4 Easter: A voice without self-interest

May 7, 2017 by Cam Miller

Text for Preaching This Week: John 10:1-10 and “Flock” by Billy Collins

I knew a bishop once
who would proudly announce,
every time there was a procession
of diocesan clergy
bedecked in their liturgical finery and splendor, and lined up waiting for the opening hymn
so they could enter the church,
that the reason he, the bishop,
was the last one in procession
was because the shepherd
always walked behind his flock.
His job was to prod and guide them,”
he would add.

Then, at one such event, unexpectedly,
the voice of a new young priest piped up:
“But Bishop,” he said,
“just think about what those shepherds
had to walk through following those sheep.”

Time is the sleeve
and memory the arm slipping through it.
So reach back now into your childhood.
Was there a voice,
an innate companion
that called you by name?

Was there ever,
in any time of your life,
a voice that called you by name?
Somewhere,
sometime,
in a dream;
when you were all alone,
in a crowd,
when you were lost –
was there a voice
that called you by name?

It may not have been an actual voice you heard.
It may simply have been that somehow,
you didn’t know how,
but you knew what you needed to know
when you needed to know it;
and that was enough
to make a difference,
or make a necessary change,
or maybe even save a life –
maybe even your own.

Or maybe, if you are like me,
there were times you did not listen
to what you heard
or what you knew
or what you should have done.
Maybe you didn’t listen
because you didn’t believe it.
Or maybe because you thought is was something
other than it was
even though it knew your name.
We may not be able to retrieve
an actual memory of God from childhood.

If ever we talked out loud about that voice,
or that something we couldn’t name,
to another person,
or mentioned the dream
or the vision
or the whisper,
we soon discovered such talk
is not taken seriously.

Hearing the still small voice within,
let alone a voice that knows us by name,
is not something that rational,
mature, sensible adults
talk out loud about in our world.
If we ever did talk about such things as a child,
we were told it was something
other than what it was.

It would have been dismissed
as a child’s “pretend”
or simply ignored like a bad smell
as children’s insights and visions often are.

We learned from the way adults responded to us,
that the holy is like Santa Claus:
talked about by adults
in that voice we use for children,
but never heard in the voice
adults use with one another.

We learned
that anyone who talks out loud
about hearing the voice of God is crazy.

We learned
through the modeling of adults around us,
to turn off our sensitivity to the holy
in the same way boys are taught not to cry.

We learned
from listening to the adults around us,
and watching their reactions
to those considered too religious,
that an encounter with God
is not something normal people talk about.

So we learned
to close off those faculties,
the ones that allow us to tune-in
to that dimension of life
around us
and within us
that some of us call the holy.

We learned
to ignore the voice of the holy
within and around us
until we stopped hearing it at all together.

We put that part of ourselves,
and those memories,
to sleep.

The holy is not a voice we hear,
or a language we speak,
or a sound we know,
except through memories that call to us
from the other end of that long sleeve of time.

That’s a problem,
and right now in this stage of human history,
it is an acute problem.

Human beings are in crisis.
Especially in the Global West,
which is now saturated with,
and dominated by, economic culture –
by which I mean the social matrix binding us together is predominantly ruled by
the values and ideas of economics.
We are in crisis, you and I,
because we have mostly lost the ability to hear
the voice of the one who knows us each by name.

At the same time, the voices we can hear,
the ones cooing or shouting or hawking at us
to follow them and trust them,
are not trustworthy voices at all.

Here is just one easy example.

We know that our atmosphere
and the environmental balance
of Earth’s ecosystems
are in grave danger.
But we also know that even as our shepherds
talk-the-talk of environmentalism,
or proclaim it is not a problem of our own making,
they nevertheless walk-the-walk of corporations
that bestow wealth upon those who continue
to degrade the environment.

We hear the voices of our cultural shepherds,
and we see in their actions
they cannot be trusted.

That is just one low-hanging example
that points to the crisis of trust
that is eating away
at the fabric of communal hope.

Who can we trust?

What happens when
no matter how hard we listen,
we cannot hear a voice we can trust?

In religion,
in war,
in health care,
in education,
in technology

we know we cannot trust the shepherds
because their first interest
is their own self-interest.

If ever we meet someone
who is not guided primarily
by his or her own self-interest,

it is enormously compelling
and we want to know them
and have them know us.
I hope you know someone like that;
someone who,
when it comes to your relationship,
you can sense is not guided exclusively,
or even primarily by their own self-interest.

But we are in crisis
because the voices we can hear
cannot be trusted,
while the voice we can trust
cannot be heard.
We are in crisis
because we walk
through the valley of the shadow of death
but we cannot hear the voice
of the one who knows us each by name.
In the valley of death
we are surrounded by the voices
we know are guided by their own self-interest.

There is no easy answer to this crisis,
no single, silver bullet.
But I have an idea about what to do.
It is not THE answer, only one small idea.

