the Gospel may be truly preached, and truly heard. It is a prayer that taps into God’s deep desire to foster conversation.
As someone who engages in the act of public speaking on a weekly basis and who participates in multiple conversations each and every day, I am aware of how easy it is to misunderstand and to be misunderstood. I have been involved in numerous conversations where it seemed like the participants simply were not hearing what each other was saying. I have witnessed more than one conversation where the speaker did not understand what he himself was saying. But I think about those glorious times when a group of people, fogged in by their inability to understand different points of view, suddenly and miraculously were able to hear and comprehend the diverse perspectives of others in the group. Perhaps you have never thought of it in this way, but this is the work of Holy Spirit. It is always a mini-Pentecost when true conversation occurs, when people keep company and live with one another.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
The 6th Sunday of Easter: Loss & Looking Forward
Jesus said, “You have heard Me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming to you.’”
Several times a year I have a dream about my childhood home. We moved into it when I was three and my mother owned it until I was twenty-seven. There is something about losing your place of origin that sets you adrift; you have to move forward when there is no nest to which you can return. In most of the dreams, my childhood home is falling apart: the pipes leak, the roof has holes, the wiring is setting off sparks, and on and on and on. Now I am not a professional interpreter, but I think these particular dreams always pop up around issues or concerns regarding my family of origin. Another interpretation is that they have something to do with my own sense of getting older. Either way, you will understand why I am drawn to this poem by Eric Ormsby called Childhood House:
After our mother died, her house, our
childhood house, disclosed
all its deterioration to our eyes.
While living she had screened us from, or we hadn’t seen,
the termite-nibbled floorboards and the rotting beams;
the wounded stucco hidden by shrubbery; the frayed,
unpredictable wiring, and the clanking labor
of the hot-water line into the discolored
tub; the fixtures in the dining room
skewed and malfunctioning.
I remember thinking with a
swarm of confusion that this was the true state
of our childhood now: this house of dilapidated girders
eaten away at the base. Somehow I had assumed
that the past stood still, in perfect effigies of itself,
and that what we had once possessed remained our possession
forever, and that at least the past, our past, our child-
hood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve,
did not deteriorate like the untended house of an
aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in
our remembrance. I see that this isn’t so, that
memory decays like the rest, is unstable in its essence,
flits, occludes, is variable, sidesteps, bleeds away, eludes
all recovery; worse, is not what it seemed once, alters
unfairly, is not the intact garden we remember but,
instead, speeds away from us backward terrifically
until when we pause to touch that sun-remembered
wall the stones are friable, crack and sift down,
we could cry at the fierceness of that velocity
if our astonished eyes had time.
When Jesus said, “I am going away and I am coming to you” He was calling on His followers to embrace the paradox that life is about losing and looking forward. Ormsby’s poem ends with the shattering realization that he has done neither well. Rather than acknowledging what has been lost, he looks backward as if everything in his past is in tact; as if it has not changed at all. To the degree that he has moved forward he has done so based on this mistaken premise about the past. And then, to his astonishment, reality hits him with a “fierceness of velocity” and he can scarcely make sense of what it all means. It is one of the paradoxes in life, that life is about losing and looking forward.
The word ‘paradox’ comes from the Latin roots para, which means ‘contrary to’, and doxa, which means ‘opinion’. So a paradox is a statement that is contrary to popular opinion. It comes to us as a proposition seemingly self-contradictory and yet expresses the truth. It also holds together two things that seem to be in contradiction.
Popular opinion holds that you should avoid loss at all costs. The greater the loss the more our culture seems to want to sweep it under the rug. Jesus goes against our conventional wisdom when He tells His followers right up front, “I am going away; there is a loss coming and there is nothing you can do about it.”
This passage of John’s gospel has particular liturgical significance at this time, which is why it is assigned to be read today. This Thursday will be the 40th day after Easter Sunday. It is the day when the church celebrates the Ascension of our Lord. It is the day when Jesus literally goes away (and does so in very dramatic fashion by being lifted up into the air and disappearing into the clouds). Two weeks from today, on the 50th day after Easter, we will celebrate Pentecost, which is the birthday of the Church inaugurated by the coming of the Holy Spirit. Do you see in these two feast days the paradox of loss and looking forward? Jesus does not shield His friends from the inevitability of loss. It is a part of the reality of this life. But He also points them toward the promise of a new reality, a new blessing, a new gift, a new day, and new joy.
Religion and paradox go hand-in-hand. We turn to faith to make sense of life’s contradictions and to discern deeper truths that may be contrary to popularly held opinions. Our faith teaches us that nothing lasts forever, that death in all its many forms is inevitable. Yet, Christ assures us that the cry of death is not the last word because it is always followed by the joyous shout of “resurrection!” We are people who even at the grave make our song “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!” The losing in life is not something from which we hide, rather it is something we embrace. As the grief of lose eases we become more and more able to look backward in celebration of what has been, even though it no longer is. And as we look back, we can also anticipate what is to come: today, tomorrow… a new blessing, and new blossom, a new burst of life, and one day a new heaven and a new earth.
Today is Mothers’ Day. It is a day of paradox when we celebrate the blessing of mothers in our midst while quietly remembering the mothers we have lost. It is a day of losing and looking forward. It is a reminder of our faith’s opinion about life: we can embrace what was and is no longer as we live in hopeful anticipation of what will be.
Several times a year I have a dream about my childhood home. We moved into it when I was three and my mother owned it until I was twenty-seven. There is something about losing your place of origin that sets you adrift; you have to move forward when there is no nest to which you can return. In most of the dreams, my childhood home is falling apart: the pipes leak, the roof has holes, the wiring is setting off sparks, and on and on and on. Now I am not a professional interpreter, but I think these particular dreams always pop up around issues or concerns regarding my family of origin. Another interpretation is that they have something to do with my own sense of getting older. Either way, you will understand why I am drawn to this poem by Eric Ormsby called Childhood House:
After our mother died, her house, our
childhood house, disclosed
all its deterioration to our eyes.
