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Day of Pentecost 2019: Seeing Red

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This is my fourth Pentecost at Trinity,
I can’t believe it.
For those who weren’t here then,
I was taller and had a full head of hair.
We have come a long way:
navigated radical changes with resiliency,
held hands along the way,
and we have a future.
Happy Pentecost!

The Bible: This is how it works,
and how it routinely reveals our relative unfamiliarity with it –
because it is not truly our text
or our story
in the way it was for those who wrote or edited
the books that make up the Bible.
So, for example, we hear the Book of Acts story
in all its whacko exuberance
and are either:
1) Wowed and amazed by it
2) In immediate disbelief before it, or
3) Left wondering about whether they were drunk or not

The punch line of the story, though,
if we were hearing it within generations of its telling
and were steeped in the stories of ancient Israel,
would be that God had made all of those people
speaking in different languages,
understand one another.
That was the point of the story:
God made them understand each other.
Think about what a miracle that is –
we rarely understand each other
when we are speaking the same language!
So that is a heck of a punch line.

Here is why we can tell that was the punch line:
The Tower of Babel story.
We almost used the Babel story today
instead of this one from Acts.
We are given the choice for either one in the lectionary
but I have never heard the Tower of Babel story
told on Pentecost.

Yet it is the counterpoint to Pentecost,
the other bookend, which we don’t realize
because it is not truly our story.

As you might recall the Tower of Babel
from the Book of Genesis,
God a sundered humankind
by causing us to have different languages
so that we could no longer communicate with one another.
It was not exactly a punishment
but rather, a tactical maneuver on God’s part
because our rascally capacity for engineering and technology
had succeeded in building a tower too high into the sky.

God showed a bit of fear
about human encroachment
upon the divine habitat.

That story comes early in Genesis
and well before monotheism is in place,
since it hosts a conversation between the gods
about what to do in response to human encroachment.
The decision was to divide us
with a variety of languages
so that it would be difficult for us to collaborate.
We can see that this Pentecost story from Acts
is an intentional contrast to Genesis and Babel –
a story that comes to Luke, the author of Acts,
from at least five-hundred years before him.
Where God once separated us with language,
God now unifies us with a Spirit
that enables all understanding
and so overcomes human division.

Like I said,
if the Bible were truly our story
in the way that it was their narrative
so long ago,
we would be able to hear these stories in context,
and understand them
within the rich historical and literary soil
in which they are rooted.

That is not a criticism,
just the acknowledgement of a fact.
Even those Christians that proclaim Biblical literalism
and the inerrancy of the Bible,
more often than not,
know the Bible through a doctrinal lens
that makes every punch line about Jesus and Christianity
when they just are not.

For years and years,
since seminary basically, I thought
my task as a preacher and teacher
was to be an ombudsman for the Bible,
to help make it our story –
at least in those congregations where I served.
Now I can see
that that effort was part of an essential denial
of human cultural and institutional reality
in the modern and post-modern age.
The Bible cannot be our story,
it is the story of an ancient people
whose reality was far, far from ours.
Theirs is not our story, BUT…
their story can inform ours.

In their story or stories,
we can see ourselves in a clearer light.
It is what a good therapist can do for us.
What a therapist does is help us hear ourselves
and see ourselves
with fewer blinders on.
We need someone else to do that
because we stew in our own juices
and are limited by our own prejudices and assumptions
that color what we see.
In other words, we generally see
what we expect to see,
and so we need someone to help us
dig around in our assumptions
and poke through the ashes of our history
and allow us to look around our blinders
to see what we have been missing.
It is not the therapist’s job
to tell us what we do not see,
but he or she allows us to do the work we need to do
to see it ourselves.

Likewise, the biblical story
offers us spectacular insights into ourselves
and inklings about interactions of God with humankind.
What the Bible offers is not confined to the exact words
because the Bible is not a motion picture
or even a stage play
in which the action and dialogue
tell us exactly what we need to know.
Rather, the Bible is more like a painting or music,
it is an artistic rendering of human experience
we must stare at
and ponder
and open ourselves to
and see and hear and imagine
our way into the message of the rendering.
The Bible cannot tell us what we need to know,
it helps and allows us to encounter the unveiling.

The biblical story
is poetry and prose
rather than memoir or biography.
We often have it sold to us
as something it is not,
and when that happens,
it makes the biblical story inaccessible for some
and toxic for many.

We have many stories, of course.
D-Day is one of our stories.
Slavery is one of our stories.
My Lai is one of our stories.

The achievements and failures of human and civil rights
is one of our stories.
The arc that moves from the landing at Plymouth Rock
to Voyager 1 leaving the solar system
is one of our stories.

The healing of once incurable disease and trauma
as well as those we still can do nothing to cure
is one of our stories.
On top of all of those stories are our personal stories –
who we came from,
how we got here,
the alcoholic or abuser who defined our family,
the saint that was our mother or father or grandmother,
the rags to riches we evolved through,
the limitation overcome,
the fortunes lost,
the mid-life transition…
So many stories and
so many of them without texts
with which to follow.

I see now
that the Bible is not one of our stories
but a lens through which we can read and re-read
the stories of our lives.
It is one of the tools we have
that enables us to see more clearly,
understand more keenly,
and imagine more broadly.