Our deafness to the holy
has been learned over many years
and is not easily reversed.
And when it comes to being shaped over time,
in unnatural ways,
I often go back to an important lesson
I had to unlearn as an adult.
I have mentioned it to you before.

In our culture, as in many cultures,
we teach boys not to cry.
Teaching boys not to cry
is of course a horrendous disservice to men –
and therefore to women.
It makes us emotionally crippled.
Its negative impact on the culture at large
can be observed and encountered everywhere.

Children know how to cry
and most of them cry easily,
so we teach them to cry appropriately
in order to manage their tears.
That makes a certain amount of sense,
so long as we are not teaching one another
to shut down the capacity to cry altogether.
But that is what boys are instructed to do
under the bludgeon of humiliation.

I learned how to cry again as an adult,
in an acting class in college.
I didn’t know at the time
that was what I was doing,
nor how important it would be to me later,
but that is where I learned it.

It came about because I had a role in a play
that called for me to break down in tears
and my professor would not allow me to act –
he insisted that I learn to cry.
No fake crying, but real sobs and tears –
that, he said, is the difference between drama
and acting.

I had to learn to make myself cry,
first by acting as if I was crying.
Then I had to put myself in touch
with the memories of what hurt inside
until the tears I evoked
were real tears.
I had to act as if
I was crying
until I learned to allow myself to cry.
You see the methodology?

What I want to suggest
is that learning to hear the voice of the holy
begins with acting as if we can hear it.
Even before we actually can hear it,
we need to act as if we can hear it.

Then we need to do something

that is counter-intuitive:
We need to practice listening for the holy
in the midst of our fears and our hurts
because that is where
we feel the greatest need for God.

One of the glaring perversities of human nature
is that we learn and change
in the midst of dissatisfaction and need,
while under the spell of satiation and balance
we put ourselves to sleep.

It is walking through the valley
of the shadow of death
where we are most acutely aware
of both the crisis
and our need
for a power greater than ourselves.

So listening within,
listening within to our fears and to our wounds,
is where we begin to hear the voice
of the one who knows us each by name.

What is it we fear?
Which of our hurts is most enduring?

If we will listen hard
and listen well
to that chamber of our heart,
we will begin to hear a new voice –
one we instinctively know
we can trust.

In that innermost chamber of our heart,

where few if any have ever been allowed to peek,
only the presence of someone or something
we know is not guided by self-interest,
can be tolerated.

Because we could only allow
such a trustworthy presence as that,
into our place of tenderness deep inside,
it feels like a lonely place
and we are hesitant to go there.

And yet, that is where our gold is stored.

There are treasures
in the very place we fear to look
just waiting for us to behold.
Among those treasures,
in that place,
is a memory so tender,
so sacred, and so dear,
we hold it like fragile glass.

Going there,
and listening for the one without self-interest –
acting as if it knows us by name,
acting as if it cared for us personally,
and acting as if we were able to hear its voice –
will allow us to re-gain our hearing.

That which resides
in the inner most chamber of our heart,
among the tenderness of our
fears and hurts and wounds,
is also God’s voice echoing our name.
Listen.
Even if we fear it, listen.
Listen quietly and intently,
and hear the voice of the holy
where it is freshest.

It is possible to hear the voice of God again
even as we heard it all those years ago
at the other end of the long sleeve of time.

The voice of the one who knows us each by name,
calls to us
out of the innermost chamber of our heart,
also whispers to us
in the midst of what is both
precious and fearsome.

If we will practice listening
we will hear it again.

In a time of crisis
is when we most need to hone our listening skill,
to recover our ability to hear
the voice of the one we can trust;
the one that will lead us and guide us
without self-interest.

So the punch line is: keep listening.
Practice-listen,
practice-listen as if there is
a power greater than yourself
who speaks to you without self-interest.

Practice-listen
in that place at the center of your being,
where resides both fear and hurt.
Go there, expecting loneliness
but discovering a presence
both healing and trustworthy.

Practice, as if you will hear.

3 Easter 2017: When you stop is where you stop

April 30, 2017 by Cam Miller

“How could I know the moment I moved
within except in retrospect?”

In seminary
we are given the analytical tools
to put small passages and stories of the Bible
through an historical and literary MRI.
The hope is such tools will help us see
the soft tissue on textual bone,
so that we might be able to decipher:
what the original author’s intent was,
and how the original audience heard and understood it,
and even how many contributors there might have been
as the text evolved over time to its present form.

Then there is the question of how the text
was understood over the centuries by later theologians,
and doctrinal advocates,
and eventually preachers and teachers and scholars.
All of that is 20^th century scholarship
and it is still being taught
and touted
and valued.
But it now seems like a wobbly WWII bomber
compared to a 21^st century stealth wing.

That kind of 20^th century biblical scholarship
is still valuable as a counter-weight
to the whacky biblical literalism
that arose in the 20^th century,
in reaction
to academic theological analysis of the text.

