Cam Miller

12 Pentecost C, 2019: Peace be with you

September 1, 2019 by Cam Miller

I went to a laboratory school.
It was kindergarten-through-high school
in the same building, and,
while a public school,
it was also operated by the teacher’s college
of the local university.
I mention it, because we did not have letter grades
until high school.
All through the first nine years of classes,
we had written evaluation that emphasized “the positive”
while allowing for comments
that identified “problematic areas.”
So, the end of the first semester of ninth grade
was a time of reckoning
when, for the first time,
there was a single letter staring up from the page.

That individual letter was very loud,
and somehow it seemed to say more
than the longest evaluation ever written
by one of our previous elementary
or middle school teachers.

I can’t swear to how many A’s I had,
but I think I had all A’s, one B, and a C.
That C was in Algebra and an absolute success story.
The B was in Spanish,
and considering my goof-off and Smart Alec behavior,
it was probably a gift.

My mom looked at my report card,
said nothing about the A’s I had received,
and told me in no uncertain terms
that the B and the C were unacceptable.
At the end of the second semester,
I had all A’s a D and an F.

That says as much about my psychology at the time
as it does hers, and was just a hint
of the problems to come.

Any of us who had a hyper-critical parent
know and recognize the problems and behaviors
planted within the garden of such relationships.
One of them is the voice of that critical parent
traveling with us over time and space,
no matter how we grow and change and flourish.
Struggling to keep that critical parent inside our head
as a small voice instead of a dominant one,
can sometimes be exhausting.
Which is also why, I sometimes read the gospel story
appointed for a given Sunday,
and say, “Ugh.”

I love Jesus,
and with all honesty,
the wisdom of Jesus is my life’s blood.
Some would be surprised to hear me say that
because I do not talk about Jesus or quote Jesus
like some Christian bobble-head.
But Jesus, along with his prophetic pals –
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, and Amos –
is my chosen primary lens
through which I decipher the world.

That said, sometimes I just sigh
because the negativity gets to be too much.
Or more accurately, when I am struggling
with that critical parent inside,
the hard medicine of Jesus
feels like too much.
That is the case today
with this reading from Luke.
I could easily go on and on about the prophetic witness
Jesus lets loose with this story from Luke –
or that Luke lets loose with this story of Jesus.
But not today.
You see, when I read the gospels
I understand that you and I
are the bad guys in the story.
I think there is a lot of Christianity around
that inserts Christians as the good guys,
which makes for a very different story.

But that is so strange to me, when we know
the good guys in these gospel stories,
especially in Luke,
are “the poor, the crippled, the lame,
and the Blind.”

That is Luke’s motto for “the good guys.”
The good guys are the marginalized
not the fat cats like us.

The poorest among us here
would be judged hugely wealthy in that society.
So, in these stories,
we should know that at best,
we are the Pharisee with the lavish banquet
that invited the wrong guests.
But at worst, and more likely,
we are the imperial citizens or senators back in Rome
whose agents are forcing peasants into bankruptcy
in order to amass wealth at the edges of the empire,
or worse, crucifying them.
It is a view of ourselves that is difficult to gaze at
for extended periods of time
if we take it seriously and want to know more.

Yet, like I said,
there is a majority of Christianity in this country,
that reads these scriptures very differently.

They see themselves,
even if middle class and quite wealthy,
as the marginalized and pure at heart
amongst a threatening horde of “secular atheists”
or the fearsome and alien “Muslims,”
or the strange and perplexing godless Buddhists
and polytheistic Hindus.
They domestic Jesus
in order to bring him into their polite company.

While it often doesn’t feel good,
I prefer to keep Jesus as the zealous
social and theological prophet that he was.
Even so, sometimes, like today, it is just too much.

Without going into it in detail today,
I would also say that part of our challenge
as Christians in the 21^stcentury,
is that the context of Jesus and his society
is radically different than us and our society.

That change in context
creates change in the wisdom,
and when we do not seek to understand those changes
and hear his wisdom in OUR context –
or when we over-simplify that wisdom for our context –
then we are not doing any better
than the Christians who think that they are the good guys.

That is just a little tease for the weeks ahead this fall,
when the sermons will seek to examine
the wisdom of Jesus
and how it changes from his context to ours.
But today, I have a few words
about that critical parent inside.

It is important to note
that I am talking about the critical parent “inside”
and not the actual parent in our life,
whether living or dead.
You and I know that at some point
we cross a line
after which our parents are no longer the issue.
Rather, it is how we internalized our parents
and we have some control and responsibility with that.
I know it is no longer my mom talking to me
when I beat myself up inside
for failing at something,
or when I am getting a C
and unwilling to recognize that in this case, a C is success.
Whether it is a critical parent
or critical boss
or teacher, friend, or grandparent,
their voice fades over time
and it becomes our own.

