I know I am a curmudgeon. I wish I were more tolerant and serene, less judgmental and way less prone to agitation. Not likely, given my schematics.
I pray as I do mostly in hopes of re-wiring, pleading with the Good Electrician to remodel me. My wife assures me she has, over the years, noticed real change in me...I think she means for the better (as in, more light, less heat), but maybe she is pulling my leg as I often pull hers (which is to say, I am a better actor than pray-er, a dimmed and low-watt bulb).
Anyway, yesterday, after about five hours of study at Panera, I packed my stuff and waited in sure and certain hope for Jacob, my son, to collect me after he got off work. It was raining. Nasty--nothing like the poor folk in Fargo were experiencing (I needed no sand bags), but it was really wet and damp.
Computer case and briefcase slung over my shoulder, and conscious, as I always am, of trying to stay out of people's way, I took my interim stand just outside the front entrance. For about ten minutes I played doorman, opened the glass doors for people scurrying in, head-down against the elements, also for people covering their heads, bracing themselves to bolt for their cars. I could not help but see the traffic jam inside.
A sign that greets everyone entering Panera, with an arrow and words, indicates that the line for ordering forms to the left. Beside it is one of those movable floor posts, made for theatres, airports and such, with nylon strapping at the top that uncoils, stretches and attaches to another post a little further on--to make a lane. At my Panera, the strap cuts the lobby in two: the left side is the pastry display, the free samples and the cash registers. The right side creates a path for exit. Also, the coffee is there.
For the 10 minutes or so I watched, everyone entering the lobby went to the right--against the sign's counsel--and formed the ordering line there: the Great (pedestrian) Wall of Panera. It kept people from the coffee. It created problems for people trying to leave. More than once I heard "Ex-cuse me, please!" from frustrated folk as they tried to make for the exit. Several irritated stares were exchanged: Hey! I am in line here! Yeah, well, you and the line are in the wrong place!
Vicariously, Pharisaically, I was irritated too, even though I had no dog, really, in the fight. I was already outside. But more than once I thought to go in, to tell the people in line, "Get over to the other side of the strap. Read the dadgum sign! Can't you see you are clogging things up? What is wrong with you?"
Yeah, boy, I have changed a whole lot. The prayers of a righteous man may avail much, but much prayer has not availed to make me the least bit righteous.
Okay, so maybe the folks came in all wet and bothered and did not see the sign. Or maybe it is not all that big a deal where they stand while they wait and on a rainy afternoon we all need to cut each other some slack. Or maybe it is just that people look at other people quicker than they read written guidance...and if someone is standing over there, that must be where the line forms and so I will fall in behind them and stand there too. Of course, I then become a reason for those arriving after me to stand in the wrong place, and all of this congestion and irritation could have been avoided if the first folk had read the sign and done what it said, or if the next person in line or the folk after them had read the sign and stood in the right place so that the folk coming after them would have followed their example and been in the right place and things would not be so unpleasant inside as the rain falls outside...
And why is it that we look to each other first, always look first to what everyone else is doing instead of following the directions that someone wise and experienced has written for our instruction and comfort?
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Best of Times, Worst of Times
I am always glad to hear when someone has read something I have written and found it to be helpful or meaningful. Doesn't happen too often--either because I have so few readers or have written such unhelpful and unmeaningful stuff or both. Today, though, I had such a moment...
In my study group, one of our older members told of another group in which he takes part, a kind of mentoring and support group (ours is a lectionary study group), and that one fellow in that group has been going through a terrible time. He seems to have been charged with or accused of some impropriety and has been away from ministry for a while, though now he has finished a time of counseling and renewal and may be preparing to re-enter the fray. Anyway, my friend told me this morning that in a recent meeting the damaged pastor confided to him that he had discovered a book that really helped him: Praying for Dear Life, by yours truly.
Tears came to my eyes immediately, both remembering my own prodigality--some 15 years ago now--and knowing that the book the fellow read was born out of similar tragedy and hope.
I lost so much. I gave up so much, really. In truth, I threw so much away. But the horrible aftermath of that debacle was so intertwined with hope as to conceive the book I wrote some years later. Tragedy and hope, like egg and sperm, joining and gestating in the darkness of exile, birthed and raised in the wilderness between liberation and promise.
It is my baby, that book, and I am proud of it as parents are proud of their kids. When no one can see how special my baby is, I grieve--for the book and myself. But on those rare occasions when others seem to appreciate it as I do, a least a little, it makes my day. The best of times.
I said more or less all that to my friend.
He got a funny look on his face and said, "Well, now, I will have to unmake your day." And he proceeded to tell me that the damaged fellow had no idea who I was or that I was a colleague of his only one district removed. In other words, we are in the same conference of ministers, attend the same meetings, are supervised and superintended by many of the same people, and yet he had no idea who I was or where I serve or anything.
I thought of that logion of Jesus: prophets are not without honor except in their own home, but of course I am no prophet, or the son of a prophet. I am just a "herdsman," a "dresser of sycamore trees," which is to say, I am a garden-variety pastor, one of the little guys, and so no surprise that though he pitches his tent only a little ways over from me, he does not know who I am.
What is a surprise is that he has read me (when many, even of my friends, haven't). What is a grace, and the profoundest of joys, is that what he has read, apparently, has spoken to his heart --my spirit bearing witness to his spirit that we are both children of tragedy, children of hope, children of God.
In my study group, one of our older members told of another group in which he takes part, a kind of mentoring and support group (ours is a lectionary study group), and that one fellow in that group has been going through a terrible time. He seems to have been charged with or accused of some impropriety and has been away from ministry for a while, though now he has finished a time of counseling and renewal and may be preparing to re-enter the fray. Anyway, my friend told me this morning that in a recent meeting the damaged pastor confided to him that he had discovered a book that really helped him: Praying for Dear Life, by yours truly.
Tears came to my eyes immediately, both remembering my own prodigality--some 15 years ago now--and knowing that the book the fellow read was born out of similar tragedy and hope.
I lost so much. I gave up so much, really. In truth, I threw so much away. But the horrible aftermath of that debacle was so intertwined with hope as to conceive the book I wrote some years later. Tragedy and hope, like egg and sperm, joining and gestating in the darkness of exile, birthed and raised in the wilderness between liberation and promise.
It is my baby, that book, and I am proud of it as parents are proud of their kids. When no one can see how special my baby is, I grieve--for the book and myself. But on those rare occasions when others seem to appreciate it as I do, a least a little, it makes my day. The best of times.
I said more or less all that to my friend.
He got a funny look on his face and said, "Well, now, I will have to unmake your day." And he proceeded to tell me that the damaged fellow had no idea who I was or that I was a colleague of his only one district removed. In other words, we are in the same conference of ministers, attend the same meetings, are supervised and superintended by many of the same people, and yet he had no idea who I was or where I serve or anything.
I thought of that logion of Jesus: prophets are not without honor except in their own home, but of course I am no prophet, or the son of a prophet. I am just a "herdsman," a "dresser of sycamore trees," which is to say, I am a garden-variety pastor, one of the little guys, and so no surprise that though he pitches his tent only a little ways over from me, he does not know who I am.
What is a surprise is that he has read me (when many, even of my friends, haven't). What is a grace, and the profoundest of joys, is that what he has read, apparently, has spoken to his heart --my spirit bearing witness to his spirit that we are both children of tragedy, children of hope, children of God.
Monday, March 16, 2009
I have already decided
that next year I am going to give up the Internet and my cell phone for Lent. This, after reading in Kathleen Norris' Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life that "broadcast and Internet news media have emerged as acedia's perfect vehicles, demanding that we care, all at once, about a suicide bombing, a celebrity divorce, and the latest developments in nanotechnology. Advertisements direct our attention to automobiles; medications to combat high blood pressure, hemorrhoids, and insomnia; the Red Cross; a new household cleaner. When the "news" returns, there are appalling segues, such as the one I witnessed recently, the screen going from "Child Sex Offender Search" to "Gas Prices Rise." It all comes at us on the same level, and an innocent from another world might assume we consider these matters of equal importance. We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming at the bottom of the screen. But the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring. As Thomas Merton predicted, our world has been flattened, and we've been had." (128-129)
Faith, Hope and Haste
I do not have to understand it all right now.
I do not have to understand it all right now.
I do not have to understand it all right now.
I keep telling myself all that, but I get so frustrated sometimes, trying to put it all together and immediately. I am reading Brian McLaren (Finding our Way Again), Kathleen Norris (Acedia and Me), Phyllis Tickle (The Great Emergence), Eugene Peterson (The Contemplative Pastor) and the lections for Palm Sunday. I am still thinking about Dr. Gil Rendle and his comments about adaptive leadership, positions vs. interests, and the challenges facing the "bi-modal" church.
All of these great thinkers and writers are, it seems to me, writing from very different positions (except perhaps Tickle and McLaren), but diagnosing the Christian past, the present ethos and the days ahead in remarkably similar terms. Peterson's book can only be described as prescient, as he wrote it 20 years ago or more, while the other titles are very recent.
I wonder, reading this stuff, whether I have either the skill set or the insight to do any more than chaplain the dying mainline. I know they say that prayer, listening, attention--all of those things more than problem-solving activity; which is to say, faith and grace more than works--are called for in these unsettled and unsettling days. And yet, as Norris writes, "it is always easier for us to busy ourselves" than to be.
I do not have to understand it all right now.
I do not have to understand it all right now.
I keep telling myself all that, but I get so frustrated sometimes, trying to put it all together and immediately. I am reading Brian McLaren (Finding our Way Again), Kathleen Norris (Acedia and Me), Phyllis Tickle (The Great Emergence), Eugene Peterson (The Contemplative Pastor) and the lections for Palm Sunday. I am still thinking about Dr. Gil Rendle and his comments about adaptive leadership, positions vs. interests, and the challenges facing the "bi-modal" church.
All of these great thinkers and writers are, it seems to me, writing from very different positions (except perhaps Tickle and McLaren), but diagnosing the Christian past, the present ethos and the days ahead in remarkably similar terms. Peterson's book can only be described as prescient, as he wrote it 20 years ago or more, while the other titles are very recent.
