Br. Larry's Blog

Journeying On

2011-05-08T11:00:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached at Marsh Chapel, Boston University on Sunday, May 8, 2011 on the text of Luke 24: 13-35.

Allow me this morning to publicly express my gratitude to Dean Hill for giving me my very own preaching series. Yes, indeed, you have arrived at Marsh Chapel, whether in person, or by radio waves or by internet signals, for the first offering in Br. Larry’s 2011 secular holiday preaching series. We begin today, Mother’s Day, and will pick up again at the end of May with Memorial Day. The series concludes on July 4, Independence Day. I consider it the highest honor to have been invited to participate in the life of Marsh Chapel in this way, although I would encourage you to note that Dean Hill reserved for himself that pinnacle of secular holidays. Yes, the very one you are remembering just now from back in February, Groundhog Day. I can only pray that some day I will attain to such a stature in preaching as to aspire to be invited on so noble an occasion. Speaking of prayer.

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Let us pray.

Holy and Gracious God, we gather this morning of Mother’s Day and we celebrate the mothers here with us and the mothers, for some of us, who dwell far away. Keep our hearts and minds, this day and all days, in the mothering presence of your most Holy Spirit, that the thoughts of minds and the meditations of our hearts might be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Surely you have had the experience of being a passenger in a car traversing the streets of Boston. You are riding along on your way to an afternoon at the Museum of Fine Arts. You know where you are going. Your driver knows where she is going. You sit smiling as you gaze out the windows. Then, your driver takes a turn. “Hmmm…” you think, “this must be a shortcut. I should pay attention for the next time when I am the one driving.” Another turn. “Really. Interesting. I never would have thought to go this way,” your minds voice utters. A third turn. Now it is impossible for you to contain your words any longer. “Um, where are you going?” “Well,” your companion replies, “I am going to the MFA. Where did you think I was going?” “Yes, I thought we were going to the MFA, too, but the MFA is over there,” you reply, pointing back through the rear windshield. “Yes, dear,” says your companion, soothingly. “But this is Boston. Sometimes it is necessary to circumnavigate the entire city just to get next door.”

Amen? Amen.

“Where are you going?” There are actually two questions bound up in this one verbal ejaculation, but let us begin by taking the question at face value. It is certainly a legitimate question to ask as we consider the journey of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. There is another question that we might wish to ask along with Cleopas of his companion, namely, who are you? That line of questioning, however, at least at this stage, is not terribly likely to arrive at positive results. On the other hand, it is not entirely clear that our “Where are you going?” question will lead to positive results, either given that there is no clear evidence of a village called Emmaus two stadia, which is about fifty miles, from Jerusalem. This is to say that we do not know precisely where Cleopas and his friend were going, but the question remains relevant for us.

“Where are you going?” This question may be a constant, and perhaps somewhat grating, refrain for many of our graduating students here at Boston University. Family, faculty, friends, chaplains: all want to know where our graduates will be going next. Bound up in the question are clearly many other questions. “Do you have a job?” “Are you going to graduate school in the fall?” “Are you staying in Boston or moving back home or somewhere else entirely?” There are broader implications of the question as well, not merely about the immediate future but about the long term. “Do you have a plan?” “Are you career minded?” “What are you going to be, now that you are grown up?” And the questions have implications beyond merely the trajectory of career and work. “Are you going to get married?” “Are you going to have children?” “Are you going to be able to put your life together in such a way that you will both be fulfilled and able to pay the rent?”

“Where are you going?” In a time of global economic and political uncertainty, it can be especially challenging to even acknowledge the question. “Do you have a job?” “No, but not for lack of trying.” “Are you going to graduate school?” “Well, yes, but only because I cannot find a job, and by the way, I have no idea how I am going to pay for it, either now, or in the long term.” “Are you going to stay in Boston or move home?” “Well, I would like to stay in Boston, but Boston is expensive, and although I really do not want to be the graduate who spends the next two to three years living in my parents basement, I really do not see that I have any better options at this point.” Sorry, dear friends, but here at Marsh Chapel we do not preach a prosperity gospel but a Gospel of responsible Christian liberalism, which is to say that we abide in a realistic spirit with great hope for the possibilities of the future. It is in the spirit of realism that we must confess that the prospects are not what we might have hoped when we began four years ago. And it is in hope that we journey on.

It is a funny thing, returning for a moment to our pair of companions seeking to find their way to the MFA, that the question posed by the passenger to the driver, “Where are you going?” is not really a question as to the destination, but as to the route. This is to say that passenger and driver are both clear on where it is they intend to go. They are both aiming toward the MFA. It is just that the real route of the driver does not quite align with the ideal route of the passenger. Indeed, the real question the passenger is asking when verbalizing, “Where are you going?” is, “How are you going to get there?” This too is a question we may wish to bring to Cleopas and his companion on the way to Emmaus. After all, it is a neat trick not only to arrive but merely to set out toward a village of which there is no evidence of existence. How do you get to somewhere that isn’t?

It is my great hope that there is a primacy of the “How are you going to get there?” question in the “Where are you going?” inquisition that our graduates are racked upon by family, friends, faculty, and yes, chaplains. Indeed, of the two, it is the more profound. “Where are you going?” is simply to inquire of a single point, and the final point in the series, at that. “How are you going to get there?” inquires as to all of the infinitesimal points in between here and wherever it is you may be going. Furthermore, it is not so much a quantitative question about the points themselves, but a qualitative and relational question directed more toward the person for whom those points will be constitutive of their life. This is to say that the “How are you going to get there?” question is really a question of “Who are you, and how will you be in the world?” It is not a question of doing but of being, not that the two are ever more than theoretically distinguishable. It is a question of what sort of person you are and what manner of being you will endeavor to live into.

“How are you going to get there?” The reason that I hope that this question is the primary question implied in the “Where are you going?” inquisition is that this is the question that a university education should prepare you to answer, even if it does not prepare you to answer the “Where are you going?” question on its face. If nothing else, I pray that our graduates have uncovered something about themselves in their experience at Boston University, whether in the classroom, in the dorms, on the athletic fields and courts, in the dining halls, while studying abroad, while participating in community service, or just walking up and down Bay State Road. This is to say what Howard Thurman said much more eloquently: “Do not ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go and do that, because what the world needs is people who come alive.” In the final analysis it is a sense of concrete, embodied purpose, which only comes by moving through the spiritual process of self-discovery and actualization that empowers those who change the world. To transform others, be ye first transformed, and journey on.

Now that we have winched tight the inquisitor’s rack on Cleopas and his companion, perhaps we should stop for a moment and ponder the fact that the two questions that spring immediate to mind for us, “Where are you going?” and “How are you going to get there?” are actually not the question that Jesus poses. Jesus does not ask where these two disciples are going. It would have made sense if he had. After all, we hear throughout the Gospels of how the disciples are constantly misunderstanding what they are to do, where they are to go, and most importantly, why they are to do what they have been given to do. It would make sense that Jesus would be concerned that these disciples have once again wandered off, and as the good shepherd, that he would seek to bring them back to the fold.

Instead of asking, “Where are you going?” Jesus asks, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” Jesus is interested neither in the destination nor in the route but in the relationships built along the journey. If Jesus had been in the car making its way through the streets of Boston toward the MFA, or at least intending to be moving toward the MFA, the driver and passenger would not have been riding along silently such that the first audible sound is the inquisitor’s whip, “Where are you going?” Had Jesus been in the car, he would have wanted to know why the pair was going to the MFA. “Well, there is a new Art of the America’s wing that has just opened, and we have heard so much about it.” “Is American art important to you?” “Yes, we are particularly captivated by the expansive landscapes of the Hudson River School.” “What captivates you so?” “Well, I think it has to do with the way the artists work with light, so that parts of the painting are illuminated while others fall into shadow. In so many ways it is more real than the actual view of which the painting is purportedly a record could ever express.” “Is not this the point of art?” “Yes, seeing the world in an artistic lens tells us more about who we are than we could ever otherwise come to know.”

Of course, the conversation with the disciples fails to actualize the potential for such a conversation. After all, these are the same dumb disciples who have been misunderstanding Jesus and his purpose and ministry since the get go. They are entirely bound up in trying to reconcile themselves to the crucifixion, and now also to the reports that Jesus is resurrected. And so Jesus must turn to admonishment. “‘Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” Once again, Jesus is left trying to bring the disciples up to speed. It is clear that the disciples have a ways yet to go as they journey on.

Speaking of journeying on, it seems that this is just what Jesus is intent to do, and what Jesus would have done had the disciples not intervened to invite him to Emmaus with them for dinner. Now, it is important to remember that these two disciples did not yet recognize that this was Jesus. Is this not often our experience as well, that we fail to recognize Christ in our midst. Often as not, Christ comes to us in the figure of others, the very same family, friends, faculty, and the occasional chaplain who winch us tight on the inquisitor’s rack. St. Francis said, “You may be the only vision of Jesus Christ someone will ever see.” A dear friend of mine said it even more boldly: “You may be the only Jesus Christ the world will ever see.” It is indeed a great responsibility.

It is significant that, even though they did not recognize Jesus, the disciples invited him into their home for dinner. The saying goes that you should always extend hospitality to strangers because you never know when you might play host to angels. Well, apparently you may also end up playing host to Christ. Jesus becomes known to the disciples in the breaking of the bread. Of course, the disciples later recognize that they had in fact felt the presence of Jesus as they journeyed together along the road, in the familiar sense in which Jesus had always made their hearts burn. Perhaps, not realizing that the feeling signaled the presence of Jesus, they even took an antacid. That is what you do for heartburn, isn’t it? Anyway, they had not recognized him, which is to say, the familiar sense of hearts aflame had not risen to the level of conscious awareness, but now they were aware of the connection between what they felt on the road and what they had felt as they accompanied Jesus throughout his ministry.

This is to say that as you journey on, I would encourage you to extend and receive hospitality. In the end it is neither the goal nor even the path that is truly important. It does not really matter whether or not you ever make it to the MFA. What matters is the relationships you cultivate along the way. This is the good news of Jesus Christ for us today: resurrection and salvation by relationship. I leave you today with the prayer of my order, of the Lindisfarne Community: that we may be as Christ to those we meet, and that we might find Christ within them.

And in all things, make your mother proud. Amen.

Jesus Repents

2011-04-22T12:55:00.002-05:00

Meditation on the Third Word from the Cross, John 19: 23-27, on Good Friday, 2011.

Allow me to begin by saying that I love my mom. Which is why I struggle somewhat to understand how someone who, while perhaps not specifically anticipating death by crucifixion, certainly knew that trouble was brewing for him in Jerusalem, would not have made arrangements to care for his mother at some point substantially before he found himself hanging from a cross. This is, after all, what we have here. Jesus is arranging for his mother to be taken into the home of his beloved disciple, to provide for her in the wake of the death of her firstborn.

We should remember, of course, that Jesus’ relationship with his family was strained at best. In the Gospel according to St. Luke, we hear that Jesus’ “mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, ‘Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.’ But he said to them, ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.’” Ouch! We may want to forgive Jesus for having his mind on things heavenly rather than things earthly. On the other hand, is it not the whole point of the incarnation that God is with us, here on earth, not in heaven?

Jesus did not have a very high view of family in general, not merely his own particular family. St. Luke’s Gospel also recounts Jesus saying, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided:

father against son

and son against father,

mother against daughter

and daughter against mother,

mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law

and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’”

And yet, here is Jesus, hanging on the cross, abandoned by those among whom he shared the word of God, and as we shall hear momentarily, abandoned by God as well. Jesus spent his whole life and ministry relying upon God, who he called father, to the point of standing against all others. But here, finally, at the last, when everyone else is gone, only his mother is left. And Jesus repents. Finally, here on the cross, Jesus is more Confucian than Christian, making one last, desperate attempt at reconciliation in an act of filial piety. It is raw, not sentimental; a humble apology rather than noble effort. Mary courageously stood by and watched as the child God called her to bear, and who subsequently rejected her, was betrayed, forsaken and abandoned by humanity and by God, and was crucified. In the end, she was all he had, and Jesus repents. Amen.

Unspeakable Unknowing

2011-04-21T18:00:00.001-05:00

Sermon preached at Marsh Chapel on Maundy Thursday, 2011 on the text of Luke 22: 31-62.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

This evening I am going to do something rather unorthodox. For those who have been subjected to my preaching, much less my theology, in the past, this should not be terribly surprising. Perhaps it will be of some comfort to you that whatever level of unease you may be feeling about what might be coming, it inevitably pales by comparison with the abject terror Dean Hill is experiencing even now as he wonders if he is about to deeply regret letting me step into the pulpit.

It is customary in preaching to hold forth upon the texts that have just been read. I am not going to do that. Tonight I am going to preach on the text that will be read at the end of the service, Luke 22: 31-62. If I manage to pull this off, it is my ardent hope that you will appreciate the irony of a sermon entitled “Unspeakable Unknowing” on a text that is as yet unknown and unsaid.

May we pray?

Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Eternal, have mercy on us. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Amen.

If I cast my mind’s eye forward on what God might call and empower me to accomplish in my life in ministry, I would consider it close to the pinnacle of my career to have the opportunity to preach a sermon on Easter Sunday entitled, “He’s Up! (Act Surprised).” The fact of the matter is, of course, that we already know where this is going; we already know how the story ends. It is a great privilege to stand on this side of salvation history from whence we can see what has been accomplished in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that the suffering and pain of his death are not the final word.

In the course of Christian history, there have been those Christians, perhaps most often found among those loyal to the see of Rome, who have placed extraordinary emphasis on the agony, fear, torture, suffering and death of Jesus of Nazareth in their lives of faith. And in good reactionary form, there have been those among the Reformers who have swung the pendulum back, although we must confess that, like many reactionaries, they are wont to let the pendulum swing back too far. What is at risk here, on one hand, is the glorification of suffering in the passion, and the triumphalistic denial of suffering on the other. How might we find our way forward to a dialectical resolution?

Tonight I wish to suggest that if we would seek to be Easter people come Sunday then we must, in these three days, unspeak and unknow resurrection. If I have learned anything from sitting at the feet of Ray Hart for the past twelve weeks, it is that human life is lived between two nots: the not from which we come in birth, and the not toward which we go in death. Not; nothing; nihil. This is to say that in life we know not where we are from, and we know not where we are going.

If this is so, that we know not where we are going, then we must come to know what Jesus did not know as he faced the cross. We have not yet heard how Jesus prayed in grief and anguish that the cup be taken from him. There are those who have said that this grief and anguish came at the prospect of suffering, pain and death. But I ask you, in your own experience, are you grieved and anguished by the prospect of pain, or are you grieved and anguished by not knowing what lies on the other side? Are you grieved and anguished at the prospect of final exams and term papers, or are you grieved and anguished at not knowing if you will have a job after you graduate?

Even as we gather here this evening, a very dear friend of mine from the church in which I was raised sits by her father’s bedside in a Washington DC hospital. It is becoming ever more clear that he is not long for this world. She was there in Washington, to be with her father, even as she received word that her fiancé had died in a tragic beach accident in Brazil. She knows grief. She knows anguish. And is it not the case that in the times of great grief and of great anguish that we know not whether joy will ever come again? In times of deep suffering, it is a woefully inadequate platitude to proffer that “weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30: 5).

If there is any truth in the theological notion that the efficacy of salvation is somehow connected to the divine experience of being human, then the experience of unknowing, of sensing abandonment, of being betrayed and forsaken, is the most humanizing experience God could possibly undergo. Not knowing whence we come or where we go is what makes us finite beings, in stark contrast to the infinity of God. If it is in crossing the chasm from infinite to finite that salvation is achieved, then the infinite must undergo unknowing.

And so must we. In these days, living as we do in the light of resurrection, we must unknow and unspeak what we know, that resurrection might truly come as a surprise. We must enter into, embrace, and become possessed by the confusion of unknowing exemplified by Peter his confident insistence that he will remain loyal, faithful, trustworthy and true, only moments later to betray, forsake, abandon and deny Jesus. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” (Inferno, Dante). There is no glory in this suffering. Merely abiding, come what may.

In these services of Triduum, including this service tonight and the Good Friday service tomorrow, I would encourage you to allow the rituals of Passiontide to move you to a place of deep unknowing. On Good Friday, the seven last words of Jesus from the cross will be read and meditated upon, but I encourage you to listen most deeply to the silence, in which everything we know about Jesus, his life and his death, is swallowed up in unspeakable unknowing. Tonight, as the vestments and paraments are stripped from the clergy, from the altar, and from the pulpit, allow the loss of beauty to help you to unspeak and unknow your hope and your expectation. As you come forward to have your feet washed, unknow your sense of comfort and security, and as you wash the feet of another, unknow what you take to be clean or dirty.

In a few moments we will turn to the communion table. This is perhaps the deepest place of unknowing in all of the Christian tradition. What are these things? Bread or body? Wine or blood? Why am I consuming them? What will eating and drinking them do to me?

We enter into these mysteries of God-with-us as people who know not and speak not. We are both fascinated and terrified by the God who beckons us, as Rudolph Otto pointed out, the God who draws us onward toward the not we do not know. And we step into a great cloud of unknowing, just as God knew not God on the threshold of the death of God. Amen.

Movement Calls to Movement | The Fund for Theological Education

2010-10-13T10:09:00.001-05:00

Check out my post on the Fund for Theological Education's Calling Congregations Blog.

Rejoice?

2010-07-04T11:00:00.000-05:00

Click here to hear the sermon only.

Isaiah 66: 10-16
Luke 10: 1-11, 17-20
Galatians 6: 1-18

Oh good! You’re here! You have made it this far, anyway, to the wooden pews amidst limestone walls and stained glass in the nave of Marsh Chapel. Or, at least you’ve managed, on this glorious holiday weekend, to set your radio alarm dial to 90.9FM, and you have been blessed to awaken to the sometimes playful, always joyful strains of organ and choir. A holiday weekend is a nerve-wracking endeavor for any preacher, but perhaps especially when the holiday itself falls on Sunday. Will anyone bother to show up? Indeed, you have come to glory in the opening days of July in beautiful Boston, and we welcome you here at Marsh Chapel on your way to hear the Pops and watch the fireworks this evening. What a rich blessing. May we pray?

Holy and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, guide our hearts and minds into ever deeper knowledge and love of you, that at the last we may find communion with you and one another at the banqueting table of all good gifts. Amen.

Oh, goodness. This is uncomfortable. Well, yes, it is rather warm in an un-air-conditioned nave on a hot summer day in Boston, but no, this is not what I was referring to. Even more uncomfortable for the preacher of the day than heavy vestments on a hot day is the task of wrestling with apparently contradictory texts. What are we to make of this?

Well, what shall it be? Are we to rejoice with Jerusalem, as God has declared victory for her and accounted divine sanction to her future success, as with Isaiah? Or, are we to follow the command of Jesus: “Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you”? To rejoice or not to rejoice, that is the question, at least for today. And what finer day to ask the question than on the day we celebrate the victories and successes of the United States of America, from its founding to the present day?

Yes, we would be remiss, on this at least as much on any other day, to glory in our triumphs, victories and successes without acknowledging and grappling with the concomitant ambiguity inherent in such accomplishments. Noah Feldman, of the law school at a neighboring institution, put it poetically when he titled his recent contribution to the New York Times Op-Ed page, “The Triumphant Decline of the WASP.” Indeed, as Feldman points out, should Elena Kagan be confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States, then the great vision of meritocratic achievement and inclusion bequeathed to this country by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants will be accomplished precisely by delivering a bench devoid of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Or, given the recent proliferation of vampires in the media, I am hoping that a reference to the recent film Daybreakers may not be too far off mark: the central problem of the film is that once the vampires have bitten everyone and turned them into vampires, they have effectively cut off their own food supply. Oops!

These are, of course, both extreme cases of the colloquialism, “Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” While in the former case we may wish to affirm the outcome, and in the latter case we may find some amusement in the irony, it is almost certainly the case that the successes achieved were not quite what the instigators had in mind when they started the snowball rolling down the hill. (Do we have enough metaphors going on here? Are you keeping up? Oh, good.)

Now, do not misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that President Obama should have nominated a vampire to the Supreme Court. Vampires and the Supreme Court have nothing to do with one another.

What I do want to put on the table for consideration is the ambiguity of success. Politicians and pundits would have us take an apocalyptic view with regard to virtually every issue of our day. If we go one way, the world will come to an end. If we go the other way, we will enter a utopian paradise of harmony and bliss. To be honest, life would probably be easier if it actually worked this way.

Unfortunately, life is not made up of black and white issues. Life is complex, interconnected, and messy. In contrast to the apocalyptic view of life and its issues, we might call this the whack-a-mole approach to life and its problems. Every time you solve one problem, WHACK, one or possibly several more pop up that you could not have expected.

Even when we do manage to pull off what would amount to a clear victory, we are often left with a feeling of ambivalence. It may be that the Union North defeated the Confederate South in the Civil War, but then what exactly are we to make of the hundreds of thousands of casualties along the way? Or perhaps even more immediately distressing, it may be that you graduated first in your class from BU Law, but now there are no jobs for lawyers! Did I make the right choice? Did I follow the right path? I have achieved my goal, but was the goal really worth pursuing in the first place?

And not only are you stuck with both the good and the bad mixed up in whatever path you followed, you are also stuck with the outcome at which you have arrived, and not any other. After three years of law school you become a lawyer, which is also to become not a doctor, not a teacher, not a journalist, not an historian. After three years of seminary… Well, actually, it’s still not entirely clear to me exactly what you become after three years of seminary. But whatever it is, that is what you are, and not something else.

“Do not be deceived,” says Paul, “for you reap whatever you sow.” Is this not precisely the problem? Dare we to sow anything, for fear that we might be forced to reap it?

What, pray tell, are we supposed to do with all of this ambiguity? Let me assure you that you have come to the right place. The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that all of the ambiguities of life in the world are in fact taken up in God, whence they are judged. God does not judge us for clarity and decisiveness: “do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you.” No, we are judged based on the gracefulness with which we pursue righteousness: “rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” The trick, you see, is not to be right; the trick is to be grounded and oriented such that as ambiguous successes and failures come our way we can navigate successfully between Scylla and Charibdis. As I am wont to say to my colleagues in higher education administration, if our students somehow manage to learn nothing in the classroom but learn to fail and recover gracefully during their time at Boston University, we will have succeeded in achieving our educational mission.

And how better are we to learn to cope with ambiguity than by coming to the communion table? There is no more ambiguous space. What exactly are we consuming when we come to the table? Bread and wine, or flesh and blood? And if indeed it is flesh and blood, how so and how is this possible? We do not know. There is and never has been an entirely unified answer to this central question in the life of the Christian church. And yet, the ritual act of sacrifice at the center of the Eucharistic rite remains at the heart of Christian life and practice, in all of its ambiguity.

In one exchange at the fraction between priest and congregation, the priest proclaims, “Behold what you are!” and the congregation responds, “May we become what we receive.” As we turn to Christ’s table, may we become what we receive. Let us become people whose ambiguous lives are yet sources of rejoicing, not in absolute successes on our parts but in the glory of God who loves us in the midst of ambiguity and ambivalence. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Good Friday Meditation

2010-04-02T12:00:00.002-05:00

Luke 23:26-34

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

Thus begins Gregory David Roberts’ autobiographical novel, Shantaram.

There is indeed freedom in forgiveness.

To be sure, our own tortured existences are less likely to be of the physical variety undergone by Jesus or Roberts. There are those, today, whose torture is physical, some even in our fair city of Boston. But for most of us our torture is more existential than physical. We are on the existential rack, so to speak, being pulled between the winches of denial and guilt. In denial we attempt to pretend that nothing is wrong, or at least that whatever is wrong is not our fault. In guilt we remember that it is in fact our fault but then conclude that no force in heaven or on earth could overcome it.

And yet, there is freedom. Our freedom does not overcome the torture, any more than Roberts’ freedom stopped the torturers or Jesus’ freedom obstructed the crucifixion. No, our freedom is in the midst of the torture. We are never absolutely conditioned. Yes, torture is psychologically debilitating. And yet, in speaking with at least some torture victims, what is striking is not their bitterness and anger but their compassion.

To arrive at this point, where we can take up our freedom responsibly, is to humbly reject humiliation. Pain and degradation, whether physical or existential, is not the last word. But without a carefully cultivated humility, the pain and degradation become totalizing. Humility is the recognition that denial and guilt make it all about us. But torture is rarely about the tortured; it is always about the torturer, attempting to convince the tortured and themselves that it is about the tortured. Freedom comes when humility wins the day and we know that this is not so. Then, and only then, are we free to forgive.

From the cross Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

“When it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility.”

Thanks be to God.

To Know and To Do

2010-04-01T18:00:00.001-05:00

1 Corinthians 11: 23-26
John 13: 1-17, 31b-35

“If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

Apparently, for a significant proportion of the history of American Christianity, attendance at weekday Holy Week services, such as this one, the Good Friday service tomorrow, and the Easter Vigil on Saturday, was desperately low. In fact, at least in Protestant strains of American Christianity, many churches simply did not have weekday Holy Week services. Thus began the tradition of reading the entire Passion narrative on Palm Sunday, so that people did not think that salvation history moves directly from Palm Sunday to Easter without first passing through, not over, the suffering, crucifixion and death of Jesus.

At least, this is what my parents, Dean Hill, and others of their generation and older tell me. By the time I came along, two and half decades ago, American Christianity had awakened to the fact that passing over Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday was in neither their spiritual nor theological best interests. So it was that at Hughes United Methodist Church, in which I grew up, the congregation undertook to resurrect the practice of Holy Week. We began with Maundy Thursday.

There are two versions of the Maundy Thursday service at Hughes, and they alternate yearly. The first is a recreation of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, complete with elaborate sets and costumes that match the painting perfectly. Those enacting the reenactment enter the scene and freeze in place, just as in the painting. One by one they break free of their frozen state to tell their story of encounter, call, decision to follow, and experience of ministry with Jesus. At the end of each monologue they ask rhetorically, “is it I?” wondering who it will be who betrays Jesus. At the end, communion is celebrated and served, just as Jesus shared a meal with his friends at Passover.

The second version is women who knew Jesus. This dramatic presentation includes some parts spoken, other parts sung, and other parts danced. Each tells the story of encounter and participating in ministry with Jesus. Everyone involved in the drama wears a colored scarf over her head. At the end, each woman removes her scarf and weaves it together with the others on the altar, announcing the character she played, her real name, and stating, “and I know Jesus, too.” Again, the presentation ends with communion.

“If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

Here in the heart of the fourth largest private research institution in the United States, it is easy to become enchanted with the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. To be sure, the beauty of mathematical equations, the insights of literary criticism, and the fulfillment of an historically informed musical performance are indeed achievements in their own right. And clearly, Jesus is not opposed to the idea of knowledge as valuable in itself. After all, he spent much of his ministry just trying to get the wayward disciples to understand what he was about. Nevertheless, true blessing comes from the application of knowledge. Mathematical equations allow engineers to manipulate the material world. Literary criticism allows speakers to craft effective arguments and avoid arguments that are likely to fall flat. An historically informed performance can lift the souls of both listeners and performers toward transcendent light.

For those of us involved in religious life, there is a particular danger associated with the valuation of knowledge in its own right. Karl Jaspers pointed out that the world’s great religious traditions, founded as they were in what he termed the Axial Age, were focused on cultivating an applied ethical awareness. Nevertheless, there has been a tendency throughout religious history for religious people to overemphasize knowledge of God, of the transcendent, of ultimate reality, above the enactment of knowledge in everyday life. For how this happened in Gnostic Christianity, see Dean Hill’s dissertation, An Examination and Critique of the Understanding of the Relationship Between Apocalypticism and Gnosticism in Johannine Studies. No household should be without it.

Indeed, Martin Luther’s insistence that salvation is by faith, not by works, has translated throughout much of modern history into a form of Christianity that focuses on what adherents believe about God, themselves, and their own relationship to God. I do not wish to argue that beliefs are unimportant, but as Jesus emphasizes for us so eloquently in the act of washing the disciples’ feet, “if you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.” Belief, or knowledge, leads to blessing when it is enacted. Plato was right. Philosophy can only ever be a guide to life.

And so we can come to understand our Holy Week practices. Spiritual practices are just that, practice. Our presence here is a transition between the knowledge of God and the enactment of that knowledge in our lives. As my high school band director emphasized, “practice is the mother of skill.” To live skillfully, we must practice the enactment of knowledge.

This is why the midweek Holy Week services are so important. It is not enough simply to know that Jesus shared table fellowship, washed the disciples feet, was betrayed, suffered humiliation and physical pain, was crucified, died, and was buried. Simply to know this is to pass over, not through, the salvation history that falls between Palm Sunday and Easter. It is good to read the passion narrative on Palm Sunday. But we must also practice what we preach.

Tonight, we too will share table fellowship with friends, and with Jesus. Tonight, we too will wash one another’s feet, and in having our feet washed, Jesus washes our feet. Tonight, we will strip the altar and sanctuary bare, enacting the darkness and ugliness of betrayal. Tomorrow, from noon until three in the afternoon we will suffer with Jesus upon the cross. And tomorrow, at three in the afternoon, we will toll the bell to seal the tomb. We do these things that in life we may be partners of the gospel, servants of Christ in those we meet, humble confessors of our own sinfulness, compassionate partakers of brokenness, and patient witnesses of finitude.

It is only in light of the practices of Triduum, of Holy Week, that Easter makes any sense at all. After all, what need is there of resurrection to correlate with the humbly triumphal entry into Jerusalem? The joy of resurrection is that God passes over our sinfulness, but we must pass through in practice at least as much as in belief, in doing at least as much as in knowing, to experience that joy truly.

“If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Marsh Chapel Atonement Sermon Series

2010-02-28T11:00:00.000-05:00

Philippians 3:17-4:1
Psalm 27
Luke 13:31-end

Well, dear friends, here we are, once again, plodding through the liturgical season of Lent. The weather has decided, this year, to cooperate with the penitential feel of the Lenten season. Here in Boston, unseasonably warm temperatures have yielded a series of rainy, dreary days instead of the usual snow. Snow, of course, is too beautiful to be penitential, although New York and Washington, DC may wish to point out that they have been experiencing penitential snowfall by sheer quantity.

Now, it must be said, and at the outset, that natural occurrences and calamities, be they rainfall and snowstorms or the earthquakes that rocked Haiti last month and Chile yesterday, are simply not a result of divine malign. In theology, like in statistics, correlation is not causation. The facts that rain and snow fall from the skies and that human beings are sinful do not mean that human sinfulness causes rain and snowstorms. The facts that the earth shifts and shakes and that human beings are sinful do not mean that human sinfulness causes earthquakes, any more than rainfall, snowstorms, or earthquakes are excuses for human sinfulness. While natural events may provide an emotional canvas on which to paint our spiritual journey, it is both a spiritual and a theological mistake to confuse the painting for reality.

Having set aside the temptation to equate natural events with divine intent, it is our task in considering the theme of atonement to investigate the equation of human sinfulness and divine grace. Temptation and addiction are two central figures in the drama of human sinfulness. Here at Marsh Chapel we may be prone to an addiction to excellent preaching. This is why it is important for me to step into the pulpit occasionally, to break the habit and remind everyone not to take for granted the homiletical extravaganza they are blessed to hear every other week.

It is no easy task we have set ourselves, to speak of atonement. Not that we at Marsh Chapel are prone to taking the easy road. Last summer we tackled the theme of Darwin and Faith, one of the greatest sources of tension in contemporary religious life. Now we delve into one of the greatest controversies in the history of Christian doctrine: how is it that the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth almost two thousand years ago effects a transformation from sin by grace in you and in me today and every day?

Rehearsing the myriad theological treatments of this central question in Christian faith and life would consume our time together and almost certainly result in even more snoring than is already emanating from the congregation. Alas, I am afraid that the vast majority of atonement theologies would not touch on the lived experience of so many of us in the second decade of the 21st century. In our question of the atonement we are not looking for the correlation between sin and Jesus, but for a causal relationship. We expect God in the person and work of Jesus Christ to actually do something to or for us on account of our sinfulness. But I wonder if the way we pose the relationship is not the source of our trouble in understanding atonement in light of our lived experience.

You see, in our posing the question, we expect something of God; that our sinfulness causes God to do something. Our Gospel lesson today sets things up differently. Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Paul too understands the discrepancy when in our reading from his letter to the Philippians he says “For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” What Jesus and Paul explain is that we understand very well what God does for us; what we do not understand is ourselves and our sinfulness. We are not willing. Our minds are set on earthly things.

There are four movements of atonement: confession, repentance, mercy, forgiveness. Atonement theologies have historically been arguments about the relationships among these movements. But our lived experience, and the breakdown in the atonement process, that Jesus and Paul knew and that we live daily, is not in the process itself but before and between its movements. In my admittedly brief time in ministry, my own experience is that people are often in one of two places with regard to their lived experience.

The first place many of us find ourselves is stuck in the starting gate; the atonement process never even gets going. As anyone who has ever moved from addiction to recovery can tell you, the first step in overcoming the addiction is admitting that you have a problem. Yes, dear friends, many of us are in denial, and I do not mean a river in Egypt. (Clearly, that for which I most need to atone is a predilection to bad puns).

The most obvious form of denial is the excuse. The most thoroughgoing excuse conceived in human history is the strict determinism of scientific materialism, resulting in the statement, “the universe made me do it!” Indeed, many of us cannot identify the exact cause of our failures of responsibility, but the sense that something beyond our control must have impinged upon our actions is prevalent. And the conclusion is that whatever it was that intervened should be held responsible for our failure.

If you are wondering if you have ever actually had an experience that matches up with this abstract musing, just ask yourself this question. Have you ever found yourself saying, or at least thinking, “Oops! I forgot…”? “Oops! I forgot to turn off the stove!” “Oops! I forgot to make my rent payment!” “Oops! I forgot to fill the car with gas.” Really, it works with just about anything. “Oops! I slept through class.” “Oops! I cheated on my girlfriend.” “Oops! I pressed the wrong button.” The word “oops” serves a dual function in our experience. It signals that we know something is wrong, and that we should not be held entirely responsible. After all, how can I possibly be expected to remember everything? I forgot to turn off the stove, but I remembered to lock the front door. I forgot to pay my rent but I paid the cable and electricity bills. I slept through class but I work so hard and for so many hours that I get exhausted. I cheated on my girlfriend but I was drunk.