While living she had screened us from, or we hadn’t seen,
the termite-nibbled floorboards and the rotting beams;
the wounded stucco hidden by shrubbery; the frayed,
unpredictable wiring, and the clanking labor
of the hot-water line into the discolored
tub; the fixtures in the dining room
skewed and malfunctioning.
I remember thinking with a
swarm of confusion that this was the true state
of our childhood now: this house of dilapidated girders
eaten away at the base. Somehow I had assumed
that the past stood still, in perfect effigies of itself,
and that what we had once possessed remained our possession
forever, and that at least the past, our past, our child-
hood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve,
did not deteriorate like the untended house of an
aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in
our remembrance. I see that this isn’t so, that
memory decays like the rest, is unstable in its essence,
flits, occludes, is variable, sidesteps, bleeds away, eludes
all recovery; worse, is not what it seemed once, alters
unfairly, is not the intact garden we remember but,
instead, speeds away from us backward terrifically
until when we pause to touch that sun-remembered
wall the stones are friable, crack and sift down,
we could cry at the fierceness of that velocity
if our astonished eyes had time.
When Jesus said, “I am going away and I am coming to you” He was calling on His followers to embrace the paradox that life is about losing and looking forward. Ormsby’s poem ends with the shattering realization that he has done neither well. Rather than acknowledging what has been lost, he looks backward as if everything in his past is in tact; as if it has not changed at all. To the degree that he has moved forward he has done so based on this mistaken premise about the past. And then, to his astonishment, reality hits him with a “fierceness of velocity” and he can scarcely make sense of what it all means. It is one of the paradoxes in life, that life is about losing and looking forward.
The word ‘paradox’ comes from the Latin roots para, which means ‘contrary to’, and doxa, which means ‘opinion’. So a paradox is a statement that is contrary to popular opinion. It comes to us as a proposition seemingly self-contradictory and yet expresses the truth. It also holds together two things that seem to be in contradiction.
Popular opinion holds that you should avoid loss at all costs. The greater the loss the more our culture seems to want to sweep it under the rug. Jesus goes against our conventional wisdom when He tells His followers right up front, “I am going away; there is a loss coming and there is nothing you can do about it.”
This passage of John’s gospel has particular liturgical significance at this time, which is why it is assigned to be read today. This Thursday will be the 40th day after Easter Sunday. It is the day when the church celebrates the Ascension of our Lord. It is the day when Jesus literally goes away (and does so in very dramatic fashion by being lifted up into the air and disappearing into the clouds). Two weeks from today, on the 50th day after Easter, we will celebrate Pentecost, which is the birthday of the Church inaugurated by the coming of the Holy Spirit. Do you see in these two feast days the paradox of loss and looking forward? Jesus does not shield His friends from the inevitability of loss. It is a part of the reality of this life. But He also points them toward the promise of a new reality, a new blessing, a new gift, a new day, and new joy.
Religion and paradox go hand-in-hand. We turn to faith to make sense of life’s contradictions and to discern deeper truths that may be contrary to popularly held opinions. Our faith teaches us that nothing lasts forever, that death in all its many forms is inevitable. Yet, Christ assures us that the cry of death is not the last word because it is always followed by the joyous shout of “resurrection!” We are people who even at the grave make our song “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!” The losing in life is not something from which we hide, rather it is something we embrace. As the grief of lose eases we become more and more able to look backward in celebration of what has been, even though it no longer is. And as we look back, we can also anticipate what is to come: today, tomorrow… a new blessing, and new blossom, a new burst of life, and one day a new heaven and a new earth.
Today is Mothers’ Day. It is a day of paradox when we celebrate the blessing of mothers in our midst while quietly remembering the mothers we have lost. It is a day of losing and looking forward. It is a reminder of our faith’s opinion about life: we can embrace what was and is no longer as we live in hopeful anticipation of what will be.
Monday, May 3, 2010
The 5th Sunday of Easter: Discerning God's Will
A parishioner comes to see the minister. He is thinking about quitting his job and starting a new business. It is an important decision with significant ramifications. It is something he has been praying about for a long time and now believes that God is telling him to make the change. A woman has a premonition that something is wrong with her sister so dials the phone. “How are you doing?” she asks, “God told me to give you a call.” An angry young man straps a homemade bomb around his waist, walks into a hospital, and sets it off. He kills himself and dozens of other people. Why? Because God told him to do it.
Our Christian faith holds that God speaks to us through the Holy Spirit. At one time or another, most of us have responded to what we have perceived to be God’s will. We as a parish listen intently for God’s guidance. For instance, two and a half years ago the Search Committee reported to the Vestry that God had led them to a particular candidate to call as Rector. The Episcopal Church constantly engages in discernment as we seek to bring the Good News to a changing and challenging world. The Spirit can speak clearly to us as individuals, to us as a faith community, and to us as a denominational body. But, we know that not everyone who hears a god-voice is actually being led by God’s Spirit. And there are times we wonder if what we hear is in fact God speaking to us and if what we think we hear God saying to do is actually what God wants us to do.
These concerns have been with the Church from its very inception. Our first reading from the Book of Acts is Peter’s eyewitness account of what is known as “the Gentile Pentecost.” You will recall that Pentecost is the day the Holy Spirit fell upon the disciples and they began to speak in various languages as they proclaimed the Good News of God in Christ to all people. That outpouring of the Holy Spirit was experienced exclusively by Jewish followers of Jesus (the text refers to them as “circumcised believers” because they were raised up in and conform to Jewish customs and practices). Their subsequent work and ministry was directed exclusively to people of the Jewish faith tradition.