I wonder, reading this stuff, whether I have either the skill set or the insight to do any more than chaplain the dying mainline. I know they say that prayer, listening, attention--all of those things more than problem-solving activity; which is to say, faith and grace more than works--are called for in these unsettled and unsettling days. And yet, as Norris writes, "it is always easier for us to busy ourselves" than to be.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Law and Gospel, Or, Only in Paul's Dreams
This week's lectionary texts are among the richest in Holy Scripture. We have the first of three accounts of the "10 Commandments" in Exodus/Deuteronomy, the "noting but Christ and him crucified" in I Corinthians, the so-called natural revelation/special revelation in Psalm 19, and everybody's fave, Jesus' cleansing of the Temple in John 2.
Interestingly, in the other gospel accounts, the episode of Jesus' zealotry for the purity of Temple worship comes late, at the beginning of Holy Week, and serves as one of the primary motives for Jesus' enemies to move against him in a final, murderous way. In John, the story is early, just after his first sign (turning water to wine), as if the second clause to the preamble of ministry's agenda (miraculous grace, withering judgment).
There are many, many points of convergence in these stories. Right now I am interested in the fact that God's command to have no other Gods "before me" might be suggestive of the clutter we put in between ourselves and God. For fear or comfort, the human tendency is to mask the divine, to carve it into manageable shape, to render it in lifeless stone, to turn to mediators both human and inanimate (priests, horoscopes, tarot cards, formulas and periodic tables) who/that can interpret the mystery and make it less frightening).
Churches, Temples--created to carve out essentially empty space for God to fill and for us to experience God--are gradually filled with stuff (related to faith or not) but in every case the result is that we shield ourselves from the terrible and wonderful intimacy that is crucial to true epiphanies or real experiences.
Later in the Exodus text the people of Israel--already terrified by the signs they see of God's presence on Sinai, fire and smoke and the thunder of God's voice--put Moses "before God": you go talk to him and tell us what he says (vs. 19). Moses tells them not to be afraid, but they are anyway. And so we remain. Half-disbelieving, half-afraid. And so we protect ourselves either from disappointment or Reality with the "stuff" we put as buffer between ourselves and the Almighty. If no one can see God and live, no one can really live who has not caught at least a glimpse of God, but as Willimon and others have suggested, pastors spend a good bit of their time and energy protecting their people from God--and so pastors and their people are often mostly dead.
The Temple is filled with idols and junk during the time of Hezekiah and Josiah...cluttering the space with things that apparently were meaningful or important or pleasant to the people (feel free to make your own joke here), but were between the people and God. I think, too, of the walls in Martha's kitchen... she is doing stuff for Jesus but that keeps her from being with Jesus. Those who give themselves to the business and busyness of the church are doing things for God, but many times these things are "before" God, not just in terms of priority but also proximity: a shield, a buffer, in between us and God.
Interestingly, the critique of John 2 is addressed to the priests...the preachers. Those of us who are so busy about the stuff that we protect ourselves and our people for the terror and wonder of worship.
We proclaim nothing but Christ and him Crucified? Only in Paul's dreams!
Interestingly, in the other gospel accounts, the episode of Jesus' zealotry for the purity of Temple worship comes late, at the beginning of Holy Week, and serves as one of the primary motives for Jesus' enemies to move against him in a final, murderous way. In John, the story is early, just after his first sign (turning water to wine), as if the second clause to the preamble of ministry's agenda (miraculous grace, withering judgment).
There are many, many points of convergence in these stories. Right now I am interested in the fact that God's command to have no other Gods "before me" might be suggestive of the clutter we put in between ourselves and God. For fear or comfort, the human tendency is to mask the divine, to carve it into manageable shape, to render it in lifeless stone, to turn to mediators both human and inanimate (priests, horoscopes, tarot cards, formulas and periodic tables) who/that can interpret the mystery and make it less frightening).
Churches, Temples--created to carve out essentially empty space for God to fill and for us to experience God--are gradually filled with stuff (related to faith or not) but in every case the result is that we shield ourselves from the terrible and wonderful intimacy that is crucial to true epiphanies or real experiences.
Later in the Exodus text the people of Israel--already terrified by the signs they see of God's presence on Sinai, fire and smoke and the thunder of God's voice--put Moses "before God": you go talk to him and tell us what he says (vs. 19). Moses tells them not to be afraid, but they are anyway. And so we remain. Half-disbelieving, half-afraid. And so we protect ourselves either from disappointment or Reality with the "stuff" we put as buffer between ourselves and the Almighty. If no one can see God and live, no one can really live who has not caught at least a glimpse of God, but as Willimon and others have suggested, pastors spend a good bit of their time and energy protecting their people from God--and so pastors and their people are often mostly dead.
The Temple is filled with idols and junk during the time of Hezekiah and Josiah...cluttering the space with things that apparently were meaningful or important or pleasant to the people (feel free to make your own joke here), but were between the people and God. I think, too, of the walls in Martha's kitchen... she is doing stuff for Jesus but that keeps her from being with Jesus. Those who give themselves to the business and busyness of the church are doing things for God, but many times these things are "before" God, not just in terms of priority but also proximity: a shield, a buffer, in between us and God.
Interestingly, the critique of John 2 is addressed to the priests...the preachers. Those of us who are so busy about the stuff that we protect ourselves and our people for the terror and wonder of worship.
We proclaim nothing but Christ and him Crucified? Only in Paul's dreams!
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Water Torture
Yesterday, as I do the first Friday of almost every month (and would to God it were more often), I went to Belmont Abbey to pray with the Benedictine brothers there. Before the hour of mid-day prayer, I met with three friends to discuss "The Great Divorce," C.S. Lewis’ powerful meditation on the afterlife. He attempts to evoke, not heaven itself, but the "valley of decision" between what is either purgatory or hell, and the Mountain.
In a vast gray shadowland there is a train station. Ghostly residents of these precincts board a vehicle for passage to the valley. The ride is unpleasant as the vehicle (and the people) grow larger (though they remain unfinished, "man-shaped smudges") and the stakes are incredibly high: whatever the ghosts ultimately decide in the valley interprets the shadowland "backwards." That is, the lonely, gray expanse will be seen in retrospect to have been either a place of purgation (and therefore preparation for the Mountain), or of retrenchment (thereby effecting ultimate and indeed eternal separation from the Mountain and its inhabitants). Those who choose "reality"--who leave the shadows and start for the mountain--soon "thicken," come to see glory only redeemed eyes can begin to comprehend.
Over and over again the task is clear: to become all that we are created to be, all that God would ultimately make us, the only thing we have to do is lay aside our lives as we have made them, our idols as we have formed them, our lesser desires as we habitually choose them. Over and over again, however, the ghosts (those who have arrived on the bus), most of them, anyway--are unable to do those things. They refuse the entreaties of the Spirits, will not believe the promise, refuse to take their journey to the Mountain. They consider the Spirits untrustworthy, the promise a lie, and for those reasons regularly and even hastily choose to return to the shadows, even under the threat of coming Night.
To live, all we have to do is die--give up what we think makes us who we are so that God can remake us into what only God can. We set aside pride, rights, exclusive devotion to less than God; we begin to want, just begin to desire God for God's sake (and not God for others' sake; we do not, for example, desire heaven to be reunited with Aunt Minerva, but to be reunited with God. Then, but only then, do we find that Aunt Minerva is there with us). That seed of loving God at the expense of ourselves, at the expense of other, lesser things--Lewis says our desires are not too strong but too weak—begins the transformation.
Lewis says it is a choice made many times each day. God says to us, "Thy will be done," and we reply either, "Yes, my will be done," or "No, THY will be done." In every moment, we are turning either toward God or away from God, toward joy or away from it toward something far less substantial, even unreal. It is in fact the reality of the valley of decision that is so off-putting for so many.
Then it was time to pray with the monks. As we entered the basilica, near the rear doors to the nave, there was a small bowl, hewn from rock, with holy water in it ("How do you make Holy Water?" the old joke begins. "Boil the hell out of it."). I dip my fingers in and mark my forehead with the sign of the cross, remembering my baptism and being thankful for spiritual friends and good books and a place to pray and men who have given their lives to this place and this kind of praying that a poor Methodist preacher might find a place in the choir.
I sit in the cool of the loft, preparing myself for prayer, praying to be able to pray, when suddenly I am aware of the cross on my forehead. There is moisture there, still, and it begins to feel strange...which is to say it begins to, well, burn on my forehead. It may be the breeze of the entering monks and others, the the cool of the river stone that forms the chancel, but something has caught the last bit of unevaporated water on my forehead and it irritates, annoys, begins to drive me crazy.
I think to reach up, wipe it off, as some say they have to remove the ashes on Ash Wednesday because they “make my head itch”--but I determine to let the water and the breeze do their full work on me, making me mad if they will, but I will not try to remove them… Conversely, I think of the man in The Great Divorce with the lizard on his shoulder, the lust in his heart, the touch and fire that would remove them but he fears the pain.
We begin mid-day Prayer. There is plaintive chant. There are Psalms. There is a reading from Jeremiah: "Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, says the Lord."
The cross burns me as if branding my skull. I want to shout in the silence. "O My God, make haste to help me…O God, be not far from me"—but his presence is indeed a refining fire and I seem unable to endure this least evidence of his mercies or judgments. If I cannot endure this little water torture, this cruciform touch, this gift of water and the spirit, how shall I see him face to face? How shall I endure his appearing?
I have no source, no plea, no hope but in God himself. Let me hear what the Spirit says. Let the water and the blood do their horrible, wonderful, painful, healing work. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen and amen.
In a vast gray shadowland there is a train station. Ghostly residents of these precincts board a vehicle for passage to the valley. The ride is unpleasant as the vehicle (and the people) grow larger (though they remain unfinished, "man-shaped smudges") and the stakes are incredibly high: whatever the ghosts ultimately decide in the valley interprets the shadowland "backwards." That is, the lonely, gray expanse will be seen in retrospect to have been either a place of purgation (and therefore preparation for the Mountain), or of retrenchment (thereby effecting ultimate and indeed eternal separation from the Mountain and its inhabitants). Those who choose "reality"--who leave the shadows and start for the mountain--soon "thicken," come to see glory only redeemed eyes can begin to comprehend.