It is then the voice of OUR perfectionism
or OUR negativity
or OUR overly-critical judgments.
And we know all too well,
that if that voice becomes the dominant, lecturing voice
inside of us, it will ooze and bleed outside
and get all over those we care about and love.

So what would Jesus have to say
to a slave-driving,
perfectionistic,
haranguing voice of criticism
whose hot breath is on our neck
and leaning over our lives?
I think what Jesus would say is, “Peace.”
“Peace be with you,” he might coo into our ear.

While I doubt that Jesus
would have cared about us Romans and Pharisees
as much as he cared about “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,”

I do believe he cared about us.
If he is the personification of the love of God,
then no matter how many C’s and D’s and F’s we have
on the scorecard of life,
then we are cared for and loved.
I think the theory goes,
that if we ever finally come to realize we ARE loved,
then we will start doing better on the scorecard
when we are able.

But I do not think that Jesus
can take away the presence of that niggling voice of negativity
once it has gotten inside us.
I do not even think WE can exorcise it.
We can, however, moderate it.
We can quiet it
and make it just one of the many voices
we hear every day inside our busy heads.
“Peace” is how we do it.

That is why Jesus kept saying that
to his disciples, especially
when they were anxious and afraid.
“Peace be with you,” he would say.

Truly, when the dominating and the ugly
are loud in our hearts
and taking up too much room in our minds,
we need to stop and breathe in peace,
and to stop and exhale peace,
because it is the only thing I know that truly does the job.

When my own voice saying “peace” is not powerful enough
to quiet the big voices or sometimes the army of voices,
I can recruit Jesus in my imagination
to come along and add some strength.
I can recruit the memory of affirming elders
and I can recruit the wisdom of teachers.

There are a whole bunch of people you and I have known
that want nothing more
than to be the source of peace in our lives.
We need to let them.
We need to activate them.
We need to give them voice in our hearts and minds.

Peace be with you.

11 Pentecost: Newton’s Law of Sabbath

August 25, 2019 by Cam Miller

By Mgiganteus1 at English Language Wikipedia

TEXTS for PREACHING: Emily Dickonson’s, “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52138/some-keep-the-sabbath-going-to-church-236

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52138/some-keep-the-sabbath-going-to-church-236

Luke 13:10-17: http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp16_RCL.html#gsp1

Remember “blue laws?”
Consumerism wins, Sabbath loses.
But Sabbath lost
a long time before capitalism.

The connotation of Emily Dickenson’s poem
is the liberation of sabbath
from the confines of church or synagogue or mosque.
True sabbath isrestnot necessarily religious worship.
Resting in the beauty of Creation
or rest in the loveliness of slumber
or rest in the sloth of nothingness.
Just plain rest.

Imagine, if you can,
resting.
Electronics put away,
multi-tasking suspended,
no “thing” to accomplish or complete:
no goal
no project
no destination
no “doing” that isn’t restful in and of itself.
How un-21^stcentury, don’t you think?

I want us to consider the heart sabbath for a moment.

We cannot be certain of the unique contributions
of any historical moment
or any particular culture –
mostly because ideas
percolate in more than one place
and among more than one people
and at more than one time in history.
Ideas and inventions
and ways of doing things
bubble up from the collective human endeavor.
Ancient versions of democracy
can be found in many places, not just Greece.
Electricity, the telephone, airplane, and car
were not singular inventions
by individuals
but a race
to be the first to completion
and then the first to production
and distribution.
So it is all the more startling to claim
that the notion of Sabbath –
a day of rest
bestowed upon all people by a God who loves them –
is a gift from escaped slaves
who came to be known as Hebrews.

It makes perfect sense.
A society with its origins in slavery
would yearn for a day of rest
and understand the toll
that uninterrupted labor takes
on the body
but also the mind,
but also, the spirit.

We have forgotten the context
in which sabbath was created
and when we forget its origins
we may become blind to its purpose.

It is useful then, to ask why
we resist rest?
We need to know why we resist
being at rest
because it is a countervailing force
that prohibits true sabbath.

Remember the law of inertia
or Newton’s first law of motion?
Don’t freak out
but it is really interesting to think about this,
because we simply assume
our contemporary notions of physics
as a kind of obvious background truth
when there was a time
in which Newton’s laws of motion
were not believed or known.

Before Galileo and Newton,
the general assumption was not motion,
but rather, that objects had a built-in brake
or inclination to slow down.
They believed it was the nature of anything that moved
to also slow down and stop.
Slowing down and coming to a halt,
the way that gravity causes objects in motion to do,
was assumed to be a natural capacity
withinthe object
rather an outside of it.

But we know
that friction, gravity, and resistance
are external forces that change velocity.
Or to put it in the terms of Newton’s law of motion –
the only description of reality you and I have ever known –
“An object at rest remains at rest,
or if in motion, remains in motion
at a constant velocity
unless acted on by a net external force.”