Here is what I see
through the lens of the Babel-Acts continuum,
from a communal spiritual perspective.
There is a kind of moment,
an experience between people,
in which we know without words
that we are connected.
I have witnessed it
once or twice
around tables in here –
at book discussions
when we landed on such a moment.
It begins with someone unveiling a tender piece
of their own story, and
without words or warning

everyone else is occupying the exact same space
at the exact same moment
with the exact same experience.
It might remain a wordless moment
of unspoken looks,
or it might rise up in a crescendo of laughter,
or it may appear in watery eyes.

It happens every once in a while in worship too.
I think I witness such a moment
the first time we sang Louis Armstrong’s,
“It’s a wonderful world.”

We wandered into it with uncertainty
and then at some point, verse three maybe,
we heard ourselves singing sweetly,
and we heard the song,
and we had a collective moment of,
“yes, it is a wonderful world.”

There are such moments
between individuals that happen because of pain.
It may require many slow, arduous conversations to get there
but when two people land on such a moment,
oh, there is a healing.
Even where there is not a cure
there can be a healing,
which is what allows us to keep going
and even to thrive in the midst of struggle.
That may be its own kind of miracle.

Here’s my point.
That Babel story describes the more prevalent experience
of human beings unable to connect
no matter how much they try.
In addition to the problem of language
we have a problem with self-interest, pride, competition,
and just downright beligerance.
Acts describes a different kind of moment,
when something happens,
either that we have worked towards
or that comes as a gift of serendipitiy,
and we touch one another.
In that touch
words can flow or stay silent
and still we understand.
Such connecting may be
in the midst of joy or pain or struggle,
it is that kind of gift.

So that is what I see and here in this story
and how I would use it to tell our own story.

I do not have the very long Trinity perspective
that some of you have,
and it may simply be my being a late arrival,
but I sense we are closer together as a community of faith
than we were four Pentecosts ago.
I think it is because of Pentecostal moments
in which we have touched one another
and experienced both understanding
and healing.
Not everyone
all together
all of the time,
but enough people
and enough times
to be leaven for the deepening of community.

That is the story I hear
and the story I have experienced
and the story I am telling
about us.

Happy Pentecost.

PS. In many liturgical churches, red is the color for the celebration of Pentecost

 

 

 

6 Easter 2019: A Note in a Bottle

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Ptolemy World Map 1467

To my grandson.

My Dearest Declan,

Just this week for the first time, you escaped your play blanket on your own. Your mom and dad celebrated it by texting us all a picture (by the time you read this, you may not know what a text is but I’m sure there will be a way to find out, as in our time it was a Google search). They are excited and encouraging your every strong movement now, but soon they will be reining you in and holding you back. You will chaff as they once did, to become a free agent. But that is not why I am writing.

It is 2019 and we are feeling our way in the dark –groping our way into what will become your century not ours. I remember fifty years ago talking to my Great Aunt Elma who was born in 1880. To hold her hand, and feel her breath upon my cheek, and to touch her spotted skin was as if I were on a long-distance call to another place in the time tunnel. She had known Civil War veterans and freed Slaves, and people who had heard Abraham Lincoln debate Stephen A. Douglas. Now I am your ligament to the last century and, like Aunt Elma, I will become just another rusting link to another time and place.

So, my heart is in my throat as I write to you with a little voice inside, one who whispers what I most know and care about. I am stretching every joint and tendon to reach into your world with words that will move your blood.

Please listen then, for the pulse of wisdom that runs from my heart to yours; that runs in veins sutured together across time and space, carrying life and holiness and wisdom from the most ancient, ancient of days, to your present time.

That pulse is Hope.

Hope is a four-letter word we use without thought and yet it is the glue that keeps us poised to change the world. Or, when we live without it, to dissolve into the squalor of cynicism.

As powerful and essential as hope can be, it is maddening that we have so much difficulty putting our finger on what it is we should hope for.  Our minds are divided: “double-mindedness” is the word I like to use.

We have half-a-mind to live as cynically as a sewer rat, and half-a-mind to reach for the thinnest of explanations that will allow us to believe in fairies.

Authentic hope lives in between.

In 2019, which is the trapdoor to the past from which I am writing you, cynicism is on the rise and doing well. There is so much bad news that it seems naïve and child-like to hope for a quick end to the entangled, endless wars of our day or to arrest the encroachments of climate change. I feel certain that both of these are growing tentacles into your world.

Only the one we call God, knows what the world of your adulthood will be like – the last half of what is right now a young century. But at this moment, people are so brutal and violent, the ravages of legal and illegal pharmaceuticals so devastating, and the threat of pestilence and disease so random that many people feel hope is absurd or simply do not know what to hope for.

On the other hand, memory can serve us well.

Back when I was holding my Aunt Elma’s hand, India and China were importing rice and struggling with cycles of starvation.  Now they export rice and import jobs.  While such success is a two-edged sword for the earth, it is a measure of how fast things once assumed to be hopeless can change.

But there is a war of worlds going on right now, and I wonder if the partisans of the various constituencies will know peace by the time you are old enough to read and understand this letter.