Over and over again the task is clear: to become all that we are created to be, all that God would ultimately make us, the only thing we have to do is lay aside our lives as we have made them, our idols as we have formed them, our lesser desires as we habitually choose them. Over and over again, however, the ghosts (those who have arrived on the bus), most of them, anyway--are unable to do those things. They refuse the entreaties of the Spirits, will not believe the promise, refuse to take their journey to the Mountain. They consider the Spirits untrustworthy, the promise a lie, and for those reasons regularly and even hastily choose to return to the shadows, even under the threat of coming Night.
To live, all we have to do is die--give up what we think makes us who we are so that God can remake us into what only God can. We set aside pride, rights, exclusive devotion to less than God; we begin to want, just begin to desire God for God's sake (and not God for others' sake; we do not, for example, desire heaven to be reunited with Aunt Minerva, but to be reunited with God. Then, but only then, do we find that Aunt Minerva is there with us). That seed of loving God at the expense of ourselves, at the expense of other, lesser things--Lewis says our desires are not too strong but too weak—begins the transformation.
Lewis says it is a choice made many times each day. God says to us, "Thy will be done," and we reply either, "Yes, my will be done," or "No, THY will be done." In every moment, we are turning either toward God or away from God, toward joy or away from it toward something far less substantial, even unreal. It is in fact the reality of the valley of decision that is so off-putting for so many.
Then it was time to pray with the monks. As we entered the basilica, near the rear doors to the nave, there was a small bowl, hewn from rock, with holy water in it ("How do you make Holy Water?" the old joke begins. "Boil the hell out of it."). I dip my fingers in and mark my forehead with the sign of the cross, remembering my baptism and being thankful for spiritual friends and good books and a place to pray and men who have given their lives to this place and this kind of praying that a poor Methodist preacher might find a place in the choir.
I sit in the cool of the loft, preparing myself for prayer, praying to be able to pray, when suddenly I am aware of the cross on my forehead. There is moisture there, still, and it begins to feel strange...which is to say it begins to, well, burn on my forehead. It may be the breeze of the entering monks and others, the the cool of the river stone that forms the chancel, but something has caught the last bit of unevaporated water on my forehead and it irritates, annoys, begins to drive me crazy.
I think to reach up, wipe it off, as some say they have to remove the ashes on Ash Wednesday because they “make my head itch”--but I determine to let the water and the breeze do their full work on me, making me mad if they will, but I will not try to remove them… Conversely, I think of the man in The Great Divorce with the lizard on his shoulder, the lust in his heart, the touch and fire that would remove them but he fears the pain.
We begin mid-day Prayer. There is plaintive chant. There are Psalms. There is a reading from Jeremiah: "Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, says the Lord."
The cross burns me as if branding my skull. I want to shout in the silence. "O My God, make haste to help me…O God, be not far from me"—but his presence is indeed a refining fire and I seem unable to endure this least evidence of his mercies or judgments. If I cannot endure this little water torture, this cruciform touch, this gift of water and the spirit, how shall I see him face to face? How shall I endure his appearing?
I have no source, no plea, no hope but in God himself. Let me hear what the Spirit says. Let the water and the blood do their horrible, wonderful, painful, healing work. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen and amen.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Lenten Synchronicities
I am working on a new book. I have been thinking about the two primary gestures of Lent: giving up and taking on. The first gesture is referred to as mortification, and while the second does not have a traditional name that I know, it is easily identified as a means of "bearing one another's burdens, thus fulfilling the law of Christ." Self-denial and other-love. Something like that.
As I have been working through some of these general issues, I have also been reading Kathleen Norris' new book: Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life. Unpromising title behind--possessing descriptively what it lacks evocatively--the book is a treasure and not least because it talks about the theological dimensions of commitment to place, to people, to vocation. This emphasis corresponds nicely with similar sentiments I have seen in Eugene Peterson, particularly in his Under the Unpredictable Plant: A Study in Vocational Holiness. In that book, Peterson suggests that ministers, poisoned by the culture in which we serve, toxically imagine that movement and mobility are the hallmarks of "success," whereas faithfulness requires an almost monastic devotion to a particular place, a particular people, and a particular role among them. Additional thoughts to this effect are in The Contemplative Pastor.
In any case, Norris has helped me this week to see that marriage, of all places, is a locus in which both of the classic gestures of Lent find more than seasonal expression. Her husband, a poet afflicted with deep and "well-defended neuroses," and terrible physical ailments besides, helped her learn this truth. She writes, "I did not yet comprehend marriage itself as a form of asceticism and was slow to grasp what it would require of me" (102).
Earlier she had said this: "Imagine for a moment that the people you encounter at home, work, or school, are the very people (my emphasis) God has given you to pray with, eat with, and play with for the rest of your life. And you are supposed to thank God for this, every day, several times a day. This is what monastic people take on. And what they've learned from this particular form of asceticism, in attempting to live in peace with themselves and others, may constitute their greatest gift to us. How radical to think that we can best know ourselves by embracing commitment, not rejecting it; by relating to others, of callously relegating them to the devilishly convenient category of 'other."
In Marley and Me--the movie version--after the first baby as come and Jennifer Anniston's character is trying to do her work and be a mom, she is increasingly frustrated, says something to the effect that she is "losing what used to make me me." Of course. It is hard giving up dearly beloved parts of oneself for greater love of vowed commitment to others. It is if anything harder to take on the burdens of others, some of whom never think or know how to thank you, and in that way fulfill the law and evidence the sacrificial love of Christ.
One need not mention the occasion of divorce in the sitcom, Two and a Half Men: Mommy left because Mommy has a right to be happy. As Norris says, "There are situations, as in the case of abusive relationships, where seeking a change is the right course of action. But often it is acedia that urges us, for no good reason, to fantasize and brood over circumstances in which we will be affirmed and admired by more stimulating companions. Whatever the place of our commitment--a monastic cell, a faith community, a job, a marriage--well, we are better off just walking away" (25). Lord knows, many do.
But loving one another, and not just when it is easy--which it almost never is--is a place to learn something more of the love of God and of how to be more godly. Whether it is Hosea learning from wayward Gomer, or the many for whom the problem is polar opposite--it is in marriage, I think, and family life (and in church life, too, if Luther is to be believed) where both gestures of Lent have their sharpest daily definition, work to chisel our souls, and not just seasonally, into something more like the selflessness and embrace that is the heart of Christian and real marital love.
+ + +
As I have been working through some of these general issues, I have also been reading Kathleen Norris' new book: Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life. Unpromising title behind--possessing descriptively what it lacks evocatively--the book is a treasure and not least because it talks about the theological dimensions of commitment to place, to people, to vocation. This emphasis corresponds nicely with similar sentiments I have seen in Eugene Peterson, particularly in his Under the Unpredictable Plant: A Study in Vocational Holiness. In that book, Peterson suggests that ministers, poisoned by the culture in which we serve, toxically imagine that movement and mobility are the hallmarks of "success," whereas faithfulness requires an almost monastic devotion to a particular place, a particular people, and a particular role among them. Additional thoughts to this effect are in The Contemplative Pastor.
In any case, Norris has helped me this week to see that marriage, of all places, is a locus in which both of the classic gestures of Lent find more than seasonal expression. Her husband, a poet afflicted with deep and "well-defended neuroses," and terrible physical ailments besides, helped her learn this truth. She writes, "I did not yet comprehend marriage itself as a form of asceticism and was slow to grasp what it would require of me" (102).
Earlier she had said this: "Imagine for a moment that the people you encounter at home, work, or school, are the very people (my emphasis) God has given you to pray with, eat with, and play with for the rest of your life. And you are supposed to thank God for this, every day, several times a day. This is what monastic people take on. And what they've learned from this particular form of asceticism, in attempting to live in peace with themselves and others, may constitute their greatest gift to us. How radical to think that we can best know ourselves by embracing commitment, not rejecting it; by relating to others, of callously relegating them to the devilishly convenient category of 'other."
In Marley and Me--the movie version--after the first baby as come and Jennifer Anniston's character is trying to do her work and be a mom, she is increasingly frustrated, says something to the effect that she is "losing what used to make me me." Of course. It is hard giving up dearly beloved parts of oneself for greater love of vowed commitment to others. It is if anything harder to take on the burdens of others, some of whom never think or know how to thank you, and in that way fulfill the law and evidence the sacrificial love of Christ.
One need not mention the occasion of divorce in the sitcom, Two and a Half Men: Mommy left because Mommy has a right to be happy. As Norris says, "There are situations, as in the case of abusive relationships, where seeking a change is the right course of action. But often it is acedia that urges us, for no good reason, to fantasize and brood over circumstances in which we will be affirmed and admired by more stimulating companions. Whatever the place of our commitment--a monastic cell, a faith community, a job, a marriage--well, we are better off just walking away" (25). Lord knows, many do.
But loving one another, and not just when it is easy--which it almost never is--is a place to learn something more of the love of God and of how to be more godly. Whether it is Hosea learning from wayward Gomer, or the many for whom the problem is polar opposite--it is in marriage, I think, and family life (and in church life, too, if Luther is to be believed) where both gestures of Lent have their sharpest daily definition, work to chisel our souls, and not just seasonally, into something more like the selflessness and embrace that is the heart of Christian and real marital love.
The color of passion--not just attraction but steadfast devotion and even suffering--is purple, after all, and that is the color of Lent. But purple paves the way to white, to victory, to purity of heart, even as Lent prepares us for Easter.
+ + +
In Bible Study last night, my friend Buddy Smith suggested that in rereading I Corinthians 13 we substitute Paul's descriptions of love (kind, not jealous, etc) for the word "love" itself in that chapter. For example, Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not (kindness, gentleness, boastlessness, etc), I am a noisy gong..." What a great way to repreach that text!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Diminishing and Enriching
Tonight in Bible study, as we were all-but-snoozing through Acts 11--this because we had just had an incredible Fat Tuesday feast of pancakes, bacon, country ham, sausage, scrambled eggs, ham, biscuits--I noticed something that I had never seen before.