Now, lest you think this stuff
loops on demand in my brain,
I had to go online to a teacher website,
KhanAcademy.org,
to help me out.
And I am so glad I did.
It had the most potent example
of Newton’s law I’ve ever seen:
A two minute video
of astronauts on the space station
eating tacos.
Yep, eating tacos.

One of them has a drink in one hand
and a taco in the other,
and when he wants to reach for some sauce
to add to his taco,
he just lets the taco go.
The taco just stays there
in the air
waiting for him to hold it again.
It is like some cartoon –
an impossible reality for us
because of gravity.

But as Newton told us,
out in interstellar space
an object in motion staysin motion
unless something comes along to slow it or stop it.
And likewise, an object with no velocity
simply does not move – like a taco –
unless something comes along to move it.

So, apply Newton to our resistance to sabbath:
what is it
that keeps us from resting –
what is it
that keeps us moving and
striving
and unable to simply…rest?

I suspect, but do not know for sure
and there is no Newtonian law
to proclaim it,
but I believe the force
that prevents us from stopping
and truly resting, is an anxiety or fear
lodged in the raw tissue
of an old wound or wounds.

We fear, instinctively,
that if we stop and rest
that stuff we have been running from
will catch up to us.
And you know, our instinct is probably correct.
To stop and rest
means that we hear what we’ve been missing,
we see what we were moving too fast to see,
and we feel what we might rather not feel.

All of us have old wounds,
dreaded voices,
and storage ponds of sorrow and grief.
Such wounds are different for each of us, of course,
but we all have them.

No one gets out of childhood alive
without some woundedness.

And no one anywhere in the world
walks this planet
without some painful wound
that broke the skin inside us
during adolescence or adulthood.

The power of our wounds
and the velocity of the motion they fuel for us to escape,
is different for all of us –
and different at different times in our lives.
But if we find ourselves
unable to stop
and rest…
to truly be at rest
for a nice long time of sabbath,
then it is wound-management
we might want to consider.

Wound management
is accomplished by gazing upon
that time and place
and those people, with whom the wound was formed.
It is accomplished by listening to the wound.
It can be done with introspection
or conversation;
journaling,
writing,
therapy,
spiritual direction,
contemplation,
or meditation.

If we give attention to that which is keeping us in motion,
we may be able to slow down enough
to truly rest – to enter a real sabbath.

But resting is harder that it seems like it should be.

I remember my first training in meditation
and the man who taught me said,
“Don’t worry about it if you fall asleep.”
I did both – I fell asleep and worried about it.
When I asked him what it meant,
he said, “You were tired.
If you are tired when you meditate,
you will probably fall asleep,
and that just means you needed some sleep.”
Tiredness can be one of the things
that keeps us from true rest.

If we have a backlog of sleep deprivation,
we will fall asleep when we allow ourselves
to arrive at sabbath.

But we are all different
and different personalities have to work their way
toward rest in their own unique or odd ways.
One-size does not fit all
whether we are talking about clothing or spirituality.

When our kids were young
and we were on vacation,
Katy and I had mandatory “FOB Time“ after lunch.
FOB: “Flat on back.”

The four kids didn’t have to nap
but they could not leave their bed
and they could not disturb anyone else.
It was amazing how differently
they managed their half hour of FOB.
One would read,
another one would play without a sound
with little soldiers and tanks and things.
Another one could not be still
and practically climbed around the sides of the mattress
like a salamander or Spider Man,
keeping within the confines of the rule
but just barely.
One of them could be still
and often fell asleep.
All of them would fall asleep
if they would be still for any length of time,
but that was what they were resisting.
Motion kept them from sleeping,
and for whatever reason,
sleeping seems like a giant failure to a lot of kids.

But whatever is keeping you and me in motion
so that we have difficulty stopping,
and resting, and
just resting,
it needs our attention.

Strengthening and deepening our capacity
to enter sabbath
and take long drinks from that well,
is a singularly important spiritual skill.

I offer it as a solid piece of wisdom
from the depths of our spiritual tradition.

Proper 13C, 2019: The Dustiness of Jesus

August 4, 2019 by Cam Miller

IMG_0340

Texts for Preaching:
Hosea 11:1-11;
Luke 12:13-21;
Liturgical poem: “The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog” by Alicia Ostriker: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53677/the-blessing-of-the-old-woman-the-tulip-and-the-dog

Oh, that gospel is my nightmare.

So this starts with a confession of sorts.
I have this thing I do
when I am feeling stressed,
that has to do with numbers.
You see, I like numbers –
which is a terrific irony because I flunked math in high school,
literally flunked it.
Of course, I was a problem child as a teenager,
primed for failure
with alcohol and drugs
along with family issues.
But all that to the side, I got a big fat “F” in geometry
and the next year
had to drop out of Algebra II
to avoid another one.