In today’s reading Peter provides an account of how all of this changed. He shares the details of how Holy Spirit fell upon a Gentile named Cornelius and upon his family. The Spirit manifested among them with the same signs manifested by the disciples at the initial Pentecost.
Peter makes this report at what is now known as the First Council (or assembly) at Jerusalem. Word of what Peter had done spread among the circumcised believers in Judea. They were shocked to learn that Peter entered the home of a Gentile and that he ate a meal there. Both acts rendered him unclean according to the laws of Jewish purity. Peter defends his actions before the council by pointing to his vision, to the timing of Cornelius’ men approaching him, to Cornelius’ own dream, to Cornelius’ devout lifestyle, and – most importantly – to the way the Holy Spirit fell on the gathered Gentiles. Peter, perceiving that the Holy Spirit was a gift common both to those circumcised and to those uncircumcised, recognizes that the Church as God dreams of it will be more widely cast and inclusive than the disciples initially had thought.
A second council will be called in Jerusalem to debate the need for Gentiles to be circumcised and to adhere to other demands of the Law. Both gatherings determine that God’s Spirit is speaking clearly; inviting Gentiles into the faith, but not requiring them to conform to a Jewish heritage foreign to their own upbringing.
Several guiding principles have emerged over the centuries as devout men and woman have sought ways to authenticate God’s leading:
• Is this leading calling you to do something clearly immoral? If so, than it is not God speaking to you. God does not sanction suicide bombers.
• Is it foolishly reckless? God does not want to test your faith by asking you to swim in the Niagara River just above the falls.
• Is it contrary to the will of God we see revealed in Christ? Notice that is says “as revealed in Christ.” We believe that the fullest expression of God’s will is found in the life and words of Jesus. His example of loving your neighbor supersedes an Old Testament figure’s call to kill the enemy. His way elevating the place of woman in His company supersedes Paul’s counsel to a specific faith community that women should be silent in church or that they may never teach men.
• To what degree does the call fulfill an ego desire? The more it is about what you need the more likely the voice is your own and not the Spirit’s.
• Does the prompting have a compulsive power? A compelling call and psychological compulsion are not the same thing. Does this sound like God’s call to you: “I like that new sports car, I want that new sports car, I need that new sports car, I can’t think of anything else but that sports car, I can’t live without that sports car, Hey, I just got a tax refund so God must want me to have that new sports car.” Compulsions leave no room for freedom of choice, but divine promptings can always be refused because God never overrides our free will.
• Does what God calls you to do produce fear, or bring peace and joy? Most callings are accompanied by a certain amount of apprehension, but this gives way as you become more settled and certain in God’s leading.
• What are the consequences of my saying yes? Being able to anticipate the downside and to embrace the challenging aspects of what will or might happen is an important part of the process of responding to God’s call.
• What would be the fruit of my saying no? Again, this aspect of discernment forces us to take off our blinders and really look at the issue from all angles.
Several years ago the educator and writer Parker Palmer faced a major decision. He had interviewed for a college president’s position and had been offered the job. He was part of a Quaker community that practiced group discernment so its leaders gathered in a room with him where all sat in prayerful silence. Slowly and over time, individuals felt led by the Spirit to ask engaging questions to which Palmer would respond. One person asked what he anticipated not liking about the position. He reflected and said he would not like the fund-raising, nor would he care for the faculty politics, nor was he excited about navigating difficult issues with the student body, nor did he care for the job’s public demands that would come at the expense of teaching and research. A long period of silence followed before someone asked what excited him most about being a college president. The response was sure and confident: having his picture appear in the newspaper announcing the new hire. Some time passed before a person asked, “Can you think of any other way to get your picture in the paper?” And with that, Palmer determined that God was not calling him to take the job.
We rejoice that God speaks to us in many and varied ways, that we are led along right pathways, that we are prompted towards acts of courage and compassion. But we also recognize that many times it is not easy to distinguish between what may be God’s call and what may be something else. We in the Church hold that wisdom and discernment resides in the common whole; that God’s will is authenticated more easily by two or three than by one alone. There are times when the one moves the whole into a fuller realization of God’s dream for all people. We see this is today’s reading about Peter. And there are times when the whole corrects and redirects the thinking of the one. It may not always be easy or clean or clear or conflict free, but we see in today’s reading that from the beginning of the Church it is the way God speaks to us and leads us.
Our Christian faith holds that God speaks to us through the Holy Spirit. At one time or another, most of us have responded to what we have perceived to be God’s will. We as a parish listen intently for God’s guidance. For instance, two and a half years ago the Search Committee reported to the Vestry that God had led them to a particular candidate to call as Rector. The Episcopal Church constantly engages in discernment as we seek to bring the Good News to a changing and challenging world. The Spirit can speak clearly to us as individuals, to us as a faith community, and to us as a denominational body. But, we know that not everyone who hears a god-voice is actually being led by God’s Spirit. And there are times we wonder if what we hear is in fact God speaking to us and if what we think we hear God saying to do is actually what God wants us to do.
These concerns have been with the Church from its very inception. Our first reading from the Book of Acts is Peter’s eyewitness account of what is known as “the Gentile Pentecost.” You will recall that Pentecost is the day the Holy Spirit fell upon the disciples and they began to speak in various languages as they proclaimed the Good News of God in Christ to all people. That outpouring of the Holy Spirit was experienced exclusively by Jewish followers of Jesus (the text refers to them as “circumcised believers” because they were raised up in and conform to Jewish customs and practices). Their subsequent work and ministry was directed exclusively to people of the Jewish faith tradition.
In today’s reading Peter provides an account of how all of this changed. He shares the details of how Holy Spirit fell upon a Gentile named Cornelius and upon his family. The Spirit manifested among them with the same signs manifested by the disciples at the initial Pentecost.