Acts 11 basically reiterates Acts 10. That is, the experience of Peter in Joppa, preaching to Gentiles of Cornelius' house. The results are swift and dramatic: the Holy Spirit falls on them. Peter, amazed that these Gentiles have been granted the Spirit just as he and his fellow Jewish believers have, orders them baptized. What is crucial is that the Jewish Christians who are with Peter and observe the phenomena are "astounded."
Meanwhile, the Jewish Christians back in Jerusalem who, as chapter 11 begins, hear about the Gentiles' conversion are outraged and, when Peter returns home, demand an explanation. How dare you, they say, go among the Gentiles? Peter recounts the story of Acts 10, and at the end of his testimony the angry Jewish Christians are mollified, are amazed that God is in fact doing what was promised in Joel (pouring-out the Holy Spirit on all flesh).
Here is what occurred to me. The fact that the disciples in Jerusalem accepted his testimony enriched both Peter and his inquisitors. Had they not, both Peter and the Jerusalem Christians would have been diminished, impoverished, belittled.
Likewise, when we are able to trust and accept the testimony of our brothers and sisters, we are enriched by their experience, broadened in our perspective, ennobled. When we reject the testimony of our spiritual friends,we are correspondingly diminished.
Acts 11 basically reiterates Acts 10. That is, the experience of Peter in Joppa, preaching to Gentiles of Cornelius' house. The results are swift and dramatic: the Holy Spirit falls on them. Peter, amazed that these Gentiles have been granted the Spirit just as he and his fellow Jewish believers have, orders them baptized. What is crucial is that the Jewish Christians who are with Peter and observe the phenomena are "astounded."
Meanwhile, the Jewish Christians back in Jerusalem who, as chapter 11 begins, hear about the Gentiles' conversion are outraged and, when Peter returns home, demand an explanation. How dare you, they say, go among the Gentiles? Peter recounts the story of Acts 10, and at the end of his testimony the angry Jewish Christians are mollified, are amazed that God is in fact doing what was promised in Joel (pouring-out the Holy Spirit on all flesh).
Here is what occurred to me. The fact that the disciples in Jerusalem accepted his testimony enriched both Peter and his inquisitors. Had they not, both Peter and the Jerusalem Christians would have been diminished, impoverished, belittled.
Likewise, when we are able to trust and accept the testimony of our brothers and sisters, we are enriched by their experience, broadened in our perspective, ennobled. When we reject the testimony of our spiritual friends,we are correspondingly diminished.
Monday, February 23, 2009
At the Bottom of the Mountain
Yesterday was Transfiguration, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany and the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. We remember that strange story of Jesus going up the mountain with Peter, James and John, where he was changed in some way--not so much that the disciples could not tell who he was but enough that the fishermen were both terrified and elated. Not knowing what to say or do they offered to build chapels for Jesus, and for Elijah and Moses, too, who were there on the mountaintop with them for a while.
Our focus is always on that part of the story, on those four characters (or six, counting the Law-giving Liberator and the Prophet; seven, counting the Voice). This week, though, as I have brought my own recent experiences to the reading of the text and the preparation of my sermon, I have been thinking about the other disciples, the ones still down the mountain, those on the outer edge of the inner circle, the ones who for one reason or the other were not invited to go along and therefore were not a part of the experience. Did not have the vision. Did not hear the Voice. Did not share the mountaintop moment.
I'm hip.
I wonder if they wondered why Jesus favored some and not all? Why a few got to see and the rest had to hear. Why one of the three, at least, was always getting it wrong and still got the invite while other, somewhat more steady if not always more faithful of the group did not. I have to say I wonder all of that even if they didn't. About them. About us.
Soon Jesus and the others will come down from the mountaintop and find the rest of the disciples in an argument. A man had brought his sick son for healing, and healing him is something that the disciples had authority to do, ought to have been able to do, tried to do--but failed. Not surprisingly, their sense of failure, prompting a sense of inadequacy, resulted in defensiveness and controversy--a parable of church life, I think. Jesus is annoyed with the whole scene, it seems: with his feckless disciples, with the illness of the child, with the doubt of the man, who by the time Jesus returns has seen so much of the disciples' inabilities he questions Jesus' abilities. Jesus is even irritated with the man: "If I am able?!" he barks at the man's plea, as if to say, "Just whom do you think you are talking to? Of course I am able." Jesus, after all, is the one who really believes.
And the disciples just stand there, in the middle of the battle in a way and as unarmed they can be. Worse: they know they should be armed, should be able, but are not. Maybe if they had been on the mountain and seen a vision. Maybe if they were blessed to be on the inside of the inner circle. Maybe if Jesus had blessed them the way he blessed the others and not left them alone down at the bottom of the hill to do this work that only he seems able to do.
Why is it that some are favored and some are not? I do not know that, but it can be painful to be among the left behind, as it were. I am among the chosen and called. I do believe that. I am not, however, one of the favored chosen or called. I know that all too well. I sometimes think if I knew why all that were true I could do something about it, could earn more favor or blessing--but that is not the nature of "favor" or "blessing," is it? Those dispensations are products of grace, not of works, lest anyone should boast.
Like others waiting at the bottom of the mountain, I have been called. All of us have been commissioned, and Jesus will return to us to finish what we have been unable, in truth, to start. He may chide us for our insufficiencies, but he will love us nonetheless.
If I did not believe that I could not go on.
Our focus is always on that part of the story, on those four characters (or six, counting the Law-giving Liberator and the Prophet; seven, counting the Voice). This week, though, as I have brought my own recent experiences to the reading of the text and the preparation of my sermon, I have been thinking about the other disciples, the ones still down the mountain, those on the outer edge of the inner circle, the ones who for one reason or the other were not invited to go along and therefore were not a part of the experience. Did not have the vision. Did not hear the Voice. Did not share the mountaintop moment.
I'm hip.
I wonder if they wondered why Jesus favored some and not all? Why a few got to see and the rest had to hear. Why one of the three, at least, was always getting it wrong and still got the invite while other, somewhat more steady if not always more faithful of the group did not. I have to say I wonder all of that even if they didn't. About them. About us.
Soon Jesus and the others will come down from the mountaintop and find the rest of the disciples in an argument. A man had brought his sick son for healing, and healing him is something that the disciples had authority to do, ought to have been able to do, tried to do--but failed. Not surprisingly, their sense of failure, prompting a sense of inadequacy, resulted in defensiveness and controversy--a parable of church life, I think. Jesus is annoyed with the whole scene, it seems: with his feckless disciples, with the illness of the child, with the doubt of the man, who by the time Jesus returns has seen so much of the disciples' inabilities he questions Jesus' abilities. Jesus is even irritated with the man: "If I am able?!" he barks at the man's plea, as if to say, "Just whom do you think you are talking to? Of course I am able." Jesus, after all, is the one who really believes.
And the disciples just stand there, in the middle of the battle in a way and as unarmed they can be. Worse: they know they should be armed, should be able, but are not. Maybe if they had been on the mountain and seen a vision. Maybe if they were blessed to be on the inside of the inner circle. Maybe if Jesus had blessed them the way he blessed the others and not left them alone down at the bottom of the hill to do this work that only he seems able to do.
Why is it that some are favored and some are not? I do not know that, but it can be painful to be among the left behind, as it were. I am among the chosen and called. I do believe that. I am not, however, one of the favored chosen or called. I know that all too well. I sometimes think if I knew why all that were true I could do something about it, could earn more favor or blessing--but that is not the nature of "favor" or "blessing," is it? Those dispensations are products of grace, not of works, lest anyone should boast.
Like others waiting at the bottom of the mountain, I have been called. All of us have been commissioned, and Jesus will return to us to finish what we have been unable, in truth, to start. He may chide us for our insufficiencies, but he will love us nonetheless.
If I did not believe that I could not go on.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
The Sweet Smell of Fish Vomit
The irony is that while I was having my D.Min. students read Eugene Peterson's Under the Unpredictable Plant, I was learning again what fish vomit smells like. See, I thought I was on my way to Tarshish, to a place and a job that seemed an amazing gold ring for my carousel and roller coaster career (to mix a couple of midway machines if not actual metaphors). Once again I am bound for Ninevah, there to preach whatever little message God has given me to preach. I am covered with fish vomit, but that is not a bad thing all in all. It means it matters to God where I am, where I am going, how I am going to work-out this call with which God called so long ago.
I will not bore you with details. There is little comfort in knowing that I was almost but not quite the person "they" were looking for. In any case, it reminded me of a terrible moment in my professional life some seven or eight years ago when I was one of two finalists for a position at the seminary and, to my mind, a shoo-in, when at the eleventh hour and forty-fifth minute another guy emerged and got the job. It was a no-brainer for the school--he was clearly the superior candidate. I know that.
I just didn't feel that. Still, I tried to distinguish between being rejected and being unchosen. They are different things, of course, though each leaves your emotions similarly raw and your knees similarly jellied. And in some ways being unchosen is actually worse, if only because Election, God's choosing, and Covenant are so crucial to our faith history and identity. It is good to publish books and articles...but if no one chooses to read them; it is good to be the finalist or near-that for a glossy job...but if you never get it; it is good to be a husband, a father, a friend...but if others do not choose you every now and then over against some other need or purpose or history, it is pretty disheartening.
So maybe I need to regard fish vomit as the smell of my election and call--which is to say, being one of the often and essentially unchosen by people and institutions, maybe I can smell this harsh detour back to my original destination (as a work-a-day pastor) as a kind of incense and blessing,
In any case, I am not going to Tarshish. Come June I am on the way to Ninevah, though I do not know where that will be precisely. My prayer is that wherever I am on July 1, that will be the place God has given me to serve and, I pray, thrive. If I bloom where I am planted it will be because even the fish vomit was a kind of fertilizer.
I will not bore you with details. There is little comfort in knowing that I was almost but not quite the person "they" were looking for. In any case, it reminded me of a terrible moment in my professional life some seven or eight years ago when I was one of two finalists for a position at the seminary and, to my mind, a shoo-in, when at the eleventh hour and forty-fifth minute another guy emerged and got the job. It was a no-brainer for the school--he was clearly the superior candidate. I know that.