Another form of denial takes the form of “it’s not that big a deal.” This is the recognition that something is not quite right, but also the concomitant belief that the not-quite-rightness does not rise to the level of a real problem; certainly not to the level of sin. The “no big deal” form of denial is less verbal than the impingement form, mostly because we tend not to acknowledge such events since they are of supposedly negligible importance. Nevertheless, there is a sense that things could have been better. “I could have said that better.” “The sauce could use more oregano.” “The prelude would have been better if I’d hit the F# instead of the F-natural.” Of course, Justin never hits a wrong note so he wouldn’t know.

As one great theologian, who is no stranger to this pulpit, has said, to be human is to be obligated. We are all responsible to fulfill all of our obligations. But, alas, our obligations are so many and various as to mutually exclude each other and overwhelm us. It is this condition that gives rise to the coping mechanism of denial. It is easier to simply say that fulfilling all of my obligations is impossible so I cannot possibly be responsible. Such coping mechanisms are reinforced when they are successful in getting us out of the consequences for our failures. Unfortunately, this coping mechanism is not entirely true, and thus not entirely helpful. The fact of the matter is that we do feel our obligations and resulting responsibility deeply. Even if it is the case that our obligations overlap and conflict, we still must choose which we will fulfill responsibly, and we are still responsible for the ones we choose not to fulfill. We are responsible. We ourselves. Not someone else. Not the situation. We are responsible and we have failed in our responsibility, despite any intervening agents and situational complexity. We have failed. We have sinned. We are responsible and culpable and in need of repentance, mercy and forgiveness.

The other place that many of us find ourselves is stuck in the middle. Of course, the truth is that in some sense we are all stuck in the middle. It is always the case that we have sinned again before the sin we just confessed and repented of can be forgiven. But this is a different kind of being stuck in the middle. This is the kind of stuck in the middle that gets depicted in the 1998 dramatic film, What Dreams May Come. The character Annie, wracked by guilt over the death of her husband Chris, commits suicide and is damned to hell, not by God, but by the psychological pain that brought her to commit the act in the first place. This middle place, which for many is a hell of their own making, is marked by an overwhelming sense of guilt.

The place of guilt is in many respects the opposite end of the pendulum swing from the place of denial. In guilt it is not that our obligations are overwhelming and therefore we cannot be held responsible, but that our obligations are overwhelming and we are so responsible that we can never escape. There is not enough mercy in the world to overcome our failures. To be stuck in the middle is to be stuck constantly repeating Hagrid: “I should not have said that. I should not have said that. I should not have said that.”

The problem here, once again, is not really a lack of confidence in God, but a lack of self-confidence that we are really worthy of forgiveness. God could not possibly forgive me, not because God is not capable, but because I am not worthy. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” The agony of the place of guilt is only partly our own agony in the face of our own sinfulness; it is also the agony of God who longs for relationship but we are unwilling. It is not God who counts us unworthy; it is we ourselves.

How, then, might we bring the pendulum back to the balance point? And what might life look like once it is there? Let’s take the second question first, shall we?

We, in the spirit of Lent, seek to live in the space between denial and guilt. If we are to avoid denial, we must be honest, first and foremost with ourselves, about our own failures and thus our own sinfulness. And yet, to avoid extreme guilt, we must learn humility. We must humbly acknowledge our faults and enter a place of deep contrition out of which those we have faulted may offer forgiveness. So too, we must humbly recognize that the mercy of God is far greater than any sin we might possibly commit. When I was last on silent retreat with the Community of Taizé, Br. Sebastian led our daily reflections. He pointed out that the only possible way to withstand humiliation is to cultivate humility. Denial and guilt are both defense responses that attempt to fend off humiliation. But at the end of the day, neither are successful coping mechanisms. Br. Sebastian is correct. The only possible way to withstand humiliation is to cultivate humility.

I often find myself saying to faculty and administrators that if students at Boston University learn nothing in the classroom, but during their time here learn to fail and recover gracefully, then we will have succeeded in our mission as an institution of higher education. To fail in our responsibilities is indeed inevitable in life. This inevitability does not absolve us of our responsibility. Only God can do that. But neither does it doom us to live guilt-wracked existences. We can, in fact, recover.

The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that there is more love in God than sin in us. “But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith” (Romans 3: 21-25).

From the perspectives of denial and guilt, it may appear as the saying goes, “you just can’t get there from here.” In the Protestant traditions there is a hesitation here, because justification is by faith, not by works. Indeed, it is God who delivers mercy and offers forgiveness of sins, and yet it is we ourselves who must make the spiritual journey of Lent from denial and guilt to humility. This journey largely consists in ritual.

There are two theories of ritual at Boston University. The first is that of the former Dean of Marsh Chapel, the Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville, who points out that ritual is the cultivation of habits that allow us to live well in the world. The second is that of anthropology and religion professors, respectively, Rob Weller and Adam Seligman. For them, ritual is the creation of subjunctive, “as if” spaces in which our own brokenness and the world’s brokenness can be held together as if they were whole. In neither perspective is ritual identified solely with religious rites such as the one we are in the midst of now. Both understand that ritual consists in such mundane patterns of behavior as walking down the street and driving the car, all the way up to the patterns of ceremony involved in religion and civil society.

So who is right? Is ritual a set of patterned behaviors that allow us to live well, or the creation of “as if” spaces that help us cope with our own and the world’s brokenness? The mistake would be in assuming that the two views are mutually exclusive, and the Lenten spiritual journey is the perfect case for demonstrating that the correct answer is a resounding, “both!”

On the one hand, the rituals of discipline in Lent really are better ways of living in the world. To reject temptations, begin to recover from addictions, and honestly and humbly recognize our own sinfulness makes us better able to see ourselves and our world as they truly are. Furthermore, the ritual movements from confession and repentance through mercy and forgiveness help us keep balance between denial and guilt and to cultivate humility. When we do so we are better able to relate to friends, family, neighbors, the world and, above all, God.

But in order to have that effect on our lives, ritual must first pull us out of our world and then stuff us right back in. The rituals of Lent pull us out of our normal daily existence and confront us with that fact that human sinfulness is world destroying. According to the Christian narrative, it was human sinfulness that lead to the death of Jesus on the cross, not the sinfulness of some humans, but the sinfulness of all humanity. Jesus Christ, who in our ritual context was in the beginning with God and through whom God created the world, is destroyed by our sin. But just as surely as our sinfulness is world destroying, so too is the grace of God world founding. Sin is not the final answer, but is overcome by the victory of resurrection life by the grace and mercy of God. And so the ritual places us back in the world in the middle, not stuck but moving more fluidly through the process of confession, repentance, mercy and forgiveness.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” In the Lenten journey let us participate in the drama of atonement, the movements of confession, repentance, mercy and forgiveness that we might become willing participants in the realm of justice and peace that resurrection ordains. To do so we must in all humility reject the extremes of denial and guilt by allowing the ritual discipline of Lent to do its work. The ability to fail and recover gracefully is the greatest learning we might hope for, and then give thanks that the love and mercy of God indeed triumph over sin and death.

Let us bless the Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Feeling Darwin’s God’s Politics

2009-08-23T11:00:00.003-05:00

Ephesians 6: 10-20
Psalm 84
John 6: 56-69

Well, here we are, in an un-air conditioned nave in the peak of the Boston summer. And, after nine weeks of sermons on Darwin and faith, we are almost to the end of our summer series, turning to our second string as we round the last bend. We feel the heat and humidity. We feel the intellectual weight of our topic. We feel, yes, let us confess it, a bit distracted by the national debates on health care reform, by our preference to be at the beach right now, and by the prospect of the Red Sox trouncing the Yankees at least as badly as they did last night. Today, dear friends, amidst the heat and humidity, the gravitas of evolutionary theory, and our myriad distractions, we attend to our feelings. Let us pray:

O God, when I speak, may a message be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Amen.

That religion has primarily to do with feeling, not knowing or doing, was a central claim for Friedrich Schleiermacher in his Glaubenslehre, perhaps the founding text of liberal theology. We would do well to remember this as we consider the struggles of the last century-and-a-half between religion and evolutionary theory. To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution raises a number of conceptual problems for theology, many of which have been discussed throughout our Darwin and Faith sermon series. But as faithful people, our solving the conceptual problems does not resolve the tension between religion and science. The tension is not merely thought but felt, and we must be attentive to the feeling of the tension, and the feelings the tension produces, if we are to have any chance of such resolution.

What is this feeling?

I remember, about a dozen years ago, traveling from my home in Silver Spring, Maryland up to Princeton, New Jersey for a visit with Uncle Doug and Aunt Helen. This was a regular occurrence for my brother and I. While my immediate family were and are avid churchgoers, Doug and Helen were not. I distinctly remember, at one point, my brother asking Doug if he was a Christian. Doug replied that he was not. After pondering this for a moment, my brother looked up with raised eyebrows and pronounced, “Oh! You’re a Helenist!” Given that her own lineage was Greek, Helen was simultaneously delighted and amused by this naïve conclusion.

On this particular trip, I found myself browsing the copious bookshelves that lined the walls of their Princeton home. I came across a book making the case for evolutionary theory over against religion. This discovery led to a lengthy discussion with Doug about the merits of the theory of evolution and its discrepancies with biblical descriptions of creation. In spite of the fact that Doug is a professor of politics, or more likely because of it, he did not argue his case with anything like the stridency we see in typical political discourse. Instead he made his points clearly and calmly and invited me to consider and question them in a similar spirit. Indeed, it was not Doug’s argumentation that led me to experience for myself the tension between religion and evolution but the real tension that is there. Coming, as I was, with what I will charitably call a Sunday School conception of faith, my experience of the life of faith, of God, and of religious experience had very little way of coping with the implications of Darwin’s theory.

In fact, the tension between religion and science does in part arise from the contradiction between biblical images of creation and the theory of evolution. But this is still a conceptual problem and does not yet get at the feeling. In the face of contradiction, the normal human response is doubt: one of the two views, if contradictory, must be wrong. Religious doubt is especially deep. It reaches to something like what Descartes meant when he said that he doubted everything except that which cannot be doubted, namely his own existence. If he doubted then there must be a self that doubts and so he must exist. This is the meaning of his famous statement cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. Arriving at this fundamental conclusion, however, required doubting absolutely everything else, all ways of knowing and thinking and understanding the world. At this point, the entire world of meaning, and all ways of meaning-making, must be completely reconstructed from scratch. Moreover, there must be a process of letting go of the old ways of understanding and finding meaning in the world. There is a loss here, and loss is accompanied by grief.

It is no different with the confrontations between religion and science in our own time. The truth that the world comes to be the way we find it, and that we come to be the way we are, as a result of evolutionary processes, requires doubting the Sunday School conception of faith. This is what Professor Wesley Wildman was pointing to in the first sermon of the Darwin and Faith series. There is no simple adjustment to the Sunday School faith, such as saying that the Sunday School God creates through evolution, that does anything like justice to Darwin’s theory. Conceptually, Dr. Wildman hit the nail right on the head. But now we must continue on to understand what letting go of a Sunday School faith implies, to see what the process of grief looks like, to examine our own feelings in the tension between religion and science. We are, after all, human beings, who have evolved to construct for ourselves worlds of meaning made up of truths that we can depend on. We have not evolved to simply let one world of meaning go and pick up another. If we had, those worlds of meaning would have no value. No, we are tenacious in our beliefs and cling to them precisely because they are valuable. They give us meaning and purpose, direction and confidence. And so, when they break down, we feel the loss and we grieve.

To be sure, this process of loss and grief takes place at the personal level. Darwin himself may be the best example of this. Being in training for the Anglican priesthood at Cambridge University when he made his journey on the Beagle, eventually leading to his landmark theory, Darwin had read the leading natural theologies of his day. Most of these, and especially the natural theology of William Paley, are versions of the teleological argument for the existence of God. The argument is to the effect that a world exhibiting such complexity, order, purpose and beauty as ours must have been created by an intelligent entity. Darwin’s theory of evolution, however, is precisely a demonstration of how complexity, order and beauty come about through the natural process of evolution, which only purpose is survival. Darwin saw and knew the contradiction explicitly. And for the remainder of his life Darwin remained ambivalent about faith. A letter from 1879 to John Fordyce is revealing. Darwin says,

[My] judgment often fluctuates.... Whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term ... In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. -- I think that generally (and more and more so as I grow older), but not always, -- that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.

Clearly, Darwin could no longer tolerate his earlier beliefs, but neither would his grief at its loss allow him to abandon faith entirely. Not all grieve in this way; many do abandon faith.

The grieving process takes place at the social level as well. We see this as many Christians resist the teaching of evolution in public schools and advocate the teaching of creationism based on their belief in a personal, purposeful god. We might diagnose this response to the challenge Darwin’s theory poses for such Sunday School faith on the Kübler-Ross grief cycle as somewhere amidst the stages of denial, anger and bargaining. Denial: such Christians continue in their faith lives as if Darwin had never published On the Origin of Species. Anger: Sunday School Christians express anger at the social adoption of evolutionary theory by challenging it in court, by denying that Christians who accept evolutionary theory are true Christians, and by attempting to keep politicians who accept evolutionary theory out of office. Bargaining: Recent advocacy of having creationism taught alongside evolution and the shift from strict creationism to intelligent design theories are attempts at bargaining with evolution. Given that Darwin’s theory was published 150 years ago and we are socially only at the fourth of seven stages, half-way there, we can see that the grieving process at the social level, especially where religious beliefs are concerned, can take a very long time indeed.

This timeframe should not be entirely surprising. After all, the feeling with which Schleiermacher identified religion is not just any feeling; it is the feeling of absolute dependence. But it is hard to understand how we can absolutely depend on God if God turns out not to be who or what we thought. Sunday School faith tells us that God is a person, often imagined as a white man with a beard resting on the clouds, who relates to us as persons, giving us meaning and purpose in our lives. Dean Hill gave us three tools the Boston Personalists provide us for engaging with evolutionary theory, but Darwin’s theory contradicts Personalism’s central tenet, namely that personhood is the fundamental category for understanding reality. Evolution points out that the only purpose inherent in the ongoing development of the world is survival. Evolution as a process is tragic, as Alfred North Whitehead understood the term, pointing toward “the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” As Dr. Wildman pointed out in relation to Darwin’s own struggle with faith,

Surely such a loving, personal deity would have created in another way, a way that involved less trial and error, fewer false starts, less mindless chance, fewer tragic species extinctions, less dependence on random symbiotic collaborations, fewer pointless cruelties, and less reliance on predation to sort out the fit from the unfit.

If evolution is true, as it surely is, then that upon which we absolutely depend is certainly not personal.

Upon what, then, can we depend absolutely? Who is Darwin’s God? Darwin’s God is a creator god who creates us not personally but as part of a world that exhibits complexity and beauty and change and chance and order and that presents us with myriad choices, the decision among which make us who we are. Darwin’s God is not scaled to human concern; God is the creator of the H1N1 flu virus just as much as you and I. Darwin’s God creates a world not of predetermined outcomes but of competing interests. Darwin’s God creates not the world of utopic idealism, exhibiting a nice, neat, orderly progression, but the messy, mean and infinitely interesting developments in life. Darwin’s God, like Anselm’s God, is that than which nothing greater can be thought. As human thinking develops, as it has with Darwin’s theory of evolution, that which is greater than human thought and presses it to its limits must also expand. We can absolutely depend upon God to be more than we could ever imagine or comprehend. Darwin’s God is not as attractive as the personal God, because Darwin’s God does not care particularly about us, but Darwin’s God is more honest about the God we discern in the world God creates, whereas the personal God tells us more about our own desires and selfishness than about God in Godself. Darwin’s God is absolutely dependable to resist our selfish interpretations and demand humble submission.

We can see the unattractiveness of Darwin’s God when we consider the present debates about health care reform. Darwin’s God looks much more like the death panels that conservative politicians and pundits impugn upon reform proposals than anything any Senator or Congressperson could ever dream up. From the evolutionary perspective, human flourishing would certainly be greatly improved if societies were not encumbered by the old and infirm; humanity would be much more suited for survival. But none of the proposals in Congress suggest any such thing. Last week, Dr. Rodney Petersen warned us of the dangers of social Darwinism. Indeed, it is incumbent upon us to make wise decisions with regard to health care reform such that those who need care are cared for while also stewarding resources responsibly. But these wise decisions must be made in light of the human needs of our present historical moment. They cannot be attributed to a personal divine will and given ultimate cosmic significance. Darwin’s God will not accept such responsibility.

We stand in the same relation to the teaching about God revealed to us in Darwin as the disciples did to the teaching about God that Jesus offered them in our gospel reading today. With them we ask, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” Jesus knew that accepting it would be difficult, that there were some who did not believe. And Jesus asks us today along with the twelve so long ago, “Do you also wish to go away?”

The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that we need not turn away. Like Peter we can both address the conceptual contradictions and take up our grief at the loss of our Sunday School faith. And so with Peter we can say, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Time, Eternity and End Times

2009-08-16T10:30:00.003-05:00

Psalm 106: 1-12
Jonah 1
2 Peter 3: 14-18

I was quite excited to hear, in his invitation to me to preach today, that Rev. Hawes is preaching a series of sermons this summer on “questions of faith.” He offered that I did not have to participate in the series and could preach on whatever I liked, but I find that it is always better, as a guest preacher, to fit myself into the ongoing life of the community as much as possible. So, I requested the list of questions that he had compiled from your input. Then I began thinking that attempting to step into the middle of a sermon series might not be such a good idea after all. You all ask tough questions!

At Marsh Chapel, the architectural and spiritual center of Boston University, we are in the midst of our third annual national summer preacher series. This summer we are tackling the theme of Darwin and Faith in recognition of the 200^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150^th anniversary of the publication On the Origin of Species. Many of you probably know that Darwin’s theory of evolution and Christian theology have been in significant conflict since that publication. Our hope at Marsh Chapel is to help those who find themselves caught between these ways of understanding life in the world discover ways of being both authentically religious and honest about the truths revealed in the light of modern science. One of the questions on your list of “questions of faith” was about creation and evolution. Given that my contribution to the Marsh Chapel series comes next Sunday, I thought about giving it a trial run this week. But in the end I decided to settle for a slightly lighter topic from your list: time and eternity.

The notion of turning to the front page of a daily newspaper to catch a glimpse of what is going on in the world is fast becoming obsolete. For example, I get my news by following national news outlets like the New York Times and local news sources like Boston News Now on Twitter. However you get your news, it is hard to look at the goings on in the world today with overly much optimism. The war in Iraq seems to be quieting down somewhat, just in time for a resurgent conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan bleeding over into nuclear armed Pakistan. Almost 10% of U.S. citizens are unemployed, and while there are some signs that the recession is slowing, economists suggest that there will be a long road to recovery. The culture wars continue, perhaps in softer tones than in recent years, with debates over gay marriage, abortion rights and gun control continuing to be contentious. Of course, the most pressing issue in the news these days is health care reform and the many problems surrounding its cost and implementation. More on this later.

What are we to make of all of this? How are we to interpret wars and recessions and cultural upheaval and societal change in light of the gospel? One of the ways that religious people the world over have taken these “signs of the times” is to cast them onto a vast cosmic canvas. On this canvas, these mundane events are signs of evil ascendant in the world. We have seen in the past decade how some fundamentalist Muslims have taken this ascendancy as a call to resist modernizing forces through violent resistance and militant offensive actions. Christians have also been all too keen to read divine intent into such events, seeing the interpreted ascent of evil as a precursor to the final destruction of evil by God followed by the reign of Christ. Just read Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind novels. In other words, religious people have a tendency to interpret events in the world as signs of the coming end of that world.

One of the interesting things about people who make such predictions is that they seem to think that the confluence of wars, recessions, cultural upheaval and social change are novel; that they have never happened before. A cursory review of history will tell us that this is simply not the case. Take the New Testament for example. The gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four gospels, was written right around 70 A.D. when the Jerusalem temple was destroyed. In fact, the purpose of the gospel of Mark seems to have been to convince people to repent and follow Jesus ευθυς, immediately. Mark understood the destruction of the Jerusalem temple as a cosmic sign that Jesus’ return was immanent. From our vantage almost 2000 years later, it would seem that Mark was wrong. Paul, whose letters were written before any of the gospels and are the earliest literature in the New Testament, encouraged Christ believers in Corinth to “remain as you are,” i.e. single, because of the “impending crisis,” i.e. Jesus’ return. This is why Peter, in our reading from his second letter today, written after the destruction of the temple, says that some of the things Paul said are “hard to understand.” Peter was writing at a time when Christians were struggling to come to terms with the fact that Jesus had not returned as soon as they had hoped. Suddenly, a lot of things early Christians had claimed made less sense. This is also one of the reasons the gospels of Matthew and Luke were written, based on Mark but addressing the particular needs of later communities.

Living in the early centuries of the Common Era, the understanding of the biblical writers of the way the world works was distinctly disparate from the modern worldview. The earth was flat. The sky was a vast dome, above which were the several realms of heaven. Below the earth were the several levels of hell. The end of the world was when hell was defeated and the earthly and heavenly realms would be merged. Of course, today we know that the earth is round and that the sky is not a dome but a series of levels of atmosphere beyond which is a vast universe of stars and galaxies. If the atmospheric levels were to break down, as some of them are because of human produced pollution, we would not find earth merged with heaven but an entirely unlivable planet with no air to breathe.

In fact, Christian history is riddled with claims that the world is going to end. Still, here we are in 2009. Empirically, none of these claims has ever come to pass. Nevertheless, the fact that the world has never ended does not necessarily mean that the world never will end. One of these days, the prediction just may turn out to be right.

Actually, any claim that the world will end is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of time and eternity. Claims that the world will end, be they claims in the Bible or claims made by modern Christians, are based on the idea that some sort of cataclysmic set of events will bring time to a close and then we will be in eternity with God. Unfortunately, this conception gets both time and eternity wrong. It gets time wrong because it assumes that time is made up of individual moments, like water dripping from a dropper, one after another. But this is not time as we experience it. We experience time as a flow, like a river in which no one drop can be distinguished from the whole movement of the water. Being in the flow of time, in the river as it were, we experience some events as past, some as present, and some as future. Furthermore, as we move along, the flow of time moves some events into the past and other events from the future become actualized in the present. Present events limit some of our future possibilities.

Human history is nothing if not a long list of wars, recessions, cultural upheaval and social change. These are normal parts of human life, not signs that the world is about to end. Casting the events of our daily lives onto the vast cosmic canvas of divine purpose says a lot more about our own sense of our importance than it does about what God is actually doing in the world. It is also a way of escaping from our responsibility for doing anything about it. Human predictions of the end of the world are a lot like Jonah fleeing God’s work for him in Nineveh. Why should Jonah go to Nineveh if God is just going to destroy the city anyway? Why should we worry about all of these things that are happening if the world is going to end shortly anyway?

Claims that the world will end also get eternity wrong. For those predicting the end of the world, eternity is a continuation of the drops from the dropper forever and ever. The only difference is that in eternity God is in charge and so there are no more wars or recessions, no more cultural upheaval or social change. In other words, eternity is time without change. It is as if time is frozen in one drop of water forever. The inadequacy of this conception is apparent when we consider the resurrection. At what age will you be frozen in that drop of water? Will you be an infant, with all of your future possibilities ahead of you, but not knowing your children or having grown up and learned the skills of a profession? Or will you be elderly, when life has been lived fully but the body may not work as well as you may want if it is going to be forever? Eastern Orthodox Christians believe that we will be resurrected at age 33, the age Jesus was when he was crucified. But is this not just as arbitrary? And what about the people who do not live to the age of 33?

No, time is not drips of water from a dropper and eternity is not the continuation of a single drop forever. The river of time flows, and time is our conception of the river from within it, understood as the three modes of past, present and future. Eternity, on the other hand, is all the modes of time together, the God’s eye view from outside the river. It is not even the case that God sits on the bank of the river at a particular point, a particular present, judging our pasts and knowing our futures. God sees all of time together as fixed pasts and as open possibilities in the future realized in present moments. This is what it means to say that God is not in time; time is in God. Visions of the end of the world assume that eternity is something that intercepts and interrupts the flow of time. But that misses the point of eternity. Eternity is all of the modes of time – past, present and future – together. Time as we know it is our view of time from within the flow. Eternity is God’s view of time from outside the flow from past into present into future. Eternity does not interrupt time; it suffuses time with life and meaning.

There is a very practical implication to all of this: time has no beginning and no end. There is no end of the world. There is no cataclysmic moment when the world as we know it falls apart. And while we are searching the future for signs of the end of the world, we are missing eternity all around us. After all, we are in eternity just as much as we are in time and our present actions have eternal consequences. A choice, once made, is fixed and is past but also limits future possibilities. Choices, actions in the present, have eternal consequences.

The upshot is that we should worry about wars and recessions and cultural upheaval and social change. Our choices about how we handle these events in human life have eternal consequences, not at some point in the future, but from the eternal perspective of God in which our choice, once made, is past and fixed and our future is a kaleidoscope of possibilities.

Now we can get back to the health care debate. More than any issue since the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the present debate about health care reform is being cast onto a cosmic canvas, claiming that change in the health care system signals the end of the world, replete with the four horsemen of the apocalypse schematized as death panels. We do this because in a culture thoroughly inculcated with the idea that time is like individual drops of water, there is enormous pressure to escape the incessant dripping. We seek to escape from embarrassments of our past and from terror in the face of the future. Like Jonah, we seek to escape from the eternal vision of God. Stuck within the narrow vision of our present drop of water, we fear death and so we cast discussions of end-of-life issues with our doctors onto the cosmic canvas and they become death panels, deciding our fate for us. We are embarrassed by the past failures of our healthcare system to treat patients equally and effectively and so we cast the past onto the cosmic canvas such that any change signals the end of the world. From the perspective of eternity, however, the need for health care reform is about facing the fact that we live in Nineveh. Our wickedness is denying care to those who need it most who God calls us to serve. Our wickedness is our own selfishness causing us to fear conversations with loved ones and doctors about end of life issues. From the eternal perspective of God, this sort of behavior is going to land us in the belly of a very large fish.

The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that we do not live in a world of dripping present moments but in the eternal flow of the river of time. We need not fear death, because faithful people trust that God holds us in the eternal divine embrace, and so we should welcome conversations with our loved ones and doctors about end-of-life issues. We are indeed responsible for our past failings, but that does not mean that we can neglect the present obligation to improve on past decisions into the future. We are responsible for wars undertaken in our name and we are obligated to do everything we can to avoid them in the future. We are responsible for living beyond our means, setting the stage for the present recession, and we are obligated to live within our means into the future. We are responsible for those neglected by and mistreated under the present health care system and we are obligated to improve it. When we see life from the perspective of eternity, the glimpse of which is a sure sign that we are made in the image of God, then we can step out in confidence without embarrassment or fear. We should catch a glimpse of eternity in our midst, accept responsibility for the sins of our past in our society, and walk out in hope that the future we live is the future God eternally creates. The most profound theological statement thus far in the 21^st century was spoken from the steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2009: “This is the source of our confidence — the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.” Amen.

Charles River Yacht Club Blessing of the Fleet Prayer 2009

2009-05-26T16:45:00.001-05:00

Most holy God,
creator of earth and heaven, sky and sea,
you breathed your Spirit over the face of the waters and made the world;
you led Moses and the Hebrew people out of Egypt by parting the Red Sea;
you sent a giant fish to consume Jonah that he might become your prophet;
and your Son Jesus Christ was baptized in water, taught from a boat,
and called fishermen to be his disciples.
We who gather here today on the banks of the Charles River pray your blessing
upon these boats and all who would travel upon them,
upon this marina that it might serve as a safe haven,
and upon the Charles River Yacht Club that it might foster fellowship in your Spirit.
In the name of Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Boston University Baccalaureate Prayer 2009

2009-05-17T11:00:00.001-05:00

Marsh Chapel, Boston University
May 17, 2009

Creator God,
who makes the world and us in it,
we give you praise for your glory,
shining forth from what you have made.
We give you thanks that you give us
eyes to see your glory throughout your creation
that on this day especially we may see your glory
in the graduates of this great University.
Your glory is manifest in those who would become

doctors and lawyers,
businesspeople and artists,
engineers and journalists,
prophets, priests and civic officials.

We come before you to confess
that it is not our own work that has brought us to this day
but the work of your glory in us;
for it is you who have called us
to participate in the partnership of the gospel,
the good news that the work of creation continues
in those who would take up their lives
in love and service to the world.
We ask that your glory permeate our hearts and minds
that we may live into our vocations
in humility and grace.

God of order,
who establishes the very possibility of knowledge,
we praise you for your wisdom,
revealed to us in encounter with true persons.
We thank you for the gift of reason,
embodied in the hearts and minds of persons
that we may participate in the spirit of inquiry
in formal study in the University
and in our daily lives of work and leisure.
Your wisdom is manifest in

professors and administrators,
police and counselors,
facilities crews and support staff,
the deans, the provost and the president.

We confess that our own wisdom is folly
and that true wisdom belongs to you;
all truth is your truth.
Grant that we may continue to be inquirers
all the days of our lives
that we may live in the spirit of truth,
in the pursuit of wisdom and insight,
and in the grace of knowledge and understanding.

God of love,
who draws all things into relationship,
we give you praise for your power,
bringing each together into community.
We thank you for the gift of faith,
the capacity for trusting relationships one with another,
that we may not be alone
but part of a great congregation
seeking justice and peace
in a world of suffering and pain.
Your power is witnessed in

resident assistants and student affairs staff,
chaplains and campus ministers,
athletic teams and musical ensembles,
the City of Boston,
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
the United States of America,
and throughout the world.

We confess that our relationships are broken
and that only you have the power to heal.
Sustain us with the power of your spirit,
that we may remain connected
one with another,
with our schools and colleges,
and with the communion of saints at Boston University.

I Thirst: Good Friday Meditation

2009-04-10T13:45:00.001-05:00

John 19: 28

The arena was packed. Thousands of fans gathered last night in the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., myself included, to watch the BU Terrier men’s hockey team take on the University of Vermont Catamounts. And we were thirsty. The team was thirsty, the coaches were thirsty, the fans were thirsty. And indeed, our thirst was quenched. Although, I can say from the standpoint of the next morning, after all that screaming, I am thirsty again in a much more literal sense.

Our thirst was quenched, finally, by a 5-4 victory over the Catamounts. What is a Catamount, you may be asking? Well, as it turns out, it doesn’t really exist, or else it may be another name for a cougar. But existent or not, the Catamounts made us fight to quench our thirst. Terriers up 2-0 at the end of the first period. Catamounts up 3-2 in the second, only to tie it at 3 a piece by the end of period. Catamounts ahead 4-3, tied again, Terriers go ahead with five, and then defend the lead to the bitter end. Thirst, it turns out, is not so easily quenched. We must strive for it, work for it, persevere until the final buzzer.

Do not misunderstand me. I am in no way equating the thirst for victory in sport with the thirst Jesus endured as he hung on the cross in the scorching near-east Sun, moments away from death. Thirst employed as a means of torture, 2000 years ago or in our very own day, is one of the most horrific and damning acts of human-on-human violence that could ever be perpetrated, second only to the horror of thirst imposed upon millions around the world by sheer neglect.

But, if we are to understand anything of the agony of thirst and its quenching fulfillment, it can only be through the mediation of our own personal, frail and human experience. What is it that we know of thirst? Thirst is a passion. It is a passion in the sense that it is a suffering. Two weeks ago the choir sang the passion of Christ as recorded in the gospel according to St. John and set to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, the story of the suffering of Christ in the days leading up to his crucifixion.

Thirst is a passion too in the sense that it drives toward fulfillment. Passion is a motivation. Thirst motivates us to drink that our thirst might be quenched. Passions may be positive motivations. Frederick Buechner said that vocation is where our deep passion meets the world’s great need. Passions are often negative motivations. Passion in the form of suffering drives the one who suffers to seek its alleviation. The passion of thirst orients us toward quenching grace.

The impassioned thirst of Christ upon the cross will be quenched come Easter morning. We, with two thousand year thick lenses through which to glimpse the crucified and risen Christ, know already what is to come. Our thirst, perhaps, is lessened by the hope of the promise of resurrection. Jesus, even if he believed that he would be resurrected, could not know such to be the case with anything like certainty. His thirst upon the cross is a thirst with only the barest glimmer of resurrection hope. There are many, too many, in our world today whose thirst all too literally knows little if any hope of quenching drink, let alone quenching grace.

Easter is coming, but today is Good Friday. Today we sit: dry, parched, thirsty for living water. We see, hear, feel Christ crucified, forsaken by God, and thirsty. We acknowledge our own thirst, and hopefully await quenching grace.

Marsh Chapel, Boston University

Get Stoned

2009-02-25T18:00:00.002-05:00

We should begin our considerations of the woman caught in adultery, of course, by noting that the stoning referred to in our Gospel reading this evening is quite different from what we mean on a University campus by “getting stoned.” Both are deplorable, the stoning referred to in our passage even more so as its practice continues in some societies in our world today, especially against women. On the other hand, Jesus being stoned would certainly go some way toward explaining his odd behavior. In response to the question posed by the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus “bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” If everyone else there were stoned, it would go a long way toward explaining why no one seems to have remembered what he wrote! But, no, neither Jesus nor anyone else present there, that we know of, was stoned. To suggest that they were would be an ahistorical and anachronistic interpretation out of sync with the liberal theological tradition we stand in here at Boston University.

Still, we are left with the perplexing question, what was Jesus writing? There have been many attempts to answer this question, some based on historical evidence, others arising from pastoral need. All of them are speculative. Of course, the status of the whole passage is speculative as well. The most ancient sources lack it entirely. Some that have it have it earlier in chapter 7, others append it to the end of the whole Gospel, and yet others hand it off to Luke. Unfortunately, we cannot possibly sort out the question of the historicity of the passage here, but thankfully Dr. Knust over at the School of Theology is writing a book about it and I am sure she would be happy to explain the whole thing to you if you are so inclined.

So where does this leave us? We still do not know what Jesus was writing and we have virtually no historical ground to stand on in answering the question. Well, since all of the possible answers seem to be speculative, we should feel free to be speculative as well. Come; let us speculate. After all, it is the only thing we know of that Jesus ever wrote!