Peter makes this report at what is now known as the First Council (or assembly) at Jerusalem. Word of what Peter had done spread among the circumcised believers in Judea. They were shocked to learn that Peter entered the home of a Gentile and that he ate a meal there. Both acts rendered him unclean according to the laws of Jewish purity. Peter defends his actions before the council by pointing to his vision, to the timing of Cornelius’ men approaching him, to Cornelius’ own dream, to Cornelius’ devout lifestyle, and – most importantly – to the way the Holy Spirit fell on the gathered Gentiles. Peter, perceiving that the Holy Spirit was a gift common both to those circumcised and to those uncircumcised, recognizes that the Church as God dreams of it will be more widely cast and inclusive than the disciples initially had thought.
A second council will be called in Jerusalem to debate the need for Gentiles to be circumcised and to adhere to other demands of the Law. Both gatherings determine that God’s Spirit is speaking clearly; inviting Gentiles into the faith, but not requiring them to conform to a Jewish heritage foreign to their own upbringing.
Several guiding principles have emerged over the centuries as devout men and woman have sought ways to authenticate God’s leading:
• Is this leading calling you to do something clearly immoral? If so, than it is not God speaking to you. God does not sanction suicide bombers.
• Is it foolishly reckless? God does not want to test your faith by asking you to swim in the Niagara River just above the falls.
• Is it contrary to the will of God we see revealed in Christ? Notice that is says “as revealed in Christ.” We believe that the fullest expression of God’s will is found in the life and words of Jesus. His example of loving your neighbor supersedes an Old Testament figure’s call to kill the enemy. His way elevating the place of woman in His company supersedes Paul’s counsel to a specific faith community that women should be silent in church or that they may never teach men.
• To what degree does the call fulfill an ego desire? The more it is about what you need the more likely the voice is your own and not the Spirit’s.
• Does the prompting have a compulsive power? A compelling call and psychological compulsion are not the same thing. Does this sound like God’s call to you: “I like that new sports car, I want that new sports car, I need that new sports car, I can’t think of anything else but that sports car, I can’t live without that sports car, Hey, I just got a tax refund so God must want me to have that new sports car.” Compulsions leave no room for freedom of choice, but divine promptings can always be refused because God never overrides our free will.
• Does what God calls you to do produce fear, or bring peace and joy? Most callings are accompanied by a certain amount of apprehension, but this gives way as you become more settled and certain in God’s leading.
• What are the consequences of my saying yes? Being able to anticipate the downside and to embrace the challenging aspects of what will or might happen is an important part of the process of responding to God’s call.
• What would be the fruit of my saying no? Again, this aspect of discernment forces us to take off our blinders and really look at the issue from all angles.
Several years ago the educator and writer Parker Palmer faced a major decision. He had interviewed for a college president’s position and had been offered the job. He was part of a Quaker community that practiced group discernment so its leaders gathered in a room with him where all sat in prayerful silence. Slowly and over time, individuals felt led by the Spirit to ask engaging questions to which Palmer would respond. One person asked what he anticipated not liking about the position. He reflected and said he would not like the fund-raising, nor would he care for the faculty politics, nor was he excited about navigating difficult issues with the student body, nor did he care for the job’s public demands that would come at the expense of teaching and research. A long period of silence followed before someone asked what excited him most about being a college president. The response was sure and confident: having his picture appear in the newspaper announcing the new hire. Some time passed before a person asked, “Can you think of any other way to get your picture in the paper?” And with that, Palmer determined that God was not calling him to take the job.
We rejoice that God speaks to us in many and varied ways, that we are led along right pathways, that we are prompted towards acts of courage and compassion. But we also recognize that many times it is not easy to distinguish between what may be God’s call and what may be something else. We in the Church hold that wisdom and discernment resides in the common whole; that God’s will is authenticated more easily by two or three than by one alone. There are times when the one moves the whole into a fuller realization of God’s dream for all people. We see this is today’s reading about Peter. And there are times when the whole corrects and redirects the thinking of the one. It may not always be easy or clean or clear or conflict free, but we see in today’s reading that from the beginning of the Church it is the way God speaks to us and leads us.
Monday, April 26, 2010
The 4th Sunday of Easter: Tabitha's Story
The assigned lessons during the season of Easter always gives us a chance to read from the Book of Acts; a book which contains the stories and testimony of the early Church. These stories begin with events just a few weeks after the Resurrection and move forward twenty-some years.
There is a lot going on between the lines in today’s narrative, which otherwise appears to be straight-forward. Let me list out a few of these things:
* The Book of Acts focuses on Peter and Paul. Today’s narrative is part of an arc that refocuses on the Peter’s ministry after a description of Paul’s conversion.
* Acts 9:32-11:18 describes Peter’s role in the conversion of Cornelius, a Roman centurion who is the first Gentile convert to the faith.
* This story arc begins with Peter’s healing of a paralytic, then tells today’s story where Peter is the lead figure in bringing back to life a woman named Tabitha. Both events establish Peter’s credentials to convert a Gentile by demonstrating his works as being like those of the prophets and Jesus Himself.
* The twin cities of Lydda and Joppa lie on the Mediterranean coast and have some historical significance that bears on this arc. Jonah (of Jonah and the whale fame) was in the city of Joppa when God called him to prophesy to the Gentile city of Nineveh. That Peter is in the same city when he receives direction from God to proclaim the Gospel to a Gentile adds additional validation to this sweeping theological and ecclesiastical change in the life of the early Church.
With all of this going on, it might be easy to miss the value of the story itself. Given that, and the addition of the miraculous act of bringing a dead person back to life, it is possible to overlook the very human elements of this story.
There was a disciple in Joppa named Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas and means “gazelle.” Is there significance to referencing her two names? Well, think about Simon, who is also known as Peter, and Saul, whose name is changed to Paul. The mention of a dual name seems to imply status in the life of the early Church. Tabitha’s status is further affirmed by the way the narrative refers to her as being a ‘disciple.’ This is the only instance in the New Testament where the feminine form of the word ‘disciple’ is used. The text goes on to describe her ministry in Joppa. She was (as one translation puts it) “always doing good and helping the poor” or (as the version we heard reads) “she was devoted to good works and acts of charity.” Amongst these good works, it seems Tabitha made clothing for women too poor to afford something to wear.