I just didn't feel that. Still, I tried to distinguish between being rejected and being unchosen. They are different things, of course, though each leaves your emotions similarly raw and your knees similarly jellied. And in some ways being unchosen is actually worse, if only because Election, God's choosing, and Covenant are so crucial to our faith history and identity. It is good to publish books and articles...but if no one chooses to read them; it is good to be the finalist or near-that for a glossy job...but if you never get it; it is good to be a husband, a father, a friend...but if others do not choose you every now and then over against some other need or purpose or history, it is pretty disheartening.
So maybe I need to regard fish vomit as the smell of my election and call--which is to say, being one of the often and essentially unchosen by people and institutions, maybe I can smell this harsh detour back to my original destination (as a work-a-day pastor) as a kind of incense and blessing,
In any case, I am not going to Tarshish. Come June I am on the way to Ninevah, though I do not know where that will be precisely. My prayer is that wherever I am on July 1, that will be the place God has given me to serve and, I pray, thrive. If I bloom where I am planted it will be because even the fish vomit was a kind of fertilizer.
Monday, February 09, 2009
These Scotch Presbyterians!
Dr. Samuel Johnson, famously, was incredulous as to whether even "one book of any value on a religious subject" had ever been penned by a member of the Scottish clergy.
It may be unseemly to disagree with Dr. Johnson, but I must. My mentor in prayer is John Baillie, whose A Diary of Private Prayer saved my life. And day by day I am blessed by a little book edited by John Birkbeck, A Private Devotional Diary, which has snippets of sermons and writings from Scottish men and women--clergy, gentry, royals and others.
The entry for this past Friday, from a sermon written by James Henderson (1787-1858), Minister at Galashiels, reads:
"Jesus will never forsake them that truly love him. Though their love be but a feeble spark, he will not suffer it to be quenched amid the trials and troubles of this life, but will watch over it and fan it into a flame. Though their faith be weak, he will give growing distinctness to its views and confidence in the promises it embraces, and make them strong in its exercise, giving glory to God. Though hope may now struggle feebly with doubt and fear, it shall yet fix its anchor firmly within the veil, and comfort the soul that is tossed with tempest, with the sure prospect of an entrance into the desired haven."
I think if Dr. Johnson had read that, or Dr. Baillie's books, he might not have been so dubious. For my part, Wesleyan that I am, I am almost invariably strengthened in my prayers by these Calvinists and their convictions as to the sovereign grace of God.
It may be unseemly to disagree with Dr. Johnson, but I must. My mentor in prayer is John Baillie, whose A Diary of Private Prayer saved my life. And day by day I am blessed by a little book edited by John Birkbeck, A Private Devotional Diary, which has snippets of sermons and writings from Scottish men and women--clergy, gentry, royals and others.
The entry for this past Friday, from a sermon written by James Henderson (1787-1858), Minister at Galashiels, reads:
"Jesus will never forsake them that truly love him. Though their love be but a feeble spark, he will not suffer it to be quenched amid the trials and troubles of this life, but will watch over it and fan it into a flame. Though their faith be weak, he will give growing distinctness to its views and confidence in the promises it embraces, and make them strong in its exercise, giving glory to God. Though hope may now struggle feebly with doubt and fear, it shall yet fix its anchor firmly within the veil, and comfort the soul that is tossed with tempest, with the sure prospect of an entrance into the desired haven."
I think if Dr. Johnson had read that, or Dr. Baillie's books, he might not have been so dubious. For my part, Wesleyan that I am, I am almost invariably strengthened in my prayers by these Calvinists and their convictions as to the sovereign grace of God.
Friday, February 06, 2009
My heart whispers...
For those who don't pray, and for those whose prayers serve to make them arrogant.
For those who do not read their Bibles, and for those who read to sharpen their "swords" against the imagined enemy.
For those who see no intercourse between the Bible and daily life, and for those who imagine the challenge of scripture can be condensed into a red or blue platform.
For those who are afraid of God, and those who are too chummy with God.
For those who have never experienced the Holy Spirit and because of withered hearts have prevented others from drawing near; and for those who have experienced the Holy Spirit and because of self-righteousness have prevented others from drawing near.
Let our prayers today, O God, make us meek, humble, lowly of heart, ready to serve and to see you in those we serve.
For those who do not read their Bibles, and for those who read to sharpen their "swords" against the imagined enemy.
For those who see no intercourse between the Bible and daily life, and for those who imagine the challenge of scripture can be condensed into a red or blue platform.
For those who are afraid of God, and those who are too chummy with God.
For those who have never experienced the Holy Spirit and because of withered hearts have prevented others from drawing near; and for those who have experienced the Holy Spirit and because of self-righteousness have prevented others from drawing near.
Let our prayers today, O God, make us meek, humble, lowly of heart, ready to serve and to see you in those we serve.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Benediction
From Carlo Carretto, The God Who Comes.
How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!
How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you!
I should like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence.
You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand sanctity.
I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.
No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, although not completely.
And where should I go?
Where, indeed?
How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!
How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you!
I should like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence.
You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand sanctity.
I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.
No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, although not completely.
And where should I go?
Where, indeed?
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Vintage Cars and Historic Theology
I will say at the start that I do not think Gran Torino is Clint Eastwood's best film. It is not even the best of the ones I have seen, and I have not seen all of them. His turn in The Outlaw Josie Wales is a favorite of mine, but Unforgiven is, I believe, his most profound work--a midrash on the doctrines of justice, sin (original and actual), redemption, even the communion of the saints.
That said, I found Gran Torino both compelling and theologically interesting. Eastwood's character is Walt Kowalski, a Korean war vet and Ford Motor Company retiree who in many way is still fighting those wars (he hates his Hmong neighbors; he loathes his son's affiliation with Toyota). He is "not at peace," as the tiny Hmong shaman rightly observes. Walt's regard for the foreign priest is as jaundiced, if more bemused, as his attitude toward the Church. If Walt ever had more than nominal regard for matters of faith he has long since given-up even that. His wife's funeral, which opens the movie, finds him a stranger in a strange land, alone in the midst, as estranged from his own sons and their rude and presumptuous children as he is from any of the few church members who have gathered. He is especially contemptuous of Father Janovich (Christopher Carley), growling at the young priest, “I think you're an overeducated 27-year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies and promise them everlasting life.”
The test of wills between the young priest (who promised Walt's wife he would check-in on Walt and try to get Walt to go to confession) and the grizzled old man that Kowalski has become comprises one major sub-plot in the movie. Another is the silent and in that way hilarious stand-off between Walt and the old Hmong woman who lives next door; each disdainfully eyes the other porch-to-porch. If by the end, the young father has learned from Walt something about death, for his part Walt turns to the priest for something like friendship and for absolution. That unforeseen eventuality is as surprising as Walt's learning from his heretofore-hated neighbors that life does not consist in mowing the grass, fixing things, drinking beer and waxing the Gran Torino that he helped build while he was still on the assembly line ("I mounted the drive shaft in that car").
Everyone wants Walt's car--his unappreciative granddaughter, who has no use for Walt himself but brazenly asks for the car when he, "you know, die(s)"; a Hmong gang; his young neighbor Thao. The fate of the car will mirror Walt's own.
The Gran Torino is Walt's "immortality symbol"--a kind of religious relic, a symbol and sacrament of a former time when, to Walt's mind, life obviously made more sense. All the homes in his neighborhood save his, where people like him used to live, are run-down and inhabited by folks "he used to kill and stack like wood." Only later does he realize that the Hmong were actually allies of American forces. The old Hmong woman wonders why he, like his kind, doesn't just move. She seems not to understand that his home, where he made what passed for a good life with his wife and sons, is his castle, his fortress. Maintaining this property, like maintaining his car, is his last defense against change. He will not, it turns out, be saved by his work--at least not this kind of work.
Walt is sick, and unto death it seems--another parable.
Begrudgingly and unwillingly, Walt becomes guardian angel to his neighbors. At first he is simply, and literally, defending his own "turf." He remains an old soldier almost to the end, still lighting cigarettes with a First Calvary lighter he "got back in 51," taking up his rifle when he can and wielding a pipe wrench or his fists and boot when the rifle is not available. His most ominous threat, however, comes in the form of his finger! It is strength and weaponry that has saved him thus far; the salvation he ultimately both experiences and provides is effected by laying all his weapons down--except perhaps that of prayer. With his last breath he begins to recite the Rosary.
There is much plot I have not mentioned, many levels of meaning to be discerned. What finally interests me is how Catholic the movie is--and not just in its context and trappings. I will say that his eventual confession to Fr. Janovich (where he confesses three sins: a stolen kiss in 1968, not paying taxes on a boat and motor he sold ("just as good as theft") and not being close to his boys) is beautifully linked, both temporally and visually, to the "confession" Walt makes to Thao after he locks Thao in the basement to keep him safe. Even more is the way in which the movies maintains that life, real life, comes only through sacrifice and death. All the resurrection we see--whether in the Hmong community, in Thao and his family, or in Walt himself--is occasioned by surrender. Even before Walt dies cruciform in a Hmong yard, he has sacrificed much in the way of prejudice, habit and behavior. His self-surrender for a few becomes efficacious for the many as by his willing death he takes on, and defeats, the "principalities and powers" at work in the neighborhood--and especially in the form of the gang.
If you have a "Faith and Film" series during Lent, this is a good one--if you can deal with the harsh language that is absolutely crucial to setting the table of Walt's (and others') prejudice.
That said, I found Gran Torino both compelling and theologically interesting. Eastwood's character is Walt Kowalski, a Korean war vet and Ford Motor Company retiree who in many way is still fighting those wars (he hates his Hmong neighbors; he loathes his son's affiliation with Toyota). He is "not at peace," as the tiny Hmong shaman rightly observes. Walt's regard for the foreign priest is as jaundiced, if more bemused, as his attitude toward the Church. If Walt ever had more than nominal regard for matters of faith he has long since given-up even that. His wife's funeral, which opens the movie, finds him a stranger in a strange land, alone in the midst, as estranged from his own sons and their rude and presumptuous children as he is from any of the few church members who have gathered. He is especially contemptuous of Father Janovich (Christopher Carley), growling at the young priest, “I think you're an overeducated 27-year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies and promise them everlasting life.”