But we are light years away
from pre-WWII German biblical scholarship
like Karl Barth;
and where we stand in 2017
is an experiential leap away from
the great 20^th century theologians like Paul Tillich,
C S Lewis,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Reinhold Niebuhr,
and Jürgen Moltmann.

They now represent the big ideas
and eloquent rhetoric
of a world long dead and gone.

Think of the intellectual,
psychological,
and imaginative distance
between the world before Hiroshima
and Auschwitz
and the world after it.

I am not talking about the physical world
so much as the human perspective –
the mind’s eye.

Or another example: take just a moment to consider
the difference between the political context
before the assassinations of JFK, MLK,
Bobby, and Malcolm,
and then the post-Nixon context.

There is an awesome and terrifying distance
between perspectives on the human condition
before the Moonwalk
and more recent images of the ice shelf melting.

Stand for just a moment in your memory,
or your imagination if you are younger.
Conjure up the difference in worldview when,
in your left ear you are waiting minutes
for an operator to connect you with another party,
and in your right hand,
with your thumb,
you posted a tweet…
that two thousand people
on six continents will read
within seconds.

My friends, those are different worlds,
and they are just barely connected,
like a spinal fracture
exposing a thin strand of nerve.
The distance is so great
it has utterly changed the human mind
and what the brain sees and imagines.

Now, if you are touching the enormity of that distance
and can feel our historical dislocation
from what came before us,
even though just a little bit ago –
even though you may have lived through it yourself –
then let’s add one more layer.

At this present moment in the history of humankind,
we have at least three centuries of human mindset
double and triple exposed
one on top of the other.

At one and the same time,
looking around the world
and even in our own country,
we have people living within the assumptions
of the 19^th century,
and others within the worldview of the 20^th century,
and still others in the 21^st century.
At one and the same time,
we have human beings sharing the same planet
but seeing the world around us
from totally separate experiential frames –
even though sometimes
all of us are using the same super modern technology.

So, for example,
Educational institutions designed in the 19^th century
are straining to hold together
like hundred-year-old bridges carrying the weight
of more traffic than we ever dreamed of.

A two hundred year old financial system
is doing things that it can’t control,
known and unknown,
unexpected and unanticipated,
because the speed of wealth and capital transfer
makes much of past institutions irrelevant.

The international Christian denominations,
what we call “The Church” –
like Roman Catholicism, Anglican and Episcopal, Orthodox, and Lutheran –
all of which were originally designed
from the prototype of an empire…
now seem like a dry, dead coral reef
where the ocean has receded and left it as a ghost
of a once vibrant ecosystem.

Change can be merciless like that,
especially to those organisms,
structures,
and ideas
that tether themselves
to stationary objects
in hopes of preventing change.

Let me use a painful Church example
that I know is near and dear
to many hearts here.
Classical music.
3% of the population
listens to Classical music.

What happens then,
to a Church with worship
that is tied exclusively
to European Classical music tradition?
It becomes that dry, exposed reef
whose watery environment receded.

But misery loves company.
Evangelical mega-churches
that adopted American pop music formulas
with which to create praise music
and love songs to Jesus,
are having the same struggles –
in part, because,
while they innovated twenty years ago
they have not continued to shift with the culture.
Music and culture never stops evolving.

But church growth
and church survival
is not really the tail I want to wag today.
It is just an interesting implication
I wanted to point out
because you and I will be facing decisions
about what to do about it
sooner rather than later.
And just to ease anyone’s anxiety about music,
it never has to be either/or,
rather, it can be both/and.

But I mention all of this
because what we call “secularism”
is something that every person of faith
needs to contend with,
sooner or later,
and with varying degrees of intensity.

It is not about science and technology
erasing the need or capacity for faith in God, either.
That is a giant misnomer
and misunderstanding of both science and faith.

Many of the most brilliant and agile minds
in the world of science,
retain deep personal reservoirs of awe
in which they also can imagine God.
Some of them have personal faith experiences.

The threat to faith
is not science and technology
it is neglect.
When we neglect to expand,
adapt, and change
the mindset and imagination of our faith as we change,
then our faith becomes brittle,
dry, and eventually, lifeless.
There is a reason
that ritual and sacrament
can become rote,
and then empty of content.
We must refresh it
even as we are refreshed by change.
We must bring our new
and renewed imagination
to the questions
and rituals of faith
if indeed we want them to survive
as powerful influences in our lives.

We have to work at it,
and do something about it,
and give it attention,
and nurture,
and exercise.
When we stop is where we stop.
When I was a freshman in college
I was struggling to keep up,
and one of my professors offered her students
a speed-reading course.

When I was tested at the beginning,
I had an 85% retention rate
but my speed level was at 3^rd grade.
I felt humiliated when I found out,
but was told it wasn’t unusual.
In part, I was told,
it is because we stop teaching kids
“how” to read in 3^rd grade.
So many kids like me stopped learning to read
around 3^rd grade and and simply read.

So when did you stop your intentional learning
about spirituality and religion? Or did you?