We have those who live in a world that was formed even before my Aunt Elma was born – a world undefined by machinery, assembly lines, and things we think of even now as old fashioned.

Let’s call that the “old world,” by which I mean people in cultures living today but living with expectations and values of the pre-modern world. They continue to respect and revere the past, tradition, and elements of a more ancient time and culture. They resist what most of us consider ordinary and denounce what we think of us good.

And yet, those living as the “old world” do so side-by-side with people living a more contemporary life. Let’s call that world “the modern” world. My generation is known as the Baby Boomers, and we were raised in the modern world by people, like my mom and dad, who were born during World War I. Our parents lived through a metamorphosis ushered in by speed and flight, and atoms and microchips.

We do not cherish the past or revere tradition in the ways that the “old world” does, and we have come to expect comfort, security, and the possibility of affluence. The institutions that defined the twentieth century are crumbling in the twenty-first century, and though it is disconcerting it is not all that surprising to us.

As you might have guessed, the old world and the modern world are at war with one another, pitting terrorism against state-sponsored violence in an endless cycle of misery.

And then there is the “new world.” Where both the “old world” and the “modern world” imagined order as the orchestrating element of everything, the “new world” imagines chaos as the guiding agent, and recognizes change as the nature of Nature.

The “new world” lives alongside both the “old world” and the “modern world,” but it sees life through the lens of technology and in streaming images, considers money and privacy as quaint, and insists upon borderless communication. In the “new world” values and beliefs are extremely personal rather than communal, and all of it thoroughly relative.

Domestically, in politics and culture wars, there is a nasty power struggle paralyzing any effort to make progress. That bitterness reflects what is happening internationally, and very little problem-solving or even repair seems to be getting done.

The people of these three worlds walk among each other, witnessing the very same earth and sky and sea but apprehending them differently, literally seeing them differently and warring in the process. How will they ever come to terms? How will they ever learn to agree or tolerate such differences?

My sweet Declan, the struggle of these three worlds and the carnage that this conflict is creating across the planet earth, and within our own nation, is the very ache that has caused me to write you so many years before you can understand a word of it.  I suppose this is a note in a bottle dropped into the ocean of time between us.

It is the grasp to hope, and the reach to know what to hope for, that inspires me to write you.

Human beings almost always live out over our skis, lean too far over our handlebars, and imagine how it could be even before we know how to create it. We have buried deep inside us a powerful grain that enables hope: Imagination.

Our double-mindedness is healed by the knowledge and experience that what we can imagine we can achieve. While you are now experiencing the daily frustration of your reach to crawl that exceeds the grasp of your body, it is that very capacity to “reach” that offers hope.

Moses envisioned a day when the grandchildren of slaves that built the pyramids would become a nation unto themselves. He did not live to see it but it happened.

Jeremiah once dreamed that God would invite gentiles into the covenant with Israel.  He did not live to see it but I am living proof that it happened.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of racial equality and economic justice for all.  He did not live to see it and neither will I, yet it is still being created stone upon stone.

Technology that once seemed a ridiculous projection of bad science fiction is now in use, even commonplace.

My grandfather, your great-great grandfather on my mother’s side, was a country doctor in rural Michigan. He watched people die of pneumonia and tetanus while today we watch hearts and lungs and kidneys traded like spare parts.

What we can imagine we can achieve.

This is where we can hope; and it is where you become part of the hope even as I am part of the hope.  We need to imagine ourselves into what the gospels would have us to become.  We need to imagine ourselves into the kind of people that Jesus and so many of our spiritual ancestors have told us we can become.

We need to imagine ourselves becoming tender with love, generous with resources, vulnerable with service, and open to receiving wisdom from where we least expect it.

When we have become cautious and timid with our love because we have been betrayed or hurt, we need to employ our imagination. We need to imagine how we would act if we were to take the risk to love more courageously.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

If we are stingy with our money, jealous with our time, or self-centered about the use of our hands, then we need to make up a story about how the scrooge inside us will be transformed.  We need to write ourselves a script that imagines a new future.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

If we have been timid about crossing socio-economic, ethnic, racial, or political boundaries to develop relationships of mutuality that defy our differences, then we need to imagine what it would take for us to be braver.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

If we find ourselves defensive and resistant to ideas that threaten our assumptions, then we need to imagine that we can become a new canvass upon which the ancient wisdom will be painted in new and vibrant images.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

Declan, I mentioned a man named Jesus, someone I hope you have learned about along the way. Moses, Jeremiah, and Isaiah too.

Like many prophets and agents of God’s love, Jesus was facing a violent end at the hands of a world order who feared people like him. He saw with sober clarity the horrendous suffering he faced, and still, even then, he imagined a new relationship with God that his friends and family could live into. He promised them a hope he would not enter, but that he could imagine.

I find that inspiring Declan, and a way of soothing my double-mindedness. I let those ancients and moderns alike, the ones I call prophets and agents of God’s love, lead me into futures I cannot not see.

So, my sweet boy, or man as you may be now, whatever the condition of your world, you can engage in the subversive act of imagining a new world.

You can engage in the revolutionary act of imagining a new order or new chaos.
You can engage in the healing art of imagining a new way of living and loving.
You can practice imagination with a purpose, the re-creation of the world as God has dreamed for it to become.