The test of wills between the young priest (who promised Walt's wife he would check-in on Walt and try to get Walt to go to confession) and the grizzled old man that Kowalski has become comprises one major sub-plot in the movie. Another is the silent and in that way hilarious stand-off between Walt and the old Hmong woman who lives next door; each disdainfully eyes the other porch-to-porch. If by the end, the young father has learned from Walt something about death, for his part Walt turns to the priest for something like friendship and for absolution. That unforeseen eventuality is as surprising as Walt's learning from his heretofore-hated neighbors that life does not consist in mowing the grass, fixing things, drinking beer and waxing the Gran Torino that he helped build while he was still on the assembly line ("I mounted the drive shaft in that car").
Everyone wants Walt's car--his unappreciative granddaughter, who has no use for Walt himself but brazenly asks for the car when he, "you know, die(s)"; a Hmong gang; his young neighbor Thao. The fate of the car will mirror Walt's own.
The Gran Torino is Walt's "immortality symbol"--a kind of religious relic, a symbol and sacrament of a former time when, to Walt's mind, life obviously made more sense. All the homes in his neighborhood save his, where people like him used to live, are run-down and inhabited by folks "he used to kill and stack like wood." Only later does he realize that the Hmong were actually allies of American forces. The old Hmong woman wonders why he, like his kind, doesn't just move. She seems not to understand that his home, where he made what passed for a good life with his wife and sons, is his castle, his fortress. Maintaining this property, like maintaining his car, is his last defense against change. He will not, it turns out, be saved by his work--at least not this kind of work.
Walt is sick, and unto death it seems--another parable.
Begrudgingly and unwillingly, Walt becomes guardian angel to his neighbors. At first he is simply, and literally, defending his own "turf." He remains an old soldier almost to the end, still lighting cigarettes with a First Calvary lighter he "got back in 51," taking up his rifle when he can and wielding a pipe wrench or his fists and boot when the rifle is not available. His most ominous threat, however, comes in the form of his finger! It is strength and weaponry that has saved him thus far; the salvation he ultimately both experiences and provides is effected by laying all his weapons down--except perhaps that of prayer. With his last breath he begins to recite the Rosary.
There is much plot I have not mentioned, many levels of meaning to be discerned. What finally interests me is how Catholic the movie is--and not just in its context and trappings. I will say that his eventual confession to Fr. Janovich (where he confesses three sins: a stolen kiss in 1968, not paying taxes on a boat and motor he sold ("just as good as theft") and not being close to his boys) is beautifully linked, both temporally and visually, to the "confession" Walt makes to Thao after he locks Thao in the basement to keep him safe. Even more is the way in which the movies maintains that life, real life, comes only through sacrifice and death. All the resurrection we see--whether in the Hmong community, in Thao and his family, or in Walt himself--is occasioned by surrender. Even before Walt dies cruciform in a Hmong yard, he has sacrificed much in the way of prejudice, habit and behavior. His self-surrender for a few becomes efficacious for the many as by his willing death he takes on, and defeats, the "principalities and powers" at work in the neighborhood--and especially in the form of the gang.
If you have a "Faith and Film" series during Lent, this is a good one--if you can deal with the harsh language that is absolutely crucial to setting the table of Walt's (and others') prejudice.
Monday, January 26, 2009
UNBELIEVABLE!!
I promise I am not making this up...
My daughter, taking a break from her pursuit of a graduate degree, is a server at the Chili's a few miles down from our house. Like many others her age she is already pretty critical of the church and its obvious hypocrisies. Her cynicism, that to say, is neither atypcial nor incomprehensible. Nor does this kind of thing help--her or others.
A group of six church-goers came in last night after their evening services and sat down, not in her area but in another server's. When the girl came to greet them and take their drink order, one of them said, "We want to tell you up front that we will not be tipping you tonight because..."
Are you ready?
"...we do not believe in people working on Sunday."
The girl was taken full-aback, stammered out something that sounded like "I wouldn't have to work on Sunday if so many church people didn't come in," or some such. She was furious. So was the manager of the restaurant whom she summoned to deal with them. I think he should have tossed the people out on their...uh...Bibles. To his credit, and demonstrating something like agape all around, he did say to them, "Well, we don't believe in making our people work for nothing, so I will be serving you tonight." And he did. God bless him.
No one is consistent. I am clear on that. But better to confess your own sin in such a situation than presume to see it in another who is just doing the best they can. No wonder Jesus had such animosity toward Pharisees who "lay (heavy burdens) on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them" (Matthew 23:4). No wonder an entire generation of would-be believers has such animosity toward the church.
As George MacDonald wrote long ago, "Had you given yourself to understanding his word that you might do it, and not the quarrying from it of material wherewith to buttress your systems, in many a heart by this time would the name of the Lord be loved where now it remains unknown..."
For my part--and I am a Pharisee myself, even saying this, but I cite my practice not with pride but with confession--I pray for the forgiveness of God and verbally ask the forgiveness of the Hardee's drive-through lady each Sunday as I buy coffee on my way to church. I know I am complicit: on the one hand I do wish, with my head and heart, that all people had Sunday free; that said, I do nothing, nothing to lift a finger to make that happen by even so little a fast or act of self-sacrifice as making my own coffee on a busy Sunday morning--much less by not eating a Sunday lunch or dinner at one of the sit-down places in town.
My daughter, taking a break from her pursuit of a graduate degree, is a server at the Chili's a few miles down from our house. Like many others her age she is already pretty critical of the church and its obvious hypocrisies. Her cynicism, that to say, is neither atypcial nor incomprehensible. Nor does this kind of thing help--her or others.
A group of six church-goers came in last night after their evening services and sat down, not in her area but in another server's. When the girl came to greet them and take their drink order, one of them said, "We want to tell you up front that we will not be tipping you tonight because..."
Are you ready?
"...we do not believe in people working on Sunday."
The girl was taken full-aback, stammered out something that sounded like "I wouldn't have to work on Sunday if so many church people didn't come in," or some such. She was furious. So was the manager of the restaurant whom she summoned to deal with them. I think he should have tossed the people out on their...uh...Bibles. To his credit, and demonstrating something like agape all around, he did say to them, "Well, we don't believe in making our people work for nothing, so I will be serving you tonight." And he did. God bless him.
No one is consistent. I am clear on that. But better to confess your own sin in such a situation than presume to see it in another who is just doing the best they can. No wonder Jesus had such animosity toward Pharisees who "lay (heavy burdens) on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them" (Matthew 23:4). No wonder an entire generation of would-be believers has such animosity toward the church.
As George MacDonald wrote long ago, "Had you given yourself to understanding his word that you might do it, and not the quarrying from it of material wherewith to buttress your systems, in many a heart by this time would the name of the Lord be loved where now it remains unknown..."
For my part--and I am a Pharisee myself, even saying this, but I cite my practice not with pride but with confession--I pray for the forgiveness of God and verbally ask the forgiveness of the Hardee's drive-through lady each Sunday as I buy coffee on my way to church. I know I am complicit: on the one hand I do wish, with my head and heart, that all people had Sunday free; that said, I do nothing, nothing to lift a finger to make that happen by even so little a fast or act of self-sacrifice as making my own coffee on a busy Sunday morning--much less by not eating a Sunday lunch or dinner at one of the sit-down places in town.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
I am a truly happy man...
My wife and I watched the Clive Donner "Christmas Carol" the other night, starring George C. Scott in a role, I believe, he was born to play. I love this particular production of the classic, but what struck me as so powerful this time was the moment at the Cratchet's, when Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come arrive and it is revealed that Tiny Tim has died. Bob comes in late, having stopped by the cemetery, and after a few moments, tears in his eyes, he tells his broken-circle of a family that he is indeed a "truly happy man."
Sentimentality? Only a scrooge would think it so.
Instead, it is a powerful spiritual truth Bob Cratchet voices, one that is evident in scripture and Church History...and not least in the story of Martin Rinkart hymn "Now Thank We All Our God," or "It Is Well With My Soul" by Horatio G. Spafford. In the latter, famously, Spafford wrote the lyric in the face of terrible personal sadness, his family having been lost at sea. During his own subsequent transatlantic voyage, when his ship crossed the same general location where his family's ship had gone down, he enacted with that poem a kind of "in spite of" thanksgiving and experienced, if the lyric indeed by true, a kind of assurance, the peace that passes understanding.
In the case of Rinkart, the Thirty-Year's War had brought Black Death to Bavaria where he worked as a parish pastor. He was performing, by some accounts, as many as fifty funeral a day. In that ethos of sickness and death he wrote, "Now Thank We All Our God, with heart and hand and voices, who wondrous things hath done, in Whom this world rejoices!"
Praise is a choice in the face of grief. No one knows it better than the Psalmists. Thanks is an act of hope in the face of contrary data. No one speaks it better than Rinkart and Spafford. The people of God, and individual believers, have the blessed opportunity and even the sacred obligation to embrace and enact joy irrespective of circumstance. Doxology in the darkest moments of tragedy and fear and grief is neither sentimental hogwash or idiocy--but faith.
This Advent season, like others in years past, I am keenly aware of my many losses. I am quite in touch with my grief and dysthemia--and yet I proclaim, for this Gaudete Sunday and beyond, that I am a truly happy man.
I have work. I have children who talk to me (just today my son called to tell me nothing other than that he had seen a huge hawk, brown and beautiful, on a trashcan beside the road as he made his way to his biology final at his nearby college). I have a wife engaged in ministry and enough writing assignments (and a book deal besides) to keep me busy till July. I have a congregation that vexes me at times, but I know what it is like to be without a place to serve and consequently am so very thankful even for the aggravations (if it lets me stand with God's people at the most important moments of their lives). Besides, I have the prospect of another place of service come July.
Like Bob Cratchet, if I am "a little down"--dysthemics stay in mostly shallow valleys--there are yet those, as Fred Hollywell said to Bob, who have told me they are "heartily sorry." They hear my lament and try their best to understand. They embrace my sense of loss with their own. They do doubt or disdain, and for the most part do not grow impatient with the blues I am given to sing. That, too, is a huge blessing.