But still, I like numbers.
I can remember numbers in a way
I cannot remember other stuff –

I don’t know why.
In one of my parishes
there were several budgets,
the sum of which exceeded a million dollars
and most of the time I had total recall of those numbers.
Why, when I can’t remember where I put my phone,
can I remember where a decimal point is?

Anyway, when I get stressed out,
one of my go-to habits is to run numbers
related to my eventual retirement.
I have been doing this for years and years.
I never met a retirement calculator I didn’t like.
I have a theory about why this is comforting to me.
Most of what I do,
whether in ministry or writing,
has no real perimeter or measurement.
Teachers must have this dilemma too.
You don’t really get to know the outcome of your work
because it is a work in progress
that disappears over the horizon.

Anyway, that is why I think I find it comforting
to play with and obsess over numbers.
They are measurable and neat.
It is like cutting grass – a meaningless activity
that gives me an unreasonable satisfaction
because I can see the results of what I did.

But this gospel haunts my doing it.
It keeps me from taking any real pleasure
in my mindless obsession with numbers
because that little voice says,
“You fool! This very night your life is demanded of you.”

It is all the more bitter an irony, of course,
because I have no storehouse of grain
to sit back like Jabba-the-hut and grin over.
I play with the numbers
but they all turn out the same anyway – hopefully enough
so we don’t end up on our kid’s doorstep
but no barns to pull down and build up
in which to store a fortune.

And yet, there is that voice
as I am nearing the conclusion of my obsession-session
that chuckles in a dark kind of way:
“Heee-heee-heee, it’s all dust you idiot.
From dust you were born
and to dust you shall return.”

Welcome to the “Good News” of Jesus Christ.

One of the reasons I trust Jesus so much,
is that he kicks my butt
at least as much as he comforts my sorrows.
To go along with that awesome poem,
if we can’t smell the presence of God
in what is on our shoe,
then what we are smelling from the rose
probably ain’t God either.
(“The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog” by Alicia Ostriker).

Think about this now.
Those who told the story of Israel
actually believed they had been rung
through the ringer of the Assyrian Empire.
Whether you think Hosea was interpreting history
with clear vision, or, you think God
would never have done that, it is important to note
that the prophets of Israel believed it.
They thought it happened just that way.
They believed that God loved them like a child,
but even though they were beloved of God,
God still watched them grind through the shredder.

Likewise, whether or not you believe
that Jesus was tortured and executed for our sake,
or he was tortured and executed
because that is just what we do to people
who threaten our power equations,
it is important to note that his survivors
began to see his death that way –
like Hosea and Israel, they saw Jesus as a child of God
who God allowed to be ground in the shredder.

Again, whether or not that is true
is not the question because, honestly,
we can never know the answer.

But it is amazing
that our theological and spiritual tradition
is not afraid
to incorporate the aftermath
of tragedy, injustice,
brutality, violence, and random horrors
into our salvation history.

It is not all blessing and prosperity
as so much of popular Christianity wants to proclaim.
We come out of a tradition
that knew the smell of blood
as much as it knew the fragrance of hope –
and maybe a lot more of the blood.
So how do we make sense of that in our day?

First of all, let me acknowledge up front
that I do not have the answer
and no one I know or read has the answer.
But here is how I contextualize it theologically.

People who study such things
believe that a crater on Mars –
that is 75 miles wide –
is the remnant of a massive collision with a meteor
that generated Empire State Building-high tsunamis
on that planet’s long-lost ocean.
Do we imagine God sent that meteor
hurling through space to Mars?

The Earth had such a catastrophic collision
that pretty much extinguished 75% of plant and animal life
and left a fifty mile wide crater off Mexico.
Do we imagine that God
sought to punish the dinosaurs?

We probably do not ascribe to those ancient events
a divine causality – a God driven catastrophe.
Instead, we could easily imagine
they were random events –
with no cause other than the ones we know from physics,
which have to do with trajectory and speed and motion.

Instead, then, of wondering how God
is involved in cancer and oppression and
murders and violence, we could assume that God is not.
Rather, we might assume
that God is the creator of the cosmos
and somehow PRESENT in all of it –
present in the fire of a star enveloped in a black hole
as much as God is present

in the sorrow of grief over someone we have lost.
We could imagine God of the sparrow and God of the whale
is also God of the asteroid and God of the volcano –
and that the love of God
is not a pen-light focused on something we care about,
but somehow connected and connecting ALL OF IT.

What if the LOVE of God
was not perceptible or knowable in small pieces
apart from all of what we see and know
and imagine but still cannot fathom?
What if the LOVE of God was – all of it?

What if the LOVE of God
was the presence of holiness
in everything we know
but imperceptible and indistinguishable
without the whole?

You see, because we are such a small little part,
we see everything in relationship to ourselves.
If it doesn’t have an impact on us
and it cannot be measured by how it helps or hurts us,
we have difficulty seeing it.
What good is a God that doesn’t take an order
for health and wholeness from us?
What good is a God we cannot pray to
and place an order for peace and prosperity?