In the days ahead, on your long march to learn to walk and see and know and love and care and understand, I pledge to keep my own imagination alive so that when the time comes, I can teach you how to imagine.

With whatever time we may have to share the world together, we will use our imaginations to set in motion such incredible changes that God will smile, and we will continue to live with relentless hope.

Love,
Granddad

 

 

 

 

5 Easter 2019: Trust

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The Wheel of Life (Samsara) – Tibetan

Preachers are such an easy target.
And church-goers in general, way too easy
for the culture to lampoon and caricature.
I’m not breaking any news here, am I?

We used to be the mainstream
and one of the weightbearing pillars of society,
and when we occupied that space,
it was just pot-shots from intellectuals.
Now, reduced to categories and demographics
in the partisan cultural divide,
us church-goers have become easy sources of humor.

But the best of that humor, and
one of the first and most famous,
is still “Elmer Gantry,” by Sinclair Lewis.

It was written in the 1920’s when Fundamentalism
and Pentecostalism were taking off
in non-denominational form,
and infiltrating the more mainline
Baptists and Methodists.

It was a satire of Christian hypocrisy
with Elmer an amoral, self-interested charlatan
that becomes a nationally renowned
preacher and evangelist.
I’m sure many of us read it once, years ago.

It is a little painful to read now
because it appears that the Elmer Gantrys
have taken over religion and politics
in our moment in history.

Be that as it may,
I want to read a brief excerpt of a sermon
Elmer preaches, a kind of signature theme of his.

You have to hear this as Burt Lancaster
playing Elmer Gantry,
preaching in a tent to the suckers born every minute,
with a smarmy lilt and slight drawl:

“Love! Love! Love! How beauteous
the very word! Not carnal love
but the divine presence.
What is Love? Listen!

It is the rainbow that stands out,
in all its glorious many-colored hues,
illuminating and making glad
against the dark clouds of life.
It is the morning and the evening star,
that in glad refulgence,
there on the awed horizon,
call Nature’s hearts to an uplifted rejoicing
in God’s marvelous firmament!”
Love, love, love.  (“Elmer Gantry” by Sinclair Lewis, Chapter 20)

I offer that bit of satire
in contrast to Teihard de Chardin,
the famous French Jesuit paleontologist
and theologian.

Maybe they are almost the same,
except the religion that Sinclair Lewis
was lampooning
is built upon wiggly worms of anxiety about death,
while Chardin embraces death
as a natural source of fire in a cosmos of love.

“And on that day, for the second time
in the history of the world,
we shall have discovered fire.”

Elmer Gantry knew we hate death.
Death is like a raspberry seed stuck in our teeth.
It doesn’t matter how magnificent and beautiful
the day,
the month,
the year,
the life…
just the idea that death is inevitable
makes it a ghostly presence in our midst.

This anxiety and struggle against death
goes way back, way…way back.
We can cast our gaze on those iconic cave paintings
from prehistoric France,
and imagine how they express hope
for something more from life
long before the advent of words.

But we also see it more directly
a mere two-thousand, six-hundred years ago –
in that poem from which the Book of Revelation
snagged its poetic imagery.

Six-hundred years before Jesus was born,
the poet Isaiah envisioned
a new heaven and a new earth,
but it was on a mountaintop
rather than a city,
where John of Revelation envisions it.

Isaiah wrote:
“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined.  And God will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples…”
(by which he meant death).

And note that the opposite of death is a feast.
He went on to write:
“God will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of God’s people will be taken away from all the earth…”

So, we can see how much John,
in the book of Revelation,
writing from some dark, dank corner
of a Roman prison,
was paraphrasing Isaiah, when he wrote:
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth…
And I saw the holy city of Jerusalem
coming down…(and there)
God will dwell with (God’s) people,
and God will be with them,
(and) wipe away every tear from their eyes,
and death shall be no more,
neither shall there be mourning nor crying
nor pain any more,
for the former things have passed away.”

So we see that the musings
in John’s book of Revelation
barrow directly from old Isaiah,
and both of them,
like prophets, poets, and sages
from the past and present,
imagine a world without death.

We need to see this in the context
of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs:
Once we have food stored up in the cave
or the barn or the refrigerator;
and once we have a nice warm fire going
to keep the cave warm
or the pipes from freezing;
and once we have a sense
that we are pretty well hidden and protected from the tigers,
or the tribe living around the next bend in the river,
or the gang of criminals prowling the neighborhood,
or the cops who bang on us…
then we can look up to the heavens and say,
“Hey, is this all there is?”

When we humans
get enough of a cushion
between ourselves and starvation,
and even a hint of stability and security,
it is then
we start asking questions about life and death.

It is then
that no matter how fat and sassy we are,
it does not feel like enough.

And it is then
we want some assurance
that this is not all there is,
and in fact, the rest of it needs to be pretty good too.

Heaven,
Moksha,
Jannah,
Salvation,
Nirvana…all the ideas
about what happens after we die,
reflect what the cultures they derive from
believe would be an improvement
on what is now.

In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions of the West,
a very human-sounding distributive justice
is exacted upon the good guys
and the bad guys alike,
and the rewards and punishments
meted out at the end of life
will right the scales of justice.