And so, this Advent--and not like other years--I look at all my broken circles, the pieces of my life and work, and find myself able to say, indeed choose to say, "I am a happy man. I am a truly happy man."
Sentimentality? Only a scrooge would think it so.
Instead, it is a powerful spiritual truth Bob Cratchet voices, one that is evident in scripture and Church History...and not least in the story of Martin Rinkart hymn "Now Thank We All Our God," or "It Is Well With My Soul" by Horatio G. Spafford. In the latter, famously, Spafford wrote the lyric in the face of terrible personal sadness, his family having been lost at sea. During his own subsequent transatlantic voyage, when his ship crossed the same general location where his family's ship had gone down, he enacted with that poem a kind of "in spite of" thanksgiving and experienced, if the lyric indeed by true, a kind of assurance, the peace that passes understanding.
In the case of Rinkart, the Thirty-Year's War had brought Black Death to Bavaria where he worked as a parish pastor. He was performing, by some accounts, as many as fifty funeral a day. In that ethos of sickness and death he wrote, "Now Thank We All Our God, with heart and hand and voices, who wondrous things hath done, in Whom this world rejoices!"
Praise is a choice in the face of grief. No one knows it better than the Psalmists. Thanks is an act of hope in the face of contrary data. No one speaks it better than Rinkart and Spafford. The people of God, and individual believers, have the blessed opportunity and even the sacred obligation to embrace and enact joy irrespective of circumstance. Doxology in the darkest moments of tragedy and fear and grief is neither sentimental hogwash or idiocy--but faith.
This Advent season, like others in years past, I am keenly aware of my many losses. I am quite in touch with my grief and dysthemia--and yet I proclaim, for this Gaudete Sunday and beyond, that I am a truly happy man.
I have work. I have children who talk to me (just today my son called to tell me nothing other than that he had seen a huge hawk, brown and beautiful, on a trashcan beside the road as he made his way to his biology final at his nearby college). I have a wife engaged in ministry and enough writing assignments (and a book deal besides) to keep me busy till July. I have a congregation that vexes me at times, but I know what it is like to be without a place to serve and consequently am so very thankful even for the aggravations (if it lets me stand with God's people at the most important moments of their lives). Besides, I have the prospect of another place of service come July.
Like Bob Cratchet, if I am "a little down"--dysthemics stay in mostly shallow valleys--there are yet those, as Fred Hollywell said to Bob, who have told me they are "heartily sorry." They hear my lament and try their best to understand. They embrace my sense of loss with their own. They do doubt or disdain, and for the most part do not grow impatient with the blues I am given to sing. That, too, is a huge blessing.
And so, this Advent--and not like other years--I look at all my broken circles, the pieces of my life and work, and find myself able to say, indeed choose to say, "I am a happy man. I am a truly happy man."
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
King David, meet Thomas Jefferson
A friend used to say, “Whenever you see a church named ‘New Hope,’ there is an old hope out there somewhere. I was reminded of that truism recently when I noticed that we have a new congregation in town, a shaky little fellowship called “Solid Rock Baptist Church.” As I understand it, there was a power struggle at another, larger fellowship nearby and the losers, along with the larger congregation’s now “former” pastor, constituted themselves as a new people, determined to build their worship and practice on the Bible alone, just like Jesus said (and not, you know, like some other folk).
Solid Rock is meeting in a storefront recently abandoned by a group of Pentecostals: the World Evangelism and Outreach Center. In fairness, the church does broadcast its services across the planet via short wave radio. The congregation had outgrown their small strip mall headquarters and Day Care Center/Christian Academy; there were about 80 who began worshiping in a small brick-front metal building constructed in part by their pastor, a second-career fire-baptized holiness preacher who, before his conversion, was a contractor.
Nice man. Intense, though. He has the Bible nearly memorized. His Post-Millenial interpretation of Revelation about got him kicked out of the Assemblies on a heresy charge. He resigned his credentials shortly before the trial was to convene and began his own work. Some like-minded men, members of his former congregation, ordained him, but two of them left WEOC along with their families during the recent construction. There was serious disagreement as to the slope of the parking lot and whether it would properly drain.
Meanwhile, near the “old church” where here my wife serves (planted on a then-all-but-trafficless, now bustling state highway way back in the seventies), no less than three new and exciting fellowships are promised to passersby on big signs here and there along the corridor. Already fifteen denominational and post-denominational congregations flank the road, all of them trying to “reach” and “minister to” the huge and relatively long-lived influx of what used to be called yuppies. With the collapse of the economy, however, as many are moving away, and more, as not so long ago were moving in. The disposable income which was to kindle all this new spiritual fire has mostly disappeared.
“Coming Soon!” signs may soon be replaced by “For Sale” signs, and what does such come and go come and go say of Christ’s Body, the church, or testify regarding the given and abiding Word?
All of this ecclesiastical busyness seems deviantly “sacramental”—which is to say, an outward and visible sign of an inward and unspiritual malady. Frederica Mathewes-Green has summarized the dysfunction in The Illumined Heart. Reflecting on the aftermath of the Reformation she says,
“…the once universal idea that there existed a common deposit of faith had been lost.
The hope of returning to a simple, Bible-based faith was now complicated by the need for
someone to explain what that faith was. Soon many gifted leaders were offering differing
interpretations, and followers aligned with one or another as they found them most
convincing.”
If that dynamic was also true in, say, Corinth, the full consequences were not. She continues,
“The next step was that, if each person can decide for himself whom to follow, each person
can decide for himself what the faith is. The splintering was complete. And since the
current generation is always the one making these decisions, it seemed that the most
innovative, up-to-date ideas were the correct ones…”
The positive side of this reality is that intractable institutions really are intractable and “exodus” may be the only way of freeing its slaves. Additionally, growing up Protestant, and Baptist, in fact, the rending and forming (or reforming!) of congregations never seemed strange to me. At the denominational seminary I attended, students used to say that every congregation we knew or served either had split, was splitting, or dividing up sides and getting ready to. Still, we spun that reality positively: splits aided evangelism, opened doors in otherwise closed situations. Even preachers getting fired, their belongings left on the front lawn and parsonage locks changed, had an upside: persecutions of all sorts had always advanced the kingdom. Blood of the martyrs and all that.
Still, there is something nefarious at work here, I believe. A rejection of tradition, and especially in favor of novelty, may not be an issue of mere “style,” but more nearly of “substance”… a form of idolatry as addictive as any narcotic. Eugene Peterson has noted that when the human heart’s proclivity to idol-making (ala Calvin) is combined with North American consumerism, the sad result is the very kind of soul-numbing market-based smorgasbord that impels people to jump from paten to paten, as it were, that compels religious leaders to do their best and most serious study in terms of what “works” in attracting new folk.
I have noticed another disturbing aspect of the same tendency—this time in my own United Methodist Hymnal. I have long been annoyed that our Psalter is incomplete. There are whole Psalms and sections of Psalms left out (Thomas Jefferson, meet King David. King David, meet President Jefferson). Since most of what has been excised are imprecatories, curses and the like, I assumed some beatnik editor or pacifist professor had demanded the cuts in light of our more "evolved" sensibilities, which are unwittingly literalist and unforgiving of metaphor--forgetting, for example, that in the hymn, "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war," the most important word in that verse is as. And so I was surprised to learn that the evisceration of these hymns of their (sometimes most interesting) parts were a result of John Wesley's own sense that "certain of the Psalms and large portions of others are unfit for Christian lips."
Oh, really?
They were okay for Jesus to say, but not for us? So much for the “whole counsel of God.” So much for the “faith once delivered to the saints.”
Of course, Wesley who also left “descended into hell” out of the creed because he did not personally think there was sufficient scriptural warrant to justify its inclusion. Wonder if he would have had an opinion about the paving at that church?
Hey! I am just kidding! Really! Sort of.
Solid Rock is meeting in a storefront recently abandoned by a group of Pentecostals: the World Evangelism and Outreach Center. In fairness, the church does broadcast its services across the planet via short wave radio. The congregation had outgrown their small strip mall headquarters and Day Care Center/Christian Academy; there were about 80 who began worshiping in a small brick-front metal building constructed in part by their pastor, a second-career fire-baptized holiness preacher who, before his conversion, was a contractor.
Nice man. Intense, though. He has the Bible nearly memorized. His Post-Millenial interpretation of Revelation about got him kicked out of the Assemblies on a heresy charge. He resigned his credentials shortly before the trial was to convene and began his own work. Some like-minded men, members of his former congregation, ordained him, but two of them left WEOC along with their families during the recent construction. There was serious disagreement as to the slope of the parking lot and whether it would properly drain.
Meanwhile, near the “old church” where here my wife serves (planted on a then-all-but-trafficless, now bustling state highway way back in the seventies), no less than three new and exciting fellowships are promised to passersby on big signs here and there along the corridor. Already fifteen denominational and post-denominational congregations flank the road, all of them trying to “reach” and “minister to” the huge and relatively long-lived influx of what used to be called yuppies. With the collapse of the economy, however, as many are moving away, and more, as not so long ago were moving in. The disposable income which was to kindle all this new spiritual fire has mostly disappeared.
“Coming Soon!” signs may soon be replaced by “For Sale” signs, and what does such come and go come and go say of Christ’s Body, the church, or testify regarding the given and abiding Word?
All of this ecclesiastical busyness seems deviantly “sacramental”—which is to say, an outward and visible sign of an inward and unspiritual malady. Frederica Mathewes-Green has summarized the dysfunction in The Illumined Heart. Reflecting on the aftermath of the Reformation she says,
“…the once universal idea that there existed a common deposit of faith had been lost.
The hope of returning to a simple, Bible-based faith was now complicated by the need for
someone to explain what that faith was. Soon many gifted leaders were offering differing
interpretations, and followers aligned with one or another as they found them most
convincing.”