But what if the good news
was only that God is present with us
in all of it,
and present with us in everything?
And what if that PRESENCE
didn’t necessarily change anything
but at the same time
made everything a blessing?
What if we had the eyes of Hosea
to see that whether or not something was
good or bad for US,
God is indeed present
and that presence itself
is itself the sign of great love?

What if God’s LOVE,
was not reflected in a storehouse of wealth
or a social security check,
but instead, was simply seen
in God’s presence with us
in everything
and everywhere
no matter what was happening with us
or to us
or between us?

I wonder how that would change things?

You see, I think that wanting to have God
at the fine end of a magic wand
is a kind of greed
that Jesus was warning against.

I think that expecting God
to change the laws of nature
so they shift the trajectory of a meteor that is due
to land where we live,
is a kind of greed –
a spiritual lust
that places ourselves as the sun
at the center of the solar system.
It is quite natural, of course, to be self-centered
and to care most specifically
about what happens to us.
But it seems to me
a kind of spiritual rudeness
to insist that God be mixed up in our greed.

Please do not hear me refusing to accept
that weird and amazing things happen.
Healings and curings that defy logic
do in fact happen.
Unexpected reprieves do take place.
The path of meteors and comets do change.
So far, we are too small to understand how or why.
But we can be awed by such events
and exceedingly grateful when they happen.

But here is the thing we do not fully appreciate about God,
and this notion that God’s LOVE
consists in God being present
in every moment
and in everything
that is
and ever was.
What is there in the world,
at least the world we know about,
that is more powerful
more loving
more healing
and more saving than simple presence?

When we are in pain,

when we are afraid,
when we are lonely,
when we are grieving,
when we are full of sorrow…
what is there
other than the simple presence of someone who loves us,
that makes any difference at all?
Nothing.

Honestly, I do not know what Hosea saw or believed,
and it is an impossible stretch
to take what I am saying
and put it into his mouth,
or on the tongue of those
who interpreted the death of Jesus like they did.

But coming to appreciate the power
of God’s presence,
and to see that presence as pure LOVE,
is not a violation of that ancient spiritual wisdom either.

To that ghostly voice
that reminds me I am dust,
I can say, “and so is God.
God is dust,
and in the dust with me.”

To me,
that is the “good news” of Jesus Christ.

Proper 12 C: The New Physics of the Lord’s Prayer

July 28, 2019 by Cam Miller

So, this sermon was written
sitting on the floor of our empty sunroom
as movers loaded up the van
to take the remaining contents of our home
to storage for six months.

I am telling you this, in part, for catharsis
because as a large person
I felt a terrible combination of guilt and sadness
for not being able to help.
Having worked road construction,
laying concrete, and other manual jobs in my youth,
and helping countless friends, colleagues,
and parishioners move,
strength has been part of my self-identity.
But bad knees and an angry back
from weeks of preparation for the move,
sent me to the bench that day.
And to be honest, I’m on the bench
most any day these days.

Many of you are ahead of me
on this journey into aging.
You have been there, done that,
know what it feels like.
It brought forward for me a memory of my dad.

We had a family cottage in Northern Michigan
and one of the last times
my dad and I were there together,
I was taking down the dock for winter
while he sat in a lawn chair watching.
My dad was a man of very few words
who rarely expressed his emotions directly.
But I could tell by the look on his face
he wasn’t happy.
When I asked,
he said it was awful
to sit and watch me do something
he had done for decades and decades.

I had little inkling then of what that felt like,
but I sure felt it on moving day this past week.
What I said to my dad at the time, was:
“Dad, for everything there is a season,
and this is my season to do this,
and your season is to be with me
and to make sure I’m doing it right.”

On moving day,
I tried to imagine how my words sounded to my dad
but even from my new perch on this aging reality,
I don’t know what it would have sounded like to him.
To me, it sounds about right:
No need to sugar-coat truth
because truth has its own poetry, and
when heard, makes for a more graceful entry.

That would be my advice to young preachers too.
For everything there is a season,
and you don’t need to address every doggone reading
appointed for every given Sunday.
They do not always fit together organically,
and sometimes, a particular passage is just a dog.

The Hosea passage today may be a dog.
There is probably some good stuff in there
if we wanted to take the time to dig into it,
but I didn’t, and so we won’t,
at least not this morning.

The passage from Luke is full enough
for hours of conversation,
and too much to deal with all at once.
So I chose to spotlight just one part of Luke,
the part we say every week if not many times a week:
the prayer Jesus taught.

In the new physics, Field Theory teaches
that any field of vision we are in,
at any given time,
is teeming with elements and activities
we simply do not perceive.

I know I have brought this up before
but it is an especially powerful idea.

For example, all around us here in our field of vision,
are an enormous number of things going on right under our noses:
elements, event, activities, actions and reactions
that we simple do not perceive.