In Hinduism, the scales of justice
are measured somewhat differently than in the West,
and balanced through reincarnation.
Hinduism explodes the mind into openness
with a withering array of gods
and levels of the universes,
and succession of lives
that make possible
any and all conceptions of fairness.

Buddhism, of which there are as many brand names
as there are Christian denominations,
reckons that all lives,
good and bad,
are spokes stuck on a wheel of suffering.
The only hope hinges,
not upon the balancing of a scale,
but upon release into nothingness.
Nirvana is not heaven,
it is the absolute going out of existence
and so disappearing from the relentless cycle of lives.

Modern science, with its own brand of religion,
has given us a new vision:
an odd kind of afterlife
knit within the matrix of molecules and atoms.
Science has declared
that no energy is ever lost
but simply changes form.
We live, we die, we become part of the soil
and that in turn feeds
and becomes a part of the on-going
cosmic cycle of energy –
whether confined to planet earth
or released into space.

But is that all there is?
Are those our only choices?
Heaven, Reincarnation, Nirvana, Thermodynamics?

I suspect that all of us, to some degree,
have that pervasive human desire
to know what is next.

For some people that desire
is an underground river
coursing through their upper consciousness
with nerve-endings of anxiety.

For others, the desire to know
holds the key to peace of mind.

Some people cannot accept
their powerlessness before death
without the certainty
of knowing what is next.
Those people cannot, will not,
comprehend the value of any religion
that is unable to satisfy all questions of eternity.

But there are also people
who find the focus on life after death
and theories of heaven and hell,
a loud distraction from the ethical action
upon which they believe Christianity is built.
To some of those people,
all our talk about Original Sin,
Salvation,
Redemption,
Heaven and Hell,
the Age to Come and Life Everlasting,
keeps us from the real business of the religion
and makes people vulnerable to the
Elmer Gantrys of this world.

But as is often the case,
there is a third way, a middle way, and
quite simply:
Trust that the creator loves us.

When we trust – deeply and profoundly –
that someone truly loves us,
then we make ourselves vulnerable to them.

When we trust
that someone truly loves us,
we know – not by any scientific measurement,
but in our gut – that our welfare matters to them.

When we trust
that someone truly loves us,
we put ourselves in their hands
in ways we do not even calculate beforehand.
We do that, knowing
they may not be able to protect us
from all dangers, or even
keep from hurting us sometimes themselves.
But we trust their love
and we bank on it
and we live by it,
and we know
no matter what happens,
we can live into it
because they love us.

That kind of love is as powerful as fire.

So, if we trust in the love of God,
if we trust that God loves more completely
than we have ever been loved before,
then no matter what happens,
it will be okay.

You see, if we can find for ourselves
that kind of trust
in the love of God,
then we will no longer need to speculate
about what happens when we die
because we are loved…
because we are loved by God
and whatever else happens,
it is okay.

Obviously, we do not
get to know ahead of time anyway.

All religious theories are fantasy at best.
When our trust is in fantasy
we are most vulnerable to the Elmer Gantrys.

But the love of God,
if we have ever felt ourselves touched by,
even slightly,
is enough to hold onto.

In fact, if we can only extrapolate
the love of God
from the most profound human love
we have ever experienced,
that too is enough to hold onto.

And that, by the way,
is what the Biblical Hebrew word for faith means:
“to hold onto.”
Literally, faith means, to hold onto.

Yeah, though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,
I hold onto
the love of God.

Trust.
In the end, that’s all we’ve got…
and it turns out to be enough.

4 Easter: That Terrible Trinity

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Okay, this is a little weird for a sermon,
but it’s all I got for today.

Of all the creatures on this blue planet,
the two with whom we have
the most generous relationship,
are cats and dogs.
Here is a basic difference between
cats, dogs, and humans.

I have lived 23,861 days
give or take a few.
A dog would have no concept of days,
every minute of every day being all there is.
A cat could care less about the past,
and its only concern about the future
is how to get the best out of it.

A human
can actually calculate the number of days,
obsess about what was missed
and fret about what is to come
all without ever stopping
to experience the moment that is.

Now the truth is,
we have no idea what it is like
inside the mind of a cat or dog, it is
just our projection.
In this case, mine.

But being human,
we all share that
like germs on a grease spot.

Past, present, and future are so human –
maybe even uniquely human
among the creatures on this planet.

Each one of us lives in a hall of mirrors
made up of those three panels –
past, present, and future.
We cannot escape it,
it is what defines us,
and how well we manage
those relationships
will determine our wellness –
spiritual and otherwise.

The past, only lived out in the memory,
is chock full of
nostalgia,
melancholy,
resentment,
trauma,
happiness,
bitterness,
and sorrow.

The future, only lived out in fantasies
or projections of the mind, is where
anxiety,
fear,
dread,
hope,
and anticipation live.

Everything else hangs out in the present.
Love, joy, grief, pain, and gratitude
are all present tense.

Time, like manna, cannot be collected
or stacked up in a pile like dirty dishes
nor stored like plasma
or last summers canned tomatoes.