If that dynamic was also true in, say, Corinth, the full consequences were not. She continues,
“The next step was that, if each person can decide for himself whom to follow, each person
can decide for himself what the faith is. The splintering was complete. And since the
current generation is always the one making these decisions, it seemed that the most
innovative, up-to-date ideas were the correct ones…”
The positive side of this reality is that intractable institutions really are intractable and “exodus” may be the only way of freeing its slaves. Additionally, growing up Protestant, and Baptist, in fact, the rending and forming (or reforming!) of congregations never seemed strange to me. At the denominational seminary I attended, students used to say that every congregation we knew or served either had split, was splitting, or dividing up sides and getting ready to. Still, we spun that reality positively: splits aided evangelism, opened doors in otherwise closed situations. Even preachers getting fired, their belongings left on the front lawn and parsonage locks changed, had an upside: persecutions of all sorts had always advanced the kingdom. Blood of the martyrs and all that.
Still, there is something nefarious at work here, I believe. A rejection of tradition, and especially in favor of novelty, may not be an issue of mere “style,” but more nearly of “substance”… a form of idolatry as addictive as any narcotic. Eugene Peterson has noted that when the human heart’s proclivity to idol-making (ala Calvin) is combined with North American consumerism, the sad result is the very kind of soul-numbing market-based smorgasbord that impels people to jump from paten to paten, as it were, that compels religious leaders to do their best and most serious study in terms of what “works” in attracting new folk.
I have noticed another disturbing aspect of the same tendency—this time in my own United Methodist Hymnal. I have long been annoyed that our Psalter is incomplete. There are whole Psalms and sections of Psalms left out (Thomas Jefferson, meet King David. King David, meet President Jefferson). Since most of what has been excised are imprecatories, curses and the like, I assumed some beatnik editor or pacifist professor had demanded the cuts in light of our more "evolved" sensibilities, which are unwittingly literalist and unforgiving of metaphor--forgetting, for example, that in the hymn, "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war," the most important word in that verse is as. And so I was surprised to learn that the evisceration of these hymns of their (sometimes most interesting) parts were a result of John Wesley's own sense that "certain of the Psalms and large portions of others are unfit for Christian lips."
Oh, really?
They were okay for Jesus to say, but not for us? So much for the “whole counsel of God.” So much for the “faith once delivered to the saints.”
Of course, Wesley who also left “descended into hell” out of the creed because he did not personally think there was sufficient scriptural warrant to justify its inclusion. Wonder if he would have had an opinion about the paving at that church?
Hey! I am just kidding! Really! Sort of.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Our Last Best Hope
I
Does everyone know where they were 67 years ago this Sunday morning?
Some of you were still in the heart of God, of course, not yet a twinkle in your mother’s eyes. Some of your mothers were not born by then either, did not themselves have eyes to twinkle. But there are a few of you in here who know what I am asking. You remember where you were.
For some of you the memory is as clear as the day the Twin Towers fell. You know where you were standing when you got the news, just as well as you know where you were when you heard about the assassinations in Dallas and in Memphis. You remember FDR’s famous line on the Monday following, “December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy.”
About the time church let out on the east coast, a couple of hours later, word began crackling through Philcos of the nation that something was happening, had happened, in the jewel of the Pacific: how at a deep-water harbor named Pearl, the rising of the sun had brought wave upon wave of planes, like bats out of hell, with darkness and death in their wings.
It was 67 years ago today, of course, that Japanese planes and midget subs attacked the US Navy’s unsuspecting and completely unprepared Pacific fleet, our ships and sailors both enjoying another Sunday morning in paradise, snoozing row by row. Ninety minutes later we had been dragged, burned and bleeding and humiliated, into the Second World War.
II
I did a little research this week, to see if I could find what preachers had been preaching on that morning as the attack got underway. I did not have much success. And so I looked instead at the assigned scriptures for that Sunday, December 7, 1941, in the lectionaries of the day. I didn’t have much luck with that either.
What I do know is last September, when I was inthe mountains reading and praying and outlining sermons for the coming year, when I looked at the the epistle reading assigned for this, the second Sunday of Advent, for this day and date, I found this, from II Peter 3, verse 10:
the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with
fire…
And suddenly to my mind came a picture of the USS Arizona, its main tower tilted to starboard and enveloped by billows of black smoke, its might guns useless to defend the ship or its crew or its harbor or its nation, sinking slowly into the sea.
With loud noises, the myth of peace and isolation, of neutrality and national security, dissolved with fire—along with the Missouri and West Virginia, the Oklahoma and USS Tennessee, and 2345 military personnel besides.
III
Why dredge up that painful past on such a day as this? And especially since, these days, Japan is an ally and friend?
Only to remind ourselves that the things in which we often put our trust—whether the military, political leaders, portfolios, our own youth and health and strength…all of those things pass away. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, sometimes with a loud bang, and sometimes with a whimper. Sometimes there is raging fire; sometimes hot embers grow cold. In any case, the season of Advent continually reminds us of our idolatries and presumption, and that a kind of reckoning is coming.
The season of Advent, beautiful as it can be, is a dark season, really—a reminder that try as we might we cannot save ourselves, that things will not naturally get better, that neither optimism nor denial are appropriate preparations for the coming of Jesus.
Advent always looks back, even before it looks ahead. It proclaims the provision of God, of course, but it names the presumptions of God’s people, we who day by day do not put our first, best hopes in God. The season of Advent confesses the sin of God’s chosen, and then God’s grace to choose them again. Advent always calls us to ask ourselves: How did we get into such a mess?
The season of Advent answers, over and over again, that we get into this mess, that mess, most every mess, by placing our faith in other than God. The season of Advent calls us to confess that sin—Advent, until lately, has been considered a penitential season—and to repent, to begin again to put our trust only in those things that last…the Purposes of God, the Presence of Christ, the Guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Advent calls us to sad remembrance and honest confession and humble repentance, to resolute recommitment to build only on the firm foundation of God’s eternity…because all else is fleeting. Passing. Impermanent.
Money. Power. Beauty. Health. Life as we imagine it, or craft it for ourselves. How quickly it can all pass away.
And so Peter says, “Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?”
Indeed, what kind of persons ought we to be?
Hopeful…waiting for new heavens and a new earth…
Peaceful and obedient… striving to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish.
Patient… regarding the patience of our Lord as salvation.
IV
After that Sunday, I am sure all sorts of people were saying all sorts of things… pundits and politicians, hawks and doves, saber-rattlers and doom-sayers, and preachers among the lot.
But the Psalmist has a word for us as we remember—a word that is set for today but is applicable every day—“Let me hear what the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to the people.”
Indeed. It is a prayer worthy of Advent. Let us hear what the Lord will speak, for the Lord’s word will stand for ever.
Saturday, November 01, 2008
all saints
I have been trying to think of a definition of “saint,” or if not a definition, then a characteristic, anyway…and I have about decided that saints are those who come to the place where they welcome, are eager, even, for God’s judgment. They do not fear eternal fire or annihilation, but long for purgation, for cleansing, for the completion and healing that can only come by God’s ferocious grace and fierce mercy.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Pax Christi...
I interrupt my prayer time to scribble this thought, preceded by a memory...
A few weeks ago, one of the little boys in our congregation--and all of his family more or less new believers--just after I announced the sharing of the Pax Christi among us, turned to his mother and said, "What am I supposed to do with a 'piece of Christ'?"
The phrase haunts me. You do not have to affirm Transubstantiation to believe that in the bread and wine we each of us are given a "piece of Christ" as well as the peace of Christ. But the phrase is polyvalent, for it reminds me not only of Eucharist but also of St. Paul's reminder that while we (together) "are the Body of Christ," we are individually "members of it." Which is to say we each of us are "pieces of Christ."
And so I am thinking of both discipleship and ministry. It may be that the first step, the first and on-going practice of discipleship is the imitation of Christ--going as Jesus goes, learning to see as Jesus sees, to love as Jesus loves and speak as Jesus speaks; to die as Jesus dies if it comes to that, in hopes of rising as Jesus was raised (Frederica Mathewes-Green has suggested--though these are not her exact words--that Christians are those of whom it is a compliment to say, "They never have an original thought"). But the imitation of Jesus, and also of Stephen, Paul and the saints who lived cruciform lives--all of them live with Christ's words on their lips, die with his forgiveness on their tongues--is toward this end: the imago Christi. The imitation of Christ forms us into the image of Christ
We imitate Christ until we become him--a piece of him anyway. Evangelicals have long said words to this effect: Christ has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet; we may be the only Jesus a stranger or neighbor sees today. We are a piece of Christ, sharing the peace of Christ.
Perhaps in their own way Sacramentalists say the same thing--that the pieces of Christ received become a part of us so that we become a part of Christ, a piece of Christ's peace in the world.
A few weeks ago, one of the little boys in our congregation--and all of his family more or less new believers--just after I announced the sharing of the Pax Christi among us, turned to his mother and said, "What am I supposed to do with a 'piece of Christ'?"
The phrase haunts me. You do not have to affirm Transubstantiation to believe that in the bread and wine we each of us are given a "piece of Christ" as well as the peace of Christ. But the phrase is polyvalent, for it reminds me not only of Eucharist but also of St. Paul's reminder that while we (together) "are the Body of Christ," we are individually "members of it." Which is to say we each of us are "pieces of Christ."
And so I am thinking of both discipleship and ministry. It may be that the first step, the first and on-going practice of discipleship is the imitation of Christ--going as Jesus goes, learning to see as Jesus sees, to love as Jesus loves and speak as Jesus speaks; to die as Jesus dies if it comes to that, in hopes of rising as Jesus was raised (Frederica Mathewes-Green has suggested--though these are not her exact words--that Christians are those of whom it is a compliment to say, "They never have an original thought"). But the imitation of Jesus, and also of Stephen, Paul and the saints who lived cruciform lives--all of them live with Christ's words on their lips, die with his forgiveness on their tongues--is toward this end: the imago Christi. The imitation of Christ forms us into the image of Christ
We imitate Christ until we become him--a piece of him anyway. Evangelicals have long said words to this effect: Christ has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet; we may be the only Jesus a stranger or neighbor sees today. We are a piece of Christ, sharing the peace of Christ.
Perhaps in their own way Sacramentalists say the same thing--that the pieces of Christ received become a part of us so that we become a part of Christ, a piece of Christ's peace in the world.
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