In our field of vision, right now,
are intensely brilliant colors from microwaves
that are bouncing all around us –
and we do not see them
because we cannot see microwaves.

In our field of vision, right now,
are sound waves we do not hear or see.

There is electromagnetic energy
about which we have no inkling.

There are micro-organisms, atoms,
and sub-atomic particles
all in constant motion
and yet outside the purview of our awareness.

Even in our own private field of vision, right now,
there are memories of events
imprinted upon our brains
of which we carry no immediate awareness,
and yet, those memories
guide and direct our decisions
and reactions right here and now.

Heck, we are not even aware of how differently
each of us is perceiving this immediate moment
and how our differences in perception
influences how we are as a community.

In short, all around us,
just in this small field of vision,

there are monstrously large numbers of elements
and activities taking place
that have an impact on
what we are,
what we think,
and how we feel – even here, even now.

Field Theory seeks to increase the depth
of our perception of the field around us,
as well as our understanding of the relationship
between all those many parts of the whole.
It is even relevant to spirituality.

An attorney
who is incredibly perceptive in the courtroom
and who has a facility to intuit a whirlwind of activity
going on in that field,
may be nearly blind to the presence of holiness
constantly around him or her.

A physician
who can diagnose an invisible disease
simply by seeing what antibodies
the body has deployed as its defense,
my not be able to perceive the holy
in her or his own field of vision.

A mother or father who is so sensitive
to the indicators of hurt, fear, sorrow, and distress
in the lives of his or her children,
may be terribly insensitive
to the movement of the spirit
that is circling all around them.

We sharpen our senses
to recognize those elements in our field of vision
that we believe grant us the greatest advantage,
but we sharpen them for a purpose
and in a particular direction, which means
we also filter out an enormous amount
of other things taking place
in the same field of vision,
and most notably the presence of the holy.

I am going to apply this Field Theory idea
to the Lord’s Prayer
and see if we can increase our perception
of what is swirling around that Biblical field.
It begins, “Abba, who art in heaven…”

We translate Abba as a formal title
suitable for the King’s English.
In fact, God as sovereign – king or emperor –
was how the Aramaic and Greek
were translated in Christian history.
Our Liege,
Your Highness,
Your Majesty…

But Abba translated as “Our Father,”
and a formal liturgical expression,
is a contrast to how it may have been used by Jesus
as an informal, personal prayer.
It would be like the difference between
“Good morning, madam or sir. How are you today?”
verses, “How’s it go’n?”

Gender likewise, for what Jesus was modeling,
may also not be essential.
It could be mother, mom or mommy,
and father, dad or daddy.
Dealers choice.

The relationship infused in the word “Abba”
is intimate and personal,
rather than formal or transcendent.
But I also believe, it was not intended to lock God
into maleness.

I suspect that in the 21^stcentury
many if not all of us
have come to understand that God
is not a bearded man on a cloudy carpet.
We understand that humans
have anthropomorphized God
by putting arms and legs,
and hands and eyes on the Big Bang.

Science has given us a new
and more complex perspective on God,
with an increased knowledge
of what is in the field with us in the cosmos.
But God as a faceless, amorphous energy
is impossible to pray to:
it has no voice,
there is no intimacy,
we are too small for that relationship.
And so Jesus invites us to pray, “Abba.”
He invites us to bring God closer,
smaller, even into a love more recognizable.

It does not change the reality of God,
but it does change OUR reality,
and that is okay.
That is what we need to do from time to time.
Just as my dad had to adjust to a new season,
and as I am learning to do as well,
the field around us changes all the time
and we need to change our lenses in order to see it.
With his prayer,
Jesus is pointing to a lot of holiness stuff
that is floating around us in our field of vision.

“Your Kingdom come”–
the reign of God,
the very presence of God
is in the field around us even here, even now.

“Your will be done”–
there is a currentmoving within the field,
and when we get in it,
instead of fighting against it,
or avoiding it,
incredible things begin to happen.

“Give us this day our daily bread”–
there is so much that is life-giving
and at hand in every moment,
even when we imagine that our hands are empty.

The pathway toward sustenance and nurture
is present in every moment, sometimes
even when bread is not.

“Forgive our trespasses” –
the presence of all that we have done
is in our field of vision at all times.
There should be no hiding from it
or abolishing it.
All that we have said
and all that we have done
is present with us in a collective whole
at every moment,
and it is either empowering us
or disabling us
or both.
If we have not fully acknowledged and accepted
what is in the field,
embraced the potential for forgiveness
for our failures, then we will not heal.

“As we forgive others”–
forgivingand the accepting of forgiveness
are Siamese twins in the soul –
they cannot be separated if we are to live.
Forgiving ourselves and one another
does not mean “forgetting” or “denying”
or “pretending” that things didn’t happen.
It means seeing and acknowledging
what is in the field around us
and learning how to live with it.