Most of us were taught
that faith is a fixed point on the horizon –
a particular idea
that when we come to embrace it,
THEN we “have” faith.
But that is not faith;
that is a belief.

We “believe” in ideas
but faith is something altogether different.
It is experiential, as I said last week,
and it is something that is an organic part of us
that grows as we grow
or shrivels with neglect as the rest of us grows.

“How could I know the moment I moved
within except in retrospect?”

Faith grows in the imaginative,
intuitive,
psychological,
and emotional sphere
of our personhood.

We must constantly tend to it,
seeking new metaphors to embody it
just as we continue to collect
new music we hadn’t heard yet,
or new poems
or new novels we hadn’t read yet,
or ingested new visual art we hadn’t seen yet.

God as envisioned by CS Lewis
probably isn’t big enough in 2017.

And Christian spiritual practice
as articulated by Dietrich Bonheoffer
might continue to inspire us
but isn’t voiced quite right for 2017.

Imagining God as a cosmic ecosystem though,
given what we know about biology
and environmental science, might work for us.

God as an improvisational jazz musician,
riffing on familiar as well as unique patterns
but always unexpected and mysterious,
instead of than controlled and rationalistic – that
might work for us.

But keeping our faith vibrant in the midst
of a highly secularized culture,
requires us to be intentionally
and continually reflect on our experiences –
“How could I know the moment I moved
within except in retrospect?”

Being open to new experiences is vital,
but then reflecting on them
and allowing those experiences to form and change us
is also crucial.

The fact is,
mostly I do not care any more what Luke
wanted his audience to believe,
and mostly I do not care any more
how our understanding of this text
has changed over time.

What I care about
is whether or not this text
speaks to us
now –
in the highly global,
rapidly shifting
technological environment
that threatens us
with a wide array of human-sourced hazards.

What, if anything,
can Cleopas and company
shout to us
that we can still hear
across the chasm of time?

It is the reminder
that when we keep our imagination fresh,
our hearts and minds open,
and we actively attempt to adapt
to the changes taking place around us,
that God will be able to pierce even our resistance.

Mostly in retrospect,
we will be able to see the shadow and outline
of a presence we didn’t quite register at the time,
and we will be amazed and grateful.

Knowing it,
whenever we see it,
will change us
and keep us supple, adaptive, and open.

That is as true for a congregation
as it is for each of us as individuals.

So fire up
the imagination;
open up
the heart and mind;
start stretching now
and get that spiritual muscle flexible.

We’ve got change to ride
and it’s a bull!

2 Easter: The Terrifying Trauma of an Encounter with God

April 22, 2017 by Cam Miller

Das_Bild_der_Höchsten_Seele_als_Lichtpunkt_TR The measure of how much we have domesticated
Jesus, the gospels, and everything
associated with this Christian spirituality of ours,
is the fact we can read that story
about Thomas every year –
or the one from last week on Easter –
with a straight face
and without the shock
of having just seen a ghost.

I mean, come on!
Crank up that poem
and gin up those synapsis
and juice the bloodstream.

“Let in the wind,
let in the rain,
let in the moors tonight…

let in the fear,
let in the pain,
let in the trees that toss and groan,
let in the north tonight.

Let in the nameless formless power
that beats upon my door,
let in the ice, let in the snow,
the banshee howling on the moor…

Let in the fire,
let in the power,
let in the invading might.

Let in the wound,
let in the pain,
let in your child tonight.”
From “Northumbrain Sequence IV” by Kathleen Raine

That story about Thomas
ought to set our hair on fire,
which is what I said last week about Easter.
If we had the slightest inclination
to believe that Thomas stuck his fingers
in the crusty,
pus-lined holes
of Jesus’ mangled torso,
we wouldn’t be sitting here
politely listening to the mad preacher
carrying on.
We’d freak out
and run for dear life,
or in some other way
lose control of ourselves.

And so we have a problem,
one that involves managing the distance
between what we say we believe
and what we actually believe –
which is also revealed by how we act.

But let me back up a little
and come around to this thing
from another angle with less decibels.

To me, the best Easter story is from the Gospel of Mark.

Here is how Mark’s Gospel,
the first of the four to be completed and circulated, ends. Mark writes:
When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.

As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

They were freaked out.
They ran away.
They were seized with terror and amazement –
“seized,” it says!
Seized means captured or arrested by,
involuntarily grabbed and taken over.
They ran away and said nothing to anyone.

Now I can get behind a story like that!
“Let in the fire,
let in the power,
let in the invading might.

Let in the wound,
let in the pain,
let in your child tonight.”

But John, Matthew, and Luke
couldn’t leave well-enough alone,
and added stories that could not possibly
be told with enough emotional and psychological trauma
to make them credible.

Imagination is the better guide
when we come to an experience like this one.
In Mark they freaked out,
ran away,
and didn’t tell anyone
anything.

What John is doing with the Thomas story
is lecturing us.

He is wagging his finger
looking down his nose,
one eyebrow raised,
and warning those of us in future generations
to believe his story
or face disapproval from Jesus.