Time is a use-it-or-lose-itkind of thing.
And yet we act as if time
is a hand of cards we hold –
the pastare the tricks we have collected
and stacked in neat little piles
at our place at the table,
while the future
is a brand new deck
we are about to draw from.

But in fact, we only have
what we are holding at the moment.
We can no more stack our days
in the sleeve of memories
than we can predict the future;
and we can no more re-live our memories
than we can play the future
as if it were a sequence on a DVD.

Re-living the past and predicting the future
are equally illusory
and equally seductive.
The proof of this pudding
is that Goddoes not reside
in either the past or the future,

That is why we have great difficulty
encountering God.
God only resides in the present.
Encountering the holy
is elusive and capricious,
and darn impossible to hold onto,
and hard on us humans.

Of that terribly Trinity
– past, present, future –
we love two and hate the other.
We fondle the past with great pleasure,
and beg the future
as a pauper at the feet of a king.
But from the present,
we hide our face as if
the moment were a horrible
misshapen victim.

Joan Borysenko helped me
to understand the power
of living in the moment,
something I had heard so much about
from every religion I studied
but found elusive.

She is a physician and researcher
who was on staff at
the Harvard Mind/Body Institute
before peeling off on her own publishing career.
I once heard her describe the power
of the present moment
as she discovered it in her own life.

She told us that as a very young child
she was gripped with a debilitating obsessive/compulsive disorder.
Everything had to be just so for her,
counted and placed to perfection
before she could go anywhere or do anything.
She described her liberation
from this prison of rigid compulsion
when she discovered
the perfect freedom
of the present moment.
All of a sudden one day
at a young age, as if
by spontaneous healing,
she found herself in the present moment
instead of living in anxiety about the future.

Whereas she was used to living in the dread
of “what if,” she discovered
that by residing in the present moment
there was no anxiety or remorse,
only what was happening right then and there.
That revelation freed her
from stacking, sorting, counting, and planning.
Her life-long recovery had begun.

Now most of us do not live with the tyranny
of that kind of powerful obsession
but many people struggle with something.
Any recovering alcoholic or drug user
can tell us about the power
of living in the present moment,
when memory calls for a drink
and anxiety insists on getting high.
“Living one day at a time,”
or one hour at a time,
or one minute at a time,
even when it is not the happiest moment,
leads to freedom from past and future.

Being in the moment
keeps us from obsessing
on what was or what will be
and allows us to focus on
just now– even if just now
is a struggle, actually, especially
if just nowis a struggle.

Everything else
is what one Buddhist meditation teacher
calls our “planning mind.”

Planning mind is that mental tendency we have
to race ahead of this moment
in anticipation of what we need to do,
what we have left undone, and
what we have forgotten.

Then again, sometimes
our thoughts fall back into yesterday
where we do comparison shopping
with the present.
By which I mean that
sometimes we nurseour nostalgia
as if it were honeyed mother’s milk
we could never give up.

Sometimes we suck on resentments
as if a straw in a snow cone,
knowing that the sweetest stuff
is still down there somewhere
if we can just get to it.

So the past draws us with power,
as does the future
even though both are at least somewhat illusion.

For example,
memory is not a photographic essay
of what happened once,
nor video evidence
of who was there and what happened.
Memory always wears the lens of the present,
coloring what would otherwise
be a grainy old black and white movie.
Memory adds details that were never there,
fitting it for the present mood or cause,
changing it with or without
intention and yet forever.
Memory is indeed a trickster.
It is a great gift, of course,
but one that can confuse our senses,
color what was,
and blind us to the present moment.

Likewise our “planning mind,”
while a benefit,
can cut us off from the present
like a butcher knife.
While acknowledging and embracing
our “planning mind,” which stutters over
what has not yet happened,
we must also learn to discipline its voice
to only speak when spoken to.
Indeed, we need memory
to call to us from out of the past
and remind us of what we have learned.
And we need our planning mind
to patiently stay in place, silent
in the future
until evoked for a specific purpose.
Focusing on either the past or future
can be tremendously helpful to humans
when used surgically for a specific task.
But they are a terribly debilitating
blunt instrument when used indiscriminately.

Practicing simple presence,
being held in the moment
and refusing to look back or forward,
is an exercise we need in our repertoire.

Now, why in the world,
did I get on this subject today?

Because…
Psalm 23 and John’s Jesus
talking about hearing his voice,
are all about our ability
to enter and hold
the present moment.

The guidance of still waters,
following pathways of justice,
enduring the vale of death’s shadow,
the consolation of God’s presence
in the face of foes…all of it,
is only available in the present moment.

The voice of the holy,
whether we ascribe it to Jesus
or the Holy Spirit
or a still small voice,
is cradled only in the present moment.
We can remember such times from the past
and hope for such times in the future,
but what was and is to come
are trustworthy only when mediated
by the voice of God in the present.

This should probably be a “how-to” sermon,
but in truth, every liturgy
is a practice session in mindfulness,
or being present in the moment.
That is what we are invited to do,
enter into this moment
and experience the presence of God among us.
The prayers,
the music,
the candles,
the bread and wine…
that is what all of this invites us into:
here and now
in the presence of God.
The one fly in the ointment
is this thing – is the sermon.