Every healthy, dynamic faith community has people in it like Tabitha. Often, but not exclusively, they are women who muster the resources and marshal the energy required to offer a significant ministry that meets one or more of the specific needs of the community. These people are the ‘pillars’ of the church. Two things consistently point out who they are. First, everyone marvels at their ministry and, second, everyone wonders how the church would get along without them.
Well, both come into play with Tabitha. Suddenly and without warning she falls ill and dies. Even as her church is overcome with grief, they find the strength to tend to the normal burial requirements of the body and preparing for the final rites. Word comes that the Apostle Peter is staying in nearby Lydda. A small delegation of men is sent to invite Peter to come immediately.
It is not clear to me from the text if they expect Peter to be able to restore Tabitha’s life, or if they want him to attend as a sign of the wider church’s respect and admiration for all that she had done in her ministry. Most commentators understand the request to be an expectation of healing. I tend to see it as more akin to what happens when a prominent member of the parish dies and someone says, “We should let the Bishop know because he may want to attend the funeral.”
When this Bishop arrives the full fruit of Tabitha’s ministry is on display. When Luke retells this story in his grand narrative of the life of the early Church, it is all about establishing Peter’s credentials to proclaim the Gospel to a Gentile, but here, in the moment, it is all about Tabitha and the incredible ministry she offered during her life. A group of widows, who appear to have been the people most blessed by her work, show Peter the clothes and wears that Tabitha made for them. It is a gathering both of grief and celebration: grief over the sudden loss of one so dear and celebration of the incredible blessing she brought to others.
According to a note in the Book of Common Prayer, both responses are appropriate for a person of faith:
The liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy [this is why we say the word “alleluia” at a burial even if it takes place in the season of Lent]. It finds all its meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, shall be raised.
The liturgy, therefore, is characterized by joy, in the certainty that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
This joy, however, does not make human grief unchristian. The very love we have for each other in Christ brings deep sorrow when we are parted by death. Jesus himself wept at the grave of his friend. So, while we rejoice that one we love has entered into the nearer presence of our Lord, we sorrow in sympathy with those who mourn. (p. 507)
This pastoral theology is firmly grounded in Tabitha’s story because the early Church experienced both joy and sorrow when she died.
Restoring Tabitha to life is surely the climax of the story, particularly if you focus on how it validates Peter’s Apostolic authority. But keep in mind that the miracle is not the climax of the story as Luke tells it, because for him it is a résumé builder for Peter’s work with the Gentile Cornelius. I think the story of Tabitha reaches a crescendo as everyone gathers to celebrate her life. Its final and fullest climax will come for her only as it does for each of us, at the Resurrection of the Dead. That Peter is able to restore her life augments our faith in the final Resurrection, but this one-time event is no substitute for the real thing, only a dim, brief allusion of it.
This Fourth Sunday of Easter is known as “Good Shepherd Sunday” because the Gospel readings always point to this aspect of Jesus’ role in our lives. This morning we heard His promise:
My sheep hear My voice. I know them, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of My hand.
We give thanks for people like Tabitha who heard the voice of the Good Shepherd and reached out in love and concern for others; becoming themselves shepherds to those in need. And we give thanks that for Tabitha, for all those we love but see no longer, and (one day) for ourselves, the Good Shepherd’s voice will call out and we, like them, will hear it and not be lost.
There is a lot going on between the lines in today’s narrative, which otherwise appears to be straight-forward. Let me list out a few of these things:
* The Book of Acts focuses on Peter and Paul. Today’s narrative is part of an arc that refocuses on the Peter’s ministry after a description of Paul’s conversion.
* Acts 9:32-11:18 describes Peter’s role in the conversion of Cornelius, a Roman centurion who is the first Gentile convert to the faith.
* This story arc begins with Peter’s healing of a paralytic, then tells today’s story where Peter is the lead figure in bringing back to life a woman named Tabitha. Both events establish Peter’s credentials to convert a Gentile by demonstrating his works as being like those of the prophets and Jesus Himself.
* The twin cities of Lydda and Joppa lie on the Mediterranean coast and have some historical significance that bears on this arc. Jonah (of Jonah and the whale fame) was in the city of Joppa when God called him to prophesy to the Gentile city of Nineveh. That Peter is in the same city when he receives direction from God to proclaim the Gospel to a Gentile adds additional validation to this sweeping theological and ecclesiastical change in the life of the early Church.
With all of this going on, it might be easy to miss the value of the story itself. Given that, and the addition of the miraculous act of bringing a dead person back to life, it is possible to overlook the very human elements of this story.
There was a disciple in Joppa named Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas and means “gazelle.” Is there significance to referencing her two names? Well, think about Simon, who is also known as Peter, and Saul, whose name is changed to Paul. The mention of a dual name seems to imply status in the life of the early Church. Tabitha’s status is further affirmed by the way the narrative refers to her as being a ‘disciple.’ This is the only instance in the New Testament where the feminine form of the word ‘disciple’ is used. The text goes on to describe her ministry in Joppa. She was (as one translation puts it) “always doing good and helping the poor” or (as the version we heard reads) “she was devoted to good works and acts of charity.” Amongst these good works, it seems Tabitha made clothing for women too poor to afford something to wear.
Every healthy, dynamic faith community has people in it like Tabitha. Often, but not exclusively, they are women who muster the resources and marshal the energy required to offer a significant ministry that meets one or more of the specific needs of the community. These people are the ‘pillars’ of the church. Two things consistently point out who they are. First, everyone marvels at their ministry and, second, everyone wonders how the church would get along without them.