What might we speculate? Well, some speculate that Jesus was just drawing lines in the dirt while he was thinking. Yes, even Jesus doodles. This makes some sense to me. I know I doodle in the margins of bulletins during longwinded and boring sermons. (Hey! Put that pen away!). Others speculate that he was writing the names of the accusers in accordance with Jeremiah 17: 13, “those who turn away from you shall be written on the earth, for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.” This seems a bit like proof-texting. Others speculate that he was following Roman legal practice, writing out the sentence before delivering it orally. Of course, the idea that Jesus would emulate the legal system that would eventually put him to death is at least ironic. One of the oldest interpretations is that he was writing the sins of the accusers. Admittedly, this would have made it very difficult for anyone to claim they were without sin and then cast the first stone, but then the conclusion of the passage would have been virtually foregone.

One of the reasons the location of this passage is questioned is that it does not quite seem to fit. Prior to the passage Jesus is out in the countryside of Galilee preaching the good news and stirring up trouble. Following the passage, Jesus launches right back into the message: “I am the light of the world.” But here, in the first eleven verses of chapter eight, Jesus quietly and calmly manages the situation by subverting the question the authorities pose, and then is left alone with the woman they had caught in adultery. This is a very different Jesus. More importantly, it is a very different judgment.

Indeed, if anything is clear about this passage, it is that it is about judgment. The scribes and Pharisees accuse a woman of adultery and ask Jesus to pass judgment. Most of the speculations that have been offered have to do with what kind of judgment Jesus passed. The doodling Jesus speculation points toward cool, calm, rational judgment. The naming Jesus speculation points toward a scribal judgment based on the prophetic literature. The Roman Jesus speculation points toward political judgment. The sin-writing Jesus speculation points toward revelatory-religious judgment.

But is it really about judgment, or for Jesus is it about the judge? Jesus’ question to the scribes and Pharisees is subversive precisely because it calls into question not their judgment but their capacity and right to make judgments at all. Jesus sets the standard for the qualifications of any who would have judgment at sinlessness, a standard the scribes and Pharisees and everyone else who was in the temple could not meet. Of course, setting such a standard is a judgment in its own right. Recognizing this leaves the door open to Jesus’ own standard being turned back upon him. Who is to judge whether Jesus meets the standard for passing judgment? The scribes and Pharisees certainly would have called this into question. After all, Jesus was running around the countryside deceiving the people, from their perspective.

Ultimately, what should have happened is what we might call the judgment paradox. Anyone who might pass judgment must be sinless, but who has the right to make the judgment of sinlessness?

The funny thing is that the scribes and Pharisees never point this out. Given that they were not stupid, there is nothing explicit in the story that explains why they would not take this route of escape. How does Jesus avoid such an accusation? Well, now we are back to speculation. The only piece left in the story is what he has written on the ground.

So, here is my theory. What was Jesus writing on the ground? Jesus was writing his own sins.

Clearly, this throws a monkey wrench in the Christological gears. Isn’t Jesus supposed to be perfect because only a perfect sacrifice can atone for the sins of the whole world? To be perfect, doesn’t Jesus need to be sinless? If Jesus was writing his sins on the ground, this implies Jesus had sins, so Jesus was not sinless, so Jesus was not perfect, so the sins of the world are not atoned for. Oh dear, we are not saved.

No. Wait. Stop. Atonement theories like these were imposed on Jesus long after he walked this earth. It is we who think we need Jesus to be sinless to save us, not Jesus who needs to be sinless to save us. Remember, Jesus is fully human and fully divine. To be human is to sin. This is what we recognize today, Ash Wednesday. Jesus is human; Jesus is sinful; Jesus saves.

Dear friends, we find in this Ash Wednesday Jesus who writes his own sins on the ground a way forward in making judgments in a sinful world. Who determines the sinlessness of the judge? Those being judged. This is the way out of the paradox. The scribes and Pharisees turned and walked away because they saw Jesus write his sins on the ground and when he then turned the judgment to them they knew that his judgment was true. By confessing his sins, in writing them on the ground, Jesus repents of his sins and is cleansed, healed, forgiven. The sinlessness of the judge is not in never having sinned but in accepting the judgment on sin, of confessing, repenting and being forgiven.

Here we are. It is Ash Wednesday. We come and receive the sign of the cross in black, dirty ash on our foreheads or on our hands. Just as the Ash Wednesday Jesus writes his sins on the ground, let us accept the ashen cross as a confession of our sins, a sign of our repentance, and let us journey together through Lent toward forgiveness and new life in Christ.

The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that the Jesus who writes and so confesses his sins and repents meets the standard to make judgment. And Jesus does judge. Jesus judges the scribes and the Pharisees. They accept his judgment in light of his sinlessness through the cleansing of confession. He judges the woman. His judgment is just. “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” The judgment of the sinless is mercy. If we accept the sign of the cross in ash, thereby confessing our sins, repenting, and walking in the sinlessness of forgiveness, our judgment must be mercy. This Lenten season, let mercy lead and forgiveness reign. Amen.

Called to Transfigured Life

2009-02-22T11:00:00.001-05:00

2 Corinthians 4: 1-12
Mark 9: 2-9

It was one of those deceptively beautiful winter days. I stepped off the “T” into blue skies and sunshine paired with bitter cold and biting wind. After making my way, shivering, across Commonwealth Avenue, I looked up at the sculpture prominently located just left of center on the Marsh Chapel Plaza. Fifty abstract bird forms flying in an upward arc, cast in iron. There is something liberating and hopeful about the flight of birds that draws to mind the spiritual and the transcendent. It is little wonder, then, that they become focal symbols of our religious spaces, like here at Muller Chapel, and of our religious communities, like the Protestant Community dove and heart. Our birds in Boston represent the fifty states, and the freedom they express is the liberation from segregation brought about in the civil rights movement, significantly through the leadership of Boston University’s most famous alumnus, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On that chill winter morning I considered, as I climbed the stairs into Marsh Chapel, that something of Dr. King’s dream, of Dr. King’s vision, would be realized later that day.

Just before noon I walked into the student union and climbed the stairs and entered the large ballroom. It was standing room only. The whole hall was packed with students and faculty and staff. And it was silent. Aretha Franklin sang; (that bow was something else). The oath of office was administered, sort of. Four musicians from four racial and cultural backgrounds played together (or as it turned out mimed in time with a recording) a great American folk song set by a great American composer. And then there was the speech. On a cold and blustery January day, a mere month ago, President Barack Obama stood before a crowd of millions in Washington and billions around the world and delivered his inaugural address.

It was not the most inspiring speech any of us had ever heard, but its honesty was deeply refreshing and the tone was poised for a moment of great social turmoil. As I listened I looked around the room. No, Dean Elmore, our dean of students, was not there. He had received a ticket and gone to Washington. No, Katherine Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and director of the Howard Thurman Center, was not there. She too had received a ticket and gone to Washington. No, Mark Gray was not there. Oops! There he was! On the screen! Sitting ten rows behind the new President.

And then, there, toward the end of the speech, right after stating as clearly as possible the challenges to be faced in the days, weeks, months, years ahead, a line caught my ear. “This is the source of our confidence.” Confidence. What a wonderful word, confidence. It denotes nobility and grace and freedom. It is a standing up in the face of tragedy, solemnly facing the solemnity of the relentless working of things.

But where, where is the source of this confidence? Oh! There it is! Just then came from the mouth of the newly inaugurated President the most profound theological sentence thus far in the 21^st century. “This is the source of our confidence — the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.” God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

There are many theological winds blowing about in the world today. Some of them are hot air. They would have us believe that our future is determined, that our destiny is inevitable, and that those who might stand in the way are doomed to God’s wrath on the slaughter bench of history. And so I give thanks to God for blowing me toward a fresh wind, a great wind out of the Northeast, a cold snap that shocks the lungs and reminds us to breathe. In these past four years I have found myself at Boston University, a lighthouse shining the beacon of responsible Christian liberalism, a bedrock of American liberal theology, a voice in the wilderness proclaiming the Gospel of grace and freedom.

And so I ask you, is it not the case, do we not know from our experience, that the future is not determined but open and full of possibilities? Is it not the case, do we not know from our experience, that destiny is not inevitable but what we make from the realization of some possibilities and not others? Is it not the case, do we not know from our experience, that our futures are intimately tied up with the futures of everyone else such that when those who have much have too much and those who have little have too little the whole house of cards comes tumbling down?

The past is past. It is fixed. It is determined. It is the future possibilities as they have been actualized. We cannot change them, much as we might like to. We may have chosen wrong and it may be that we should have actualized a different possibility. It may not have been such a good
idea to eat that seventh bowl of chili at the cook-off yesterday. It may not have been so wise to invest in real estate. It may have been foolhardy to go crashing around in a foreign nation with an alien culture. And so we come, Sunday by Sunday, to confess our regret and remorse in contrition and compunction. The most ancient prayer of the church is still the most profound. Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy.

But if we are going to have any hope for the future at all, that we might choose differently next time, that we might choose rightly next time, that we might actualize the possibilities of justice and mercy and peace, then we must accept the forgiveness Christ offers. We must accept it and move forward in light of our remembrance of our own best past. Not all of our choices were wrongheaded, and there are those in our history who have come alongside us and shown us the way. Teachers. Mentors. Friends. Pastors. Coaches. Parents. Siblings. Civic leaders. We have chosen well at times; after all, we are here. We have seen others make right choices, and we can choose to follow them.

Yes, the past is fixed, but the future is open. We read this morning of Christ upon the mountain peak bathed in the light of transfiguration. What is this transfiguration light? It is the light shining forth of all of our future possibilities. For Jesus, as he stood on the mountain, the future was entirely open. Now, two thousand years later, we know what happened. Jesus went to Jerusalem and confronted both the temple authorities and Roman imperial power. He was crucified, died, and was raised. But then, standing on the mountain peak, crucifixion was not the only option. The future of the son of God was totally open, his destiny entirely undetermined, and the freedom of God burst forth in transcendent light.

We too are called to live transfigured lives. Our lives are full of future possibilities. An Ithaca College education prepares you for lives lived in love of God, in pursuit of excellence, and in service to the world. Even so, it does not determine us. I should know. I majored in music here at IC. Now, I am in ministry to 40,000 at the fourth largest private research institution in the United States. Moving freely into the future is not a rejection of the past. The past cannot be rejected. But it is a free appropriation of the past into whatever future possibilities are available, and they may not be the ones we expect.

The disciples, on the other hand, were confused. They wanted to build three booths, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. They did not understand that the future cannot be contained. Moses actualized for the Hebrew people a future they could barely hope for as they suffered under slavery in Egypt. Elijah actualized a future for the Israelites in right relationship with God instead of the abasement they were practicing before idols. And Jesus, Jesus actualized a future of redemption from sin that binds us to the past and liberates us to actualize our own futures in grace and freedom. The transfiguration continues in you and in me.

And what of now? What of the present moment? We know that the past is fixed and the future is open, but what are we to make of the present? The present is the moment of choice, the moment when one possibility is chosen among the kaleidoscopic opportunities. Does God tell us which possibility to choose? No. I had to choose to go to Boston. I had to choose to go into ministry. I had to choose ministry at Marsh Chapel over starting a doctoral program immediately. The choice is ours. If it is not, then God is to blame for human sinfulness when we choose wrongly. But God is present in the choice. President Obama is right. God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. It is we who do the shaping, but it is God who calls us to this work.

The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that we can, by the grace of God, move forward into an uncertain destiny in confidence. Certainty is not possible. Certainty is only available to those who cling to a determined future and an inevitable destiny. The truth is, though, that the future is open and so their certainty is false. Abandon certainty and step out in confidence. There are choices to be made among the future possibilities in our lives, and God calls on us to make them. To live in confidence is to see the transfiguring light of the future possibilities and to step out into the call of God and choose among them. The confidence of Christ, expressed in humility, enabled Jesus to endure the pain of crucifixion, calls to memory our own best pasts, and frees for us the possibilities of our futures. “This is the source of our confidence — the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.” Amen.

Feast of the Epiphany

2009-01-06T19:00:00.001-05:00

Isaiah 60: 1–6
Psalm 72: 10–15
Ephesians 3: 1–12
Matthew 2: 1–12

Dear saints who are in Ashmont and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a rich blessing to be with you this evening for the celebration of the feast of the Epiphany. Of course, as you know, the word epiphany comes from Greek, meaning “to manifest” or “to show.” Our Gospel text this evening recounts how the star over Bethlehem manifested the Christ child to the wise men. Often we focus on how the star marked the location of Jesus’ birth, but we should note also that the star was a sign to these wise men of the East that the child was anointed by God and thus royal. The writer of the letter to the Ephesians, on the other hand, is not so much concerned with Jesus’ location or royalty as with the revelation of the mystery of Christ. Revelation and epiphany are not the same thing. Epiphany indicates the bringing of something to attention that had been neglected. Revelation indicates the uncovering of something that had been hidden.

I remember one Sunday morning when I was about ten years old. As usual, our family trundled off to church in the chill morning air. My brother and I went to Sunday school first and then to the service with our parents (we grew up Methodist). We sat on the right and toward the front, right about where you are. When it came time for sharing celebrations and concerns, my Mom raised her hand. Someone brought her the wireless microphone and she said, “today is my birthday, and I am announcing it myself because my husband and both of our sons forgot about it entirely!” Oops.

My mother was born on January 6^th, which happened to fall on a Sunday that particular year. Learning this was an epiphany that I am certain never to forget. And that is just the point. My mother’s birthday was not something hidden. We had celebrated it every year. Dad was in particular trouble for forgetting since their wedding anniversary is the next day, so forgetting one virtually implies forgetting the other! No, Mom’s birthday was not hidden, merely neglected and forgotten. The experience of Mom standing up in church and announcing it was an epiphany, almost as surprising as the angels who announced the birth of Christ to the shepherds, but not a revelation.

This distinction between epiphany and revelation is a fundamental difference between the testimony of the Gospel writers, especially the synoptic tradition of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline writers of many of the epistles, including Ephesians. For the wise men, the location and significance of Jesus’ birth was made manifest through the star. All they had to do was follow it. For Paul and his school, on the other hand, the mystery of Christ was hidden; that is what it means to be a mystery. Mysteries must be made known: revealed; not simply discovered or made manifest.

These differing ways of knowing point also to a difference in what is known. For the wise men, what is known is the historical person of Jesus. They used the best science of the time, astrology, to discover his location. It was about finding a person who would be king of the Jews. The value they sought was personal. For the Pauline writers, the significance of Christ is in what Christ does for us, namely providing access to God by forgiving our sins. The value of Christ was utilitarian. Another way of putting this difference is to say that for the Gospel writers, Jesus is a good in himself, while for the Pauline writers Christ is a good for us.

Unlike in the first century, when science was the tool employed by the wise men to discover the divine design, science today is often interpreted as defeating or at least opposing religious belief. One of the main reasons for this is the foundation of modern biology in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection as elaborated in On the Origin of Species, and this year that we’ve just landed in is the 150^th anniversary of its publication. The theological challenge presented by Darwin’s thesis is that it seems to defeat the argument from design, namely that we can know that God exists because the world points to a designer. Evolutionary theory suggests that our world could have come about exactly as it is without a designer.

Like all good theological problems, the answer to the supposed defeat of God by evolution can be found in a joke. A group of scientists were considering the successes of modern science and came to the conclusion that God was no longer necessary. They swiftly dispatched one of their number to inform God of this. The scientist walked into heaven and up to the divine throne and said, “Well, Lord, we don’t really need you any more. We can take care of it all on our own now. We can even create life out of dirt!” “Really,” God replied. “Let’s see you do it.” As the scientist reached down and scooped up a handful of dirt, God rejoined, “Hey now! Get your own dirt.”

Yes, Darwin’s theory of evolution makes the cosmological argument, the argument from design, problematic. But evolution does not answer the ontological question, why is there something rather than nothing? Science can tell us a lot about dirt, and can even turn dirt into other things (albeit not yet life), but it cannot create dirt out of nothing, and it cannot explain why there is anything at all. This is not a new argument. It has been made for hundreds and thousands of years. Nevertheless, that God is the answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing is an epiphany in progress in our churches today.

But what about Jesus? Is it not the case that Epiphany is supposed to celebrate the manifestation of Jesus the Christ? Well, yes, of course. And to be sure, our world could sorely use what Paul refers to when he says “the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words, a reading of which will enable you to perceive my understanding of the mystery of Christ.” In the first chapter of Ephesians, he explains the mystery of Christ as the redemption of all people, Jews and gentiles, in God’s plan “for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” At a time when the Holy Land is besieged by violence and war, and when the greedy actions of a few devastate the living conditions of many, the message that God redeems us and holds Jew and gentile, rich and poor together is surely good news. The Pauline writers were right; the revelation in Christ is that God is for us.

Very well, but now we’ve left out the wise men, not to mention the Gospel authors! Or maybe not. The wise men read the signs in the stars and went in search of a baby. What they saw was not hidden and so it need not be revealed. It need only be discovered. The good news of this Epiphany is that God creates a world we can understand and engage. When we search, we can find the baby, evolved out of dirt over the course of billions of years. And we can love the baby, and everyone and everything else we encounter in the world God has created. The Gospel authors are right too: value is personal. As God creates our hearts out of dirt, God also speaks into our hearts that we are gathered up in the one who made us.

It may be that we have forgotten our faith in a God who creates and redeems us. As we celebrate the sacrifice, death and resurrection of Christ in the Eucharistic meal, may this Epiphany make manifest our forgotten faith. And may we find in our fellowship with Christ in the body and blood, evolved out of dirt and evolved into the person of Jesus the Christ, the revelation of the mystery that we are all one in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

Keep Awake

2008-11-30T11:00:00.002-05:00

Isaiah 64.1-9
Psalm 80
Mark 13.24-end

Those of you who were here over the summer when I preached a sermon entitled “Pay Attention” are probably getting tired of the propensity of young preachers to employ sermon titles toward mundane ends. You may be thinking, “Apparently ‘pay attention’ didn’t go so well, so now he’s hoping we’ll just stay awake!” Just you wait until Dean Hill assigns me to preach the parable of the wedding banquet, when the sermon title will be “Show up!” No, far be it from me to discourage any impulse to congregational vigor during the sermon. Nevertheless, like last June, I hope the sermon itself will draw attention to other ends toward which the title might be pointing.

May God be with you.
And also with you.
Let us pray:

Almighty God,
give us grace to cast away the works of darkness
and to put on the armor of light,
now in the time of this mortal life,
in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility;
that on the last day,
when he shall come again in his glorious majesty
to judge the living and the dead,
we may rise to the life immortal;
through him who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

As a matter of fact, it should not be too terribly difficult to keep awake during this first, (or is it the last?), Sunday of the Christian year. After all, anxiety makes it hard to fall asleep. Advent is nothing if not an anxious time, the first Sunday especially. Time itself seems to have gotten wrapped around. It is the start of the Christian year but simultaneously the end of all time. The hallmark of advent is the theme of waiting, waiting for the Christ child to come and waiting for Christ to come again, all at the same time. And so, perhaps, we can understand something of our experience, about this time last year, that may not have been as strange as we once thought, when we found Dean Hill meandering through the basement of the chapel, singing “Have an anxious, edgy advent, it’s the worst time of the year…” (to the tune of, “Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas), in his out-of-tune way.

Indeed, it is an anxious time in anxious times. We don’t know quite what to expect. Will the stock market continue its dramatic climbs, as it has since the next economic team was announced? Or will it take another staggering drop as yet another financial firm, or an automotive company, announces insolvency and bankruptcy? Of course, it could be that our anxiety about the economy is blinding us from other concerns that should be more pressing. Will ten men with guns, wearing designer t-shirts and blue jeans, come shooting into our favorite restaurants and hotels, even our places of worship, as happened this past week in Mumbai? No! Say it isn’t so! This is the season of HOPE! At least, we hope so.

Surely, some of the hostages in the Oberoi hotel harbored a few apocalyptic thoughts, perhaps along the lines of those proffered in our prophetic text this morning:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who works for those who wait for him.

It seems like a good idea, we think, for God to show up right about now and overcome our adversaries. As we hide under a table, we can imagine the archangel Michael striding forth, knocking the gun out of the young man’s hands and cleaving his head from his shoulders with a fiery sword. After all, surely we are God’s elect, and our Gospel lesson tells us, “he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.”

Imaginations of supernatural interventions in the face of extreme terror and distress are probably coping mechanisms. They distract us from the carnage going on about us and provide a sense of calming and assurance that holds back the instinctual fight or flight reactions that could draw more attention to us. To such ends they are surely good things. But what are we to make of them when the terror and carnage stop? How might we understand such experiences in the light of day? And what are we to make of the fact that there was no angel with a fiery sword? The first thing we might do is give thanks that the God who creates us creates us with coping mechanisms so that we have a better chance of surviving such acts of terrorism. Not all did survive, we know, and for them, their families and friends we pray especially this morning.

Of course, it may be that the next morning, in the light of day, we find ourselves quietly relieved that no angel with a fiery sword actually showed up. If one had, then there really would be some explaining to do! No, in the scientific age, our problem is less explaining why God does not intervene in mundane affairs and more how to understand our traditions and texts that make claims to past and future divine interventions. Such understandings are especially hard to come by when it is Jesus who predicts the intervention. After all, no one wants to be caught claiming that the Son of God was wrong! On the other hand, it may be less that Jesus was wrong and more that there is something inadequate in our interpretive framework, more specifically in our understanding of time. Let us consider, for a few moments, what Christ’s coming, and our watchfulness, might mean from the perspective of eternity.

A recent dean of Marsh Chapel is fond of pointing out that “God is not in time, time is in God.” God’s perspective is not temporal; it is eternal. And eternity is not static; it is dynamic. In eternity, the past, present and future of things are held together. In time, things have pasts that do not change and futures that are open except as constrained by the unchanging past and present choices. But in eternity, we are both our present selves, conditioned by all of our past choices, and our past selves prior to having made those choices, and all of the future selves that are possible given the choices we have, or might have, made.

That’s enough metaphysics for one sermon, or perhaps too much. But what does it mean for our texts? It means that Jesus is absolutely right that no one but the Father knows the day or the hour. The day and the hour is a concern of temporal creatures, not a concern of the eternal God. God comes to us in all the modes of time: past, present and future. God comes to us in the present by offering us our past selves, out of which we choose to continue or change course in light of future possibilities. God comes to us in the past as the value we have achieved in our choices as they were present according to the possibilities that were future. God comes to us in the future as the possibilities we might actualize by changing past actualizations in present choices.

And so Jesus was also right to say that, “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” By the time each generation passes away, God has come to all of the members of that generation in their past actuality, in their present choices, and in their future possibilities at each moment of their lifetimes. So too, “heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” Heaven and earth are parts of creation and so are subject to temporality. Time passes. This is obvious. But Jesus’ words will not pass away. God is eternal and so God comes to us in all of the pasts and all of the presents and all of the futures of our lives.

What, then, does it mean to keep awake? Does it mean that we are to be on the lookout for angels with fiery swords? Well, maybe for those brief moments while the gunmen are shooting up the dining room and we are appropriately cowering under the table. But the rest of the time, to keep awake is to attune ourselves to the coming of God in every moment of our lives in eternal perspective. God is continually coming to us in each moment as it has a past, a present and a future. Jesus is surely right that we “do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn.” We do not know when because “when?” is a question of temporal creatures. The eternal God comes to us in the evening and at midnight and at cockcrow and at dawn as each watch of the night passes from future possibility into present choice and then into past actuality.

But before we go on about our way, happily rejoicing that God is eternally come, it is important to pause for a moment and remember that God’s coming is not always such a happy or pleasant thing.

Did you hear it? Did you hear last week, as the choir sang Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata 147: Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben? Well, perhaps you didn’t if you don’t speak German. But hopefully you read it in the translation. “Heart and mouth and deed and life must give testimony of Christ without fear or hypocrisy that he is God and savior.” Indeed, all of this talk of God coming to us in each and all of the modes of time is a giving of testimony that Christ is God and savior. But to what do we testify? The tenor recitative declaims Mary giving thanks for the Christ child, and we too give thanks, but it also announces Christ as both liberator and judge. We can rest comfortably with the freedom Christ brings, but are we willing to welcome the coming of Christ in judgment, as our rose window depicts? Later the bass depicts Christ coming both to throw down and to lift up. Surely we all know both moments in our lives worthy of being cast down and times worthy of being lifted up. As the tenor sings at the beginning of the second half of the cantata, we are in need of help to acknowledge God who comes to us “in prosperity and in woe, in joy and in sorrow.” Bach leaves us resting in the arms of a loving and caring Jesus, but we would do well to remember that God’s coming is as sure as the sunrise and not always so docile: our God is a consuming fire.

Here, in the first week of advent, time does indeed collapse together and we catch a glimpse of the coming to us of the wild God who creates the world out of eternity. The good news for us today is that a day of peace does shine for us, albeit dimly. It shines to us out of the future through which God is also present to us, through our hopes and prayers and dreams. It shines to us who are awake to the eternity out of which we are created and judged. “And what I say to you, I say to all: Keep awake.”

Amen.

Secular Faith

2008-08-17T23:00:00.000-05:00

Marsh Chapel, Boston University

Isaiah 56: 1, 6-8

Psalm 67

Matthew 15: 10-28

So … um … yeah; I have a confession to make. I seem to have … uh … left my faith - at home, this morning. [pause] Oh, you know how it is. You’re preaching and you’re nervous and the basic, habitual, routine things of life are suddenly more complicated than usual. I laid everything out just like always: wallet, keys, handkerchief, cell phone, chap stick, faith. I think, maybe, as I was putting things in my pockets, I may have accidentally bumped my faith and it rolled off the edge and fell to the floor. I’m not sure. I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing. I was thinking about my sermon! Surely you can understand. Similar things have happened to you, right? [pause] I must confess, stepping into the pulpit without my faith feels much like the proverbial first-year student who dreams of walking into her or his first class in college stark naked.

By now the clergy and choir, and perhaps even you in the congregation are gripping your seats. “Oh no! We haven’t seen much of Br. Larry this summer. What happened to him? Is he really going to get into the pulpit in Marsh Chapel, broadcast over the airwaves and internet signals, and proclaim that the likes of Samuel Harris and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are right; that God is a delusion?” [pause] Fear not, dear friends. You can pry your fingernails out of the wood. As I have traversed the city of Boston this summer, visiting various churches where Boston University students have found a spiritual home, I have found no reason to despair but much that is hopeful. “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43: 1-2).

Of course, it is rather odd, unsettling even, to speak and think of faith as a trinket or a bauble that can be put in one’s pocket or fall and roll across the floor. Faith is not something we can pick up and put down at will, is it? If we are honest with ourselves, I suspect we would prefer that faith be something like the dietary restrictions Jesus addressed in the first half of our reading from the Gospel of Matthew. Faith is much easier to manage as a dimension of our life if all we have to do is be sure not to put it in our mouths; much easier to keep track of one another as well. Such faith is either on or off, a simple binary, you ate it or you refrained. Contemporary forms of Christianity have been wont to cast faith in such a light: accept Christ or reject Christ. Black and white, either/or, easily settled.

Unfortunately, Jesus does not let us off so easily. “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” A few chapters earlier Jesus said, “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” The disciples must have forgotten this because they did not understand Jesus’ parable. Our defilement is not marked by what we take in but by what we put out in speech and words. Defilement is not something that comes in from out there but something that begins in here and that we spew out to others. Defilement is more complicated than a simple binary. There are stages of degradation. It is like the frog in the boiling water. Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and it will jump out. Put a frog in a pot of lukewarm water and slowly raise it to a boil and the frog will allow itself to be cooked to death. Over time, setting aside our faith when it is inconvenient becomes the habit, and we fail to notice that we have walked out the door without it.

What is it, then, to have faith? Faith is indeed something that can be, and is, picked up and put down. If repeatedly putting our faith down is a sign of defilement, then picking it up repeatedly, daily, ritually is the sign of faithfulness. The Canaanite woman demonstrates this. She comes to Jesus begging for mercy and healing for her daughter. At first he ignores her, but she continues to petition. Eventually her persistence garners attention, albeit accompanied by the sentiments of annoyance and dismissal. Finally, after being humiliated by the one in whom she placed her faith as he called her a dog, she dug deep one last time. Br. Sebastian of the Community of Taizé taught those of us spending a week in silence this summer that cultivating humility is the only way to endure humiliation. But for the Canaanite woman, her humility was a conduit for the power of the Holy Spirit not only to endure but to transform her humiliation from the mouth of Jesus Christ into the conversion of God. The very words of her humiliation turned the situation on its head and Jesus’ own heart was turned to recognize her faith, to heal her daughter, and to adjust his mission. It shall indeed be as God declared through the mouth of the prophet Isaiah:

Thus says the Lord:
Maintain justice, and do what is right,

for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed.

And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,

to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants,

all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant—

these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer;

their burnt-offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar;

for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.

Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel,

I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.

The faith in the humble, undefiled heart of the Canaanite woman is picked up and expressed in speech and transforms the very heart of God.

This notion of faith does not sit well with our modern consciousness. As moderns, faith is most often associated with belief. It was Krister Stendahl, at that school across the river, who first pointed out that the modernity informed interpretation of the term “faith” as “belief” in the writings of the apostle Paul is in fact a result of the modern “introspective consciousness.” Recent Pauline scholarship has taken this to heart. We would do well to adjust our understanding of faith in the Gospel context as well. Faith is not belief. Faith is a state of being, a way of being in the world that informs the ways in which we interact in and with the world. When we take up faith, we behave in a faithful way. When we set it down, we behave in a defiled way. Speech is a form of behavior. Faith is what philosopher John Searle would call a “speech-act.” Being and doing are not two different things. Doing flows out of being and we are because of what we do. We are faithful and so we act in faith. We are defiled and so we act negligently. God acts to forgive us not when we merely say the words but when the words rise out of a conversion of heart.

And so we can speak of a secular faith. Of course, you know that “secular” means “worldly.” When faith is a way of being and acting in relationship, then it is a way of being that the world itself can and does exhibit. The psalmist says in the 19^th Psalm,

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard;

yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

The speech of the world in the world and to the world is a testimony of the faithfulness of the world to God. The world does not speak as people speak in voice and words. The world speaks in activity to the glory of God who creates it. We are faithful as part of the faithfulness of the world. Let us consider, for a moment, the world God creates to the divine glory.

First, our world is marked by change. This is not an entirely novel idea; other eras can be noted for their shifts in political and economic systems or in theological and philosophical ethos or in cultural and social relation. But especially in the history of the west, following Aristotle, the most valuable things in the world are considered to be things that endure and do not change. Aristotle was wrong. Things in the world do change and there is a beauty and a felicity in their changing process. Children grow and mature and become adults. Trees flower and blossom in springtime, then drop their leaves come fall. The beaks of birds evolve to meet changing conditions around them and this change allows for their survival. Change exhibits rhythm and balance and gives to life a sense of flow. To be sure, the value inherent in change is not all positive, at least in human perspective. We have some experience now with attempting to change political dynasties and systems in other lands. Russia is experimenting with this model as we speak. Indeed, we will bear the cost – financial, emotional, spiritual – into the coming decades, if not centuries. The changes brought on by natural disaster are terrifying and life consuming. And as life wanes the changes to body and mind are frustrating especially for their being unwelcome. Faith speaks faithfully in a world of change.

So too, and not unrelated, our world is marked by chance. It is not the case that life and experience grind on like a machine, each subsequent moment determined wholly by the moment prior. To be sure, if you flip the switch the lights go off. This regularity gives life coherence and consistency instead of absolute chaos. But sometimes when you flip it again the bulb burns out. Like faith, life is not a simple binary of if-then clauses. Life is marked by spontaneity, novelty and creativity. The most interesting moments in life are not when the lights go on but when they don’t. Baseball is interesting and fun because when the pitch is thrown, the batter might hit it, or he might not! Again, the possibilities of chance do not always work in our favor. Sometimes the patient dies on the operating table. Sometimes the war takes years, not days. Sometimes you lose your shirt when the markets shift and your investments are tied to sub-prime mortgages. Faith speaks faithfully in a world of chance.

Finally, ours is a world of choice. In this respect especially, the early years of the 21st century exhibit unprecedented levels of choice. We can choose what kind and color of car to drive, where we will live and whom we will live with, where and what to study. From the perspective of a student, it may seem that colleges and universities choose you, or not; but speaking from the perspective of a university administrator, I can tell you that we are at least as concerned about your choice as you are about ours. Choices in fashion, music, reading material, hairstyle, career, travel, and on and on are virtually unbounded. There is a dark side to all of this choice. So much choice produces anxiety. How are we to know that we have made the right choices? How can we choose responsibly? And sometimes, we do make the wrong choices. We choose to play instead of work, to speak instead of listen, to hate instead of love. Our power to act combined with the multiplicity of our choices can be a lethal combination. We may have the power to unseat rulers, but we are seeing what happens when that power is enacted without due consideration of the realities at home and abroad. Faith speaks faithfully in a world of choice.

God creates the world of change, chance and choice to the glory of God and we are faithful to God or not as we speak and act our choices amid the chances that bring about change. Pick up your faith daily in each word and action of your life. Remember that God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. It may be that we will have to humbly submit to humiliating rebuke. But even God changes when we choose faithfulness and speak faithfully. Foreigners too can be friends of God. Amen.

Here now, what’s this? Oh! Huh, there it is. Ha ha. It was right there all along. I guess I didn’t leave it at home after all. Oops. Sorry if I worried any of you. I’m just going to go sit down now.

Pay Attention

2008-06-22T11:00:00.003-05:00

Marsh Chapel, Boston University

Jeremiah 20.7-13
Psalm 69
Matthew 10.24-39

It is almost always a sign that you are listening to a young preacher when said homiletician resorts to employing the sermon title for the purpose of encouraging you, dear listener, to in fact listen. While I am in fact a young preacher, it is my hope that over the coming span you will discover that there is more significance to our theme, “Pay Attention,” than such a simple enjoinder. Let us pray:

Gracious God, grant us, in all the changes and chances of this mortal life, to dread nothing but the loss of you, and to cast all our care upon you, who cares for us. When disasters lie ahead, help us to avoid them if we may, and to endure them if we must, knowing that we walk with the one who endured all for us, your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

To what, then, shall we attend? I would suggest that our attention is drawn to those things in life that are out of place. We attend to unbalances in life, in an effort to reestablish equilibrium with our world. We flip the switch and, usually, the light goes on. But sometimes it does not and our attention is suddenly drawn to the fact that something is wrong. What might it be? Well, it is probably that the bulb has burned out so we go to the kitchen cupboard and dig out a new one. Hmm, still no light? Looking around, the microwave clock is off and the refrigerator is not running. Had we directed our attention more broadly, we would have noticed that the power is out. Knowing ourselves at least well enough to know that there is nothing we can do about power lines knocked out in a thunderstorm, our attention falls to plan B and we move about looking for flashlights and candles. Oh, but be careful with the candles! They bring their own risks and potential hazards, as our attention reminds us.