The sermon pulls us into memory
or points us toward action
and so messes with the whole thing.

Which means that once again,
I am part of the problem and not the solution!

Anyway, for what it is worth, mindfulness
or being held in the present moment,
is something we can practice.
In fact, it needs to be a part
of our spiritual practice.
I would go so far as to say, it needs to be
part of our baptismal practice.
The shepherd –
the voice, the rod, staff, and all that we seek –
are found in the present.
What’s crazy, is my dog already knows that.

 

3 Easter 2019: Ghost Busters

by

Pyle, Howard; Johnson, Merle De Vore (ed) (1921) “Blueskin, the Pirate”

I’m not sure we’re ready for this, but here goes.

What if I told you a story
about the time I saw my Great Aunt Elma,
five months deceased,
standing on the dresser in my bedroom
wearing a 1940’s mink fur tippet
with those poor little mink heads still on it?
Would you believe she was there
or would you listen politely
and assume my grievous imagination
had projected itself into the darkness?

Or this, what would you think
if I told you about an All Saints’ Day visitation
from a long dead childhood surrogate mother?
This was back in Columbus, Ohio
and one of the primary nurturers in my youngest years
was the centerpiece of the sermon I was preaching that day.

On my way into the church that morning,
very early when no one else was around,
I was greeted near the door by someone
I had never seen before.
All these years later, honestly,
I do no remember whether it was a man or a woman.
In those days, in that parish,
and with four very young children,
I got to church about 7 am on top of very little sleep.
Anyway, the person handed me “The Watchtower,”
the propaganda magazine of The Jehovah’s Witnesses.
After juggling my stuff and awkwardly unlocking
a series of doors, including my office,

I threw the magazine on my desk.
I never gave it another thought
until I stopped, dumbfounded,
in the middle of the sermon.

Suddenly I remembered that the woman
I was speaking about,
had been a Jehovah’s Witness.
What do you think?
Serendipity, coincidence, strange visitation, epiphany?

Just so you know, the first story is completely made up –
no Aunt Elma on my dresser.
The second story is the absolute truth,
with details as factual as I remember them.
But, being me,
I have never actually answered that question myself:
serendipity or epiphany?

John’s Gospel drives me crazy.
Katy can tell you how grumpy I get
when I have to preach his stories
more than once in a while.
Unfortunately, around Holy Week and Easter
it is John, John, John.

First of all, John doesn’t just tell a story
the way Mark does, he declares it
and then rubs it in your face.

It is the Gospel written
furthest in time from when Jesus lived,
and written by someone who never met Jesus.
And yet, John’s Gospel has the most and the longest speeches
delivered by Jesus as if verbatim,
with details and theological pronouncements
that did not even exist when Jesus was alive.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life,
no one comes to the Father, except through me…” – only in John.

“I am the light of the world…” – only in John.

Foot washing – only in John.

Raising Lazarus from the dead – only in John.

“The Jews,” as a categorical condemnation – almost entirely in John. (Matthew, Mark, and Luke specifically name the Pharisees and temple clergy as Jesus’ primary opposition, while John castigates to “the Jews” sixty-seven times).

And the difference between John’s resurrection stories
and those of the other three Gospels,
are like the difference
between my Aunt Elma and All Saints’ Day stories.
Mark, Matthew, and Luke,
like my All Saints’ story,
invite the reader’s own conclusion
about how and why the tomb is empty.

But John,
like my Aunt Elma story,
tells us what happened so graphically,
and with specific conclusions about what it means,
that we are left saying “yes” or “no.”

And John even tells us,
more than once,
that he is telling us these stories
as “proof” of his other proclamations.
He essentially says to us,
Jesus is God in the way that I tell you he is God,
and here is my proof.”

So, you see, John leaves an accident
on the floor of the living room
with all kinds of company in the house,
and then I am supposed to preach about it.
That is what makes me grumpy.
By the way, nobody else
has this story about eating fish with Jesus
on the shore of lake Tiberius either.

So, I am not going to dignify John’s story
by going into its weeds
and deciphering what it all means.

Suffice it to say that John wants us to believe
that Jesus’ resurrection was physiological
and not a ghost story.
Ghosts don’t eat fish.
And John also wants to verify that Peter was forgiven
for denying Jesus three times
on the night Jesus was arrested.
I suspect that by the time the Jesus movement
had wiggled its way across sixty or seventy years
and hundreds if not thousands of miles
to where John entered it,
those were some issues that got argued about.

So two thousand years later
we get stuck with the echo of those arguments
when we should be focused on our own.

I guess we are also kind of stuck
where we were last week, with the Thomas story.
By which I mean, it is kind of like teaching school these days
and knowing that different people
have different learning styles,
and that one is not better than another,
but that general education
has traditionally focused its pedagogy
toward one learning style.
The Church, likewise,
has pretty much been focused on proclamation –
“here is the truth, believe it.”
That works for some people
but it sure does work for me, and
I am supposed to be one of the proclaimers!
So let’s get down and dirty with the resurrection.

In spite of what John writes, is not a yes or no story.
Clearly, by reading all four Gospels,
we see that some people had a post-crucifixion experience
that shocked and amazed them,
while others stood in disbelief
and still others must have been agnostic.