Well, both come into play with Tabitha. Suddenly and without warning she falls ill and dies. Even as her church is overcome with grief, they find the strength to tend to the normal burial requirements of the body and preparing for the final rites. Word comes that the Apostle Peter is staying in nearby Lydda. A small delegation of men is sent to invite Peter to come immediately.
It is not clear to me from the text if they expect Peter to be able to restore Tabitha’s life, or if they want him to attend as a sign of the wider church’s respect and admiration for all that she had done in her ministry. Most commentators understand the request to be an expectation of healing. I tend to see it as more akin to what happens when a prominent member of the parish dies and someone says, “We should let the Bishop know because he may want to attend the funeral.”
When this Bishop arrives the full fruit of Tabitha’s ministry is on display. When Luke retells this story in his grand narrative of the life of the early Church, it is all about establishing Peter’s credentials to proclaim the Gospel to a Gentile, but here, in the moment, it is all about Tabitha and the incredible ministry she offered during her life. A group of widows, who appear to have been the people most blessed by her work, show Peter the clothes and wears that Tabitha made for them. It is a gathering both of grief and celebration: grief over the sudden loss of one so dear and celebration of the incredible blessing she brought to others.
According to a note in the Book of Common Prayer, both responses are appropriate for a person of faith:
The liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy [this is why we say the word “alleluia” at a burial even if it takes place in the season of Lent]. It finds all its meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, shall be raised.
The liturgy, therefore, is characterized by joy, in the certainty that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
This joy, however, does not make human grief unchristian. The very love we have for each other in Christ brings deep sorrow when we are parted by death. Jesus himself wept at the grave of his friend. So, while we rejoice that one we love has entered into the nearer presence of our Lord, we sorrow in sympathy with those who mourn. (p. 507)
This pastoral theology is firmly grounded in Tabitha’s story because the early Church experienced both joy and sorrow when she died.
Restoring Tabitha to life is surely the climax of the story, particularly if you focus on how it validates Peter’s Apostolic authority. But keep in mind that the miracle is not the climax of the story as Luke tells it, because for him it is a résumé builder for Peter’s work with the Gentile Cornelius. I think the story of Tabitha reaches a crescendo as everyone gathers to celebrate her life. Its final and fullest climax will come for her only as it does for each of us, at the Resurrection of the Dead. That Peter is able to restore her life augments our faith in the final Resurrection, but this one-time event is no substitute for the real thing, only a dim, brief allusion of it.
This Fourth Sunday of Easter is known as “Good Shepherd Sunday” because the Gospel readings always point to this aspect of Jesus’ role in our lives. This morning we heard His promise:
My sheep hear My voice. I know them, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of My hand.
We give thanks for people like Tabitha who heard the voice of the Good Shepherd and reached out in love and concern for others; becoming themselves shepherds to those in need. And we give thanks that for Tabitha, for all those we love but see no longer, and (one day) for ourselves, the Good Shepherd’s voice will call out and we, like them, will hear it and not be lost.
Monday, April 19, 2010
The 3rd Sunday of Easter: Giving Birth to a Dancing Star
One of the true ‘joys’ of the college I attended was its belief in the value of Saturday morning classes. They kept students on campus for the weekend and (theoretically) kept Friday night partying to a minimum. Then as now, for a college student, 8:00 in the morning comes awfully early. But there is nothing as early as 8:00 on a Saturday morning, especially if it involves going to class and especially if that class is philosophy. Oh, the monologues the professors had to deliver on Saturday morning when we students were too tired to engage in lively give and take. There were a few exceptions, like the Saturday we discussed the famous quote by the infamous Friedrich Nietzche who said you must have some chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
Around the time Nietzche penned those words psychologists like Freud and Jung were beginning to understand just how crowed and chaotic the typical soul can be. Freud described how the ego is constantly trying to balance the demands of soul’s moral component, which he termed the super-ego, with the drive of its pleasure-seeking component, which he termed the id. Jung named the chaos of the soul ‘the Shadow.’ It consists of all those parts of our makeup which make us uncomfortable. All of this, according to Nietzche, can be used in very creative and inspiring ways. Or not.
In the today’s first reading we heard about the conversion of the Apostle Paul. Born into a family of privilege and position, educated as a scholar, and raised in a multi-cultural environment, he was the kind of person who was always ready to engage the professor, even at 8:00 on a Saturday morning. Paul had every opportunity to do something fantastic with his life and, from where he stood at the beginning of the reading, he might, in fact, have said he was doing it. He used his background and experience to gain a lofty position in the religious hierarchy of the time. He was a chief persecutor of adherents to the emerging Christian faith. Paul led campaigns to arrest, try, punish, and even execute followers of Jesus. Whatever chaos was in his soul, it was not giving birth to a dancing star. Far from it.
And we know from Paul’s later writings that his soul was, in fact, a place of chaos. He wrote to the Christians in Rome about how he knows the good, but he simply cannot do it. When Paul searches for a word in Greek to describe his battle with sin, he chooses akrasia, which is like when an archer aims at a target, but misses because he did not pull back on the bow string with enough effort. Sin, for Paul, involved weakness; a failure of will power, a lack of determination.
That is one way to look at it from a theological perspective, but looking through the lens of psychology gives us another kind of insight. Jung held that, in the end, our task is not goodness, but wholeness. The more aware we are of what is taking place in our inner world the less likely this material will need to be played out unconsciously in the outer world. What we deny about our inward life often is what comes back to bite us again and again in ways that we might understand, but don’t.
So let’s think about Paul for a moment in light of Nietzche. Prior to today’s reading, Paul’s inner world is a place of chaos and conflict. Looking at the persecution he oversees, we would not say that his outer world is giving birth to a dancing star; just the opposite in fact. The opposite of dancing is not what I did at the Junior High mixers – sit against the wall and watch others as they dance – it is (I think) marching.