“Lead us NOT into temptation” –
which is a plea to strengthen us
in the midst of struggle.
In the field around us at any given time
are dangers and conflicts
for which we need plain old strength
on top of any wisdom we might have gained.
“Don’t take us there, please,”
is an honest acknowledgement of our vulnerability
and on-going recovery.

And, “deliver us from evil” –
is another plea, this one for God
to be powerful on our behalf
when we are at the limits of our own power.
Sometimes, no amount of our strength,
wisdom, or courage
is enough to save us from disaster.
That is the moment when we are truly dependent
upon a power greater than ourselves;
a power always present in the field
yet seldom seen.

“For YOURS is the reign of power and wonder,
now and forever” –
In the end,
as marvelous as you and I are,
we are but the spaces between two waves –
momentsdefined by that which is around us.
Knowing, facing, living with and under our finitude,
our very smallness,
is the beginning of wisdom.
That is the prayer.
That is our prayer if we want it.

This ancient rabbinical prayer
is an invitation for us to see anew
what is in our field of vision at any given moment:
to seeall the stuff
we look past most of the time,
and to seethe sources of our health,
of our healing,
and of our strength
that is present all the time.
We often imagine it is absent
when it is all present,
all of the time.

This prayer is an invitation
to seemore of what actually occupies
the field of vision around us,
and in so doing,
to see holiness more clearly and present.

Three Pentecost/Proper 8C: The Movement

July 7, 2019 by Cam Miller

Spring break of the last year of seminary,
the bishop of the Diocese of Indianapolis
brought the four senior seminarians home
for each of us interview in the same four parishes.
One was in Evansville down on the Ohio River,
another in Lafayette up on the Wabash River.
The other two were in Indianapolis.

I remember the interview in Evansville.
The rector was evangelical,
rigid in body and mind,

and for whatever reason,
I found him a little bit scary.
I spent the day there learning about the parish
and Evansville, as well as getting to know the rector.

He took me to lunch at a downtown club
on the top story of an office building
overlooking the Ohio River and city.
I took the moment to confess
I wasn’t sure that the two of us
were quite compatible
theologically or liturgically.
He put his arm around my shoulder
and looking down on the city, he said,
“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborer are few; therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest
to send out laborers into his harvest.”

I don’t know what I said to him, if anything.
But I do know that I was thinking,
that we were not seeing the same Jesus
nor looking at the same harvest.

Let’s keep getting clean with Jesus.

The last two weeks
I spent a little time brushing away
dirt and detritus
built up on the floor of a two-thousand-year-old
history between Jesus and us.
I want to continue with that just a bit.

I going to do something I don’t do often,
which is read a few excerpts from someone
who writes on the subject.
In part, so you will know it is not just Cam-nonsense
but also because he writes clearly.

I am going to read from John Dominic Crossan’s book,
Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography.

In it, he is commenting upon
the well-known verse in Luke
in which Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Crossan argues against the English word “poor”
as the translation for the Greek word
that appears in the text.
He prefers the word, “destitute.”
He isn’t alone in this interpretation either.
It may seem like splitting hairs until
we hear Crossan explain it.

It is a little lengthy, but here it is:
“The poor man has to work hard but has always enough to survive, while the beggar has nothing at all. Jesus, in other words, did not declare blessed are the poor, a class that included, for all practical purposes, the entire peasantry; rather, he declared blessed are the destitute – for example, the beggars.

Now, what on earth does that mean, especially if one does not spiritualize it away, as Matthew immediately did, into “poor in spirit” – that is, the spiritually humble or religiously obedient?

Did Jesus really think that bums and beggars were actually blessed by God, as if all the destitute were nice people and all the aristocrats correspondingly evil? Is this some sort of naive or romantic delusion about the charms of destitution?

If, however, we think not just of personal or individual evil but of social, structural, or systemic injustice – that is, of precisely the imperial situation in which Jesus and his fellow peasants found themselves – then the saying becomes literally, terribly, and permanently true.

In any situation of oppression, especially in those oblique, indirect, and systemic ones where injustice wears a mask of normalcy or even of necessity, the only ones who are innocent or blessed are those squeezed out deliberately as human junk from the system’s own evil operations.

A contemporary equivalent: only the homeless are innocent. That is a terrifying aphorism against society because…it focuses not just on personal or individual abuse of power but on such abuse in its systemic or structural possibilities…none of our hands are innocent or our consciences particularly clear.” End of quote.

In other words,
what Crossan is emphasizing
is what we already know to be true,
at least in our gut:
Jesus was a radical agent of change
operating at the street level.
His was a prophetic witness against the evil
frozen within what was considered normal.

But as Crossan notes,
Jesus was not really street-level,
he actually operated at the rural route level.
His mission and ministry was largely rural,
and it wasn’t until he hit the Big City
that he was gobbled up.

That too should give us pause.
We can imagine that Jesus
could easily have gone unnoticed
by many well educated and successful people
in a world that was so much smaller
and less populated than ours.
What then, are we to imagine about now
and the challenge you and I face seeing Jesus?