Personally, I want the shock and awe:
“…let in the fear,
let in the pain,
let in the trees that toss and groan,
let in the north tonight.

Let in the nameless formless power
that beats upon my door,
let in the ice, let in the snow,
the banshee howling on the moor…”

But that’s just me.
You might prefer Matthew 25,
that famous ending in which Jesus meets his pals
back in Galilee, and basically
gives marching orders for what becomes the Church.
Matthew ends like this:

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Like John, Matthew’s Jesus ends with a lecture
that codifies some later Church doctrine.

Maybe you would prefer Luke though,
which has a gentle departure for Jesus
after a couple of nifty resurrection appearances.

Luke ends with this:

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.

That’s a nice image,
easily painted and placed in stained glass
like a mosquito in amber,
and not requiring too much terror or fright.

But me, I prefer the terror
of women running from the tomb
and telling no one
anything.

Remember, we get to pick and choose
because four Gospels
have four different stories.
We can even make up our own ending if we want;
and honestly,
each of us has to decide how this story ends.

In 2017
very few people
are going to take John’s word literally
and believe it actually happened
exactly the way he said it did –
with him writing his story
nearly eighty years after the event.
So every one of us sitting here –
if we are going to be honest about it,
and listen to the shouting match
between Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John,
each one insisting we take their word for it –
we have to make up our own mind
about what did or did not happen
two thousand years ago
to evoke an outrageous story like the resurrection
and then carry it forward two millennia.

In 2017,
you and I do not get to say what we think
based upon gospel writers two thousand years ago.
That is not how our world works any more.
We are required to say what we think
based upon our experience –
and any other evidence we can bring to the table.
The 2000-year old testimony of anonymous writers
doesn’t cut it any more.

Sure, it is a piece of the whole
but in The Episcopal Church,
the bible is only one piece of the whole.
To the biblical witness
we also must also bring the witness
of tradition,
reason,
and experience.

The tradition proclaims resurrection
in a variety of ways and meanings,
and our reason and experience
must shape our own thinking and believing about it.

So in 2017
we cannot be lazy
and we cannot be ignorant
and we cannot defer to the experts
if we are going to have a vigorous faith
that survives the onslaught of secularism.

And that is really the story of Thomas,
even though the author of John’s Gospel
wants us to be chastened by it instead.

Thomas was absolutely correct
and fully justified
not to believe a word of the other disciples’ nonsense
until he could see it himself,
and touch it himself,
and feel it,
smell it,
and know it himself.
John puts the words of a lecture
on the lips of Jesus,
but he was wrong to say,
“Blessed are those
who have not seen and yet believe.”

In fact,
faith is rooted in our experiences
not in our creedal beliefs and doctrinal formulas.

The most enduring word for “faith” in the Bible
emerges from the Hebrew text
and is the word, Niph’al.
It translates as, hold God –
or “to hold onto God.”

Faith in this biblical sense
implies a highly personal relationship –
not a doctrinal idea.
Faith is experiential.
It is the act of encountering God
and holding onto that encounter.

It need not be mind-blowing
like Thomas sticking his finger in flesh,
or the two Marys running in terror
from the empty tomb.

It may be a butterfly kiss from God
that lands so softly upon the soul
or mind or cheek,
that we are simply reminded about awe
in the face of Creation.

But whatever the experience,
big or small,
subtle or profound,
supernatural or utterly ordinary,
faith is experiential,
and when we have those rare moments
of encounter with holiness,
we need to hold onto them for dear life.
The shutters of reason and rationality
do not open easily
or often,
and when they do,
we need to savor
and hold
the moment.

So the punch line today is
that we should be like Thomas,
and expect to experience the presence of God
in one way or another,
and not be dictated to
or repressed by
the limits of doctrinal and creedal definitions.

Sure, that is a terrifying amount of responsibility
but that is where faith resides:
in our fingertips,
and our dreams,
and our hearts,
and pooled in the memories and imagination
and sensors of our mind.

“Let in the wind,
let in the rain,
let in the moors tonight…

let in the fear,
let in the pain,
let in the trees that toss and groan,
let in the north tonight.

Hold onto God.

Easter 2017: When the small blue flame of love moves down the candlestick

April 16, 2017 by Cam Miller

When the small blue flame of love
crawls down the candlewick,
the last glimmer of light
fully within the closing lips of darkness,
despair as close as the next breath,
God is not finished with us yet.

When we come to our oldest moment,
the warmth receding from our fingertips
and voices fading forever from the curvature of our ears,
God is not finished with us yet.

When Earth has slowed,
its spinning ceased,
the explosive gases of our sun
an unseen mist in frigid space,
God will not be finished with us yet.

If Easter has anything left to give us
in this bent and thinning link of years – 2017 –
if there is a song left to sing
across the generations of time,
then it is the bone-deep
knowing
that even when we think the end has been determined,
God is not finished with us yet.