It has been the assumption
of Christian scholars, historians, and theologians alike,
that Christianity traveled up the Mediterranean
and proliferated across the world like a virus
because of the resurrection.
It is often said that “something powerful”
must have happened
to propel a small, new strain of Judaism
into a great new world religion.

Maybe.
But that something powerful
may not have been the resurrection stories –
or not only the resurrection stories.

There is another theory at work these days,
that suggests another reason
that Christianity went from approximately
forty small communities in the year 100 –
about the time John was writing –
to a million or so followers by the year 325
when Emperor Constantine forever changed things
by dragging it into the mainstream of history.

Early Christian communities were focused
on bringing about the Kingdom of God
“on earth as it is in heaven.”
They saw themselves as a parallel kingdom
within the Roman empire.

They did some interesting things that,
whether intentional or not, made them proliferate.

Instead of focusing on converting men,
which many of the religions did,
Christians focused on recruiting women and slaves.
They also became primarily an urban movement,
and that movement placed a passionate emphasis
on healing and bread.
In our parlance, they created a rudimentary social safety net.
Well, urbanization took off across the empire,
and of course, there were many more poor people than rich.
Likewise, women didn’t go to war and get killed.
For those reasons and more, the little Kingdom of God
grew like a mustard seed in the weeds.

But to be perfectly honest,
we have very little good historical data
on Christianity from the time of Jesus
through the first two hundred years.
It is a black hole with some echoes emanating out of it.

All we have is local lore,
the proclamations of geographically located people
whose voices got heard over everyone else’s.
A big church would have been fifty or sixty,
and a bishop would have been someone
who could claim the loyalty of a network
of a half dozen or more small congregations.
There were often violent disagreements
between groups of Christians, even
within the same town or city.
Athanasius, for example, had thugs
who cudgeled the opposition.
What constituted a church was more like a house-church,
with somewhere like Trinity Place
being a big, established one.
There were arguments about the resurrection.

Had Jesus been saved by God,
brought back to life in a statement of victory over death?
Or did Jesus do it on his own power?
Was Jesus raised from the dead
or did he rise from the dead?
Both sides called themselves orthodox,
and the many versions of this argument
were hotly contested.
Meanwhile, all of them had some version
of the Kingdom of God
they were trying to create on earth
as it is in heaven.
They did stuff that included healing and bread.

During the same time period, in the Roman empire,
at least twenty-six different people
claimed emperorship
and fought civil wars or battles of usurpation.

As the little kingdom within the empire grew
the grand empire around them became weaker.
Serendipity or an act of God?

I would not hazard a guess,
but I do believe that what propelled a small movement
gathered around a sagely holy man and prophet,
was what he taught
and the wisdom of his followers
to keep teaching and practicing it:
healing and bread,
imploring the kingdom of God
to come on earth
as it is in heaven.

I do believe that just like us,
all these years later in Trinity Place,
some were motivated by stories of resurrection
and promises of life after death;
while others were motivated by sublime wisdom
and insights that proved transformative;
while still others sought healing, some sought bread,
and while some served bread, others offered healing.

Honestly, I am able to still marvel
over that All Saints’ Day experience,
and laugh at how thick-headed I can be –
taking so long to recognize the serendipity
or epiphany, whichever it was.
That is not the only mystery and strangeness
I have been subjected to over the years,
but none of them proves anything to me.
I take that back,
they confirm for me the need for humility
and openness.
But John’s stories and my own
ineffable experiences
do not prove anything about Jesus to me.
If I needed any confirmation about the wisdom of Jesus
it is what I have witnessed in the community of faith
that engages in the practices of healing and bread.

But please do not hear my cantankerous relationship
with the Gospel of John
as calling your baby ugly.
Rather, it is simply feeling backed into the corner
by a part of our religious tradition
that insists that I take John’s words as proof of his claims,
instead of being able to witness
the presence of God in our midst,
where I do,
and how I do.

We have a diversity of lenses
and we need to recognize the glory
of all those visions we behold.

 

Our Vision

Our vision…a Trinity Church known in the community as a welcoming home to everyone, responding effectively to the needs of our community, in collaboration with fellow Episcopalians and other faith communities

Our mission…to strive in our daily life and parish life to respect the dignity of every human being, and to treat each person entering our doors as if that person is Christ.

We are striving to be as open as the table Jesus hosted, in solidarity with the people of Geneva, and an accessible partner to others who share our sense of the gospel.

It also means we have opened ourselves to the future, and not only moved but adopted a new way of being church from the more traditional model. Join us at Trinity Place, 78 Castle Street in downtown Geneva, NY.

 Trinity Place, An Open Space for Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts

“Open Space” means open and inclusive, welcoming the Geneva and FLX community to use our space, and to partner with us in building an inclusive community for spiritual inquiry and wellness. 

“Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts” means we are pointed toward a particular dimension of life, specifically that which strengthens the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. 

Trinity is a Christian community of worship and spiritual practice welcoming all, and an Episcopal Church in particular. However, we welcome all spiritual traditions and those who have no particular spiritual background but are engaged in a mission consistent with ours. We are looking for partners in mission not members (although we love to welcome new members too).

 

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