Dancing is free, expressive, open to flux and flow and the movement of others. It is creative and generative and unconfined. Dancing is related to Freud’s concept of the id – pleasure seeking. Marching, when it if freely engaged by a band or a disciplined military unit, emanates from the same place. It is a voluntary effort by a willing group to marshal movement into a collective effort for a personal and collective goal.
But when marching is forced, it is restrictive, ordered, uniform, anti-individualistic, and confining. It is exacting; demanding everyone do the same thing, think the same thoughts, and have the same beliefs. Have you ever worked under a boss or had a teacher who demanded that everyone march to the same tune? That kind of marching is related to the super-ego’s bent toward morality. And in Paul, this bent was out of control. His Paul’s inner world was an unacknowledged chaotic battleground between the id and the super-ego (and the key word here is unacknowledged). His ego, which is the outward, visible balance of the two polarities, surrenders to his super-ego and as a result he becomes a religious bounty hunter who demands uniformity; uniformity to the extend that those who do not conform are excuted for their ‘offense’. Those who dance with the Risen Lord bear the brunt of his unresolved inner turmoil.
Paul is not unique in this, he is human. His challenge is one that we all face. Sometimes we master it, other times it masters us. Martha Grant describes this struggle in a poem she calls The Committee:
The rude one is only one of many
who populate my inner committee,
an unruly group of stubborn complexes
who try to run my life.
My vigilant effort to tame these insubordinates
is ongoing, endless.
I’ve wheeled and flattered
and when that didn’t work
actually reasoned
with the most recalcitrant members
but it only makes them more determined.
Besides, they have my number.
They’ve sat often with my therapist,
wringing their collective hands in commiseration,
clucking sympathetically,
when all along they were gathering ammunition.
Now they are doling out assignments –
I can hear the papers shuffling –
and what’s more,
calling in new recruits from the street.
Those who bear the brunt of our inner battle may be those closest to us – our spouse, family, and friends – or they may be our coworkers or they may be our neighbors or they may be our fellow church members or they may even be our selves. Or, if extreme cases, it may be all of the above.
Here are three things that I find in Paul’s story that made all of the difference for him; that converted him from march at all costs to giving birth to a dancing star.
The first thing was absolutely beyond his control: the Risen Lord appeared in his life. Jesus has a way of doing that. Jesus has a way of searching out the lost sheep and brining them back into the flock. The silent sheep are surely a little harder to reach than those who bleat out for help, but sooner or later the Good Shepherd comes to each one of us just as He came to Paul.
The second thing involves being open to Jesus the Shepherd; what we call grace. The theologian Paul Tillich said that grace is accepting the fact that in the end you are accepted, despite being unacceptable. That means that you, your ego outer self, your super-ego moral self, and your id pleasure seeking self – all of you – is loved and accepted by God… you… just as you are.
The third thing that Paul did was to stop pretending. He talked and preached and wrote openly about himself. “The good that I want to do I never seem to do. The ill that I don’t want to do is always what I seem to do in the end.” Jung would call that an awareness of the Shadow. Freud would call it a reassertion of the ego’s healthy balance between the super-ego and id. Whatever you want to call it this much is sure: Paul’s life changed dramatically. He no longer sought to enforce marching because his life began to give birth to a dancing star.
And what about you? What about me? Do you force others to march or does you life give birth to a dancing star? Chaos is an ingredient in both. The only difference is that to dance, you need to give your self to the Shepherd without holding back; you need to hold tight to the hope of grace (that you are accepted even though you are unacceptable); and you need to make peace with all that you are by bringing it into the light. I am not saying that you should go out and “sin it up” – far from it. But if you cannot understand and be aware of the dark forces in your life, you will never be able to comprehend that damage they do to you and to others.
Now, I know you want a “kitchen story” – and if ever there was an example of chaos being manifested in the outer world, my kitchen project is it! Going into Holy Week and Easter Sunday I acknowledged to myself (and to others) that I was consumed with thoughts about the details of my renovation. I was not able to think much about the spiritual component I needed to bring to our services, especially the sermons. Faced with this dilemma, I decided to raid a few of my older “masterpieces” and resolved never again to schedule something this big for the week after Easter. My fixation on my kitchen became my Shadow, but I resolved it by giving myself permission to be out of it and by promising myself to be in a better spiritual place next year. As a result I came to each and every one of our Holy Week services not doing inner battle and (hopefully) not taking out my inner conflict on those in my outer world. I truly enjoyed each service for what it was, but knowing I need to offer something fresh in the years to come. This perspective helped me danced with all of you.
Each of us here this morning is a complex person. We are sought by Jesus, loved more than we could ever ask or imagine, and – bathed in this love, capable of doing wonderful things in this world. If it could happen for Paul, it can certainly happen for each one of us.
Around the time Nietzche penned those words psychologists like Freud and Jung were beginning to understand just how crowed and chaotic the typical soul can be. Freud described how the ego is constantly trying to balance the demands of soul’s moral component, which he termed the super-ego, with the drive of its pleasure-seeking component, which he termed the id. Jung named the chaos of the soul ‘the Shadow.’ It consists of all those parts of our makeup which make us uncomfortable. All of this, according to Nietzche, can be used in very creative and inspiring ways. Or not.
In the today’s first reading we heard about the conversion of the Apostle Paul. Born into a family of privilege and position, educated as a scholar, and raised in a multi-cultural environment, he was the kind of person who was always ready to engage the professor, even at 8:00 on a Saturday morning. Paul had every opportunity to do something fantastic with his life and, from where he stood at the beginning of the reading, he might, in fact, have said he was doing it. He used his background and experience to gain a lofty position in the religious hierarchy of the time. He was a chief persecutor of adherents to the emerging Christian faith. Paul led campaigns to arrest, try, punish, and even execute followers of Jesus. Whatever chaos was in his soul, it was not giving birth to a dancing star. Far from it.