After getting dressed and brushing our teeth, we carefully put out the candles and attend to our umbrella, since the power outage suggests that it is probably raining. We meander down the street and wait patiently at the T stop as gusts of wind blow the rain horizontally into us. So much for the umbrella. We get off at BU Central, scurry across Commonwealth Avenue and trundle up the steps into the narthex of Marsh Chapel. Passing through that narrow gate our attention is recast from the power outage and cold rain to the warmth of hospitality as we are greeted, offered a bulletin and find a seat next to friends. All the while the organ gently tosses out tones that fill the air with a shimmer of grace. The service begins as our attention is drawn to the pulpit in a spirit of confidence, grace and freedom. The choir sings the introit, we sing a hymn together, and as we join in a unison opening prayer the symbols that constitute our life in the world, that give us meaning, our sacred canopy falls into place.

In the reading of scripture we are given a God’s eye view on the world and our place in it. We hear not only how God attends to the world, but also how God would have us attend to our world. We hear in the Gospel, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid, you are of more value than many sparrows.” It is not the case that God does not value the sparrows. God accompanies the sparrows even as they are sacrificed. And yet we hear that we are of greater value than the sparrows. Ours is a world made up of values. Greater values and lesser values. Values concentrated here and dispersed over there. Precious when taken together, insignificant in any solitary part. God looks out over a world of value and God loves the world according to its value.

We too look out over a world of value. To a large extent, the economists are right in their assumption that our consideration of the values in the world is of their value for ourselves. In antique cultures, family held a supreme value. Family equipped children for life and provided its members a way in the world: marriage, work, social status. This is still so today for many in the world. A high valuation of one’s family is a valuation based in self-interest. How surprising it still is for us to hear Jesus rend apart the family basis of society by setting children against parents. Jesus speaks as a prophet, recasting the world from God’s perspective, everything according to its value not for us but in itself. Jesus calls us to live our lives in the world in ultimate perspective, in God’s perspective. It is God who is of ultimate value and from whom we in the world receive our value. Our attention properly directed holds the world in light of divine life. We become sinful precisely when we hold the world in our own light. It is those rare moments of insight when we glimpse the world of value in divine perspective that we call transcendence.

Of course, there is a cost to our attention. We acknowledge this in our colloquialism, “Pay Attention.” As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, commenting on earlier chapters in Matthew’s Gospel, grace is costly. Focusing our attention here precludes attention paid over there. Even those who can multitask cannot pay attention to everything. Anyone who has ever watched an action movie knows that just as soon as the hero defeats the bad guy, another bad guy creeps up from behind and knocks the hero out with a two-by-four, at least until the last scene. When chopping vegetables, we fail to notice that the pot on the stove is boiling over. When worried about whether or not we locked the front door, we fail to listen to what the preacher is saying. When the economy takes a downturn, our attention is drawn away from the plight of violence, poverty and disease in much of our world.

To be human is to live under obligation to pay attention to everything in the world according to its value. In a world where family life is the fundamental building block of society, this obligation can be doled out in various responsibilities to each member. As that building block crumbles, we find ourselves each obligated to everything. Suddenly life appears much as Thomas Hobbes describes the state of nature: solitary, nasty, brutish and short. The social contract is meant to redistribute our responsibilities among all of the people in society. But here Hobbes makes a mistake. He believes that when members of society fail to meet their responsibilities, no one is responsible. In a world created by God, the case is precisely the opposite. Everyone is responsible! When society breaks down, we must each hold its brokenness in divine light. It is as Howard Thurman said, “people, all people, belong to each other.”

This multiplicity in responsibility is especially prevalent in democratic societies such as ours. In a democracy, attention is accountability. From time to time, the public calls its leaders to account, and then either affirms or replaces them. Political scientists distinguish between attentive and inattentive publics. Attentive publics pay attention to what their leaders are doing. Inattentive publics do not. If we were all attentive publics with regards to our leaders, we would be inattentive to the responsibilities that have been entrusted to us. Most of us are inattentive most of the time. This is like breathing. Most of the time we are not attentive to our breathing. But when we are pushed under water by a wave while swimming in the ocean, breathing becomes a problem and we become attentive. In social life, we often need to be called to attention; we need to be told when our leaders fail in their responsibilities because they are not always so obvious. We must undergo μετανοια, conversion of heart and mind – a redirection of attention from our own responsibilities to those of our leaders in order to hold them accountable. And we must accept, even welcome, the attention of others as it holds us accountable.

The measure of responsibility is the values in the world in God’s perspective; the values as they are in themselves, not as they are for us. It is God’s people who stand as prophetic signs in the world, pointing to the world of values in themselves experienced in transcendence. We draw upon those momentary glimpses of the world in divine light and share them with a grieved and broken world. God created the world and called it good, and from God’s perspsective, it is good. The world is not good for us, it is good in God. “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light.” In the darkness of transcendence we see the world bathed in divine light. It is for us to speak the light, to live the light in a world of darkness.

And what of the cost? Jeremiah speaks to us of the cost. He is given the transcendent vision of God and sees that in its darkness the world is given to violence and destruction. He speaks the prophetic word, “wake up!” He calls the inattentive public to attend to the world as God attends to the world. But the world does not understand. The world denounces him and persecutes him. The psalmist too knows the cost of the call to attention. Herein is prefigured the breaking of the family we see in Matthew. “I have become a stranger to my kindred, an alien to my mother’s children.” The psalmist has been humbled in fasting, no longer self-interested but deeply interested, zealous even, in the world as God’s house. The psalmist too is called to pay the cost in insults and persecution.

This story sounds awfully familiar, but in the Gospels there is a different outcome. The prophet and the psalmist are called upon to pay the price of attention to the world of values in themselves, transcendent glimpses of the world bathed in divine light. Jesus is not only prophet and psalmist. Jesus is more. Jesus is our “great high priest, who has passed through the heavens. We come boldly to the throne of grace.” Jesus calls the world to attention and the world exacts its price. It is not God who demands payment, but we ourselves. And Jesus pays the cost.

The good news of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ for you today is that the cost is paid. The Holy Spirit, the advocate and comforter, is blowing about in the world, dispelling fear, invigorating courage, and nurturing freedom. “Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.” Two millennia after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, there is great hope for a world of freely shared responsibility, basking in the transcendent light of God. It is a rare thing in these days of democracy that our prophets are called upon to pay a price for waking us. On the rare occasions when they are – Martin Luther King, Jr., John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy – they become martyrs for the cause of grace and freedom. This is not so everywhere in our world, thinking of the tragedy of Zimbabwe, and so we continue to preach a gospel of grace and freedom, a responsible Christian liberalism. We will not always get it right. Our attention will be misdirected at times. Our response is contrition and compunction; we lament and repent.

In these days and in these times, even in the midst of flourishing democracy, there is much to attend. We must attend especially to those for whom we have failed in our responsibility, in a spirit of contrition and repentance. Today, following this service, in Barristers’ Hall at the School of Law next door, we will share a meal and fellowship and hear from Iraqi refugees. Our inattention is irresponsible. They are here to call us to attention. Wake up! Pay attention! All people are of equal value and worth in the transcendent vision of the world in divine light. Boston University is the historical home of Boston Personalism. Martin Luther King, Jr. came here to study personalism. It is a philosophy that takes as its starting point the infinite value, worth and dignity of every person. It is in this spirit that Dr. Thurman said "For this is why we were born: people, all people, belong to each other, and he who shuts himself away diminishes himself, and he who shuts another away from him destroys himself." Our salvation is in welcoming the stranger, the outcast, the refugee.

As the preacher turns to sit and the organist plays quiet strains, our attention is drawn to the window with the small friar in soft, brown robes surrounded by animals, birds especially, who were his particularly to attend. The echoes of his voice call down through the ages, “preach the gospel to all the world, and if necessary, use words.” The attentive life is lived, not spoken. The organist arrives at a cadence and in the echoes reverberate the saint’s gentle resonance, “you may be the only vision of Jesus Christ someone will ever see.” The watchful gaze of St. Francis and all the saints in stained glass mediates the divine radiance, and as the call to prayer begins, we catch the briefest glimpse of the world of values in themselves. We offer the values back to God in prayer, and we offer ourselves in the offering, not because we can pay the cost of grace and freedom, but in gratitude to God who pays attention to us. In the benediction and response we hear our responsibility to pay attention and to call others to attend our broken world. Walking out into the fresh air, the world appears bright and new, filled with grace and freedom. A gentle breeze brushes through our hair and we hear strains of transformation and reconciliation in the voice of Walt Whitman:

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world.

Models of the Church

2008-06-01T12:09:00.004-05:00

What is your model of the church? [Dulles]
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Mystical Communion Model

Your model of the church is Mystical Communion, which includes both People of God and Body of Christ. The church is essentially people in union with Christ and the Father through the Holy Spirit. Both lay people and clergy are drawn together in a family of faith. This model can exalt the church beyond what is appropriate, but can be supplemented with other models.

Mystical Communion Model

89%

Servant Model

67%

Sacrament model

67%

Herald Model

33%

Institutional Model

A Secular Easter

2008-04-06T20:09:00.002-05:00

"A Secular Easter"
Hughes United Methodist Church
Easter 2, 2008

Acts 2: 14a, 22-32
Psalm 16
John 20: 19-31

The peace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Doubtless many of you, while singing the last hymn were thinking something along the lines of, “Goodness! This is a strange hymn. Where in the world did he come up with this?” Well, if you look on the bottom right-hand corner of the page, you will discover the tune name of the hymn is MARSH CHAPEL. Indeed, Max Miller, the longtime music director at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, penned the music. And its words express something of our worldview as we seek to minister among the 40,000+ people who make up our community at the fourth largest private research institution in the United States. Our dean, the Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, has put it succinctly:

The envisioned mission of Marsh Chapel is to be a heart for the heart of the city and a service in the service of the city. In the coming decade we intend to offer a national voice, an ecumenical ethos and an excellent hospitality. Marsh Chapel harbors a non-fundamentalist expression of faith. The roots of our history lie in Methodism. The branches of our future stretch out to the oikumene, the whole ecumenical world. We preach a gospel of grace and freedom, a responsible Christian liberalism.

Here, on the second Sunday of Easter, with the trumpets and fanfare and celebration safely packed away, we may pause for a moment and wonder about the world in which we live. After all, the resurrection of Jesus the Christ takes place in a world. Peter recognizes this, at least in his portrayal by Luke the evangelist in the second chapter of his second volume, the book of Acts. Peter has a particular audience to whom he is preaching, “you that are Israelites.” His message is tailored particularly to them as it interweaves passages from the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible. It is true that the message of resurrection is universal; if it were not, we would not still be preaching it some 2000 years later. But every universal message must be expressed in a particular context. Come, wonder with me for a moment about our time and our place and our context.

First, our world is marked by change. This is not an entirely novel idea; other eras can be noted for their shifts in political and economic systems or in theological and philosophical ethos or in cultural and social relation. But, my teacher Bob Neville likes to point out that Aristotle invented boring philosophy, and this is because for Aristotle, the most valuable things in the world are things that endure and do not change. Aristotle was wrong. Things in the world do change and there is a beauty and a felicity in their changing process. Children grow and mature and become adults. Trees flower and blossom in springtime, then drop their leaves come fall. A favorite metaphor of the Easter season is the change of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Change exhibits rhythm and balance and gives to life a sense of flow. To be sure, the value inherent in change is not all positive, at least in human perspective. We have some experience now with attempting to change political dynasties and systems in other lands, and we will bear the cost – financial, emotional, spiritual – into the coming decades, if not centuries. The changes brought on by natural disaster are terrifying and life consuming. And as life wanes the changes to body and mind are frustrating especially for their being unwelcome. Christ is resurrected in a world of change.

So too, and not unrelated, our world is marked by chance. It is not the case that life and experience grinds on like a machine, each subsequent moment determined wholly by the moment prior. To be sure, if you flip the switch the lights go off. This regularity gives life coherence and consistency instead of absolute chaos. But sometimes when you flip it again the bulb burns out. Life is not a simple binary of if-then clauses. Life is marked by spontaneity, novelty and creativity. The most interesting moments in life are not when the lights go on but when they don’t. Baseball is interesting and fun because when the pitch is thrown, the batter might hit it, or he might not! Again, the possibilities of chance do not always work in our favor. Sometimes the patient dies on the operating table. Sometimes the war takes years, not days. Sometimes you lose your shirt when the markets shift and your investments are tied to sub-prime mortgages. Christ is resurrected in a world of chance.

Finally, ours is a world of choice. In this respect especially, the early years of the 21st century exhibit unprecedented levels of choice. We can choose what kind and color of car to drive, where we will live and whom we will live with, where and what to study. From the perspective of a student, it may seem that colleges and universities choose you, or not; but speaking from the perspective of a university administrator, I can tell you that we are at least as concerned about your choice as you are about ours. Choices in fashion, music, reading material, hairstyle, career, travel, and on and on are virtually unbounded. There is a dark side of all of this choice. So much choice produces anxiety. How are we to know that we have made the right choices? How can we choose responsibly? And sometimes, we do make the wrong choices. We choose to play instead of work, to speak instead of listen, to hate instead of love. Our power to act combined with the multiplicity of our choices can be a lethal combination. We may have the power to unseat rulers, but we are seeing what happens when that power is enacted without due consideration of the realities at home and abroad. Christ is resurrected in a world of choice.

But wait, Br. Larry, all of this wonder at the world sounds, well, awfully secular. Ah, you punster you! Of course you know that “secular” means worldly. To speak of the world can be nothing if not worldly. The beginning of the good news that I bear to you today is that this is the world that God creates, a world of change and chance and choice. God creates this world and calls it good. Christ is resurrected in this world, making the secular sacred and sacramental. But what does it mean for Christ to be resurrected in a world of change and of chance and of choice?

In John’s gospel, plopped down between Luke’s first and second volumes, we hear testimony of the risen Christ to the disciples. Three times, “Peace be with you.” Jesus has said this before in the gospel of John, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” God has created this world and Christ is resurrected in this world and the good news of this second Sunday of Easter is that we need not be afraid of the changes and chances and choices of this life.

“Peace be with you.” It is a strange answer to our question, we who ask looking for practical and implementable advise. But as we read the gospels we shall have come to expect the answers of Christ to be not what we expect and yet just what we need. The answer of the resurrection of Christ in this world is not an answer of certainty; it is an answer of peace. That is to say, in a world of change and chance and choice we are not given certainty – certainty is not a quality that is possible in the world as God creates it – but we are given confidence. We may be confident that grace, mercy and peace abound, even in the ambiguities and ambivalences of change, chance and choice.

Whence comes this strange confidence that is not what we expect but just what we need? Well, we have preached God’s creation of a world of change, chance and choice, and we have preached Christ’s resurrection bearing peace and confidence in the world God has created, so it is for the Holy Spirit to complete our trinitarian reflection. John testifies to this also, that Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Our confidence rests in forgiveness.

But this forgiveness is strange too, is it not? Our confidence and peace rest not in our own forgiveness but in the forgiveness we offer to the world in the power of the Holy Spirit. “Behold a broken world, we pray, where want and war increase.” The ambiguities and ambivalences of a world of change and chance and choice leave us feeling that our world is broken, and we are broken in it. But the healing of the world in confidence and peace comes not from some external and supervening power but from the outworking of the grace of God resurrected in us as we forgive the world that wounds us.

It is not an oxymoron to preach a sermon on a secular Easter. If Christ is not resurrected in and for the world then we have no business singing and praying and speaking of good news. But we need to be careful. We have explored some symbols to constitute our world, symbols of change and chance and choice. We have found some symbols too to redeem our world, symbols of peace and confidence and forgiveness. But symbols only refer truly when they are broken. We must know their limits as well as their possibility.

And so we remember, In hoc signo. Oh dear, you may be thinking, here he goes with the Latin again! But no, dear friends, this symbol you have claimed as your own. You have emblazoned it front and center on your altar. The year is 312 and the Roman general Constantine sits encamped just outside Rome, preparing to take the city. His chances are slim. As he is surveying the city, he sees a vision in the sky of the Chi Rho, the sign of the cross made by superimposing the first two Greek letters in the title Christ. Accompanying the vision is a voice saying In hoc signo, in this sign, vinces, you shall conquer. And so he did. It was under Constantine that the Roman Empire became Christian; Christendom was born with the sign of the cross in conquest.

We Christians have a distressing propensity to employ our symbols to justify conquest. Ironic, is it not? “Peace be with you.” But when our confidence devolves into certainty, peace at the point of a sword suddenly seems reasonable. A perverted form of rationalism overcomes the strangeness of the answers Christ offers. Of course, certainty is also a denial of the very world God creates. Change, chance and choice are nonsensical in a certain world. But certainty is more comfortable that confidence, and the answers of conquest and triumphalism more straightforward than peace and forgiveness.

To preach a sermon on a secular Easter is to remind us that the resurrection of Jesus Christ makes the world sacred and sacramental. We must be careful that our confidence does not cross over into certainty. When the limits of our symbols are crossed, they become demonic and the sacred becomes profane.

Let us live together the good news of Easter. God creates a world of change, chance and choice. Christ is resurrected in and for this world and offers us peace as we share forgiveness in the power of the Holy Spirit. Ours is a gospel of grace and freedom.

Christ is risen! Alleluia, alleluia.

God Is Not Here

2008-03-21T19:35:00.001-05:00

Meditation on the Fourth Word from the Cross

Good Friday 2008

A woman lies in a hospital bed in Philadelphia, even as we speak, finally being consumed by the cancer she has fought for two years. She is in the hospice ward where they struggle to manage her pain. She has been given days, if not hours, to live. She is only 29 years old.

Pause

A family lives on the banks of a small river in central Colombia, cultivating a small plot of land. One day, a heavily armed group comes and demands food from them. Of course, they surrender it. The next day, another heavily armed group comes and accuses them of collaborating with the first group. They turn over more resources to demonstrate their allegiance. In the end, they are forced to flee or be destroyed.

Pause

Contrary to popular opinion, the primary theological question is not “does God exist?” No, the primary theological question is “where is God in the midst of all of this?” Certainly, the latter question implies the former, since locating anything requires a thing to be located. But the latter question demands more. It demands relationship. It demands accountability. It demands context. “Where is God in the midst of all of this?”

How are we to answer this question in the midst of personal and structural tragedy? To be sure, we must answer honestly. Our answer must reflect our vulnerability and our openness, our pain and our loneliness. It must be both legitimate and authentic.

To give voice to such an answer is risky. Risky first because such an answer will likely be unacceptable to friends, family, colleagues; it may even appear blasphemous or heretical. Risky second because our answer means admitting to ourselves our pain and vulnerability and so deepening and ingraining them.

“Where is God in the midst of all of this?” Our answer, arising out of the depths of the human condition, in all of its honesty and authenticity, must be that God is not here.

Pause

But wait, what happened to that gospel of grace and freedom? It is true that grace is God’s response to sin and fallenness and that freedom is God’s response to oppression and fear. We celebrate these gifts no more extravagantly than on Easter Sunday when they are bound together in the reality of resurrection.

But that is Easter Sunday. Today is Good Friday. From the cross, Jesus asked, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” The question is both accusation and call to account. It is not new on either score; those who regularly read the psalms or the prophets are apt to recognize it. God is not here. Why?

There is plenty of time, three days in fact, for God to answer. But those three days are important. It is important to acknowledge and feel pain, loss and vulnerability. It is important to sit with our woundedness and not move on from it too quickly. It is important to hear the resonance of our authentic, legitimate and honest answer; God is not here.

Tahlequah Day 5

2008-03-17T12:35:00.003-05:00

We woke up in the morning to discover that the supposedly purple dye actually left everyone's hair pink. Such is life.

Our first event of the day was rafting down the Illinois River. What started as a rather uneventful trip ended up quite interesting when about half way down the river we encountered a tree that had fallen across the river. Each of the three rafts took a different approach to getting past it. One portaged their raft around the tree. Another got over at a place where about an inch of water was running over the trunk. My raft got out, stood on the trunk, lifted the boat over the trunk, and piled back in. We reported the fallen tree when we got back to the raft rental and they sent some people out to clear it.

We went back to the community center in Four Corners to change and then went to lunch at Katfish Kitchen. Everyone was amazed at how much food was available. The people there were very friendly and happy to have a large group at lunch time. The hushpuppies were a particular favorite along with large glasses of sweet tea.

After lunch we headed to the Cherokee Nation Courthouse to talk with the Assistant District Attorney and some others about legal issues the Cherokee face. The three biggest issues involve land, substance abuse, and membership. The land issue revolves around the fact that while Cherokee were guaranteed 110 acres of land when they moved to Oklahoma from Georgia and so some people have land scattered about at great distances. Substance abuse includes alcohol, marijuana and crystal meth. It is especially problematic amongst young people. The good news is that the Cherokee are finding effective ways of addressing these issues out of their cultural heritage.

The issue of membership in Cherokee Nation is especially prominent at the moment. There is a CA congresswoman who is attempting to take federal funds from Cherokee Nation because they are not including freedmen, slaves who were freed by the Cherokee during the Civil War before the US freed its slaves, on the grounds that they do not have Cherokee blood. The Cherokee feel that they have been grossly misrepresented in the press on this issue and are deeply concerned to preserve one of the only rights left to the Cherokee as a people, the right to self-determination.

Next we visited the Cherokee Heritage Center where they have a full scale Cherokee villiage set up as it would have been during the 15th century prior to Columbus getting lost on his way to India. As part of the tour we were shown how to use a blow gun. I was asked to demonstrate. I missed, but only just! Then we were shown how to play stick ball. This is a really interesting game because it was how the tribes resolved conflicts without going to war. The idea is that the winner of the game probably would have won the war anyway! The game is played by taking two sticks with baskets on each end and using them to hurl a small stone at a plaque hoisted about four stories up in the air on the end of a pole. There is a really interesting catch to this game though. Men, women and children all play, but only men get sticks. Women get to use their hands to throw the ball. Women also get to hit, kick, scratch and bite the men, but the men cannot strike the women. I was asked to try to hit the fish using the sticks to throw the stone. I missed. By a long shot. And I didn't even have a hundred other people trying to stop me! It's a fantastic model for resolving conflict. Wouldn't the world be a much more peaceful place if the Olympics determined disputes as opposed to going to war?

After stopping at the gift shop, we went to do our last bit of service for a woman named Lisa who is disabled. We cleaned up her yard and washed down the front of her house, which was quite a mess but was the off-white color it was supposed to be when we finished.

When we got back to Four Corners, we made and ate dinner and then spent a long time debriefing the week. There was general agreement that we have formed long-lasting friendships. I am deeply grateful to the ASB-Tahlequah team for letting me be a part of their week, both the service and the fellowship.

On the van-ride back to Boston, we stopped for breakfast on Sunday morning in Seneca Falls. My dear friend, mentor and colleague Allison hosted us at the Women's Interfaith Institute. As the team ate, Allison gave a brief overview of the history of Seneca Falls, womens' rights, and the work of her institute. The team was very receptive and glad to see some of the historic landmarks in Seneca Falls. I am extremely happy that my connection with Allison allowed this to come about.

Apologies for this last post being so late. On Monday night, the day after we returned, I came down with the flu and am just today returning to something resembling normal life. I also have sun burns and poison ivy to show for our efforts on the trip. Nevertheless, pictures are forthcoming in the next few days. In the mean time, have a blessed Triduum and a happy Easter.

Tahlequah Day 4

2008-03-14T07:21:00.004-05:00

Mary had asked us to meet her at her office at 9:30AM to receive our marching orders for the day. This would require leaving no later than 9AM. Given that our last ASBer didn't get out of her sleeping bag until 8:40AM, we didn't actually leave until 9:10. That was okay as we arrived and things were not as well planned as we had hoped.

Thankfully, Warren and Sam jumped in and helped us partner with the University of Miami trip in the morning. We drove about a half hour outside of Tahlequah to a project that Cherokee Nation was developing a series of cabins for groups like ours as well as retreats to use free of charge. Our project was cleaning up a bit and helping get the water line laid. We set to work with shovels and rakes and made fairly short work of getting a lot of small stones cleared out of a roadway and getting a lot of leaves raked up to be burned. After lunch we got the soft dirt to cover the water line so that it would not be broken by large rocks when the backhoe came along and filled in the ditch completely.

Warren came up with another project for us in the afternoon. We left Sam with the University of Miami group and headed back into Tahlequah where we worked in a school that Cherokee Nation had bought and converted into a charity distribution center for clothes and household items. We got one room full of stuff sorted out, a number of clothes into gender and size order, and about fifty bags of bedding and curtains folded and sorted. It was a thoroughly rewarding sight to see it all completed.

Tyson, who had invited us to work on the project, also had another project for us the next morning. He wanted us to head over near Tulsa to help him unload some lumber and sheet rock. The group was divided as to whether we wanted to do it or not, given that Friday morning was scheduled for rafting down the river. The group discussed it and worked together with Tyson to find some kind of workable compromise. The initial decision was to do the project early in the morning and then go rafting later in the morning. By evening, that had changed and we finally decided to skip the unloading in favor of a potential project helping an elderly woman clear her yard later in the day.

We went and had pizza at the Pizza Hut in Pryor, OK, thanks to the generosity of Maria from the Zoo Safari on Monday. Maria, John and August have been truly gracious to us while we've been here and we are deeply grateful to them. We also highly recommend visiting Zoo Safari if ever your are in the Tahlequah region.

After dinner we headed back to Four Corners so that the girls could spend the evening streaking their hair purple. I served as photographer for the occasion. I was strongly encouraged to get a streak or two in my hair, or maybe do my beard, but I refused. Of course, purple is the appropriate liturgical color for Lent... but no.

Tahlequah Day 3

2008-03-13T07:58:00.003-05:00

Wednesday morning involved getting up just in time for Warren to arrive and inform us that our primary contact, Sue, was very sick and so he would be organizing our day along with Mary, his counterpart at Cherokee Nation. I had just finished toasting the bagels in the oven (the first batch got a little crispy) and suddenly everyone scrambled to get ready and out the door as quickly as possible.

Our first stop was the Cherokee Nation administrative building in Tahlequah proper. We got a tour during which we learned about how the Cherokee government operates and the services they provide. One of the things they do is to run a Cherokee language immersion school. They have developed the curriculum through grade 2 at this point and plan to go all the way through high school. As we were leaving, the chief came by and spoke with us briefly and took a picture with us.

We had lunch at a small park along the lake. It was a beautiful day with sunshine and clear blue skies. After another round of picture taking, we headed to Marble City to spend the afternoon with the community there and the group from the University of Miami that was doing an Alternative Spring Break trip like ours. We learned to play Cherokee marbles, which is more like bocce balls than what I would have thought of as marbles. Then we played with a group of local children; duck-duck-goose was the favorite. We ate dinner with the community; Cherokee tacos with a base of fried dough and piled with beans, lettuce, tomato, onion, salsa and cheese.

We had been invited after dinner to join the community for a service at the church where the day's activities were taking place. It is a pentecostal church and I was very much aware that several of our members are Jewish. I spoke briefly with the trip coordinators about what the service might be like and suggested we gather the group to discuss it and how we wanted to participate. Several members of the group expressed discomfort at the idea of participating. Others thought it would be a good thing to at least observe. As the group conversed, the idea emerged to stay for the beginning part of the service, when the children would sing and then a band would play, to say "thank you" to the community for having us, and then to head home. Even in these initial stages of the service, the pastor was very involved, offering a number of prayers and speaking about Jesus as the only way to salvation, both in this world and the next. The children sang "Amazing Grace" in Cherokee and then performed several praise and worship songs in American Sign Language. The band was actually quite good, especially the guitarist.

It was notable on the hour+ ride home that no one even mentioned turning on the radio. We spent the entire ride unpacking the trip. There were a lot of questions about what we had experienced together, and several expressions of discomfort. There were also many expressions if intrigue and curiosity about this expression of religious fervor. Throughout the ride, I was asked many clarifying questions and then to give an account of all of church history! It was good to see the group unpack the experience together and to move deeper in relationship to one another out of the confusion brought on by this encounter. I was glad to be a part of it and to be able to be helpful. I am also very much aware that not every one of the 2 trips BU sends each year has a chaplain on it.

Tahlequah Day 2

2008-03-12T08:39:00.003-05:00

We woke up very cold on Tuesday morning. The heat had gone out over the night (ran out of gas) and it was below 50 degrees when we crawled out of our sleeping bags. Once everyone finally got up, the cold did have the side effect of encouraging people to display some alacrity in getting out the door.

We arrived at the site for the day and were warm within minutes. At the Downing Cemetery, we hauled brush and logs into piles to be burned and generally got the place cleaned up. Between the hauling and the burning, we were all quite toasty after an hour of work. By the end of they day, many of us (myself included) were a bit sunburned. As we sat amongst the gravestones, listening to John tell us about his family history who were buried there, I could feel the sun sinking into my already burned shoulders. By night, I was quite sore; from the burns as well as the scrapes from the pricker bushes.

We got back to the community center and had some down time before dinner and then heading into town for bowling. Unfortunately, neither the first nor the second set of directions we had were correct. We called the bowling alley and they gave us some rather uninterpretable directions ("We're just past the Walmart, but not really past the Walmart") so it required three more phone calls to finally triangulate our way there. The bowling was great fun, and everyone improved greatly in their technique, especially those we discovered toward the end of the first game were holding the ball wrong!

Bowling was followed by a trip to the store to stock up on a few missing essentials (milk!) and then an apparently obligatory stop by Sonic for shakes and snacks. This was especially fun pulling up to a drive-in fast food restaurant and having to order for 13 people! Great hilarity ensued.

It was an excellent day, and our reflection at the end of the day demonstrated this. We all turned in about 12:45 and are starting to get up and get ready for another day of service!

Tahlequah Day 1

2008-03-10T14:30:00.003-05:00

12 first-year and sophomore women and one monk. This should be interesting.

We left at 7AM on Saturday, March 8th and drove for 36 hours straight from Boston to Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Several interesting incidents marked the drive down. First, one person got sick while I was driving. I heard from the back, "someone threw up! Pull over!" Everything was fine after we got her re-hydrated. Then another person started talking in her sleep. She sat straight up and insisted that we pull over, immediately! Then nothing else she said made sense and we realized that she was talking in her sleep so we continued on. The most interesting event was getting pulled over by an overzealous Tennessee State Trooper. He got all bent out of shape because one of most conscientious drivers had gone past him in the right lane when he had pulled over a truck, instead of moving to the left lane. He gave us a lecture and let us go. Since when is asking a full 15 passenger van to change lanes unnecessarily a good idea?

We finally arrived, bought groceries for the week, and got to the community center where we are staying. We had dinner, some people took showers, and we went to bed.

This morning we woke up and headed out to our first service site. We were helping Rev. Fred, a 90 year old pastor, clear some brush and broken trees that had come down in an ice storm. Sam, from Cherokee Nation, came along with his chain saw to cut up the branches. In the middle of it, Sam found a big piece that would make a great three-legged table. He sawed a flat piece off the top and loaded in his truck as a project for us throughout the week. Many of our number are animal lovers and so Rev. Fred's dogs and cats provided great joy and amusement. This afternoon we are going to a local animal park to clear more brush and check out the goats.

The group is really bonding well and learning to work together. It's great being able to just be along for the ride. Liz and Giovanna have things so well planned that there's really nothing for me to do. Which is great! I love being able to defer all the questions from the people we work with to them. I think it surprises some to learn that these college students really have things well in hand. Go BU!

Cape Town Day 9

2007-06-14T23:00:00.000-05:00

Emily had to go in to her internship on Thursday morning so I got up early, ran a few errands nearby, and then took the taxi into town. My first stop was the District Six Museum which commemorates a neighborhood of Cape Town that functioned very much like Harlem in New York City, a center of culture and cosmopolitanism, before Apartheid policies kicked everyone out and the entire neighborhood was razed to the ground in the name of urban planning. In some of the historical material leading up to the displacement, I was surprised to discover a reference to the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, an Anglican monastic order that has a monastery in Cambridge, MA. The plaque in part read thusly,

Lydia was a young woman when, on 1 December 1834, bonfires lit up the slopes o Table Mountain and Signal Hill, announcing Emancipation Day and the end of slavry. The law required slaves to serve a further four years as 'apprentices.' Freedom of movement only came in 1838 and slaves flocked from the countryside into Cape Town. Included in this flight from the rural areas was Lydia, on whose back were the scars left by the sjambok of her master. She was one of the thousands of the city's poor. She was baptised and became a Christian, living in a cottage situated in the vicinity of 2C in Cauvin Road. Years later a school was built on the site of Lydia's cottage. It was known as Lydia's School.
The first monks of the Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE), Fr. Puller and Fr. Sheppard, arrived in the summer of 1864 to start the Mission of St. Philip's. They held their first service in Lydia's cottage. She is remembered standing in her doorway, ringing the bell calling congregants to worship.

I also discovered that the building the museum inhabited used to be a Methodist church that was started for the descendants of former slaves. During the displacements in the 1960s, the church became a focal point of resistance efforts to the displacements and to Apartheid generally. Congregants commuted back to District Six to worship from the sometimes distant places to which they had displaced and the congregation continued until the late 1980s. Throughout this time, the congregation maintained its commitment to working on behalf of the people and so started a children's center and remained a focal point for anti-apartheid meetings and events. When displaced, the congregation placed a plaque on the church building that remains there today:

All who pass by remember with shame the many thousands of people who lived for generations in District Six and other parts of this city and were forced by law to leave their homes because of the color of their skins. Father forgive us...