That is the refrain I hope to leave on our heart today:
God is not finished with us.

So now please remember what we know
from the sciences of geology
and evolutionary biology
and every other light of knowledge
we can shine under the blanket
in order to see the beginning of Life on Earth.

Reaching as we do
to squint our telescopic
and robotic sight to Mars,
and even beyond our own solar system
in search of Life
or even the history of Life now absent,
let us today, right now,
remember back to the beginning of Life on Earth.

3.8 billion years ago,
only 800,000,000 years after the origin of our planet,
darkness was upon the face of the deep,and “the Spirit of God
moved over the face of the waters,”
as it says poetically in the Book of Genesis.
There was yet no life yet. No Life.
The waters bubbled
and swirled and churned,
a mire thick with chaos and fever.
Then something happened.

In those festering shallows
a single cell appeared.
Single celled life,
bacteria,
appeared and multiplied.
More and more,
by the millions and billions perhaps.
For another billion years they reproduced
more single cells,
roiling and broiling
and living within the broth of creation
wherever water moved
and trickled
and sloshed.

For a billion years,
until our planet Earth was itself
two and half billion years old,
single celled life
lived and lived abundantly.

Then something happened.

Something stunning happened.
Hundreds, thousands, millions and billions of single cells
danced within the shallow seas
covering the face of the Earth.
Then, by serendipity or the imaginative work of God,
two cells danced into one another.
They became one.
In becoming one
they sizzled
and wriggled
and suddenly slithered into two again –
now two brand new cells had become one,
given birth from the one.

Two brand new cells given birth from one!

And the multiplication continued.
Instead of single celled life,
it was multi-celled life
hosting unique and varied DNA.

Then something happened.

In the blink of God’s eye,
a Sequoia tree reached to the clouds
like fingers of the Earth
grasping for stars.
Soon Triceratops
and Giganotosaurus
rumbled through thick swamps of luscious green.
Then something happened.

Before God could yawn from a hard days work,
and only two million years ago,
a furless upright animal
harnessed fire,
and crafted tools,
and launched the Hubbell telescope
that now spies on distant planets and stars
looking for life spawned like ours.

It is stunning, an indescribable magnificence.
What word could we possibly utter
to capture it?

Seeing this whole thing unfold
on screen with the magic of computers,
or strolling through the best new, high tech
museum of natural history,
we gaze upon this incredible
four billion year procession of Life
in all its spectacular diversity,
and imbued with mystery and wonder,
and we say, “hmmmmm.”

We witness an unspeakable splendor –
the universe exploding
and unveiling its wonders before our eyes –
and we drive on down the road
eating French fries
as if it’s no big deal.

When we should be trembling and shaking
and making uncontrollable noises
of amazement and awe,
we barely notice.

As the Polynesian saying goes,
we stand on a whale
fishing for minnows.

We dare not ponder it,
this astounding microbial birth of Life,
ignited most likely
from elements brought to our planet
by fragments of dead stars.
To imagine we are actually stardust –
that in our bodies we retain the material echo
of a long dead star –
that would set our hair on fire
and shatter our brains.
We can’t gasp it,
we can’t hold it,
we can’t tolerate this parade of time
because it literally boggles our mind.

And if we are honest,
we cannot fully open our mind to it
because it is terrifying.
We who are so incredibly small and fragile,
adrift in such a small boat across an ocean of stars.

It threatens us with our vulnerability
and we resist raw exposure to its enormity.

If we were to undomesticate the resurrection,
free it from being our pet that guards the door at night,
we would stand speechless and shattered
before a God who we could never again
assume is finished with us yet.

Think of it: two cells dancing into one another
in all that bubbling, hissing ooze –
really?

Or what about this for awesome: round fuzzy insects that construct perfectly geometric hives and make honey?
Or eight-legged creepy crawly things that spew silk from between their legs, that turns out to be five times stronger than steel of the same diameter?
Or blind mammals that fly, and without sight, can catch mosquitos?
Really?

Or how about this one:
the slowest predator
with the poorest eyesight
and the worst sense of smell,
its hearing so dull it lived in constant danger,
but it became the most dominant mammal anyway –
living in deserts, arctic ice, inhospitable jungles,
and on arid prairies?
Really?

What is so shocking about an empty tomb?

In the face of what we see all around us,
not even considering what we cannot see
and haven’t even imagined yet,
how could we ever assume
God is finished and there is nothing left?

It’s Easter
and we most likely glided in here
without fear and trembling.
We came expecting to hear
resurrection is a promise
but instead we are being told it is a threat.

“There is something here within us
which does not let us sleep,
which does not let us rest,
which does not stop pounding
deep inside.

What keeps us from sleeping
is that they have threatened us with Resurrection!”

Adapted from a poem by Julia Esquivel

Look, let’s be honest.

Most of us, most of the time,
would rather have our worst fears confirmed
than to be threatened with resurrection.
With our worst fears
we know what to expect.
We always prefer order and predictability
to randomness and mystery.