Here is a little more Crossan about Jesus’ mission:

“What sort of a mission are we dealing with,
who goes on it, and to where?

…The mission we are talking about is not, like Paul’s, a dramatic thrust along major trade routes to urban centers hundreds of miles apart. Yet it concerns the longest journey in the Greco-Roman world, maybe in any world – the step across the threshold of a peasant stranger’s home…

The missionaries were not some specific and closed group sent out on one particular mission at one particular time. They were predominantly healed healers, part of whose continuing healing was precisely their empowerment to heal others.”

What Crossan is describing is a
“network of shared healing”
initiated by Jesus but shared by his colleagues.

It was a covert movement
that pierced multiple layers
of a complicated social caste system,
and called into question
a mountainous hierarchy of relationships
and authority.

The movement that Jesus initiated
finally turned from the countryside and entered the city –
the beloved Jerusalem,
as Isaiah refers to her – and it was abruptly repressed.
But the movement refused to die
when Jesus was murdered.
Think of all the movements in our lifetimes,
ones that have included millions and millions
but that disappeared within decades
if not a few years or even months.

Here is a little portal into history,
written by a Roman philosopher named, Celsus,
who wrote something called “True Doctrine”
which was an intellectual attack
on the growing Jesus movement called Christianity.
This was written around 177 CE
when the emperor Marcus Aurelius
was persecuting Christians,
and it is included in the same Crossan book.

Celsus wrote:
“…I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind.

Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant.”

So, for generation after generation
the fledging Christian movement
continued to be a covert operation
from the bottom of society up.
And it is still a movement,
only it comes to us today saddled with an institution
that has grown up around it.

That institution unknowingly
sits upon the movement of healed-healers
like an underground aquifer
feeds lakes, rivers, and wells
that rest upon the surface.

It is that movement of healed-healers,
gathered around an open table,
sharing food across class lines
and straddling color lines
and holding hands across political lines
and subverting all the other social and economic
divisions that feed on bad faith.

It is too easy for us to see the institution
and forget the spiritual movement that feeds it.
In fact, those who have no use for the institution
don’t even know about the spiritual movement flowing underneath us –
and that is why they look at the Church
and think it is empty or without vitality.
But they are wrong.

As Crossan has observed,
we often forget
that we are healed-healers
whose continued healing
depends upon our helping to heal others.
We often slip into a mode of thinking
about the institution and imagine
that it is here for us
whenever we need it –
that it is here to meet our needs.
But the movement
running underneath the institution,
authorizing its very existence,
is a movement
and we need to remember that.
It moves – always.
It moves in and out, and it moves in and it moves out.

The movement underneath us
is an ocean lapping the beach
and pulling us out to sea again,
and anyone who brings a need or a wound
to the church for healing
should also expect to be caught up
in an outward flowing movement of healing.

The same wisdom is found
in 12 Step recovery groups
where the final and 12^thstep
is the one that transforms the healed
into the healer
by taking the new life one has discovered
and bringing it to others who seek i

Healing – spiritual healing –
takes place as the healed become the healers…
as the healed become the healers.

That kind of healing takes place
in a community of healing –
a whole movement of people
bonded together by woundedness
that is in the process of being transformed
into the power to heal.
While Crossan is a student of history and archeology,
his theological eyes of faith
could see and write about this spiritual truth.

There is so much more to say about this Jesus
who has bubbled up from below
and risen to within earshot of even our loftiness.

But that is where we leave it for now.

This Jesus, at least as refracted
through Luke, Crossan, and your silly preacher,
initiated a movement among and comprised
mostly of peasants.
It was a movement of healed-healers –
actually, healers in the process of healing
because we are never fully healed in this life.
Healers who understood that the destitute,
those people even lower down the pecking order than peasants themselves,
were the blessed.
It was their very victimization and marginalization by the ordinariness of oppression that defined their blessedness.
This was a movement of people
who were incredibly fragile economically
and who balanced precariously
over an open hole
with absolutely no social safety net.
This was a movement of people
who nonetheless kept looking downward
and outward
to extend the network of healing to others.
This was a movement – like the motion of waves,
that was ceaseless.

That is our challenge, yours and mine:
To understand that we are first and foremost
a spiritual movement and not an institution;
one that moves from personal need
to becoming healers ourselves.

We are a movement…
always moving outward from a place of healing
that is both inward and at home
but never isolated or stationary.

It moves.
It is a movement.
We are a movement.
We move, always, constantly, moving.
In and out,
change and motion,
moving, moving, moving.

12 Pentecost C, 2019: Peace be with you

11 Pentecost: Newton’s Law of Sabbath

Proper 13C, 2019: The Dustiness of Jesus

Proper 12 C: The New Physics of the Lord’s Prayer

Three Pentecost/Proper 8C: The Movement

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