After the museum I took a walking tour of the city. I stopped for a cup of tea at a café to get my bearings on the map and then set out for the Bo Kaap neighborhood of Cape Town which is a historically Muslim quarter. The neighborhood is distinctive for its extraordinarily colorful homes. There is a mosque on virtually every block and they are as colorful as the homes that surround them. Someone had a sense of humor because there is a mosque built right on the corner of Church Street! Walking further there was a driveway area between some of the colorful homes and tin and wood shacks could be seen down the way, just as colorful as the homes that lined the streets but obviously inhabited by the poor. The poor are never far in Cape Town. My next stop was the Lutheran church which has a grand high pulpit and a beautiful organ. The church was originally started when religious practice was severely restricted by law and so the church was initially disguised as a barn. Later, when freedom of religion became established, a German artist was brought in to beautify the space. I found it ironic that they were playing the Misereri Mei by Allegri over the sound system. A Renaissance setting of Psalm 51, the Allegri was for centuries thought to be too beautiful for the populace to hear and so was reserved to the Pope's hearing in the Sistine Chapel. A precocious young Mozart recognized the beauty of the piece when he happened to be in Rome during Lent and so he asked the choirmaster if he could look at the music whereupon it was explained that the music was reserved to the Pope's ears. Indignant, Mozart simply went and wrote the whole thing out from memory! Regardless, the piece is hardly contextual in a late 18th century Lutheran Church in South Africa! I stopped and grabbed a sandwich on my way back to the taxi stand and then made my way back to Rondebosch and home. Interestingly, the taxi let me off at the opposite end of the block from Emily's street and as I stepped out I looked up and saw a sign through the trees, “C.G. Jung Center.” Intrigued, I looked at the sign on the gate and discovered that the library had open hours just then. I walked around the building to the library entrance and was met by the curator who explained that this was the central place for training Jungian analysts in southern Africa. I looked around the library for a bit and found my friend Deirdra Bair's recent biography of Jung on the shelf. The little gems to be found just under our noses! After running a few more errands, Emily and I caught up with Jenn and her friend Steven who was supposed to have arrived a week earlier but got stranded in Cairo after his passport, money and other personal effects were stolen in Israel. Assured that he had arrived safe and sound, albeit exhausted, we headed off to dinner with Elliot at a gourmet burger restaurant called Royale that featured an extensive selection of vegetarian burgers. Elliot took his leave to go study a bit more while Em and I headed to the Green Dolphin, a world famous restaurant and jazz lounge. We hung out there for about an hour and a half and listened to a very good local band. It was a wonderful way to end my time in Cape Town as on Friday I depart for Johannesburg.

Cape Town Day 8

2007-06-14T09:52:00.000-05:00

Wednesday morning I got up early and went into Cape Town in the taxi to buy my train ticket to Johannesburg for Friday. The taxi system is more like a minibus route that runs in and out of Cape Town from the various suburbs and townships. On board each minibus is a driver and a manager who collects fees, sorts everyone into seats, and rides with his head out the window shouting the route of the taxi to passersby who may want to catch a ride. The taxi stand in Cape Town is right next to the train station. I got out of the taxi and headed into the station and walked up and down both sides, unable to find the distance train ticket booth. I finally asked a security guard where it was and they said that I had to go back upstairs, through the taxi stand, and over to the other side of the train station. I made my way there, bought my ticket, and got back to the taxi stand only to discover that I had no idea which line I wanted to be in! Fortunately, another security guard was walking by, saw me looking confusedly at all of the options, and took pity on the stupid American. He asked where I was going and then pointed me in the right direction. The ride home was quick and easy. I got back just in time to take the shuttle up the hill with Em to UCT where I had a meeting with Professor Andre du Toit, one of Em's professors and a planner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). I explained to him that I was interested in the role of religion in the establishment, challenge, and end of Apartheid and then the establishment and implementation of the TRC. He explained that the planning of the TRC was really a secular process and that the religious element really only became prevalent once Archbishop Desmond Tutu was appointed to chair the commission. While not exactly hostile to the religious element, Dr. du Toit spent most of the conversation explaining why the introduction of religion into the process was problematic. He also introduced a distinction between official and unofficial TRCs, the dividing line being their sanction by secular government. I found this interesting because there are many people in the world who would find a religiously sanctioned, but not necessarily state sanctioned, TRC to be more official, or at least more legitimate, than a state sanctioned TRC. This notion of what is “official” and not is something I would like to pursue further. At the end of our meeting I thanked Dr. du Toit for his time and then went to find Emily down in the atrium. We walked back down the hill to get her car and then drove out to the International Center for Transitional Justice for a meeting with her boss, Alex Boraine. Dr. Boraine was the chief architect of the TRC and a former Methodist pastor. In our meeting he explained that he left the Methodist church when he felt it was not being prophetic enough in denouncing apartheid and so made his way into politics. Nevertheless, he maintains that his underlying motivation in working for justice and peace is theological and, at least in certain respects, religious. He cites Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one of his primary models in this. As a member of Parliament, Dr. Boraine denounced as blasphemous the invocation of God in support of Apartheid policies and legislation. In the formation of the TRC, Dr. Boraine maintains a distinction between Archbishop Tutu's stance and relation to the church and his own even as he has the utmost respect for Archbishop Tutu being able to maintain his prophetic voice along with his priestly and episcopal functions. Apparently, prior to the end of Apartheid, Dr. Boraine came to Boston and gave a lecture at Boston University but the lecture was protested by black Bostonians who assumed that as a white member of the South African Parliament he must have been pro-Apartheid. Dr. Boraine was most understanding, but I nevertheless suggested that perhaps arrangements could be made to have him back to BU and a more receptive audience might be arranged. After a brief discussion of the relationship between memory (and forgetting) and reconciliation, Dr. Boraine had to go to a lunch meeting but we agreed to remain in touch. It was a deep honor to spend even a short time with such a prophetic voice and an inextinguishably energetic practitioner of the gospel. Em and I had lunch and afternoon plans of our own so we hopped in the car and drove 45 minutes out of town to Stellenbosch, one of the premier wine regions of South Africa. It was the best day since I had arrived so it was perfect for wine tasting. We stopped for lunch at the Skilpadvlei winery and then went to our first tasting at the Asare winery. Em decided not to taste there since she was driving so I tasted five wines and did pretty well at discerning the various scents and flavors in the wines. I wasn't impressed with any of them enough to buy so we headed on and decided to stop at the Stellenbosch information center for some expert advice. Advice in hand, we headed out to the area we were told had the best views. We decided we would go to the Rainbow's End winery. We headed down the road which became a back road and then a dirt road and then potholes began appearing. After going through numerous potholes and bouncing over a number of rocks (Em's car's shocks got a good workout) we arrived at the winery only to discover that they only did tastings by appointment! Thankfully, the views that had been promised were indeed spectacular and we got to see a flock of guinea hens. After taking a few pictures, we headed back out and then stopped at the Le Pommier winery for our last tasting (it took us so long to get out to and back from the Rainbow's End winery that that's all we had time for!). Here we decided that we would have dessert in the restaurant after the tasting so Em decided to taste too. We each tried five wines and I decided to buy a couple of bottles to take home to the States (I imagine Dad is already reaching for the wine glasses!). We had a dessert of waffles with caramel and ice cream on the veranda and then headed back into town. I fell asleep for a good part of the way but awoke as we were driving through the township on the N2 back into Cape Town. We got home and got a call from Jenn that she needed us to pick her up and take her to pick up her new car. We did and discovered that it was exactly the same as Em's with the exception of the fact that Em's has a spoiler and leather seats! We drove back to Jenn's place to use the internet and chatted for a while before heading home to eat a snack and get some sleep.

More pics posted.

Cape Town Day 7

2007-06-12T23:00:00.000-05:00

Tuesday began with a trip in to the International Center for Transitional Justice where Emily is interning to see if I could get a meeting with the founder, Alex Boraine, a former Methodist pastor and one of the geniuses behind the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was not in that morning so I took the car and spent the rest of the morning at the internet café before heading on to a meeting at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) while Emily was working at her internship. I was quite proud of myself for not having any problems driving on the wrong side of the road; that is the left side of the road which in South Africa is the right side of the road which is to say the correct side to drive on. My meeting with Dr. Conradie at UWC went very well. We discussed the work of the Boston Theological Institute on ecclesiology in response to a request from the World Council of Churches for reflection on their new “Nature and Mission of the Church” document. We also discussed differences in ecclesiological perspectives between Africa and North America and agreed that ecumenical theology must take global perspectives into account. I am hopeful that there can be some collaboration between theological institutions in Boston and in South Africa in the future. After that meeting I returned home just in time to change clothes and head off to the Mount Nelson Hotel for afternoon tea. While the tea left a lot to be desired (Twinnings tea bags, which I use at home but would have expected loose tea at such a fine establishment), the atmosphere and food were spectacular. The desserts were served on what appeared to be a tray but upon further inspection turned out to be a very large bar of chocolate! Emily and sat, ate, drank tea and chatted for a couple of hours before heading home. We arrived back at the apartment with a bit of time to spare before we were picked up by her Rotarian counselor Don to go to the Rotarian dinner in Hout Bay. While the dinner was not particularly accommodating for vegetarians, (I can't really blame them since they didn't know about my dietary restrictions in advance), the presentation following dinner was a thoroughly stimulating discussion of the AIDS epidemic in Africa in general, in South Africa particularly and in Hout Bay most especially. Furthermore, it seems that the Hout Bay Rotary Club has become extremely involved in responding to the crisis, raising 75,000 Rand (a bit over $10,000 US) for emergency supplies that was matched by support from Rotary clubs in the US and now turning to more long term issues. They have a detailed plan for addressing the AIDS epidemic in Hout Bay and are now setting out to implement it. It was quite inspiring to see how a community can work together to better the situation of everyone. Clearly, there is still much to be done, but the people at the meeting were energized to continue working and so there is much hope for the future. After being dropped off at home, Emily corralled Emily and Elliot to go downtown for milkshakes again and to give me an opportunity to eat something that suited. All in all, quite a busy day!

Pics from Cape Town thus far.

Cape Town Day 6

2007-06-11T23:00:00.000-05:00

The day began with Em and I running errands up at the University of Cape Town and then I went back to the library while Em sat in on the dissertation proposals of some of her classmates. When she finished we had Indian food for lunch in the atrium and then I went back to the internet café to make my bookings for Johannesburg. I worked on my blog most of the afternoon and then that evening we went into town for dinner and djembe lessons. We had dinner at Mama Africa, clearly targeted toward tourists, which specializes in serving game dishes that neither I (being vegetarian) nor Em were interested in. Nevertheless, we both had excellent meals and thoroughly enjoyed the marimba jazz band that included two marimbas, a xylophone, saxophone, trumpet, drums and everyone sang. It was a fusion of African and jazz rhythms and harmonies that was really quite cool. Afterwards we headed upstairs to Zula Bar where the swing dance lessons were just wrapping up and the djembe lessons were getting ready to begin. The djembe is a traditional African drum. The teachers, from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), began by just having us emulate them and then taught us the two basic strokes: an open palm against the center of the drum for a lower pitch and just the fingers against the edge of the drum head for a higher pitch. As the night progressed they taught us more and more complicated rhythms, breaking each one down, teaching it slowly, and then speeding up and putting all of the pieces together. Finally, once we more or less had it (some in the group had it less than others), they let us maintain the rhythm patterns they had taught us while they improvised. It was great fun even though our hands were very sore by the end of the evening.

Cape Town Day 5

2007-06-10T23:00:00.000-05:00

Sunday morning Em and I went to the 11AM multilingual worship service at Rosebank Methodist Church (Mom, Dad and Dean Hill would be so proud!). In precise reverse to the Anglican church, here the clergy were both white and the sacristan was white but the congregation was either black or colored! Emily and I stuck out a bit because we were the only white people in the congregation. The 11AM service specifically catered to college students and was filled with young adults from the University of Cape Town. The singing was all in Xhosa, one of the indigenous languages of South Africa, and was projected onto the wall in the front of the sanctuary with English translations underneath. One of the interesting things to note was that all of the songs were clearly very English hymns (including “Abide with Me” which we sing every Wednesday at Evening Prayer at Marsh Chapel) and the hymn tunes were even the same. The thing was, they were sung in Xhosa, the harmonization was clearly African, and there were djembes and a cowbell being played! A very interesting mix of indigenous and colonial, to say the least. The service was mostly led by a black layman although it is really hard to say that he led it. He read the scriptures and announced each part of the service but whenever there was the slightest pause a woman in the congregation or in the choir would pick up with a Xhosa chorus that was not projected on the screen and we would sing that for a few minutes while whatever transition that was happening happened. One interesting part of the service was the induction of the executive committee of the Young Women's Manyano, a sort of cross between a United Methodist Women's group, a United Methodist Youth Fellowship, and a religious order. The pastor explained that there is both a Young Women's Manyano and a Women's Manyano, the former wearing white blouses with red collars and the latter wearing the inverse. They all wore white hats. They make a commitment to a life of prayer, holiness and social engagement, not unlike the Benedictine rule of prayer, study and work. This was the leadership committee of the Young Women's Manyano being inducted. Em commented after the service that she thought that it was strange that some of the women in the Young Women's Manyano appeared older than the one woman present from the Women's Manyano. This is because in Africa, womanhood is often determined by whether or not a woman has borne a child, not by age. After the induction was the scripture readings and the sermon, all accompanied by more Xhosa singing. The service concluded with communion which was taken with little wafers and then the grape juice in little glass cups. The pastor did not have a formal liturgy with words of institution, epiclesis, etc., but instead spontaneously and improvisationally made up the communion liturgy on the spot. It was quite a bit shorter than the formal version printed in the worship books in the pew racks but it had all of the elements of a communion liturgy. Afterwards there was a collection, announcements and a final song. After church we went and had lunch at an internet café and then to Emily A's house so that the two Emilys could finish making plans for a nine-day excursion to Durban, Mozambique and Kruger National Park. We left with Emily A to meet a couple more of cousin Em's friends, Ilya and Melanie, at Madame Zingara's where the jazz-electro band Goldfish was playing. Em's Rotarian counselor's son is in the band. The place was packed and the band was amazing. We danced for two hours or more before heading into town to get a late night bite to eat and go home to crash.

Cape Town Day 4

2007-06-09T23:00:00.000-05:00

Saturday was mostly taken up by another driving excursion, this time down the Cape of Good Hope itself. We stopped first in Muizenberg to watch the surfers and check out the very colorful bathing chalets along the beach. This was also my first ever glimpse of the Indian Ocean! We then drove down to Simon's Town where I bought a Zimbabwean sculpture of a thinker holding a drinking pot with furrowed brow (since I couldn't actually get to Zimbabwe on this trip). We also had lunch there and tried to check out a large, single-masted sail boat but it was in the military enclosure (Simon's Town is the birthplace of the South African navy). We hopped back in the car and drove down the coast a ways where we pulled over to a beach area where we got to see penguins! Em explained that we had to jump over a low stone fence onto a rock outcropping to see them. I quickly vaulted over and found myself almost landing on top of a parent and baby penguin. The baby was almost as big as the parent, especially with all of the fluff! I apologized for almost jumping on them and then we walked over the rock a bit to find many penguins hiding in the bushes on the leeward side of the rock to take refuge against the wind. When we walked over to the windward side of the rock, we discovered why they were taking refuge. Em and I almost got blown off the side of the rock! We got back in the car and continued down the Cape. Em pointed out to me where her baboon incident took place (see Em's blog linked on the bar to the right) but we never got to see any baboons. We drove down the coast a bit farther and then cut across through the mountains to the Atlantic side of the Cape and then started driving back up. On the way back to Cape Town we drove along Chapman's Peak overlooking Hout Bay with its sheer cliffs dropping straight down into the ocean. Em and I had dinner at a little Italian restaurant called Diva's and then met up with Niv for drinks. Niv and Emily A went to a club and so Em, Eliot and I went to what was supposed to be a jazz bar called Dizzy's in Camps Bay but it only had a cover band (but no cover, thankfully!). We chatted for a while over a glass of wine and then headed back out into the rain to go home. It really is the rainy season!

Cape Town Day 3

2007-06-08T23:00:00.000-05:00

Friday involved spending a good bit of the day in the University of Cape Town (UCT) library. After getting a letter of introduction from Dean Hill, which they never even asked for, I was able to use my Boston University ID to gain visiting scholar access to the library. Unlike US university libraries, the University of Cape Town organizes its library according to the Dewey Decimal System. This meant relearning how to find books! Fortunately, most of the books I wanted were in the African Studies Library which meant that I only had to fill out a little form and the books were brought to me in the reading room. I am researching the role of religion in Apartheid, its fall, and the establishment and implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Interestingly enough, many of the books were written by or edited by either Em's professor Andre du Toit or by her internship supervisor Alex Boraine. I was also surprised to discover that one of the books I was reading that involved both of these professors also had contributions from scholars of the Boston Theological Institute, including my boss, Rodney Petersen, and one of the International Mission and Ecumenism Committee members, Raymond Helmick, SJ. What a small world! I arrived back at the apartment much drier than the day previously. That night we went and had Indian food with Emily A and Niv again along with two more of Em's friends, Jenn and Eliot. Jenn is studying in a similar program to Em's and Eliot is studying community theater and social transformation. We had an invigorating discussion over dinner and then Jenn, Em and I went in search of gelato. Unfortunately, the gelato store was closed so we satisfied ourselves with milkshakes at a restaurant on Long Street that Em had occasioned before.

Cape Town Day 2

2007-06-07T23:00:00.000-05:00

On Thursday morning Em drove me up to the Rhodes Memorial where there is a trail head leading to the trail up and around Table Mountain. She had to go to her internship to read fellowship applications so I had the day to explore. I hiked along and saw some amazing views of Cape Town and the bay. The flora is significantly different than in the US and so I had a good time looking at all of the different flowers, bushes, trees and other plants along with the diverse fauna, especially birds. At about quarter to noon I came to what seemed to be the end of the trail but it really just took off in an obscure direction up the hill. I followed it for a bit and at noon found myself on an outcropping with a bench and a canon on it. This reminded me that the day before Em and I had made a brief visit to the place where a canon is fired every day at noon. Just as I turned around I heard the canon go off and could see the smoke coming off the side of the mountain across from me. I found it a bit ironic that I had found this canon just in time for the daily shot. I said the mid-day office while sitting on the bench and then journeyed on. After going in a generally upward direction for a while, I came across a group of colored people clearing the trail. In South Africa there are three primary racial characterizations. Whites can be divided between English and Afrikaners; colored are mixed-race; and blacks are native Africans. There are also a number of Indians and quite a bit of French influence. Unlike in the US, the term “colored” is not pejorative, and several colored South Africans have broken out in laughter when I told them that we call colored people “mixed race.” The colored folks I ran across on the trail were very friendly and quickly picked up on my American accent. One of them commented that she wanted to travel to the US at some point. When I asked why, she replied that she had heard that in the US it was much better for colored people than in South Africa and she wanted to experience what that is like. I said something fairly benign but thought to myself that her vision of race relations in the US is quite a bit more utopic than reality. As I hiked on, clouds began to creep up. Just as it started to rain, I found myself at the mouth of a large cave. I ducked inside for cover and ate lunch while I waited to see what would happen with the weather. It quickly became clear that this was not going to be a quick storm so I steeled myself for the fact that I was going to get wet. I set out and indeed I did. About an hour and a half later I arrived back at the Rhodes Memorial just as the storm became incredibly windy and violent. I sat under cover and text-messaged Em to see if she could come pick me up. She replied that she was still reading applications but just then the storm cleared entirely and the sun came out! Cape Town is a lot like Boston in this respect: if you don't like the weather, wait a minute, it will change! I got home, took a shower and got warmed up. When Emily got home we headed downtown to St. George's Cathedral which was Desmond Tutu's church when he was Archbishop of Cape Town. We went to the Eucharist for the Feast of Corpus Christi at which the choir sang Monteverdi's Mass for Four Voices as the communion setting. It was spectacular, although Em was a bit confused which is understandable given that it was a very high, solemn sung Mass requiring quite a bit of familiarity with the South African Book of Common Prayer which I was not even particularly familiar with. A few things to note were that Emily and I were the youngest people there (not too surprising) and that the priests were all colored, the verger black, and the congregation almost entirely white. See my comments on Sunday for comparison to the Methodists. That evening we went over to Emily's friend Emily's house for dinner and I also got to meet Niv. Emily A, like cousin Em, is a rotary scholar. Cousin Em is studying transformation and reconciliation while Emily A is doing diversity studies. Niv is in town volunteering at various non-profits and will be headed back to the US at the end of July to start at Johns Hopkins for grad school in the fall. We ordered delivery and then chatted during the hour it took for the food to arrive. After eating, we headed home for the evening.

Cape Town Day 1

2007-06-06T23:00:00.000-05:00

Arriving at the airport in Cape Town, Emily was a sight for sore eyes. She was there with her friend Topher who had been visiting and was flying out later in the afternoon. Em and I headed for the parking lot and I met her 1992 Honda Ballade, a very nice little brown car that purrs like a kitten. We discussed learning to drive on the right as Em expertly navigated us onto the highway and on towards Cape Town. We discussed her studies, politics and the social situation in South Africa, family, and a number of other things on the way to her apartment. After dropping of my luggage and me taking a much needed shower, we went to get lunch at a little café in town and discussed our academic pursuits and career plans. It was a beautiful day so we set off into town to explore a bit. We stopped by St. George's Cathedral (Church of South Africa) to find out when the service for the feast of Corpus Christi the next day would be held and walked through the city gardens that are flanked by the library, the parliament, other government buildings, and several museums. We got back in the car and took a drive down the western side of the Cape a bit to Llundadno where we hiked out onto the rocks, watched the surfers and looked back on Devil's Peak, Table Mountain, and the Twelve Apostles. After dinner we were both beat and so headed home to bed. I got one of the best night's sleep I've ever had!

Travel to South Africa

2007-06-05T07:26:00.001-05:00

From the retreat, James+ and I drove together down to Pittsburgh. We went to dinner in Pittsburgh's South Side with James+' roomate Steve and ate at a Japanese Hibachi restaurant. It was a great deal of fun because the meal is cooked at the Hibachi grill right in front of us by a performance chef. It turned out, our chef went to high school in northern Virginia. I keep running into folk from the DC area! After dinner I crashed at James+' and Steve's apartment for the night and got up at 4AM to get to the airport. That's when things got a little crazy.

I was scheduled to leave Pittsburgh at 6:25AM but the flight was delayed so much that I was going to miss my connection in Newark and would not have made it to BWI until 2:30PM. Being afraid that I would not be able to make it from there to Dulles in time for my 6PM flight to London, I asked them to see if they could adjust it to get me there earlier. They first rerouted me still on the same airline but then that flight was cancelled so they booked me on a direct flight to National Airport on US Airways. I got to National a bit after noon where my parents met me. Unfortunately, in the confusion, my bags did not arrive. We went to the US Airways baggage area where we met Ashley who was extraordinarily helpful. It also turns out that she lives just down the street from my parents in Maryland. Strange. Anyway, she finally tracked down my bags which were on their way on my original itinerary to BWI via Newark. She made arrangements for my bags to be transferred to British Airways where they would meet me in London. Mom and Dad took me to a very nice lunch at Tysons Corner and then got me to Dulles. I slept for quite a bit of the flight and then found myself waiting around for my bags to arrive two hours after I did. They finally arrived and I retrieved them. I've been able to change clothes, wash my face, and brush my teeth. Finally! I wasn't planning on bringing both bags with me. I was going to send one home with Mom and Dad. Oh well. Maybe I'll find some use for the tent that I don't actually need until Taize!

Retreat

2007-06-05T07:23:00.000-05:00

Retreat Photos on Facebook

On Friday morning, Willard and I attended the men's breakfast at First Presbyterian Church of Ithaca. I ran into my friend Eric there and had a good time chatting with the various men who attended. Afterwards, I strolled around the Ithaca Commons and had a cup of tea at Juna's while Willard ran some errands. After lunch, a nap, and taking care of a few last minute details online, Willard and Dorothy drove me up to the Lindisfarne Community retreat, held for the past two years at Casowasco Camp, Retreat, and Conference Center affiliated with the United Methodist Church.

Casowasco sits right on the banks of Lake Owasco. When I was a student at Ithaca College, the Protestant Community took a retreat there my first year. I still remember that we stayed in Wesleyan Lodge. This time, the Lindisfarne Community stayed at Galilee Cottage, the mansion that was the original building on the property, called a mere cottage by its extraordinarily wealthy owners, that was then donated to the Methodists. The facility is quite nice with plenty of bedrooms and bathrooms, a large living room, a central dining room, a foyer, a kitchen, a nook, and a library. Just outside is a gazebo in which we held morning and mid-day prayers each day. Evening prayers and meetings were held in the library that overlooks the lake through the windows that line its outer edges. The ordinations were held in the living room because we needed space for James and Scott to make the prostrations.

Many members of the community were running behind schedule and arrived just in time to drop their bags off and rush over to Emmaus Commons for dinner. When we arrived for dinner, we learned that we were sharing Casowasco with a large women's group from a church that several members of the community had affiliation with in the past and a middle school group. The middle school group was quite loud, not very well behaved, and often downright rude. Typical middle-schoolers. After dinner we ventured back to Galilee Cottage for a meeting and night prayer. The meeting began with silent meditations for 10 minutes and then moved on to an introduction to the theme of the retreat - mindfulness - by Abbot +Andy, Abbess +Jane, Prior John+, and Prioress Chris+. Each of theme shared thoughts on what mindfulness consists in. In the middle of the reflections on mindfulness, James+ took vows of celibacy, the first in our community to do so. After the vows, Bishop +Joe of the Celtic Christian Church, a sister communion to Lindisfarne Community, asked for a chance to address the community. He explained that he had been a Roman Catholic priest who left the priesthood upon falling in love with Cait+. For the last 20 years, +Joe and Cait+ have been working with women who have fallen romantically in love with priests. +Joe explained that priests have two options in such a situation: either leave the priesthood and marry the woman, or stay in the priesthood and remain single and celibate. He went on to commend the way the Lindisfarne Community handled James+' vow of celibacy because it was a voluntary vow undertaken after much prayer and discernment. He further commended the community for making a clear distinction between the vocation of celibacy and the vocation of ordination. His reflections were powerful and provoked thought from members of the community throughout the rest of the retreat.

The following day I led morning prayer in the gazebo. For the meditation, I read a poem my friend Danielle commended to me for reflection before I left: “Heavy” by Mary Oliver. I also chanted the psalm, which many of the members of the community commented that they liked; perhaps it will become more common in the community in future. We finished at precisely two minutes to 8 and so had just enough time to get to breakfast. After breakfast we had free time until mid-day prayers. I took some time to chat with +Andy about the various projects we are both involved in: university chaplaincy for me, teaching for him, both of us writing in various academic genres, especially philosophy. After our chat I decided to try one of the many trails Casowasco boasts. I took the gorge trail which climbed rather steeply and sometimes precariously up the gorge to the main road. It was a thoroughly energizing hike and then I walked back down the road and through one of the camp sites back to Galilee cottage for a change of scenery. After mid-day prayers and lunch, we gathered in the large living room of Galilee house for the ordinations. We first professed Scott+ and James+ and vested them in the garb of the community. Following this, we had the service of ordination. As the deacon, I read the gospel and presented the candidates for ordination to the bishops on behalf of the community. James+ was ordained a deacon and then a priest and Scott+ was ordained a deacon. Both shared moving parts of their faith journeys that had led them to the Lindisfarne Community. Following the ordinations was Eucharist and then we moved out onto the lawn for pictures; many pictures. After the pictures we were all glad to get out of our vestments because it was in the high 80s that day; I had practically sweated through my alb! After dinner we had a time of sharing in which we got into a deep conversation about our role as ministers to people on the margins. This was punctuated by several lively games facilitated by Prior John+. After a snack and night-prayers, many people stayed up late into the night, carrying the conversation about ministry forward and reflecting on the ordinations. It was a deeply rich day for all involved.

On Sunday we had morning prayer on the gazebo again and then had the liturgy of the word in the library. In addition to the homily we had a time of sharing about what the retreat had meant to us and several of us shared some highlights from our ministry over the past year. I played a couple of recordings of the Marsh Chapel Choir, which has been a deep source of community for me over the past year even as it is also one of the best, if not the best, church choirs in Boston. Mike+ shared a DVD full of pictures from a mission trip he took to Haiti. +Andy preached on the Holy Trinity, it being Trinity Sunday and all, and talked about how the Trinity is a symbol that carries us beyond words to a deeper reality. Following the liturgy of the word, we vested for the Eucharist around the table in the dining room. I set the table as the deacon and +Jane celebrated. After lunch we packed up Galilee Cottage and departed.

Seneca Falls 2 and Ithaca

2007-06-01T10:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Willard and Dorothy came up to Seneca Falls from Ithaca for lunch, to see the Women's Interfaith Institute, and to shuttle me back to Ithaca. Famous for wearing bow ties, Willard is an emeritus professor of German at Ithaca College and he was a highly involved member of the Board of Directors of the Protestant Community at Ithaca College while I was an undergraduate there. He and his wife Dorothy remain good friends. Here we are having lunch at Zuzu's Cafe in downtown Seneca Falls:

left to right: Allison, Dorothy, Willard

After lunch we went to explore the historic church the Women's Interfaith Institute calls home. Here's Willard and Dorothy standing by the peace pole planted outside the institute:

The institute is home to four libraries of books that we toured through (I was an intern at the institute the summer between my junior and senior years at Ithaca College and designed the book plates for each of the four libraries):

Furthermore, when the institute bought the old church, it came with two pulpits. Here is Allison standing behind one believed to be the pulpit at Wesleyan Chapel where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others signed the Declaration of Sentiments:

Allison had posters displayed made by children advocating for peace that she bought when she was in Capetown, South Africa for the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1993, the next major stop on my Summer Excursion 2007:

Also visible was the stole the Lindisfarne Community gave her upon her retirement from Ithaca College to dedicate her time to the institute. It hangs right next to a poster celebrating the centennial anniversary of the admission to Ph.D. programs at Yale University. This fits well with the Lindisfarne Community's commitment to women's concerns, inclusive language, and scholarship.

Willard took our picture next to the sign in front of the institute:

After touring the institute, Willard and Dorothy and I drove down to Ithaca. I spent a few hours getting reacquainted with the Commons, including having a beer at Simeon's as per Cory's instructions. I met up with +Andy, +Jane, John+, Scott+, Willard, Dorothy and others from the Lindisfarne Community on Cayuga street so we could watch the Ithaca Festival parade:

The Catholic Workers were there encouraging us to impeach Bush. Yea Catholic Workers!

And, of course, no Ithaca Festival parade is complete without the Volvo Ballet:

We saw about 80% of the parade when the heavens opened up in a torrential thunderstorm. We ran for the car. En route, Willard signaled that Scott+, Dorothy and I should go stand on a convenient porch while he ventured on to get the car. He got drenched while the rest of us were merely damp. We arrived at +Andy and +Jane's house for a pizza party and to dry out. Here's +Andy with Bekah's dog Lily:

As Willard, Dorothy and I were leaving, we discovered Scott+ was taking advantage of +Andy and +Jane's new hot tub:

Boston to Seneca Falls and Seneca Falls Day 1

2007-05-30T22:34:00.000-05:00

Yesterday at noon I boarded a train at Boston's South Station and began the first leg of my almost 2 month journey. The train was fairly crowded but we chugged right along and arrived in Albany-Rensselaer almost an hour early. This left me some time to go explore Rensselaer and stretch my legs. Just as I was coming to the conclusion that the only thing to note about Rensselaer was that there was nothing to note about Renselaer, I came upon this sign:

I'm not sure what it is, but it certainly stuck out in the midst of the town.

I got back to the train station and discovered that the train to Syracuse was going to be late because it was running late getting in from New York. When it finally arrived, we still had to wait around for them to restock before the train went on. My train is the one between the platform and the other train on the far side:

Now does anyone notice anything wrong with this picture? Here they've built a beautiful train platform and no tracks. Tracks on the other side but not this side. Go figure.

The train arrived in Syracuse about 35 minutes late. I was met at the train by my mentor, teach and friend, the Rev. Dr. Allison Stokes. Allison was my chaplain at Ithaca College and I wanted to visit her partly just to catch up and partly seeking her wisdom as I am becoming a University Chaplain at Boston University. Allison is an old hand at being a chaplain, having served at Yale, Vassar and Ithaca College. She's full of wisdom and insight and it is a privilege to have her as resource, mentor and friend as I move into this new endeavor. Allison is working on an endeavor of her own. She is the founding director of the Women's Interfaith Institute which is based in Seneca Falls, NY, the birthplace of women's rights and a landmark in the development of human rights. Allison's work is incredibly important in the current historical moment, located at the intersection of ministry, scholarship and activism. I am proud to have served as an intern for the institute during the summer following my junior year of college.

During the day today Allison and I caught up on our lives, talked about chaplaincy and the institute, and assessed the state of the universe and the place of humanity in it. Not bad for a day's work!

In the evening I took a walk through Seneca Falls. It is truly a fascinating town comprised of a somewhat surprising combination of people. There are people who are more country-folk; there are college students and families; there are the more sophisticated folks who associate with the historical ethos of Seneca Falls and women's rights; and there are the feminist-activists who continue to embody the work advocating for women's rights and ways of being in the world. This diversity plays out in strange ways as you walk down main street and notice that some of the shops are more run down, some have been fixed up while maintaining the old-town feel, and some are quite modern. Clearly, someone had a sense of humor as the center for alcoholism is right next to the VFW. All together, it makes for a charming town where people are friendly and say hello as they pass on the street.

Tonight Allison showed me the powerpoint presentation she put together about the institute and its work. I gave her a few pointers to sharpen the presentation, but mostly I was astonished to note that she had pulled together 70 slides of text and photos from a year's worth of activity and work at the institute without ever giving a sense of redundancy or over-elaboration. There is so much going on at the institute and so much more they are planning to do that I can hardly believe the whole thing started merely four years ago.

Enough for today. More tomorrow!

Monster Trip Summer 2007

2007-05-23T10:49:00.000-05:00

The time is fast approaching for my (apparently) annual Monster Trip! This year's highlights include South Africa and France. Let's hope my computer makes it through this time.