When God is never finished with us,
and we never know what is next;
we can never be done
and never rest
and never know
what will be asked
by whom,
or for what?

That is the threat of resurrection:
that God is not finished with us yet.

And resurrection seeps into our dark places too.

It is only a pinhead of light
but it pierces the smallest crack
in the stony sarcophagus
encasing our hurts and fears and wounds.

Laser thin,
it enters the catacomb of tombs
carved out of our interior life
where we have buried
our dread
our shame
our grief
our ugliest hatred
and our most bitter self-abuse.

In that graveyard
inside your heart and mine,
dark and cold as outer space,
even the paper-thin light of resurrection
illuminates everything inside.
Those old dead dreams could stir.
Those limp, lifeless hopes might animate.
Those long dead passions
might begin to yawn with yearning.
Prayers we had long forgotten
or given up on and buried beneath resentment
might just begin to throb again.

The power of awe
and astonishment
and wonder
threatens to overturn the hammock of our comfort,
that sweet spot of imagined balance
we have long stretched out in.
We know, and fear,
that if we give ourselves over to awe and astonishment
anything is possible.
That is what scares us!
Anything is possible.

The worse thing in the world we can do
is domesticate our sense of wonder and awe,
and assume we understand the limits and scope
of what is possible
and what is not.
That is when we die, while still breathing.

Resurrection is a threat to our complacency.
It threatens our desire to be left alone in our comfortable little world, with our manageable set of relationships.
Resurrection threatens our stability
and it threatens our mentality
and it threatens our false hope
for order and predictability.

God is not finished with you yet,
so hold onto that for dear life –
and don’t let go.

Happy Easter.

Good Friday 2017: Who, What, and When but not Why

April 14, 2017 by Cam Miller

Good Friday.

There is little about today that is good,
at least not in terms we usually think of as good.

Today is not an occasion for a eulogy.
Today is not an occasion to wrap things up
in a nice, neat package.
Today is not an opportunity for easy euphemisms.
Today is not a lucky break
when we get to let ourselves off the hook
with quick fixes and tidy answers.

Today I am raising more questions than answers.
In fact, on Good Friday, I have no answers –
many, many questions but no answers.

It is not unlike those moments of extreme grief
when through gritted teeth
we groan and grimmace,
“Why God?”
but get no answers.

As I said last Sunday,this story about the last week in the life of Jesus is not history.
It is not factual in any measurable way.
It is a not biographical documentary.

Instead, this story of betrayal,
arrest,
trial,
torture,
and execution
is the echo of an even more ancient poem.
It was cut from the pattern of that poem
we read alongside the The Passion,
written five hundred years before Jesus
by the prophet Isaiah.

Surely we can see and hear Isaiah 52
embedded in the plot of the story as told by John.

Now by pointing that out,
some might think I am undermining
the authority or importance of The Passion.

By saying The Passion is not history,
and saying it is not factual
in the ways we think of fact
in a world filtered through science,
some might think I am denying
that the whole thing ever happened.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jesus died on a cross and that is history.
Cut away everything else from this Passion play
and at the heart of it
there is a dead man on a cross –
a real dead man
on a real cross.

Those are two things we know to be absolutely true:
Jesus was sentenced to death
for the crime of insurrection, and,
Jesus died on a cross.

What John (Mark, Matthew and Luke)
have subsequently supplied to us
in their gospel stories,
is HOW, WHAT, and WHERE.

By saying their accounts
are not meticulously verbatim
recordings with absolute accuracy
about what actually happened step by step,
I do not mean they are lying to us.

They are not politicians who will say anything
to get our vote.

They are not Spin Doctors –
marketing agents who will say anything
to manipulate our opinions.

They are not corporation hucksters –
commercial pimps
who will say anything to get us to buy their product.

What John, Luke, Mark and Matthew
are instead, are storytellers –
chroniclers of communal memory.

They place into narrative accounts
snippets of stories
told two to three generations after
Jesus died on that cross.

There was no media to fact check the details
and all the witnesses were dead.

There was no one to confirm
the specific context of a particular saying
that had come down to them in isolation.

There was no one to even ask the question,
“Did it really happen that way”
because that is a modern question.

Those ancients had different questions from ours.
We want to know
if something really really happened that way;
and we want to know
how it felt;
and we want to know
if it can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
One little leak or gap in the evidence
in any scenario in our world,
and it becomes a grand conspiracy to fool the public.

The ancients didn’t have our questions
and they did not have our expectations.
What the ancients had
was story.

Espeically those ancients
who were not well educated
and who were the primary audience
of the story we heard today.

They had story,
and story held memories
and held wisdom
and held truth
whether or not they were told with facts.

They had never heard of a documentary.
They had never heard of a history textbook.
They had never heard of history.
They had story
and story asks different questions than we ask.

Story asks, what does it mean?
Story asks, who or what was behind those events?
Story asks, who is this really about?
Story asks, how am I connected to these events and characters?