And we know from Paul’s later writings that his soul was, in fact, a place of chaos. He wrote to the Christians in Rome about how he knows the good, but he simply cannot do it. When Paul searches for a word in Greek to describe his battle with sin, he chooses akrasia, which is like when an archer aims at a target, but misses because he did not pull back on the bow string with enough effort. Sin, for Paul, involved weakness; a failure of will power, a lack of determination.
That is one way to look at it from a theological perspective, but looking through the lens of psychology gives us another kind of insight. Jung held that, in the end, our task is not goodness, but wholeness. The more aware we are of what is taking place in our inner world the less likely this material will need to be played out unconsciously in the outer world. What we deny about our inward life often is what comes back to bite us again and again in ways that we might understand, but don’t.
So let’s think about Paul for a moment in light of Nietzche. Prior to today’s reading, Paul’s inner world is a place of chaos and conflict. Looking at the persecution he oversees, we would not say that his outer world is giving birth to a dancing star; just the opposite in fact. The opposite of dancing is not what I did at the Junior High mixers – sit against the wall and watch others as they dance – it is (I think) marching.
Dancing is free, expressive, open to flux and flow and the movement of others. It is creative and generative and unconfined. Dancing is related to Freud’s concept of the id – pleasure seeking. Marching, when it if freely engaged by a band or a disciplined military unit, emanates from the same place. It is a voluntary effort by a willing group to marshal movement into a collective effort for a personal and collective goal.
But when marching is forced, it is restrictive, ordered, uniform, anti-individualistic, and confining. It is exacting; demanding everyone do the same thing, think the same thoughts, and have the same beliefs. Have you ever worked under a boss or had a teacher who demanded that everyone march to the same tune? That kind of marching is related to the super-ego’s bent toward morality. And in Paul, this bent was out of control. His Paul’s inner world was an unacknowledged chaotic battleground between the id and the super-ego (and the key word here is unacknowledged). His ego, which is the outward, visible balance of the two polarities, surrenders to his super-ego and as a result he becomes a religious bounty hunter who demands uniformity; uniformity to the extend that those who do not conform are excuted for their ‘offense’. Those who dance with the Risen Lord bear the brunt of his unresolved inner turmoil.
Paul is not unique in this, he is human. His challenge is one that we all face. Sometimes we master it, other times it masters us. Martha Grant describes this struggle in a poem she calls The Committee:
The rude one is only one of many
who populate my inner committee,
an unruly group of stubborn complexes
who try to run my life.
My vigilant effort to tame these insubordinates
is ongoing, endless.
I’ve wheeled and flattered
and when that didn’t work
actually reasoned
with the most recalcitrant members
but it only makes them more determined.
Besides, they have my number.
They’ve sat often with my therapist,
wringing their collective hands in commiseration,
clucking sympathetically,
when all along they were gathering ammunition.
Now they are doling out assignments –
I can hear the papers shuffling –
and what’s more,
calling in new recruits from the street.
Those who bear the brunt of our inner battle may be those closest to us – our spouse, family, and friends – or they may be our coworkers or they may be our neighbors or they may be our fellow church members or they may even be our selves. Or, if extreme cases, it may be all of the above.
Here are three things that I find in Paul’s story that made all of the difference for him; that converted him from march at all costs to giving birth to a dancing star.
The first thing was absolutely beyond his control: the Risen Lord appeared in his life. Jesus has a way of doing that. Jesus has a way of searching out the lost sheep and brining them back into the flock. The silent sheep are surely a little harder to reach than those who bleat out for help, but sooner or later the Good Shepherd comes to each one of us just as He came to Paul.
The second thing involves being open to Jesus the Shepherd; what we call grace. The theologian Paul Tillich said that grace is accepting the fact that in the end you are accepted, despite being unacceptable. That means that you, your ego outer self, your super-ego moral self, and your id pleasure seeking self – all of you – is loved and accepted by God… you… just as you are.
The third thing that Paul did was to stop pretending. He talked and preached and wrote openly about himself. “The good that I want to do I never seem to do. The ill that I don’t want to do is always what I seem to do in the end.” Jung would call that an awareness of the Shadow. Freud would call it a reassertion of the ego’s healthy balance between the super-ego and id. Whatever you want to call it this much is sure: Paul’s life changed dramatically. He no longer sought to enforce marching because his life began to give birth to a dancing star.
And what about you? What about me? Do you force others to march or does you life give birth to a dancing star? Chaos is an ingredient in both. The only difference is that to dance, you need to give your self to the Shepherd without holding back; you need to hold tight to the hope of grace (that you are accepted even though you are unacceptable); and you need to make peace with all that you are by bringing it into the light. I am not saying that you should go out and “sin it up” – far from it. But if you cannot understand and be aware of the dark forces in your life, you will never be able to comprehend that damage they do to you and to others.
Now, I know you want a “kitchen story” – and if ever there was an example of chaos being manifested in the outer world, my kitchen project is it! Going into Holy Week and Easter Sunday I acknowledged to myself (and to others) that I was consumed with thoughts about the details of my renovation. I was not able to think much about the spiritual component I needed to bring to our services, especially the sermons. Faced with this dilemma, I decided to raid a few of my older “masterpieces” and resolved never again to schedule something this big for the week after Easter. My fixation on my kitchen became my Shadow, but I resolved it by giving myself permission to be out of it and by promising myself to be in a better spiritual place next year. As a result I came to each and every one of our Holy Week services not doing inner battle and (hopefully) not taking out my inner conflict on those in my outer world. I truly enjoyed each service for what it was, but knowing I need to offer something fresh in the years to come. This perspective helped me danced with all of you.
Each of us here this morning is a complex person. We are sought by Jesus, loved more than we could ever ask or imagine, and – bathed in this love, capable of doing wonderful things in this world. If it could happen for Paul, it can certainly happen for each one of us.
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