Itinerary:
May 29: train to Syracuse to visit Allison and the Daetsches for a couple of days.
June 1-3: Lindisfarne Community annual retreat
June 4-6: fly to South Africa via London
June 6-13/15: visit Em and do some research in Capetown
June 13-14/15-16: train to Johannesburg
June 14/16-18: visit Johannesburg
June 18-19: fly home to Washington DC
June 19-23: visit family and friends in DC
June 23-29: Institute for Humane Studies Conference on Social Change at UVA
June 29-July 1: fly to Paris to see Stephen's production of The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten
July 1-15: train to and from the Taize Community
July 15-17: visit with John and Margaret in Geneva
July 17-18: fly home to Boston.

I will try to keep my blog updated but I know that I will be out of internet connection the entire time I am at Taize. Other than that I should be able to get on at least every couple of days or so.

You can contact me during the trip here, on facebook and by email.

Have a blessed summer!

The Road to Emmaus

2007-04-09T20:35:00.000-05:00

Luke 24: 13-35

May God be with you.
And also with you.
Let us pray.

Holy God. Holy and loving. Holy and eternal. We invite your Spirit to ignite our hearts that we may be as Christ to those we meet and that we might find within them your Christ, who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, now and forever.
Amen.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the main office at Marsh Chapel pursuing the never-ending quest to get the printer to do what I wanted when my friends Courtney and Steph came in. Others in the office were saying hello so I looked up and noted the two of them present. I had needed to speak with Courtney about a project we were both involved in and so launched directly into a conversation with her. As we wrapped up the conversation I became aware that something was not quite right. Suddenly, I realized that Steph had transferred back to her native California at the start of last fall and was only here in town to visit. I had not seen her since her visit six months prior, but her presence in the chapel felt so natural that the strangeness of her presence did not even register. When it finally did, I launched myself across the room shouting, “Steph!” and embraced her warmly. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, I was unable to recognize the strangeness of my friend’s presence.

If the disciples’ vision of their friend Jesus can be so obscured, and my vision of my friend Steph can be so obscured, how much more must my vision of Jesus be obscured? This question is often posed theologically as the scandal of particularity: how can a particular man in a particular time in a particular place be the savior of all the world in all times and in all places? Jesus was a particular man living at the particular time of 20 centuries ago in the particular place of Roman ruled Palestine and within the particular cultural milieu of oppressed and Hellenized Judaism. I am a white Anglo-Saxon Anglican religious living in 21st century Boston. Is it not more likely that I will ask the question posed of Jesus by the demon Legion, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” (Luke 8: 28).

Furthermore, we do not know Jesus directly. We only know Jesus in his particularity through a variety of authors who wrote out of their own particularity. These authors wrote at a somewhat later date away from the places these events actually occurred and with their own particular worldviews that led to their own particular ways of understanding the impact of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Luke was trying to help the early church understand her own experience by linking the law and the prophets through the proclamation of Jesus to that experience. For Luke, the tension between God’s purpose for the world and human rejection of that purpose is resolved in the person and work of Jesus through whom God’s purpose is achieved precisely by Jesus’ rejection. Luke expects that when his hearers understand this, their lives will be reshaped and oriented properly toward God and each other. Luke has a particular role in mind for Jesus and so tells the story with Jesus playing the prescribed part. Hear me saying here with Paul, “Now we see in a mirror, dimly.” (1 Corinthians 13: 12).

The life and meaning of Jesus ring down twenty centuries and across continents and oceans, passing through numerous theological, philosophical, cultural, social, psychological and political interpretations. Is it any wonder that Jesus, for many living in the 21st century, is little more than a faint echo amidst noisy gongs and clanging cymbals? (1 Corinthians 13: 1). We may know something of what the Gospel authors, Paul and other New Testament writers thought about Jesus, but how can we possibly be expected to answer Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” (Luke 9: 20).

Perhaps our problem in answering this question is that we have made Jesus too historical. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we are so concerned about the Jesus of the past that we overlook the Jesus of the present. In the Lindisfarne Community, our prayer is to be as Christ to those we meet and to find Christ within them. Our practice of mindfulness is meant to keep us attuned to the presence of Christ in our midst so as not to miss Christ in the people and the world around us. The stranger becomes the one who bears Christ to us as we bear Christ to the stranger in hospitality.

Fr. Henri Nouwen, or Saint Henri as we in the Lindisfarne Community call him, says this about the stranger:

And the stranger? Hasn’t he become a friend? He makes our hearts burn, he opens our eyes and ears. He is our companion on the journey! Home has become a good place for the friend to come. So they say, “It’s nearly evening, and the day is almost over … come and stay with us.” He doesn’t ask for an invitation. He doesn’t beg for a place to stay. In fact, he acts as if he wants to go on. But they insist that he come in; they even press him to stay with them…
“Be our guest,” they say. They want to be his hosts. They invite the stranger to lay aside his strangeness and become a friend to them. That’s what true hospitality is all about, to offer a safe place, where the stranger can become fried. There were two friends and a stranger. But now there are three friends, sharing the same table…
Jesus accepts the invitation to come into the home of his traveling companions, and he sits down at table with them. They offer him the place of honor. He is in the center. They are alongside him. They look at him. He looks at them. There is intimacy, friendship, community.
-Henri Nouwen. With Burning Hearts. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994). 66-7, 74, 77.

For Saint Henri, the invitation of the stranger is the means by which Jesus is made known.

This is all well and good for those who knew the resurrected Jesus. The question remains, however, how can we know Jesus now in a post-ascension world? Answering this question requires a more radical theology. It is true that we know Jesus in the stranger. However, that is not to say that every stranger is Jesus in a historical sense. Furthermore, we are called to be Christ to one another so that Jesus may be known in our communities and contexts. However, this is not to say that we should all embrace Christ complexes. On the one hand, it is almost impossible to read the Emmaus Road story without thinking of Matthew 25: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” On the other hand, it still seems inadequate to have something like Christ, but not Jesus Christ himself.

My friend Danielle wrote a book about her experience working with street children in Lima, Peru called Nothing but a Thief. In it she tells her stories of being Christ to those rejected by the world.

The first words out of Manzanita’s mouth told me that he had to go right now with the other boys to steal.
‘Wait for me,’ he told me.
‘Where? For how long?’ I asked, hurt.
He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘At the stadium?’ It was a Monday, and the kinds always met us on Monday afternoons at the stadium.
‘Fine. At the stadium, I’ll wait for you.’ As soon as I spoke, the boys were on their way, disappearing into another crowd. I watched Manzanita walk away until I could no longer see him. Tears burned my eyes. It hurt worse than if he had never come at all – to see him and then not to have him stay…
In the end I never met up with Manzanita…
As I waited for Manzanita, I wanted so much to show him love, to tell him that he was important to me, to provide a meal for him, and to allow him to escape life on the street for just a few hours. I would have continued to wait for him, over and over, because I love him. Manzanita was one of the reasons I returned to Peru after having left, and he was one of the kids I loved the most.
-Danielle Speakman. Nothing But a Thief: The Street and Her Children. (Kent, TN: Sovereign World, 2002), 58-9.

Being Christ to the stranger means becoming vulnerable like Christ to rejection by the very ones we are called to love. Danielle also tells stories of the children as Christ to her and to others. She tells the story of Mudo, a deaf-mute who was killed in a street fight.

In the paper, Mudo’s death gained the attention of the public in the heading: ‘The deaf-mute doesn’t even have a dog to bark for him.’ To the general public, Mudo was just another pirañita, lost in the throes of the violence that is sure to swallow those who live on the streets. But to the other street children, and to those of us who worked with Mudo, we’re proving wrong the headline. Mudo’s silent voice has persistently remained inside of those who knew him; many of whom have made it their purpose to give a voice to him and to other children like him.
-Danielle Speakman. Nothing But a Thief: The Street and Her Children. (Kent, TN: Sovereign World, 2002), 101-2.

Like Christ, Mudo was killed and the world hoped he would be forgotten, but instead he has inspired and eternally changed those he encountered in his short life.

For Danielle, it is clearly not the case that Mudo was something like Christ to her or that she desired to be something like Christ to Manzanita. Her theology is much more radical than that. She says, “We, to the world, must be the body of Christ. In the hope that hurting children will be able to start again, we must act as His body. In the hope for the children of these children – for Menudo’s children, we must be His body. We may be the only Jesus Christ the world will ever see” (Speakman, 180). We may be the only Jesus Christ the world will ever see. We must step out and become Christ for others because they may never know Jesus otherwise. We must risk letting others be Christ for us because knowing Jesus in this stranger may be our only chance.

Come, let us walk together on this road to Emmaus. Let us be Christ to those we meet, and let us find Christ within them. Amen.

Following the Lamb of God

2007-03-27T21:21:00.000-05:00

First sermon prepared for the Rev. Dr. Dale P. Andrews, Introduction to Preaching

John 21: 15-19

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace.

Jesus is the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. When our sins are taken away, we are reconciled to Jesus. In being reconciled to Jesus, we are reconciled to God. Fr. Henri Nouwen, or St. Henri as we in the Lindisfarne Community call him, says the following about our reconciliation with God:

God desires communion: a unity that is vital and alive, an intimacy that comes from both sides, a bond that is truly mutual. Nothing forced or “willed,” but a communion freely offered and received. God goes all the way to make this communion possible. God becomes a child dependent on human care, a boy in need of guidance, a teacher searching for students, a prophet crying for followers, and, finally, a dead man pierced by a soldier’s lance and laid in a tomb. At the very end of the story, he stands there looking at us, asking with eyes full of tender expectation: ‘Do you love me?’ and again, ‘Do you love me?’ and a third time, ‘Do you love me?’
[Henri J.M. Nouwen. With Burning Hearts. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994). 87-8.]

It is a bit odd, is it not, to think of Jesus as waiting expectantly? It is especially odd in the Gospel According to John in which Jesus is most often depicted as the one who knows everything. It is odd to think of Jesus waiting in rapt anticipation, vulnerable to whatever answer may come to his open question.

It is as if Jesus has taken on the role of the stereotyped insecure woman from whom the stereotyped white male flees on Thursday night sitcoms when, in her insecurity, she says, “Lets talk about our relationship.” Like the stereotyped insecure woman, Jesus wants Peter to affirm their relationship. He begins by asking, “do you love me more than these,” indicating the nearby disciples, the boats and the fish? Do you love me more than other people? Do you love me more than your job? Do you love me more than your wealth? Do you love me more than the NCAA Basketball tournament you have been watching virtually non-stop for the past month?

There is a popular style of parenting, one aspect of which is that the parents consistently offer the child pairs of options. Do you prefer the red sweater or the green sweater? Do you want milk or juice? Do you want to read a story or listen to music? I was at the grocery store recently, browsing the tea shelves, when I observed a mother employing this parenting method with her young son. As they walked down the isle, she asked, “do you want spaghetti or ziti?” The child eagerly grasped the bag of ziti while the mother put the spaghetti back on the shelf. “Do you want plain sauce or spicy sauce?” The child reached for the jar with the bright red pepper on the front, but this time the mother wisely put the jar in the cart before replacing the plain sauce on the shelf. “Do you want ginger snaps or chocolate chip cookies?” The child started for a moment with wide eyes and an open mouth. Then, with a wide grin he reached out and pronounced, “Both!” His mother was visibly shocked; I’m not sure he had ever done that before. She said, “I think we’ll just get the ginger snaps,” as she replaced the chocolate chip cookies on the shelf.

When Jesus asks the question, “do you love me more than these?” he asks, “do you αγαπας me more than these?” When Peter answers, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you,” he says, “I φιλω you.” While αγαπη is often known as the particularly Christian form of love, here it seems to be the lesser. Here, αγαπη asks for a preference or estimation while φιλω responds with a deeper kind of passionate love. It is as if Jesus asked Peter to make a determination, them or me, but Peter is unwilling to submit to the binary distinction of preference. This is no longer the Peter who is unwilling to let Jesus wash his feet. This Peter has a deep and passionate love for Jesus, a friendship with Jesus, so much so that he is willing to have his feet washed and then join Jesus in washing the others’ feet. It is as if Peter startles Jesus by answering, “Both!”

But after Peter answers the first question, Jesus is still insecure. He is still not sure that Peter really means what he is saying. Jesus is not convinced that Peter really loves him and may even suspect that Peter is just saying that he loves Jesus so that he can get back to watching the game. It is as if Jesus asked Peter, “does this dress make me look fat?” and Peter answered, “yes, dear; oh! no, dear. No, certainly not.”

And so he asks again, do you love me? Notice that Jesus is no longer asking a comparative question. Peter had better take notice, because Jesus is looking for a deeper answer. Jesus does not want to know whether the dress makes him look fat or thin, he wants to know if he is beautiful. Jesus wants to know if Peter loves him. The distinction here is neither qualitative nor quantitative. Jesus wants to know if Peter loves him absolutely, fundamentally, and ultimately. Peter, are you oriented toward me from the first to the last, and not merely in the epilogue? Is your will stretched out to its utmost in search of me?

Of course, even this is not enough for Jesus. Peter answers again, but Jesus is still not satisfied so he asks for a third time. Jesus’ insecurity is starting to make Peter uncomfortable. “Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’” Nevertheless, Peter plays a very good stereotyped white male sitcom star and breaks out the flowery Victorian rhetoric to set Jesus at ease. “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” The first knowing in Peter’s unequivocal and final response is the same cognitive and subjective knowing of his previous answers. But the second knowing, “you know that I love you,” changes verbs and now seems to indicate a much deeper and profound knowing. Peter affirms that Jesus not only knows that Peter loves him superficially but that he knows that Peter loves him at the very ground of his being.

Is it possible that even here, even after the resurrection, Jesus the Christ is in need of confirmation? How can it be that God becomes this insecure and in need of such confirmation? How is it that God can be so vulnerable in asking an open question to which our response might be terribly wounding? Who is this God? And what happened to our sure, omniscient, dependable Jesus?

This is the Jesus who wants to be reconciled with us, but it would not be reconciliation if Jesus already knew the outcome. Jesus poses the question and then must stand there, waiting, arms open, terribly vulnerable, for us to walk into them and affirm the bond of love. Peter had betrayed Jesus, terribly, three times. Is it any wonder, then, that Jesus must ask repeatedly if Peter really loves him? And each time, Peter rises to the occasion, throwing off his unstable character and affirming that he does indeed love Jesus and is now ready to pursue the consequences of that love. Peter must affirm his love repeatedly following repeated offences. How many times must we affirm our love of Jesus? How many times have we betrayed him? Is it any wonder that Paul advises the Thessalonians to pray without ceasing? Rest assured that God always leaves the question open, is always waiting with open arms outstretched, for us to confirm that our love is yet deeper and yet wider and yet more profound. Be reconciled with Christ.

Of course, entering into a relationship of reconciled love with Christ is no time to rest on our laurels. Out of our continually renewed reconciliation with Christ comes a continually renewed charge to care for Jesus’ flock. Every time that Jesus asks us to confirm our loving relationship and we offer an abundant affirmation, Jesus goes on to command us: “Feed my lambs.” “Tend my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.”

This feeding, this tending, this caring for Jesus flock requires a twofold motion on our part. First it requires that we lay down our lives. If we are to pick up this new task, this new mission of caring for Jesus’ flock, we must lay down that which already preoccupies us. We must lay down our lives.

Jesus tells Peter, “Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” Peter, apparently, was destined to lay down his life quite physically, quite carnally, quite fleshly. Peter was, in fact, to die. Peter’s manner of laying down his life was death.

This is what the Celtic saints called the red martyrdom, death on behalf of the faith, with its rather obvious allusion in the color of blood. Indeed, some today are still called to the red martyrdom. We need only think of some of the genocidal movements in these last decades: of the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, of the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians in Yugoslavia. We need only think of the Latin American priests who were executed, often enough at their own altars, for standing up to tyrannical powers. We need only think of our own alumnus, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I will not tell his story because if you do not know it then the Boston University School of Theology is in a sad state indeed.

Most, hopefully all, of us are not called to the red martyrdom. Neither were many of the Celtic saints. And yet we, like they, are called to lay down our lives. The Celts described this laying down as the green and white martyrdoms. The green martyrs were those who rejected societal life and removed themselves to seclusion in order to study and contemplate. This was the Celtic monastic tradition. The white martyrs, on the other hand, accepted a voluntary exile, setting out in small boats with no means of navigation, wicker coracles, to be blown where the Spirit willed. These martyrs were the Celtic missionaries who laid down their lives for the sake of the realm of God.

We, too, are called to lay down our lives. We are sometimes called to reject life as our society and culture would have us live it. We are called to come apart for a time of study and contemplation; we call it seminary. We are called to leave our homes and our families and our friends to go somewhere we may not wish to go, (Boston is not home for everyone), on behalf of those we do not know and may not even like.

The belt has been fastened around out waists. For Peter, the person at the other end, taking him where he does not wish to go, by tradition is Rome. Like Jesus, by tradition Peter was crucified, although perhaps upside down. But I wonder if that is what Jesus meant. I wonder if instead it is not Jesus at the other end, fastening the belt around our waists, all the while saying “be reconciled. Trust me. Love me. Follow me.”

Yes, it is this final command that indicates that the care of Jesus’ flock is not simply about laying down our lives but also about taking up. We take up the command, or maybe it is more an offer, to follow Jesus. “Follow me.” Just as Jesus first called the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee so too we are called. “Follow me.”

This is not the “Follow me” that the church has often made it. It is not a “Follow me” that gives primacy to Peter. It does not give Peter the flock nor does it give Peter charge over the flock but instead it makes Peter the servant of the flock, tending and feeding the sheep and the lambs, and it even tells Peter how to do it, “follow me and I will show you how it is done.” This “Follow me” reserves the flock to Jesus and makes Peter sovereign over none and servant of all. Even as he takes up the invitation, “Follow me,” still yet he must lay down his life.

Neither is this a “Follow me” a once and for all time. On a cold December evening, the 4th of December 2003, I found myself kneeling on the floor of the Lindisfarne Community motherhouse in Ithaca, New York. A cold, silver chain was placed around my neck with the community cross dangling from it that had blessed at Eucharist the previous day. With the community laying hands upon me, +Andy, my abbot, read the following, “When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my lambs.’ A second time he said to him, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Tend my sheep.’ He said to him the third time, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’ Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’ And he said to him, ‘Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my sheep.’” At the end of the reading, I was a novice in the Lindisfarne Community. It would be easy to think that joining a monastic order would be the end learning what Jesus’ means in saying, “Feed my lambs” and “Follow me.” It would be easy to think that being noviced, or even ordained, is a sign of achievement. They are not. They are merely signs of new life begun. They are present signs upon which to look back in seeking a direction for our constant conversion.

This “Follow me” is not what we expect. It is not the “follow me” the stereotypical white male sitcom star expects from his stereotypical insecure girlfriend after having the “lets talk about our relationship” discussion. Neither is it the “follow” me that the child in the grocery store ignores while staring transfixed at the candy in the checkout aisle. It is certainly not the “follow me” that Peter expects after reconciling with Jesus, having the manner of his death prophesied to his face.

Instead, this “follow me” defies all expectations. This is a “follow me” that will resound across continents and down twenty centuries. This is a “follow me” that is indicative of a faith that can move mountains. This “follow me” asks all that we have and promises more than we could ever imagine. This “follow me” is an invitation not only into the realm of God but to have a hand in growing the realm together with God. This “follow me” is offered by an insecure and vulnerable Jesus whose very insecurity and vulnerability are signs of the deep love and compassion that reconcile heaven with earth.

Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Jesus is also the shepherd who entrusts the flock to our care. As the lamb, we are the shepherd who accompanies Jesus through insecurity and vulnerability to reconciliation. As the shepherd, Jesus accompanies us in our insecurity and vulnerability to reconciliation, and calls us to “feed my sheep,” laying down our lives, and “follow me,” learning to be shepherds and servants, one of another.

Ash Wednesday Message

2007-02-21T08:02:00.000-05:00

1 Timothy 6: 6-19
Daniel 9: 3-6, 17-19

Today is the beginning of the Christian season of Lent. We receive ashes on our foreheads in the sign of the cross as a symbol of our penitence for our sins and of our frailty and vulnerability. It is a common practice in Lent for Christians to give up a favorite food or entertainment or other self-gratifying practice as a symbol of our identity with the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross. Nevertheless, it is merely a symbol. I do not take symbolism lightly, as I understand symbols to be the primary means that we orient ourselves in proper relationship to God and creation, and so for me to say that lenten sacrifice is "merely a symbol" points to a reality yet more profound.

Indeed, I invite you today to another lenten discipline. I began this practice after M.P. Joseph informed those of us taking his "Contextual Theologies of the Third World" course that 33,000 people die every day of hunger. I had heard such statistics before, but for some reason it never stuck until M.P. said it. 33,000 people die each day of a predicament that is imminently curable. 33,000 people. And so every morning during morning prayer I pray for the 33,000 people who will die during the course of the coming day of hunger. And every evening during evening prayer I pray for the 33,000 people who have died over the course of the closing day of hunger. I invite you to join me in praying for these people. By the time we gather together on Sunday morning for worship 132,000 people will have died. By the time Easter rolls around and we celebrate the resurrection of Christ 1,320,000 people will have died. I should mention, while the church traditionally takes Sundays off from fasting, hunger is not so considerate.

We confess that we have no righteousness to present before God in supplication. Nevertheless, God's mercy is great. May this practice be for us an aid in the pursuit of righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. We who have food and clothing should be content with these in abundance but not in surplus. Perhaps this practice will bear fruit in us in the cultivation of a spirituality of "enoughness."

Sexual Identity

2007-02-07T20:58:00.000-05:00

Some thoughts in response to the argument that homosexuality is bad if it results from nurture but may be all right if rooted in nature:

I'm not sure the nature/nurture distinction is really quite so distinct. Postmodern theorists would argue that all of reality is socially constructed, including sexual identity. While this seems to lead to a nurture viewpoint, it really is an ontological claim about all of reality. Our nature is that we are socially constructed. There is no tabula raza that constitutes our identity prior to whatever social, "nurturing," forces exert themselves upon it.

Now, I'm not entirely a postmodernist, but I don't need to be to escape the nature/nurture distinction. I just have to say that human sexuality is more complex than the binary between homosexual and heterosexual. Queer theology looks at Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and other queer identities. It's not even a linear spectrum; it's more like a color wheel, or better yet a sphere, with some people locating themselves in varying relations to all of the different factors. Research suggests that most "heterosexual" people have homoerotic thoughts at various points in their lives about people of the same sex. Similarly, "homosexual" people have heteroerotic thoughts about people of the opposite sex.

So, what then are we to make of this theologically? I would say that for most people, their human nature is to have some sort of place in the sexual identity sphere that is a mean value but that throughout their lives they will move around a bit within the sphere. This is how God created us and it is indeed good. This is our nature. Our nurture, our social construction, on the other hand, functions to sector off certain sectors of the sexual identity sphere as bad. Evolutionary psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt see this practice as part of human adaptive sensibilities to survive in a sometimes hostile world. Theologically, I would say that the human fall, sectoring off parts of the sexual identity sphere, is a result of and deeply interconnected with the fall of creation that makes creation sometimes hostile to human thriving. Salvation really is with Christ who reestablishes the full sexual identity sphere and overcomes the hostility between creation and human thriving, at least potentially. We are sinful, therefore, insofar as we continue to reject the careful balance inherent to the created world and reestablished by Christ and therefore also continue to reject the fullness of the sexual identity sphere.

This is not a judgment. It is a theological position. I've found it helpful. Perhaps others will too.

God calls us to unity through love for the sake of the world

2007-02-06T22:01:00.000-05:00

A homily delivered at Morning Prayer, Marsh Chapel, Boston University, Wednesday 7 February 2007.

Given the specialized track I have developed for my MDiv studies, ecumenical systematic theology, it should not be surprising that I chose today to be one of the three days I preach this semester when I saw the given readings from the daily lectionary for today. In the text from the Gospel according to John, we find Jesus at the end of a prayer that spans the whole chapter. The first five verses speak of glorification in eternal life. In verses 6-19, Jesus prays that the disciples will be united in the word shared among them and that God will protect them from the evil one who sets the world against them because of the word. In the pericope just heard, Jesus prays that those who will believe in the word shared among the disciples will be united. Notice, however, that the form of prayer Jesus is engaged in here is petition. Jesus is requesting that God ensure the unity. Jesus has shared the glory given to him with the disciples for this purpose and is now asking God to fulfill it.

What is the means by which God fulfills the unity of those gathered in the word? It is love. Love is a complicated word, often misused and abused. I do not want to try to sort all of that out here. But do realize that it is a special word. Notice here how it functions. In the 2 Chronicles text, when the temple of God is finished and all of the people of God have been gathered together into one body, praise is given “for God’s steadfast love endures forever.” The praise of God, the God of enduring love, is the glory of God which has filled the temple “so that the priests could not stand to minister.” Love is what brought the people together in unity. Back in the Gospel text, the love of God indwelling the disciples is the result of the name of God becoming known, a symbol of deep spiritual wisdom. It is not just any love, but the love with which God loved Jesus, and this love is itself Jesus in the disciples. This completes the cycle of indwelling started in verse 21: the Father is in Jesus, Jesus is in the Father, the disciples are in them and now they, Jesus and through Jesus the Father, are in the disciples. God fulfills the unity of the disciples, then and now, by drawing all together in the love of divine life.

Sadly, the Gospel text stops short of the inclusive message we have come to expect. The ecumenical movement loves this text because it binds together ecumenism and mission, or at least seems to. Really it does not. It only works if we read the “believing” of the world through the lens of the Reformation so that engendering belief that Jesus was sent by God is the missiological task with a salvific goal. Here, what is desired is not so much belief as we would think of it, but recognition. This is clearer in verse 23 where “know” is substituted for “believe.” The love that signals salvation in the Gospel of John is reserved to the disciples while recognition of that love in the disciples is the scrap left to the world without an invitation to participation. This great ecumenical text is not a call for mission but a perplexing and disheartening Christian triumphalism. It is a rejection of the world.

Surely this cannot be all? Surely it is not. In verse 20 Jesus prays “on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word.” Belief is not some cognitive assent with salvific effect, it is participation in the word shared by the disciples. Remembering the prologue to the Gospel of John, the word is the very participation in divine life, “the word was God.” The disciples, in whom God dwells and who dwell in God in love, extend the arms to those who recognize the divine love working in them. The word of the disciples is analogous to the Jesus the word of God, a dynamic principle working to bring the world into divine life. This is seen again in verse 26, and now the unity of the disciples in God and Jesus Christ is made manifest because Jesus will make the name of God known through the word of the disciples in verse 20. The prayer really is an ecumenical vision, but not one of reaching out to impose some cognitive uniformity. Instead, it is an ecumenism that gathers ever more diverse elements together in the temple in the presence of the glory of the loving God, and then, when the priests can no longer stand to minister, it opens the arms to more.

Intentionality After Life

2007-01-21T13:42:00.001-05:00

We found out today that an undergraduate student committed suicide. Working here at Marsh Chapel, I am involved to a certain extent in the pastoral care of the campus following events such as these. Even as we go about the business of consoling bereft and grieving friends, relatives, classmates, professors and even those who never knew him but still feel the loss deeply, it is a reminder that we have failed to share the life-giving love of Christ as we ought.

My first move upon hearing the news was to look him up on Facebook. What a wonderful tool for ministry! There are two people who share this name here at Boston University. I should not be surprised; there are some thirty thousand students here. It is relatively easy to discern who it is because one is a graduate student. I hesitate, hovering over the appropriate link before clicking it. What would the profile of someone who commits suicide look like? I would expect it to have few friends, few pictures, few groups, few recent posts on the wall, few if any recent entries on the mini-feed. I would expect that the depression that leads to suicide would be reflected in a spare and bare profile. I click the link. I am surprised to find that, in fact, he had many friends, many photos, many groups, many recent posts on his wall, many recent entries on his mini-feed. The two most recent entries are new friends added. My heart pangs, wondering what it will feel like for that friend, also a BU student to learn of his death and to discover that she was the last friend added to his list. I scroll down and discover that he worked locally part-time. What will it be like for his coworkers to learn that he took his own life? I look at this list of "friends in other networks" and discover that he had two friends at my own alma mater. I click on the links to their profiles. They both arrived after I had already left. I can imagine them seeking out solace in the chapel where I used to worship. I realize that I am relating to this poor soul, and that I am relating to him because he is dead; I feel guilty for having failed to relate to him in life.

Tomorrow will be January 22, two years to the day that my friend Linda died. She did not commit suicide; she was murdered in her Baltimore apartment. I knew Linda through middle and high school, sharing in classes together, lunch, rides home. She was in charge of the flag squad that performed with the marching band at football games during her first two years and I was in the band. We were in the National and Math Honor Societies together. She had gone to Johns Hopkins University to study biomedical engineering and was a semester away from graduating. Her death was the advent of my experience with Facebook; I created an account so that I could see her face after she had died. We had lost touch somewhat after high school and I needed to reconnect, to re-relate. Two years later, I still mourn her death.

Last week I learned that the man who killed Linda plead guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. I am sure that for many this brings some sense of closure, but not for me. Closure is when the violence stops, when the death stops. Life in prison is not the death penalty, but in our society it is still a death. We lock away people who threaten the existence of our society and all too often we throw away the key. There is little attempt, if any, to bring healing to such people. There is certainly an intent to break off relationship. This is not courage, it is cowardice. Facing the villainy in others would mean facing the villainy in ourselves, something none of us is wont to do. It is easier, we think, to lock the problem away in a little drawer, along with all of the other things we would rather not face, and forget about them. We never stop to think that we are locking away a part of ourselves as well. We are all complicit in Linda's death. What would cause someone to do such a thing? What are the social, cultural, political, economic, and yes theological conditions that would drive a person to such a drastic point as killing someone in an attempt to steal from them? These are questions we do not like to ask. Instead, we are merely human and allow our fight or flight instincts to take over. Nevertheless, just as we are complicit in the death of this student at BU by suicide because we failed to reach out and relate until it was too late, we are complicit in Linda's death because we failed to relate to the man who killed her, and we are complicit in the killer's death because we fail, day in and day out, to relate to ourselves.

When will we learn to intentionally relate to the living? And why do we wait to relate until death's sting has already been felt?

What Was, What Is, and What Might Be

2007-01-07T17:38:00.000-05:00

January 7, 2007
Feast of the Baptism of Christ
Hughes United Methodist Church
Wheaton, MD

Isaiah 43: 1-7
Luke 3: 15-22

Clip from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings: “The Mirror of Galadriel.”

Raise your hand if you remember your baptism.

I remember nothing from my baptism, which is really not surprising given that I was an infant when it happened. I am told that it happened right here in this sanctuary when Rev. Ed Van Metre was the senior pastor, but I must admit that it can sometimes be hard to recognize its importance when I do not even recall it happening! Perhaps some of you who also cannot remember your baptisms can sympathize. I can remember confirmation, up at the altar rail, surrounded by family and friends, when Carl Rife and Carletta Allen were the pastors. I remember my ordination to the diaconate, with my parents and the Lindisfarne Community surrounding me, but that one is easy because it just happened this past summer. But my baptism I do not remember. It makes the notion of “remembering our baptisms,” which we will do shortly, slightly ironic.

Nevertheless, we know that our baptisms do have meaning. The World Council of Churches has attempted to explain this meaning as it is found in all of the churches in its study document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry. First and foremost, baptism is a sign of new life in Christ and the fellowship of all of the baptized in the body of Christ, the church. For turn-of-the-era Jews and early Christians, water symbolized death, and so baptism is a sign of dying with Christ as we pass under the water, and rising again with Christ as we reemerge. (This symbolism is, of course, clearer in full immersion baptism). Water is used for cleaning and so symbolizes cleansing from sin, conversion from seeking to direct our own lives in spite of God to life in communion with God who pardons and forgives our sins and offenses. As we heard in the Gospel reading, the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism, and so baptism is a time when the Holy Spirit descends upon us and remains with us in life thereafter. These shared experiences of meaning in baptism are a sign of our common discipleship and the fact that we are knit together in the one body of Christ. Finally, these shared meanings in common discipleship are a sign of the inbreaking of the realm of God in the present world order.

But how are we to access these meanings if we cannot even remember the event happening? To bridge this gap, I want to briefly explore what the experience of baptism was in the early church, what the tradition of baptism became and is today, and then I will let our reaffirmation or remembrance of baptism serve as a sign of what our baptisms might be, recognizing that the road to sanctification twists and turns and is paved with bumps and dips.

To explore early Christian baptism, I borrow from Aidan Kavanagh, longtime professor of liturgy at Yale Divinity School:

“So they stripped and stood there, probably faint from fasting, shivering from the cold of early Easter morning and with awe at what was about to transpire. Years of formation were about to be consummated; years of having their motives and lives scrutinized; years of hearing the word of God read and expounded at worship; years of being dismissed with prayer before the faithful went on to celebrate the eucharist; years of having the doors to the assembly hall closed to them; years of seeing the tomb-like baptistry building only from without; years of hearing the old folks of the community tell hair-raising tales of what being a Christian had cost their own grandparents when the emperors were still pagan; years of running into a reticent and reverent vagueness concerning what actually was done by the faithful at the breaking of bread and in that closed baptistry. Tonight all this was about to end as they stood there naked on a cold floor in the gloom of this eerie room.

“When all the catechumens have been thoroughly oiled, they and the bishop are suddenly startled by the crash of the baptistry doors being thrown open. Brilliant golden light spills out into the shadowy vestibule, and following the bishop (who has now regained his composure), the catechumens and the assistant presbyters, deacons, deaconesses and sponsors move into the most glorious room that most of them have ever seen. It is a high, arbor-like pavilion of green, gold, purple and white mosaic from marble floor to domed ceiling, sparkling like jewels in the light of innumerable oil lamps that fill the room with heady warmth. The windows are beginning to blaze with the light of Easter dawn. The walls curl with vines and tendrils that thrust up from the floor, and at their tops, apostles gaze down robed in snow-white togas, holding crowns. These apostles stand around a golden chair draped with purple on which rests only an open book. And above all these, in the highest point of the ballooning dome, a naked Jesus (very much in the flesh) stands up to his waist in the Jordan as an unkempt John pours water on him, and God's disembodied hand points the Holy Spirit at Jesus' head in the form of a white bird.

“Suddenly the catechumens realize that they have unconsciously formed themselves into a mirror image of this lofty icon on the floor directly beneath it. They are standing around a pool in the middle of the floor, into which gushes water pouring noisily from the mouth of a stone lion crouching atop a pillar at poolside.

“Then a young male catechumen of about ten, the son of pious parents, is led down into the pool by the deacon. The water is warm (it has been heated in a furnace), and the oil on his body spreads out on the surface in iridescent swirls. The deacon positions the child near the cascade from the lion's mouth. The bishop leans over on his cane and, in a voice that sounds like something out of the Apocalypse, says: "Euphemius! Do you believe in God the Father, who created all of heaven and earth?" After a nudge from the deacon beside him, the boy murmurs that he does. And just in time, for the deacon, who has been doing this for 50 years and is the boy's grandfather, wraps him in his arms, lifts him backward into the rushing waters and forces him under the surface. The old deacon smiles through his beard at the wide brown eyes that look up at him in shock and fear from beneath the water (the boy has purposely not been told what to expect). Then he raises him up coughing and sputtering. The bishop waits until the boy can speak again, and leaning over a second time, tapping the boy on the shoulder with his cane, says: "Euphemius! Do you believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, who was conceived of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was crucified, died and was buried? Who rose on the third day and ascended into heaven, from whence he will come again to judge the living and the dead?" This time the boy replies like a shot, "I do," and then holds his nose. "Euphemius! Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, the master and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who is to be honored and glorified equally with the Father and the Son, who spoke by the prophets? And in one holy, catholic and apostolic church which is the communion of God's holy ones? And in the life that is coming?" "I do."

“When the boy comes up the third time, his vast grandfather gathers him in his arms and carries him up the steps leading out of the pool.”

This exposition of the baptismal experience of the early church seems quite distant to our late-modern ears, does it not? The greatest disparity is probably that early Christians baptized adults and adolescents, not infants, as is our practice today. The original reason for baptizing infants was the concern that only the baptized could get to heaven. Since the infant mortality rate was high in pre-modern societies, and remains quite high in some societies today, the church was worried about the status of those children who did not make it. The solution was to separate baptism from confirmation, so that baptism is the sacrament of initiation into the church at infancy while confirmation is the sacrament that seals baptism upon reaching maturity. Sadly, as we late-moderns have become accustomed to very low infant mortality rates, although not entirely absent, many of us struggle to find meaning in the theological answer to the mortality problem so many centuries ago. Baptism has become simply what one does upon the birth of a baby: a cultural ritual instead of a sacrament pointing beyond itself. Indeed, there are many Christians who come to church only on Christmas, Easter, and at the birth of a new member of the family; and some who also skip Easter and Christmas, only coming for the baptism.

In his Christmas Eve sermon, Dr. Ennis told the story of a pious grandmother who wanted her granddaughter to be baptized in spite of the fact that the identity of the child’s father was unknown. The pastor did not want to celebrate the baptism without being sure that there was a family to raise the child in the church, but the grandmother was persistent and asked that the issue be taken to the session, the decision making body in the Presbyterian polity. Finally, the question went to the congregation, and the pastor asked who would come and stand with the child and her mother. Eventually, most of the congregation stood with her. My first reaction to the story was, “how could a pastor possibly deny the sacrament of baptism to a child?” Upon further reflection, however, I decided that the pastor was not wrong for being concerned about the spiritual welfare of the child, but he was wrong for assuming that spiritual welfare is dependent upon a Norman Rockwellesque nuclear family. The congregation was right to take up the responsibility their own baptisms placed upon them to stand by the child, the mother, and the grandmother in guiding the child to maturity. In the end, this child’s baptism was given a great deal more gravity than might have been the case if the father had been known, not unlike the story of the birth of another child, albeit many centuries earlier.

The church has a special word for remembering, the Greek word αναμνεσις. This word has been interpreted theologically with regard to the sacraments of the church to mean not simply remembering a past event, but also making it present again. Furthermore, αναμνεσις not only makes the past present but also remembers the future, giving us a foretaste of what might be. It is in this full sense of remembering that I would encourage you to enter into the remembrance of baptism in a few moments. The remembrance of baptism is not a rebaptism, but for those of us who cannot remember our own baptisms, it may mean remembering out baptism as if for the first time since the actual first time is absent to us. Moreover, for all of us the remembrance of baptism is not a dwelling in the past but a movement toward the future accompanied by our family of those baptized into the body of Christ and in the awful or awe-filled presence of God in the power of the Holy Spirit. “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.” Amen.

Of Babies and Bathwater

2007-01-07T17:36:00.000-05:00

January 7, 2007
Feast of the Baptism of Christ
Hughes United Methodist Church
Wheaton, MD

Isaiah 43: 1-7
Psalm 89
Acts 8: 14-25
Luke 3: 15-22

Are you familiar with the proverb “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?” The roots of this pithy saying can be traced back to Germany in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century and it was even picked up by Martin Luther in the polemical context of the Reformation. The practical context is that babies often used to be the last members of the family to wash in the familial bathwater and by then the water was often so dirty that it would have been easy to forget that baby was there, resulting in baby being carried along when the bathwater was discarded. The meaning of the proverb can be further deduced in comparison with the more biblical aphorism contained in the Lucan gospel just heard: “Don’t throw out the wheat with the chaff,” or more blandly but precisely: “Don’t throw out the good with the bad.”

It is quite easy to draw the analogy between this proverb and the Christian sacrament of baptism, but more difficult to draw the analogy with Jesus’ own baptism. Despite the fact that we have stuck the Feast of the Baptism of Christ on the liturgical calendar a mere two weeks after Christmas, a week after the Feast of the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus and almost a month before the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Jesus was actually about thirty years old when he was baptized. This is all smoothed over quite nicely by the tradition that has developed of baptizing infants, but this was neither the practice of the early church nor of Jesus. However, this development in the liturgical tradition does point to the depth of meaning Christians find in the sacrament of baptism to the point that it became the guarantor of salvation and so of crucial importance to infants who were at great risk for survival for much of Christian history until the modern period, at least for those of us who live in societies with access to the best of modern medicine; the vast majority of Christians live in the southern hemisphere and go without such niceties.

It is the depth of meaning to be found in the symbol of baptism that makes the proverb of babies and bathwater applicable to Jesus’ own baptism when it is remembered that Christian theology has taken from Paul the metaphor of the church as the body of Christ with Jesus himself the head as one of the primary symbols of Christian life together. We celebrate today not only the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus and the voice of God proclaiming him the beloved two thousand years ago, but we carry that Trinitarian blessing forward into our own historical moment as the body of Christ. We too are beloved of God and hosts of the Holy Spirit and so we are responsible for seeing to it that the precious gift given us in that baby two short weeks ago is not washed downstream in the baptismal waters of the Jordan. In the psalm for this morning we sing of the love God has for us, for
“The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours;
the world and all that is in it—you have founded them.
The north and the south—you created them;
Tabor and Hermon joyously praise your name.”
We are created by God and so loved by God, and thus we must stand in ultimate perspective before God our creator, to borrow a phrase from my teacher Bob Neville. To stand before God ultimately is to stand responsible for the created lives we have been entrusted with living, and this responsibility is taken up in the sacrament of baptism. Baptism is a visible sign of the love God has for us and a reminder of the responsibility that love implies on our part, namely to discern the baby from the bathwater.

Kilian McDonnell finds a similar theology of baptism in the early church, that “the goal of Christian baptism is ‘to become pleasing to the Father.’ The Spirit, therefore, comes down on the Son that he, the Son, might ‘reveal salvation to all,’ to teach us how to attain the Father. The baptism of Jesus sets the pattern for the whole trinitarian economy of salvation.” This sounds rather easy, does it not? If you want to discern the baby from the bathwater, just follow the pointing of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. But this does not really solve the problem; which spirit is the Holy Spirit? There are many spirits blowing about in the world, but not all of them are the Holy Spirit pointing to the baby amidst the bathwater and thus allowing us to stand in ultimate perspective before God our creator.

We can hear these many spirits blowing through our churches quite clearly. How often have you heard it said, “the church really should do x,” or more emphatically, “the church simply must do y”? More often than not it is put negatively: “the church should not do this,” or “the church must not do to that.” How often have you said such things yourselves? I want to suggest that most of these “should” and “must” statements are probably bathwater. Why? Because the whole problem of the baby and the bathwater is that the baby is too small and there is too much bathwater; there are many spirits, but one Holy Spirit.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible that all of the things we “should” or “must” do really are from the Holy Spirit of God, they really are the baby. This seems to be a contradiction; how could the same things be either baby or bathwater, both baby and bathwater? The contradiction is resolved when we realize that it is not the things in themselves that are either baby or bathwater, spirit or Holy Spirit, but rather whether and how the things orient us to be able to stand in ultimate perspective, the meaning they convey for us that allow us to stand before God our creator, that makes them one or the other. The discernment of spirits, of babies from bathwater, is finally a human problem. It is true that we must choose the good, we must choose Christ, but the act of choosing is not the end of the story: we choose Christ when we follow in the way that leads to standing in ultimate perspective, when we seek the Holy Spirit anew in every moment of our lives, when we take up our cross daily.

I have the privilege of regularly attending Trinity Church in Copley Square in Boston, an Episcopal church of about four thousand members that is just completing renovations costing about $54 million. What better context for posing our question: baby or bathwater? It would be easy to say that paying $54 million for just about anything must be bathwater, but my experience at the church is contrary to this. I came into the community as the renovations were underway and have stayed as they come to completion. I have been quite impressed by the insistence of the church leadership, both clergy and especially laity, that the renovations are only significant insofar as they point not only the members of the church but also the entire city of Boston beyond themselves and toward God and neighbor. The renovations themselves do so in that the homeless of Boston who gather at night on Copley Square sleep on the steps and under the porticoes of the church, but the people who make up Trinity Church carry forth their worship, or their work to employ the literal meaning of the word “liturgy,” to the ends of the world. Trinity Church has an annual food drive called “Loaves & Fishes” to help stock food pantries around Boston, they host and fund the Trinity Education for Excellence Program to provide leadership development for students in the Boston public schools, they have been involved in an interfaith effort to bring health care to all Massachusetts residents, and they send several teams to Honduras each year to help with structural improvements, various services, and medical treatment, to name just a few ways that Trinity reaches out to its neighbors.

Trinity Church is a wonderful example of the fact that choosing Christ, choosing the baby, is an issue of orientation beyond ourselves in the midst of many conflicting symbols and realities, many spirits vying for our attention. We choose the Holy Spirit when we choose according to the fruits of the Spirit, some of which Paul outlines in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These fruits alone, however, are just as prone to perversion as any other norms so long as they are not oriented beyond the people who adopt them. This is why the great commandment, to love God and neighbor, is really one commandment. We are oriented properly to God who is beyond ourselves by also being oriented beyond ourselves toward our neighbor even as we are oriented properly to God who is at the very depths of our being by also being oriented toward our neighbor for whom God is also at the very depths of being.

I would suspect that many of the “should” and “must” directives to be heard in churches are oriented more toward those proclaiming them than they are toward God and neighbor. Many churches are desperate for funds to pay the utility bills, keep up with regular maintenance, and generally keep the doors open. Out of desperation, these churches turn much of their attention to raising money for the sake of the building and to increasing membership in order to raise more money for the sake of the building. Members of these churches are deeply concerned about the facility because it is where their families have worshipped sometimes for generations. Pastors are concerned about losing their pensions and benefits if traditional denominational structures fail. Churches imaginatively construct golden ages from the remembered past, hopelessly and helplessly seeking to establish the foundations to rebuild this ephemeral “Christendom.” Such churches, members and pastors have not just thrown the baby out with the bathwater, they have thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater of fear and illusion!

Glen V. Wiberg elaborates on this by paraphrasing our passage from Luke’s second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, in his Christian Century article “A Costly Baptism:” “A local businessman observing the visitation of the Holy Spirit wants to make a deal. Since everything has its price, he thinks, why not the Holy Spirit? Just name your price! But Peter speaks the terror: To hell with your money! And you along with it! Repent of your arrogant presumptions of striking bargains and offering bribes for God's costly gift.”

The church is guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater not only in its internal concerns but also in how it goes about interacting with the world. Over the centuries, the church has adopted many authorities as trustworthy guides for her members in walking the paths of life. Some of these guides include the scriptures contained in the Bible along with other texts written through the first century of the Common Era, the decisions of councils of bishops especially in the fourth through eighth centuries but continuing into the present for our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, the investigations of theologians shining the light of God through human intellect, and the daily lived experience of each and every Christian in all of its guilt, fear, anger, love, joy, peace, and hope. The problem is that in many churches the guides have become ossified into absolute authorities and so ends in themselves instead of means to the end of standing before God the creator in ultimate perspective. Furthermore, the ability of the church to speak authoritatively into this historical moment is made laughable by reliance upon these ossified authorities, leading many to charge our trustworthy guides with lacking credibility, a charge that holds so long as they remain absolutized. We throw the baby out with the bathwater when we fail to exercise the vocation adopted in baptism to be discerners of spirits in the care of trustworthy guides and instead lazily cling to absolute authorities.

So what is it like to stand in ultimate perspective? I think it is probably a lot like baptism; at least as early Christians experienced it. I quote here from Aidan Kavanagh, longtime professor of liturgy at Yale Divinity School: “So they stripped and stood there, probably faint from fasting, shivering from the cold of early Easter morning and with awe at what was about to transpire. Years of formation were about to be consummated; years of having their motives and lives scrutinized; years of hearing the word of God read and expounded at worship; years of being dismissed with prayer before the faithful went on to celebrate the eucharist; years of having the doors to the assembly hall closed to them; years of seeing the tomb-like baptistry building only from without; years of hearing the old folks of the community tell hair-raising tales of what being a Christian had cost their own grandparents when the emperors were still pagan; years of running into a reticent and reverent vagueness concerning what actually was done by the faithful at the breaking of bread and in that closed baptistry. Tonight all this was about to end as they stood there naked on a cold floor in the gloom of this eerie room.

When all the catechumens have been thoroughly oiled, they and the bishop are suddenly startled by the crash of the baptistry doors being thrown open. Brilliant golden light spills out into the shadowy vestibule, and following the bishop (who has now regained his composure), the catechumens and the assistant presbyters, deacons, deaconesses and sponsors move into the most glorious room that most of them have ever seen. It is a high, arbor-like pavilion of green, gold, purple and white mosaic from marble floor to domed ceiling, sparkling like jewels in the light of innumerable oil lamps that fill the room with heady warmth. The windows are beginning to blaze with the light of Easter dawn. The walls curl with vines and tendrils that thrust up from the floor, and at their tops, apostles gaze down robed in snow-white togas, holding crowns. These apostles stand around a golden chair draped with purple on which rests only an open book.”

To stand in ultimate perspective is to participate in the greatest mysteries of human existence. Thankfully, we have been graced with trustworthy guides and fruits of the spirit at baptism so that we do not walk the path either blind or alone. Let us walk forward together, or better yet take up the dance together with God, renewing our commitment to being a community in love with the baby and unafraid to let the bathwater flow gently away. We are Christians not only as disciples of Christ, but also as discerners of spirits. Amen.

The Unity of the Spirit in the Bond of Peace

2006-08-06T09:30:00.000-05:00

Sermon preached at Hughes United Methodist Church, Wheaton, MD on 6 August 2006

As I sat on the balcony of my cousins' house in St. Cergue Switzerland at the end of June, working on my sermon for this morning, I gazed across the wildflower laden fields that surround the house formerly owned by French philosopher Henri Bergson and across Lake Geneva at the grandeour and beauty of Mount Blanc and thought to myself that there could be no better home for the primary institutional representation of the movement toward church unity than in the shadow of such an iconic vista of the glory of God. Last night, at Chicago's O'Hare airport, rewriting the sermon I wrote in Geneva, I was struck by how my change of sermon writing scenery to rushing passengers, cramped waiting lounges and extraordinarily overpriced food is actually a much more accurate metaphor for the ecumenical movement in its present practice. You see, I have spent the last month and a half traveling across three continents visiting and journeying with various expressions of ecumenical community and getting an on-the-ground experience to balance out the idealistic vision of ecumenism that we are sometimes taught in the seminary classroom. This meant that the closely argued, thoroughly researched sermon on the Ephesians 4 text suddenly became inadequate in the face of the deeply personal situations and experiences I encountered.

The passage we read from the Epistle to the Ephesians this morning emphatically exhorts us to "lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called," and then goes on to assign to that life three virtues - humility, gentleness and patience - and one characteristic - unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. It is this latter characteristic that concerns me this morning as it is a perfect definition for the goal of the ecumenical movement. The ecumenical movement is not concerned solely with church unity for its own sake any more than Jesus, in his prayer recorded in the Gospel according to John on the eve of his death, is concerned with unity for its own sake but instead he says that the goal of church unity is "that the world might believe." This is the same thing the writer of Ephesians is concerned with when he speaks of church unity in the bond of peace because belief in Jesus is belief in the Prince of Peace. Thus, the quest for Christian unity can never be a cheap unity, as some would surely have it, but must be a costly unity that will not even be satisfied with peace within the church but will insist upon a peaceful church in a peaceful world, a sure sign of the coming reign of God.

The first community I visited was the Iona Community. The Iona Abbey was rebuilt by the founder of the Iona Community, George MacLeoud, in replica of the 12th century Benedictine abbey that inhabited the site previously. The Iona Community is a disperced ecumenical order made up of men and women, mostly in Scotland and England but also elsewhere around the world, who have dedicated themselves to a life of prayer, bible study, and service rooted in a deep concern for social justice. As my own abbot jokingly pointed out, everything in the Iona community is about social justice, which gets tacked onto the end of every program theme so that the program I attended was subtitled "Gaelic spirituality and social justice" while other programs look at liturgy and social justice, public action for social justice, free trade and social justice, peanut butter and jelly and social justice; oh, wait, maybe not the last one, but they probably could do! The program was entitled "Where Three Streams Meet," which refers to the Gaelic tradition of going to pray for justice at the place where three streams meet. Throughout the week, we cosmopolitan pilgrims in attendance were introduced to Gaelic culture and language, the struggle to keep both alive under the forces of globalization seeking to supplant the Gaelic language, which is so integral to Gaelic culture, with English, and the violence exerted against Gaelic speakers by English speakers in an attempt to assimilate them. This cultural oppression is of concern to God because Christian spirituality is inherent to Gaelic culture and its oppression is a type of structural violence that does not always leave visible scars but deeply wounds the social psyche of these people of God.

My second visit was with the Taize Community in the south of France, a globally recognized ecumenical order that plays host to between three and six thousand people, mostly under the age of 25, each week of the summer every year, and slightly fewer each week the rest of the year. These droves are drawn from all over the world, bringing their various languages, cultures and lives together to share for a week in the daily round of prayer, study, work and rest of the brothers. Unfortunately, violence has broken through the Taize bubble. Some of you may be aware of the death of brother Roger, founder of the Taize Community, just about a year ago. During evening prayer, a woman sick with mental illness entered the church, passed through the thousands of people surrounding the brothers, cleared the verdant wall of shrubbery separating the brothers from the people, negotiated a crowd of small children surrounding brother Roger, and slit his throat. Immediately after it happened questions arose as to whether the brothers would increase security, installing metal detectors at the doors of the church, searching bags when people arrived. After much prayer and discernment, the brothers decided that they would make no changes in how the community operates. There are no metal detectors or searches. The only protection is the same shrubbery separating the visitors from the brothers that was unable at last to protect brother Roger. To some extent this response comes from one of the 45 thousand letters sent to the community, this one from the prior of the Grande Chartreuse monastery, which said, "The dramatic circumstances of Brother Roger's death are merely an external coating that serve to make yet clearer his vulnerability that he cultivated as a doorway by which, by preference, God gains access to us." Being vulnerable means being open, taking risks that we may be hurt or even killed. And yet it is by this very means that we have access to God. Thus the relationship between unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace beccomes clear as it is only when we are living in peace that the vulnerability necessary to spiritual life and thus Christian unity can exist unmaligned by fear and violence.

Last Monday afternoon I arrived back in the US from a two-week Christian Peacemaker Teams delegation to Colombia. While there we met with people, church leaders, and human rights organizations who suffer under constant and violent oppression by the Colombian government and military, supposedly demobilized paramilitaries, and guerillas. We met one family, out of 3 million in Colombia, who have been displaced from their homes due to being caught in the middle of paramilitary and guerilla violence. We met with a women's organization that runs a series of lunch houses to provide inexpensive meals to women, specifically single mothers, and children. They closed up one of their lunch houses one afternoon and when they returned the next morning discovered that the house had been torn down and both the structure and all of its contents had been removed from the site. They arrived to find an empty lot. Their house had been disappeared by paramilitaries! With met with families of victims of a massacre carried out by paramilitaries on the 16th of May, 1998 when they interrupted a community assembly on a soccer field and insisted that 32 men get on the back of a truck. Twenty-seven complied and have never been heard from again. The rest were shot on the spot. We met with union organizers and human rights activists who are unable to spend consecutive nights in the same place for fear of being assassinated. We met with peasant farmer activists who live in their office in the city because it would be too great a risk to go home at night. We met some of the farmers they advocate for who have been driven from their land with equipment provided by the 700 million dollars the US spends on military aid to Colombia each year, third only to Israel and Egypt, and the land is then taken over by president Urribe and the fourteen other major land owners in Colombia who already own 65% of the land. We heard about the Colombian Law of Justice and Peace, referred to by the people as the Law of Impunity, which was supposedly intended to demobilize the paramilitary but has instead had the effect of legitimizing their violence because they have simply reorganized themselves into private security forces and continue to carry out the same violent acts and oppression of the people that they have been engaged in for years, although now the government can deny complicity because they are "demobilized." We observed a demonstration by workers from the Coca-Cola plant who were protesting the assassination, arranged by the Coca-Cola corporation, of workers who sought to organize unions. We visited a community of displaced on the borders of the industrial city of Barrancabermeja and listened as our bus driver recounted how he lived in that ramshackle and destitute villiage thirteen years ago when paramilitaries came looking for him because he was a leading organizer of the workers at Ecopetrol, the nationalized oil company, and not finding him they assassinated his 20 year old son right there in the street where we were standing. We met with farmers who grow coca, used to make cocaine, who grow it not because they want to but because it is the only way they can subsist. Furthermore, US funded fumigations are being targeted by the Urribe administration against agricultural crops instead of coca crops, as evidenced both by the personal stories of farmers as well as the increase in coca production since fumigations began. Plan Colombia is a failed piece of US foreign policy proped up by multinational corporations who have a special interest in the instability of Colombia because it maximizes their profits. It is one of the winds of doctrine we are warned to resist being blown about by as it is trickery and craftiness in deceitful scheming.

So where is the church in the midst of this corruption and violence? To a large extent the churches are complicit in the violence, either turning a blind eye or even supporting and legitimating the structures that perpetrate it. But there are some churches, and sectors of other churches, who have taken a stand on the side of the poor and the oppressed. They have taken the side of peace because they know that it is the will of God, God's dream for the world, that they do so. We heard that 75 pastors have been assassinated in the past 2 years in northern Colombia. We also observed a popular assembly in Micoahumado, a small peasant villiage in the mountains of northern Colombia, which is a grassroots political organization for the surrounding area. At the assembly we watched as its facilitators welcomed the cooperation of Roman Catholic and pentecostal church leaders in guiding, shaping, and providing space for the assembly to occur. Many of the human rights organizations we met with were birthed in the Roman Catholic church and one of the most effective is still led by a Jesuit priest. We heard from a Mennonite pastor about an ecumenical proposal that has been put forward to try to reform the Law of Justice and Peace so that it effectively mitigates continued violence and oppression.

The movement toward Christian unity is an inherently missiological enterprise. Ecumenism has mission at its heart. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who take up the exhortation to "live a life worthy of the call to which you have been called" which takes as its primary characteristic "unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." At its 9th General Assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil this past February, the World Council of Churches united missions and peacemaking under the banner of reconciliation. They did this in two ways. First, the missions agenda for the next eight years has been set to focus on reconciliation and healing. Second, the assembly approved the faith and order document entitled "The Nature and Mission of the Church" and commended it to the churches for study and reflection. The good news is that the church has not entirely lost sight of the dream God has for the world in which the wolf lies down with the lamb, swords are turned into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. A spirituality of justice and peacemaking is possible only on the foundation of a spirituality of prayer through which God imparts this vision and graces us the courage, strength, and perseverance to attain it. The writer of Ephesians exhorts us to such a life, a "life worthy of the calling to which you have been called," a life characterized by unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Computer Down

2006-07-08T09:01:00.000-05:00

Hello all,

My computer is down and won't be up for a while so I won't be posting for a while. Everything is going great and I will post everything once my computer is back up.

Peace!

WCC Day 1

2006-06-27T16:00:00.000-05:00

When I finally awoke this morning and took a shower, John and Margaret informed me that Charlotte, who was arranging my visit to the World Council of Churches, had scheduled my first meeting for 11AM. She had told me that she would schedule them for this afternoon so I had to pick up the pace so we could get out of the house and into town in time to drop me at the WCC headquarters and then Margaret could get to her appointment. John, who worked for the WCC for many years in charge of the Muslim-Christian dialogue and then interreligious dialogue in general, coming out of retirement to help with the assembly this year in Porto Allegre, accompanied me to the offices to drop me off and then headed off to the United Nations where he has been working with the newly formed Human Rights Council.

My meeting with Simon Oxley was incredibly informative for thinking about ecumenical theological education and formation. My primary question upon entry was about how to address conflict through ecumenical formation. What Dr. Oxley encouraged me to do was to reconceive my question in order to realize that some degree of conflict is inherent to the formation of a truly ecumenical consciousness, even as the success of an ecumenical community is a function of how it conceives, engages, and resolves that conflict. While for many churches faith is a function of certainty, confidence, and conviction, Dr. Oxley framed the ecumenical vision of Christianity as being more fluid and self-critical. He also made an important point regarding distinction and distance. Often Christian communities conceive their identities by creating distance between themselves and the other in the cause of preserving their particularity. Dr. Oxley made the case for more closely aligned distinctions such that particularity is not lost but enriched and refined by coming into contact with difference, something that I have noticed in my globalization studies but that has yet to become internalized by many identity formation processes.

I had an excellent discussion with the Rev. Jacques Matthey regarding ecumenism and mission and was encouraged to hear that he is working on may of the same issues that we covered in my course on ecumenism and mission this past spring. He indicated a two track program for mission over the coming years, the first being reconciliation and the second being healing. The notion of reconciliation brings in many of the issues of justice that the WCC has historically been known for championing while adjusting the paradigm to help conflicting parties live together in peace as opposed to focusing so much on one group overcoming oppression by another. Reconciliation is understood as reconciliation amongst groups, between individuals, and in the relationship of humanity and God, the last of which brings in the theme of evangelism which the WCC has been accused of neglecting in the past. The healing side of the mission movement takes a holistic approach to the wellbeing of the person, both physical and spiritual. It also brings in the pentecostal experience of healing which is more highly spiritualized than the more secularized western approach. The most interesting thing about these two tracks, from my perspective, is that they lead to a greater integration with what are classically defined as issues off faith and order, namely that of ecclesiology. If the message of the church is reconciliation, then the movement toward ecclesial unity becomes central because the message is eviscerated by the lack of reconciliation within the church. The only coherent response to the churches would be to say "Doctor, heal thyself!" Nevertheless, church unity can never be other than a unity in diversity, and so the tension is really walking a knife edge. We concluded our discussion talking about the changing ecclesial nature of the churches in general and the move to more localized expressions of church as opposed to the large denominational institutions. Rev. Matthey lamented that the WCC has been unable as yet to embody this developing reality even as he predicted the final fall of the institutional denominations in about 15 years or so, making it of central importance to my generation of theologians and church leaders. Clearly, I am in the right place in the Lindisfarne Community since our spirituality is so ecumenical while we express a glocalized church structure.

After that meeting I met up with John and we decided to get some lunch at the WCC cafeteria. On the way we ran into Tamara, an Georgian Orthodox friend of John's who works in the faith and order side of things, and invited her to join us for lunch. She was excited to hear that I am from Boston because she is working on bringing a workshop to Boston to discuss the newly adopted ecclesiological document approved by the general assembly last February. We talked about local Boston theologians to be in contact with and I hope my new position as facilitator of the International Mission and Ecumenism Committee of the Boston Theological Institute might be helpful in making this happen. Our conversation turned to some of the tensions amongst Protestant and Orthodox theologians and I expressed my own identification with Orthodoxy as a way to mitigate the sometimes less than positive effects of the western Enlightenment without falling into a postmodern relativism. Our meeting just went to prove that the chance encounters are at least as important as the scheduled meetings.

After lunch John took me on a brief tour, pointing out the library and taking me into the assembly hall and the chapel. The assembly hall is a warm space with a green tapestry embroidered with an image of Christ surrounded by symbols of the various regional churches and framed by a covenantal arc, a fig tree, and a vine. They are set to have translators into six different languages and generally to conduct business much as any international organization, but with the focal point definitely being Christ at the center of the tapestry. Upon entering the chapel there is a ramp down that is carved with symbols pointing to the water of baptism. There are chairs set up around a central alter with a low, wood carved iconostasis such that worship from virtually any denomination could occur there. There is a beautiful organ and a grand piano for music and there are worship and music books from many denominations and from around the world. Beautiful icons adorn the walls. The chapel too is a warm space, but much lighter than the assembly hall. Perhaps some day I will have the privilege of worshipping there with an ecumenical body of Christians.

We returned to L'Echapee via Nyon so that Margaret could pick up her glasses and John and I went to poke around an old castle and some Roman ruins in the town that dates back 2000 years or more. From Nyon we stopped by to visit Bossey Ecumenical Institute, a center for training the next generation's ecumenists run by the WCC, which now offers both masters and Ph.D. programs. The buildings are classic Swiss architecture and the chapel, similar in style to the one at the center in Geneva but smaller, is in a large stone tower. We walked around for a few minutes and noted the view down to the lake. After returning to L'Echapee we have taken a spot of tea and conversed about the problems and promises of the ecumenical movement and the church in general.

As I sit here on the patio, looking down toward the lake while rain clouds roll in, I am struck how the light haze the clouds bring make the Swiss country side stretched out below us look exactly like the paintings I have seen hanging in galleries in North America. Even as some of the most important international work in the world, including the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the Red Cross, and the WCC, amongst many others, is being done in Geneva, it is only a few short kilometers away that one can find cow pastures and vineyards. Somehow Geneva has been able to find a delicate balance between intense and pressing global concerns and the more pastoral life of the spirit. Where better to explore and to practice ecumenical community?

The Longest Day

2006-06-26T21:15:00.000-05:00

The day really is quite long when one stuffs so many hours into it. My Delta Airlines flight from Austin to New York City took off at 7:25AM and landed at JFK at noon. I was rather rudely shocked toward the end of the flight when the flight attendant got on the speaker and asked us to pray for all of the soldiers "doing such important work on our behalf" and then proceeded to play "God Bless America" on the airplane sound system! After quenching my sense of having been insulted, I reflected that what was really going on was a proselytism of the American nationalist religion. Note that I do not call it a religious nationalism, which is the more common term, but a nationalist religion, appearing in this instance in a mostly secular form but frequently appearing in a syncretism with Christianity. Nationalist religion turns the nation state into a deity and takes as its central tenets the authority of the state to set the moral agenda and the sacred nature of national institutions. My orthodox Christian sensibilities were quite offended by this as I was quite sure my rights were somehow being violated; certainly they would have been had the government been responsible for this public enforcement of religious expression. Of course, this sensibility itself is a conflation of religious indignation with nationalist rights. Perhaps it would be framed better to say that the prophet within me wanted to denounce this prophet of Baal as utterly ineffectual and to cry out with Amos:

Hear this word, you cows of Bashan
who are on Mount Samaria,
who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,
who say to their spouses, "Bring something to drink!"
The Sovereign God has sworn in holiness:
The time is surely coming upon you,
when they shall take you away with hooks,
even the last of you with fishhooks.
Through breaches in the wall you shall leave,
each one straight ahead;
and you shall be flung out into Harmon,
says YHWH.
-Amos 4: 1-3

After checking my Europe bag in at the British Airways counter, I took my Colombia bag with me into Manhattan where I joined my uncles, Doug and Alex, for brunch. We went to a restaurant called Imagine. I was quite surprised when they led us through the restaurant out the back into an alley with outdoor seating. My surprise was less about the alley and more about the fact that I realized that this was a filming site for a production made by a couple of Ithaca College Park School of Communications students about getting a date with Drew Barrymore that I had seem with some friends a year ago at IC. This was the restaurant where the date actually occurred! The shrimp quesadilla could have had more shrimp but the margarita and the dessert were both stellar. During our comings and goings from their apartment, we stopped and watched the gay pride parade that started at noon and lasted for about five hours. People lined fifth avenue, 8th, and Christopher St. to watch the festivities. Many of the segments were quite funny and everyone was in good humor about it. It was good to see that at least the whole world has not gone insane.

My flight to London ended up being delayed for an hour and then it took us an hour to taxi from the gate to the runway. Thankfully, this time I was flying British Airways which has superb service and is actually quite comfortable given that I was flying coach. The attendants were very friendly and helpful, although I finally had to tell one of them to stop refilling my wine glass! Now that is a wonderful problem to have! I sat next to a couple heading back to London from holiday in New York. Unfortunately, they ran out of the regular vegetarian meals but they had an alternative in a spinach sandwich that was actually very good. The Indian family sitting behind us was unfortunately not as conciliatory about the situation and made a bit of a fuss about the fact that there were not enough vegetarian meals on board. I slept quite well and woke feeling relatively refreshed, at least as refreshed as possible when sleeping in such small quarters on an airplane.

We arrived in London a bit late due to our late departure and so I got some morning exercise tearing through Heathrow terminal 4 to the opposite end in order to catch my flight to Geneva. I arrived just in time and had a very pleasant flight but unfortunately my checked bag did not, as I discovered upon landing. I met my cousin John at the airport who helped me file the claim with the baggage agency who promised that it would be delivered to the house later that evening. We drove out from the airport discussing the family and arrived at L'Echapee in St. Cergue about three quarters of an hour later. The house is a good ways up one of the Swiss Alps and overlooks Lake Geneva right toward Mont Blanc. Until 1941 it was the residence of the French Philisophe Henri Bergson. It is truly a stunning location with beautiful yards full of wildflowers, (and snails as I discovered in my explorations later in the afternoon). John and Margaret were hosting friends from Brooklyn and currently have a Korean buddhist living on the third floor as he prepares to finish a degree in hotel administration. Margaret served what she described as a modest lunch that started with white wine and sushi, continued with a first course of salmon, and then moved on to the main course of Hungarian style rabbit with sour cherries, various green vegetables, potatoes, salad and bread with a choice of white or red wine. Of course, no Swiss meal is complete without the cheese plate being passed around, and it had to be passed several times as we were entirely taken with the Gruyere and the soft cheese with black truffles in the center. Just as I thought I would burst my belt, John came out from the kitchen with strawberries and whipped cream, a huge bowl of fresh fruit, and coffee. So much for a modest lunch.

We talked together until about 5PM when Margaret and John's friends left and then I took a power nap before John and I took a hike up the mountain to pick up some fresh Gruyere cheese at the local cheesemakers' house. While the cheese was being prepared, we went around the house to contemplate the view of Lake Geneva and the dozen pink pigs in the pen who happily grunted at us. We returned to the house and delivered the cheese only to discover that Margaret had prepared yet another stunning meal, this time consisting of salad, grilled vegetables and meat, more bread and cheese and wine and fresh fruit, and tea to finish off the evening. Margaret kept insisting that it was a modest meal but it was better than I eat except when home with Mom and Dad or when visiting Doug and Alex in New York and we go to some of the finest restaurants. The truth is that it is Margaret who is modest while her food is delectable and superb. Finally, it is time for bed and a much needed rest after such extended travel with very little sleep. I am sure that I will rise refreshed as the bed is very soft and the fresh Swiss air invigorates mind and spirit.

The Promise of Ministry IV: The Power of Prayer

2006-06-25T18:50:00.000-05:00

Our silence broke at noon with the pealing of the chapel carillon followed by a procession of the Christ candle, me bearing a bowl of incense, and a choir of handbells. We processed from the entrance to the chapel down to the hall where we would eat lunch. As the bells played, people began to appear from all over the campus, converging on the clarion sound and the wafting incense. As people arrived I contemplated that fact that the emergence from silence had some things in common with our arising from the prostrations during the service of ordination a week prior. We arose as the congregation said, "Awake, O you who sleep, and arise from the dead." The pealing bells rang out as if calling us to arise from the dead. In both cases, it is interesting that death is a symbol of the place where we find a renewed and deeper sense of life, and in both cases that sense of life is brought forth as prayers rise up from the intercessions of the congregation symbolized by the rising smoke of the incense (see Psalm 141). Whether the prayers are silent, as at the conference, or spoken, as at the ordination, it is in prayer that we find the source of our life and being and lift our souls to God in thanksgiving (Eucharist).

Several of the returning fellows spent the afternoon baking communion bread at Laura's home. Laura is a returning fellow who goes to Austin Presbyterian and her husband is also in seminary there. I arrived late, just in time to have missed the actual baking but to participate in the fellowship we shared afterward. It was nice to be able to sit and chat about our lives beyond our preparation for and exercise of ministry. Contrary to popular opinion, ministers are human beings with diverse interests and talents beyond our vocations as servants of God and God's church.

Later in the afternoon we arrived at the chapel for rehearsal for the service Sunday morning. Becky and I had to leave before the service so we helped Gary, one of the faculty worship leaders, prepare the chapel for Taize prayer later that evening. We set up stations around the chapel with icons and candles. We also set up stations with alternative focus points to images as some segments of the church still struggle with the veneration of icons (even though the iconodules won the day at the seventh ecumenical council). For example, Becky and I spent a good half hour traipsing around campus finding branches and rocks and moss and flowers to put in a vase as a floral focus. We also found a mirror and set that up at a station. There was a footwashing station and my new four evangelists stole was draped over the processional cross at another station. It was exciting to be part of the process of conceiving the chapel space to be a place for contemplative multisensory reflection. We entered imaginatively into the experience of members of various traditions to try to create a space that would be inviting and open to all. There is a deeply gratifying feeling in helping people experience the presence of God mediated in ways that they are able to enter into fully.

Following a splendid banquet where I shared table fellowship with four extremely promising undergraduate fellows we returned to the chapel to light the hundreds of candles we had scattered about at the various stations. That process took a good twenty minutes with a dozen of us participating, including having to take the paschal candle down from its stand in order to light it because the torch had run out of wick. I had been invited to participate in the service as one of the four clergy anointing for blessing and healing. I wore my community habit and used the oil that was presented to my by the Lindisfarne Community at my ordination. As the service progressed, people approached for anointing and asked me to pray for specific concerns. The most common themes among them were openness, clarity, and reconciliation. I was struck by how deeply these budding ministers were seeking to align themselves with the will of God, trusting that their own fulfillment is somehow bound up in so doing, even as my own process of seeking was brought back to mind. God gently reminded me through the prayers of the fellows that my own journey toward living into my calling is still ongoing and I too must constantly seek God's will and then accept the grace given to do it. There is a great deal of power in the sacrament of anointing. There is a dialectical process of kenosis (self-emptying) and pleroma (filling) to it where the person being blessed makes room for God in their petition for a blessing and then God becomes present at the invocation of the Spirit in the name of the Holy Trinity. The person doing the anointing becomes a channel of that divine presence and a representation of Christ to the person being anointed. There is a great deal of responsibility inherent in the task and no little risk of abuse of the role. I was humbled that the Lindisfarne Community has regarded me equipped and capable of this task as I prayed for a steady stream of up and coming ministers in the church of Christ.

Following the service was the annual coffeehouse, a talent show of sorts, at which many fellows displayed extraordinary gifts. I presented "the Gospel According to Eddie Izzard" again to uproarious laughter even as I worried about what those I had just anointed might think now that I was spouting "heresy." Others shared talents from the profound to the ridiculous. Several talented singers and pianists shared what they considered to be meager gifts but which were really quite good. My friend Bonnie presented "700 years of the Protestant Reformation upside down," where she stood on her head and told the story of the reformation. Unfortunately, she fell over midway through. She was less than successful in getting back up, and on her third try exclaimed, "I have to tell you about Schliermacher!" which was probably the funniest bit of the whole act. Some of the acts were quite serious, and the evening ended with a presentation of a DVD clip of the work being done by an organization called NASP, a Seventh Day Adventist group, who work in areas that have been decimated by war, famine, natural disasters, etc. Many tears were shed as we observed starved children being laid in coffins and AIDS stricken families huddled together in huts. I felt a deep anger well up within me as I knew that many of these global ailments are well within our reach to address, and yet the sins of greed and selfish pride obstruct even those with the best of intentions. The "politics" of the situations imbue leaders with a fear of taking action, thus legitimating and tacitly approving continued negligence of all life as made the image of the Triune God.

The evening moved from prayer and anointing to heresy and drunkeness. Not really. The heresy of the coffeehouse was all in good fun and I do not think any of us really got drunk as the returning fellows imbibed the liquor that had been given to me by a friend in Mexico to be drunk after my ordination. It is called "Tarrasco" and is related to Tequila but not quite the same thing. A few of us returning fellows sat around late into the evening talking and sharing and imbibing the spirit. It was wonderful to share it with people who had walked with me in my journey into ministry. We promised to stay in touch and said our goodbyes as two of us had to leave at a truly obscene hour in the morning (one at 4:15 and me at 5:25AM!). If the power of prayer that I experienced over these past few days is any indication, then the promise of ministry looks to be a bright future indeed.

The Promise of Ministry III: The Sound of Silence

2006-06-24T10:55:00.000-05:00

Silence. The echo resounds as 200 people slowly and silently depart the sanctuary after morning prayer. We began our silence at 9:00 this morning and will break it at noon. Some have eagerly awaited this opportunity since the conference began while others shift nervously at the idea of being alone with themselves and with God for three whole hours. As I pointed out to several friends yesterday, silence really has nothing to do with not talking. The practice of not speaking is simply a tool that makes possible the creation of inner space in which the voice of God can speak. And so we ended morning prayer this morning by saying "speak, God, for your servant is listening."

Evening prayer last night lifted up the faithfulness of God, something that is easy to lose sight of as the realities of ministry are explored in detail during the course of the conference. At morning prayer this morning we introduced a bowl of incense that we borrowed from the Episcopal Church right across the street from the seminary, symbolizing our prayers rising up to God. Tonight we will have prayers around the cross in the style of the Taize Community, who I will be visiting in just a few short weeks. The biggest difference in the conference this year as opposed to the past two years is that this year I am focused on worship. The worship has always been the most striking thing to me about the FTE conferences I have attended, but this year it is really the entire thrust of my being here as a returning fellow. Even as it can be sometimes frustrating and fast paced, there is something truly wonderful about being given the opportunity to create the space for others that was created for me by others at the last two conferences. Before I would enter the chapel for morning and evening prayer and it was there that I was able to bring the new things I learned and the new experiences I had to God, but now I am responsible for creating the space in which over 200 other people are able to do the same thing. There is something appropriate about this taking place just after I have been ordained a deacon and my function in the church has been forever changed. Before, as a lay person, it was appropriate for me to be there in the space that had been created on my behalf even as my very presence shaped the space, and now, as an ordained clergy person, it is appropriate that my role reflects my function in the body of Christ. I find deep peace in that.

The returning fellows stayed in the chapel late into last night stringing beads for short chaplets for use in the chapel service this morning and during the time of silence. During our arts and crafts project, we shared about our faith and bounced around many of the questions that seminarians are want to discuss at any available moment, questions of denomination, theology, hermeneutics, and practice. For some reason, last night I was speechless, which those of you who know me realize is a rare occasion, and those of you who do not know me can probably figure out from the length of my posts. It was as though for me the silence had begun early, not a silence adopted for the purpose of the practice but a deep silence that welled up from God deep within my soul. The questions that were bouncing around the group were the types of questions that I love to dive in and tackle and take apart and analyze and discuss and dispute and even sometimes put back together, but last night I had the sense that any answer would have been inappropriate. I was content to sit and listen and string beads on fishing line. As I considered this experience even as it was taking place, I realized that I have every confidence that I could provide some sort of answer, perhaps even a good answer, to any of those questions, but that doing so, at least then and there, would have been unnecessary, inappropriate, superfluous, and utterly inadequate. Later people in the group asked me questions about the Lindisfarne Community and I responded, but it seemed out of place to speak even as I provided the best explanation I could. There was an existential shift in those moments, a few moments of transcendence beyond the questions and the answers to a deep, profound, even erotic desire for communion with God and with God's people. Now I wonder if this experience is in any way tied to the ontological change that I believe occurs in ordination. Is this an experience of my very being having been shifted? I do not know. That is the best answer I can give to this question, and it was the best answer I could give to any of the questions last night. I have no answers, not real answers, only prayers.

A cool rain has subdued the broiling temperatures here in Austin. It is appropriate that rain accompanies our silence. Rain washes and cleanses the earth and provides sustenance for plants, animals and people. Silence washes and cleanses our souls and sustains us in God's Spirit. Our prayers rise before God as incense, the lifting of our hands as a morning sacrifice. The echo of silence resounds in our souls, effecting our kenosis (self-emptying) to prepare the way for the coming of the pleroma (fullness) of Christ.

The Promise of Ministry II: Challenge and Insight

2006-06-23T16:19:00.000-05:00

The FTE conference is proceeding wonderfully. It still seems like there is way too much to do and far to little time to do it in, but in some ways that too is the promise of ministry, our conference theme, so I suppose it is appropriate. Worship has been well received for the most part, although it was reported that at one seminar a Southern Baptist fellow indicated that the service of morning prayer was "cute" but meaningless because we did not have preaching. <<<Sigh>>>

My first seminar was on "Who's Controlling the Sanctuary," which probably should have been required for every returning fellow before we were set loose to plan worship. The seminar leader, Edward Foley, is a Capuchin priest from Chicago, and he pointed out that seminarians enter the systematics or biblical studies classrooms with some degree of humility, but when they get to the worship class they all believe themselves to be experts. He had us reflect on our own presuppositions about worship and then helped us think through a method of evaluating and adjusting those presuppositions. The central questions of the seminar focused around worship as an exercise of power, with power defined as the flow of dominance in a relationship, and defining ritual as a technology for negotiating power. This has been a central concern for the church, a matter of much ecclesiological reflection, during the mid to latter part of the 20th century as an understanding of the role of the laity, beyond that of observer, developed. These are very important questions for me as well as I go to visit the communities at Iona and Taize who have developed ecumenical liturgical resources which seek different flows of power than many confessional bodies. At the same time, Prof. Foley was able to point out that certain aspects of worship that seem to be more distributive of power can actually concentrate power in places we do not necessarily expect. Watching these dynamics in action will be a new aspect to the various visits I make over the course of the rest of the summer.

Following that seminar was a plenary session by Father John Dear, a Jesuit priest who has been involved in nonviolent peace building for over 25 years. This was the perfect lecture for me given the work I will be doing in Colombia in less than a month. John, as he asked us to call him, exhorted us to be disciples of the nonviolent Jesus. He says that the whole point of Christian spirituality is to try to get your life to fit in the life of Jesus, to make sense in the light of the gospel, to be present in the story whereas the spirituality of violence says that violence makes peace; we must throw out gospel and Jesus because they are too naieve and turn to Cicero, Just War Theory, the Crusades, and ultimately blessing killing and war. In no uncertain terms he denounced the spirituality of violence so prevalent in the church throughout history as heresy, blasphemy, idolatry, and sin. It was a poignant reminder to me when John mentioned the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 because I will be preaching at Hughes UMC on the 61st anniversary of that bombing. It was also poignant when he said that as Christians we should have a vision of the heart that sees every human being as a sister or brother, a child of the God of peace, and so therefore all of us are already reconciled. It is this very reconciliation that is at the heart of the ecumenical movement and at the heart of the text (Ephesians 4: 1-16) that I will be preaching on in August. These are hard things to hear and even harder things to practice, but it was encouraging to know that there are people like John who are willing to do whatever it takes to live into the realm of God here on earth. May God give me strength to walk the way as well.

During the seminar this morning, taught by Dr. Katherine Turpin, we looked at faith formation in consumer culture and came up with "The Beatitudes of Consumerism:"

1 When Sam Walton saw the crowds, he went up to WalMart; and after he sat down, his sales associates came to him. 2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
3 "Blessed are the rich in stuff, for theirs is the large house in suburbia.
4 "Blessed are those who get what they want, for they will be comfortable.
5 "Blessed are those who take out extensive lines of credit, for they will inherit the earth.
6 "Blessed are those who eat at McDonalds and drink at Starbucks, for they will be filled.
7 "Blessed are those who acquire at others expense, for they will receive money.
8 "Blessed are the brand loyalists, for they will see rebates.
9 "Blessed are the salespersons, for they will be called bearers of good tidings.
10 "Blessed are those who buy on layaway, for they are the true worshippers.
11 "Blessed are you when people admire you and envy you and utter all kinds of jealousy against you legitimately on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in the Supercenter, for in the same way they envied the stars in the public eye who were before you."

Dr. Turpin pointed out that being aware of how much we consume and even how bad that is for us and for our world is not enough to actually make us convert from the religion of consumerism, whose high holiday is Christmas with the pilgrimage beginning the day after Thanksgiving and whose priests are sales clerks who receive our sacrifice (money) and then give us our redemption (whatever it was we bought and they even give us a receipt), because there is no motivation to do so; there is cultural capital and comfort built into the consumerist mindset. There must be an experience of justification that comes from beyond ourselves to ignite the conversion process and then we must participate in a community that nurtures the process along if we are to have any chance of successfully escaping the idolatry and blasphemy of worshipping at the cash register altar.

We have been building a lot of periods of silence in to the various worship services in hopes of preparing conference participants for three hours of silence tomorrow morning. Silence was integral throughout the service this morning and the service tomorrow morning is focused on slowly moving into the three hours. There are some people who have expressed some discomfort with the idea, but for the most part people are embracing it and at least are willing to try it. I am excited about that because silence is so integral to my own practice and it is something that I have been lacking over the past few days due to the fast paced liturgical development we have been engaged in. I pray that it is fruitful for everyone involved.

The Promise of Ministry I: Ministry at the Speed of Light

2006-06-22T15:31:00.000-05:00

I have in fact arrived safely at the Fund for Theological Education Conference on Excellence in Ministry at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The reason that I have not posted anything since I've been here is because us returning fellows have been tied up planning liturgy at a rate practically beyond comprehension. There are nine of us returning fellows who were ministry fellows at the conference last summer, which means we successfully applied for a fellowship that funds a special project in ministry, (in my case this massive trip I have embarked upon). This year we have accepted the invitation to return hand help plan and celebrate the various liturgies that happen each day of the conference: morning and evening prayer with Eucharist on Sunday morning.

We had several hours of planning scheduled before the conference began on Wednesday morning and early afternoon. We would have had more time if some of us had not gotten lost on the way back from lunch, a situation made worse by the fire department sending us to the wrong seminary when we asked for directions! There are a few things that have made the planning process a bit frustrating from my point of view. First, very few people have had a liturgy class in seminary yet as that is usually reserved for the second or third year. I am in somewhat of a different situation having been thoroughly immersed in creating liturgy in my work with the ICPC and having studied sacramental theology with the Lindisfarne Community. The returning fellows have been placed in charge of planning and celebrating morning prayer and then helping celebrate evening prayer, but both projects become daunting when the vast majority of those responsible for them are unaware of their history, form, etc. The second frustration is that we have adopted a "liturgy by committee" approach which means that several small groups are responsible for a different morning each. There are many points at which such an approach can fall apart. It would be very easy for the diversity of the group to produce a liturgy so diffuse that it lacks meaning instead of providing a balance amongst myriad traditions. It can also lead to a lack of coherence when the diverse traditions are brought together in such a way that the flow of the service becomes broken and choppy. So far we have been able to avoid such a fate, but the process of developing the liturgy has sometimes felt more like a tug of war than a mutually constructive endeavor. Finally, the speed at which these services have to be produced belie the contemplative mindset they are intended to embody.

Last night my new friend Laurie, who is part of the group planning the liturgies, and I spent several hours putting the bulletin to bed and so were unable to get to bed ourselves until almost midnight. This morning we celebrated morning prayer and it went very well. I began the service with a Byzantine chant I learned in my chant classes at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline this past year. The strangest things come in handy sometimes. Each of the elements of the service was presented creatively, at a speed conducive to reflection, and with plenty of silence for contemplation. At the end, we picked up the rousing "Alleluia" we had sung earlier in the service and danced out the back. The service was prayerful in spite of the pace of its planning.

Nostalgia

2006-06-21T15:42:00.000-05:00

I spent the afternoon and evening yesterday with friends in Ithaca. After having lunch at Diamond's, a wonderful Indian restaurant on the commons in Ithaca, with Andy, Jane, and their daughter Rebekah, I met up with my friend Gibson and we went up to Ithaca College so that I could visit my old stomping grounds. Our first stop was Muller Chapel. As we walked through the dimly lit corridors and into the bright and spacious sanctuary I was reminded of the beauty of the space and of my four years of spiritual growth and development. At the same time, as I noted to Gibson while leading against the altar table in the sanctuary, gazing out over the pond toward the island with the peace pole and the geese prancing about, I thought I would miss it more. The Muller Chapel space is stunning, but it is the people that pray and fellowship together there that make it truly special. The chapel was deserted, as it usually is during the summer months, so there was a pronounced absence of that personal element.

Gibson got me a copy of the new glossy brochures she had designed for the Protestant Community at Ithaca College (ICPC), the campus ministry organization I dedicated four years to during undergrad. It has a wonderful picture of the chapel and the pond on the cover and details about the work and worship life of the ICPC. I noticed that the mission statement that a number of us had worked hard to craft during my time at Ithaca College had been rather drastically changed, most notably the first sentence which now reads: "The Protestant Community is a witness to the reformation ideals that focus on Holy Scripture and "the Priesthood of all believers." I am a bit confused as to how this statement emphasizing ideas that split the church can be reconciled with the nature of the ICPC as a "fellowship of ecumenical Christians," but the good news is that it is not my problem any more.

We walked up to the music building to poke around the practice rooms, see if any of my former professors were around, and listen for any of the wonderful music that the Ithaca College School of Music is so well known for. Like the chapel, the music building was pretty much deserted, being run on a skeleton crew for the summer. As we walked back across the campus to the campus center so that we could go find something else to do, I confirmed for myself that I have indeed moved on. My life is now in Boston and there are new and exciting adventures to be had there. It is not good to live in the past, although we must never forget it lest we be doomed to repeating it, but to look forward toward the goal.

Gibson and I decided to go hike the rim trail of Taughannick Falls gorge, something we had done with a group of friends just before I left Ithaca last summer. It was rather warm but not too hot for a hike along the mostly wooded trail. As we walked we talked about just about everything while we absorbed the abiding spirit of the place, surely the Spirit of God. The water cascaded many stories over the falls and crashed uproariously into the river below, flowing on into Cayuga Lake. The trail was rather wet in many places from the thunderstorm earlier in the afternoon and we picked up our fair share of mud. There is really nowhere like it to walk in Boston. I love the city and all of the opportunities living in the city provides, but city life is not nearly as "complete" as many would have it. There are joys in life that simply cannot be had in the city. And this I do miss. I miss being able to go just a few minutes away and observe, up close and personal, the majesty of creation unmarred by the human hubris to believe that we know better how to arrange our environs, leveling mountains, raising valleys, draining bogs, and digging canals. There is a purity to the pristine splendor of the coursing river as it bursts forth over the edge of the falls to crash against the rocks below and then flow onward only a few hundred more yards to the lake. There is a raw exhilaration to observing literally tons of water flow with the grace of an eagle's flight. There is something in this experience that prefigures the unmediated experience of divine life that is so central to the spiritual quest.

When we finished our hike we returned to Ithaca and went to Viva Taqueria for dinner, each having a large meal and a margarita. After that we ran a few errands and then joined some other friends, Matt and Corey, at Madeline's for dessert and drinks. It has always amazed me that a city as small as Ithaca can have such diverse cuisine. Viva is a wonderful Mexican restaurant, an equal of which I have yet to find in Boston. Madeline's is a French-Thai fusion restaurant with a dessert bar that must be cleaned regularly of the drool patrons deposit on it while selecting from a constantly changing array of scrumptious pastries, pies, torts, tiramisus, and other assorted confections, and a drink list that runs for twelve pages. I already mentioned Diamonds (Indian) and there is fare to be found from around the globe, probably drawn by the presence of two schools of higher education in town, Cornell University and Ithaca College. At Madeline's I had the passionfruit tart and an extremely dry Bombay Sapphire martini, straight up with a lime twist. Speaking of heaven on earth!

At that point we retired to my friend Matt's apartment to engage in the other activity that several of us were nightly engaged in last summer when I was in Ithaca, a game of \Hearts. I brought along a liquor that I had been given in Mexico by a friend I made down there on the trip when I experienced my most direct call to ministry, and it was given with the understanding that it would be drunk after my ordination. I had my first taste of the drink made with it on an island in the middle of a lake near Morelia, Mexico. It uses the soft drink Fresca as its base and adds diced oranges and lemons along with chili powder, salt, and the liquor, and is served in a glass rimmed with salt and chili powder. It's fantastic! We played cards and drank fairly late into the night, something I really had not done since I left Ithaca. The only thing missing was my friend Cory, (not to be confused with Corey), with whom I attended middle school all the way through college, and who was my partner in merrymaking last summer. I guess you cannot have everything.

This morning Andy, Jane and I celebrated morning prayer outside on the back patio. I packed up my bags and just after noon my friends Willard and Dorothy arrived to take me to lunch and then the airport. They are some of the most amazing people I have ever met, Willard being a retired German professor at IC and Dorothy having been a research librarian there. They have travelled around the world and hosted a varied but notable assortment of dignitaries and performers during their many years in Ithaca. They have the most wonderful stories and serve as the institutional memory for a good deal of Ithaca College, certainly the ICPC, and probably most of Ithaca as well. We became good friends when Willard and I were on the ICPC board of directors together, serving on some of the same committees. They hosted me for a week one summer when I was back in Ithaca to participate in the Northwest Wind Symposium and they hosted a bunch of my stuff the summer between my junior and senior years. They keep track of me now that I am off in seminary in Boston, which they know well since Willard graduated from Harvard and Dorothy is from Boston, and they offer sage advise borne out of years of experience and dedication to their community. They have a profoundly cosmopolitan spirit, taking the whole world as the locus for their concern, a quality I admire and hope to emulate. We had a wonderful lunch at the Moosewood Restaurant, probably the most famous restaurant in Ithaca, and then, after running into Alice in the park, another ICPC board member, they took me to the Ithaca airport to fly to Austin, TX for the Fund for Theological Education Excellence in Ministry Conference. Willard and Dorothy are so loyal as to wait with me for my plane to be called and then wave goodbye to me through the window between the lobby and the boarding area. They are wonderful people who have deigned to grace me with their friendship, something I will always treasure.

As I sit here on my flight from Detroit to Austin writing this, I can see fields and farms, houses and roads stretched out across the vast landscape that is America. It is amazing to think that God is deeply and personally concerned with every blade of grass in all of those fields, with every animal on every farm, with every person in every house and driving on every road. The people God has placed in my life to mediate grace to me are persons of depth and substance as well as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self-control. They overflow with the fruits of the Spirit and I am blessed. And I find myself alive in a world that cannot but be the product of a benevolent sovereign who is personally concerned with its, and my, well-being. My soul is filled to overflowing and I give thanks.

Glory to the Father-Mother and to the Child and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be forever. Amen. Alleluia.

Ordination Pictures

2006-06-19T11:00:00.000-05:00

The Procession (Me followed by Mike and then Jim):

The Presiding Bishops (Andy and Jane)

Prostrations:

Presentation of the Candidates by Prioress Chris:

The Laying on of Hands by Abbot Andy, Abbess Jane, Bishop Joe, and The Rev. Dr. Allison Stokes:

Ordinands vested and given the symbols of their offices and of the Lindisfarne Community:

Me with my parents and Allison following the liturgy:

Sam and Kara, two great new friends:

The peace that passes all understanding

2006-06-18T07:51:00.000-05:00

During the ordination service yesterday I was fine until the middle of my little statement when I got to the part about my parents, and then the tears began to flow. It is a powerful thing, the working of the spirit. God reaches out and takes hold of a life and all of its past experiences, brings them to bear on the present moment, and then flings them out upon the path into the future. The service went on around the three of us being ordained as Andy and Jane prayed over and anointed us, and then Bishop Joe and Allison joined them for the laying on of hands. As Jane prayed while they stood with their hands upon me, I was keenly aware of the kairos of the moment. God was speaking through the church in the power of the spirit into my life in a new and refreshing way. I was given the symbols of the diaconate and of the community: the stole, the anointing oil, the Bible, and the Way of Living. Each symbol bore the meaning invested in it: the stole of servanthood, the oil of healing, the Bible of preaching, and the Way of Living of prayer. These are the mysteries I was given to bear, and the community stood with me, promising to uphold me as I seek to do so.

Later in the evening we had the Lindisfarne Community Review which included a range of things; as Abbess Jane said, "from the serious to the slightly ridiculous to the completely ridiculous." Mike shared about Breaking Bread Ministries in Chicago which he directs. Mike has a great deal of passion for his urban ministry to the poor and homeless in Chicago and it is an honor to be in the Community in which he is now ordained as he transforms so many lives and bears hope amidst despair. On the "completely ridiculous" end of the spectrum, I presented "The Gospel According to Eddie Izzard," which was rather heretical but hilariously funny. Afterwards, as Sam and Kara sang the newly composed Lindisfarne Community theme song, set to a couple of Christmas tunes, I was practically rolling on the floor laughing. One of the lines was "Larry uses big words." It's true, I admit it. And my community loves me anyway.

But here I do not really feel the need to use big words. The big words I employ in a vain attempt to point to the wonder of God and the exhiliration of living into divine life. But here big words are supurfluous because this community embodies divine life within itself. The fruits of the spirit well up from within the various members and overflow into one another, perichoretically merging with distinction and bearing us together to greater and greater heights. It is not as though this community does not have problems and conflicts from time to time, but the way in which we approach and address them marks us as qualitatively different than most of the other Christian communities I have been part of or party to.

Today the sun is bright and the lake glistens. Birdsongs accompany the somewhat lethargic movements of people who are recovering from and seeking to understand the workings of the spirit that filled us and this place just yesterday. There are quiet conversations going on all over the cottage accompanied by the lapping of the lakeshore only a few feet away. The Eucharist is not for a little while yet and there is time to explore the peace of this place and the love and joy we bring to one another. And there is a further journey ahead of me. I can see it just off in the distance, beckoning me forward, reminding me that I cannot remain here but must return to the work that has been laid before me. I do so as a new person, a new being in Christ, bearing the marks the Lindisfarne Community has bestowed upon me. I do so seeking to bring with me a piece of the irenic eudaimonia I have found here this weekend to the people I encounter along the way. And I continue to strive toward being as Christ to those I meet and finding Christ within them. Of course, all of these things are really just different ways of saying the same thing. We go in peace to love and serve our God. Amen.

Lindisfarne Community Theme Song

Am I ready?

2006-06-17T09:13:00.000-05:00

I am to be ordained this afternoon. Am I ready? Andy and Jane (my abbot and abbess) say so. The Lindisfarne Community says so. But the knot in my stomach still points to the abivalence, the ambiguity of divine encounter. Am I prepared to bear the mysteries as a servant on behalf of the people of God?

In my proposal for the Fund for Theological Education fellowship program I wrote the following definition of the ministry of the deacon to which I still hold: "I have a gift of being a reconciler of division. This is the understanding of the diaconal function of ministry in the church. The ministry of the deacon is a ministry of service, and service always has reconciliation as its goal, whether reconciliation between people and God, people and people, people and themselves, or people and their own existential situation. The office of reconciler requires several qualities if it is to be effective. First, the reconciler must have a kenotic quality such that his/her own personal interests do not interfere with the goal of the reconciliation of the parties involved. Second, the reconciler must be able to exercise holy listening, such that all parties are given the opportunity to fully express their position and are able to recognize that they have been heard. Also, the reconciler must have an intention of embrace, which involves crossing over into the various positions of the parties, such that the inherent sacredness of each person is recognized, before crossing back to the kenotic state of openness. Last, it is important to recognize that reconciliation is an extraordinarily delicate process with a high probability of breaking down at many different points, and so the reconciler must be able to sit with the knowledge that s/he may be viewed in a negative light if reconciliation is not successful."

Can I live with this? Can I live with the awesome responsibility it entails? Do I have these qualities in sufficient measure to live up to the calling of a deacon?

Thankfully, it is only partly my responsibility to answer these questions. To a large extent it is out of my hands. In an email to the Lindisfarne Community a few months ago I wrote, "I don't want to be ordained.? Ordination, as I understand it, really has very little to do with the person being ordained.? Ordination is exercised by the bishop(s) on behalf of the church and is a recognition, by the church, of the particular gifts (charisms) of the person being ordained that make them uniquely suited to be bearers of mystery.? The discernment of call is certainly something that the individual being ordained must be involved in, but ultimately is up to the community.? Augustine never wanted to be a bishop.? He tried to run away from it.? But in the end the church collared him (pun intended), carried him in kicking and screaming, and consecrated him anyway!? In my own case, I certainly have had what I feel is a profound and clear call experience, but the emphasis for me, in terms of discernment, is on its confirmation by the church.? In my case, I first offered my call experience to my parents, with great fear and trepidation (they were, after all, in the process of paying for me to go to a private college for four years where I was working toward a degree in music), and their response was something on the order of, "Well DUH!"? Same thing from my church at home and with friends at school (I wasn't part of the Lindisfarne Community at that point).? I repeat, I do not desire ordination.? Holy Orders are not taken, they are received, again with fear and trembling, from the hands of the church.? It is not up to me whether or not I will be ordained.? In a profound way, it is up to the rest of you, expressed by Andy and Jane."

It is my responsibility to be open to the working of God. This is a new stage of life, a new stage of being for me. Am I ready? Or perhaps more pointedly, am I worthy? In the prayers before the distribution of the elements at the Eucharist in the Lindisfarne Community we pray, "Savior Jesus, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed." It is a prayer of deep trust and committment and conviction as we turn over control to one who has power to give and power to take away. Am I worthy? No, of course not. But I am worthy as God makes me worthy. Thus, the question is not, "am I worthy?" but instead "am I capable of such trust and committment and conviction that I will lay aside my own will to be molded to the model of Christ?"

One of our meditations is a prayer by Charles de Foucauld which says (edited), "Father-Mother, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will, whatever you do, I will thank you, I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me, as in all your creatures, and I'll ask nothing else, my God. Into your hands I commend my spirit; I give it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, my God, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands, with a trust beyond all measure, because you are my Father-Mother." I have prayed this prayer on the sixth day of every month for the past several years now, but today it has special meaning. Today is the culmination of a process of kenosis, self-emptying, so that God may "do with me what [God] will."

There is comfort in the fact that members of the Lindisfarne Community all pray this prayer on the sixth day of every month. The individual I of the prayer, for us, is the communal I of the community. They stand with me today, praying for me and pledging their support. They are ready in spite of me, and will be there for me when I fail, which I surely will. And yet there is a deeply personal process of metanoia, of converison, of an ontological and existential shift. There is a setting apart, a distinction that is made, a line that is drawn that cannot be undrawn. I will be marked by God through the symbols presented to me by the community and by the laying on of hands by the bishops. There is something akin to baptism in ordination; an entering into the abyssmal waters of death to reemerge a new being. And there is no way to know what stands beyond the doorway through which one can never return. No one can describe what it is like on the other side, any more than anyone can describe bathing in water to someone who has lived their entire life in a desert climate, where water is scarce and presciously rationed. I walk across the threshold in the presence of the community and of friends even as I walk through it alone.

In the words of the Psalmist (Psalm 139):

O God, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
O God, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,"
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

Where God leads me, I will follow. This is where God has led me, to a cottage beside a lake surrounded by family and friends and my community. God is here. Into your hands I commend my spirit.