Those ancients did not ask
whether something was factual or not;
that is a modern question.
Instead, they asked is it true or not.
Maybe even more than that they asked,
what is the truth this story tells?
They understood that truth and facts are not the same.

So at the heart of this story
is Jesus
dead on a cross
executed by the power and might of Rome.

That is the core of the story
to which answers to the questions
that ancient’s asked
have been applied.

Their answers may not be our answers,
and that would be okay.

From the time that Jesus was arrested
to the time his body was thrown away
to be claimed by whoever might want it,
it is unlikely there were any supportive witnesses.
The best his friends could do,
if they dared,
was watch him die from a distance.

Jesus was taken away
behind the veil of administrative power
and his followers would have no access there.
So in none of these four versions of The Passion,
do we have cold, hard facts
about who, what or how.

Besides, the story-tellers
already knew who, what and how
because thousands and thousands of others before Jesus
had been arrested,
convicted,
tortured,
and executed.

The Romans had perfected public humiliation
and had inflicting maximum suffering
on the human body and mind
down to a science.

Everyone knew who, what and how.
But why?
That was the question that begged an answer.
That is always the question that begs an answer.

No one had to ask why a murderer or revolutionary
had to die like that –
it was almost expected.
But a Messiah?
Why had to be addressed when it came to Messiah.

John, Mark, Luke and Matthew
each have a somewhat different answer
to that question,
and so they tell somewhat different stories too.

But that question did not begin with Jesus
and it didn’t stop with Jesus.

We can ask the same question
about Martin Luther King, Jr. or Oscar Romero.
Why?

We can ask the same question
about Armenians slaughtered by Turks.
Why?

We can ask the same question
about European Jews slaughtered by German Christians.
Why?

We can ask the same question
about Cambodians slaughtered by Cambodians.
Why?

Rwandans slaughtered by Rwandans.
Why?

Syrians slaughtered by Syrians.
Why?

We can ask the same question
about those we know personally
who have suffered and died
in spite of who they were
and what they did
to further the reign of God.

Why?

Is Jesus’ death
really a bigger why than all the others?
Making Jesus’ death categorically different
from all the other whys
would be anathema
to what Jesus taught.
Remember all those stories he told about God’s love? Remember the claim that God shows no partiality?
That God has no favorites?

Does the weight of Jesus’ death
hang heavier on the Cosmos
than the anonymous person
who spent a lifetime loving and serving
but blending into the fabric of life
so that we never noticed or recognized him or her?

If we say YES to that,
then we have made the messenger
greater than the message.
If we say that Jesus’ death
is worse than all the other victims
of State sponsored violence
then we have raised a troubling question
about the very essence of Jesus’ teaching and wisdom.

Remember?
There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner
who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons
who need no repentance.
Jesus said that.

And now I am going to make this a little personal,
so I hope you will excuse me
for taking the focus off Jesus for a moment
and offering a personal witness to the reason
the “WHY” of Good Friday is so important.

I got sober because of questions
I could not answer on Good Friday.

As many of you know,
I struggled with an overabundance of substance –
which is a nice way of saying it.
I spent seventeen years
developing a bad habit and denying it all along the way –
which is what people have to do
when they are engaged in self-destruction.

The last time I had a hang over
was on Holy Saturday many years ago,
and when I woke up I faced the question, “Why?”
Why on Good Friday of all days,
couldn’t you stay sober just once?

I had just been ordained a priest the month before;
and on my first Good Friday as a priest
I was drunk at a party
at my own house.

I woke up feeling as though I had danced on Jesus’ grave.
And so the question came,
“Why? How could you?”

And for the first time I had no answer.
No answer.
Not even the usual denial.
No answer.
Why? Why?
For whatever reason, that time,
that day, I had no answer.

It was the moment of having no answer
that was the moment
that brought resurrection –
that brought freedom.

You see, we use answers
to fend off the impossible questions.
It is not only alcholics that do that,
all human beings do
and we see it repeated over and over again
all throughout history.

We use answers
to stuff the gaps left in our knowledge.

We use answers
to hide from hideous questions
that would otherwise lead us to freedom.

Good Friday, of all days,
is a moment to live without answers.
T.S. Eliot said it most eloquently in his Advent poem:

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love
for love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith
but the faith and the love and the hope
are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light,
and the stillness the dancing.” (Four Quartets)

Christianity has been obsessed
with proclaiming answers
and in so doing
we have missed the power
of living the questions,
and allowing those quetstions
instead of our need for answers,
to lead us.

Proclaiming drives us toward answers
but not into wisdom.

Proclaiming herds us into answers
but not into an encounter with the holy.

Proclaiming pushes us into answers
but not into the mystical presence of God
from which we will know a fierce and terrible healing.

That healing will be so much more powerful than any answer
that could ever be uttered from our fragile hearts and our tiny minds.

Good Friday is for allowing the questions
to penetrate our denial
and then lead us
into an encounter with God,
and in that encounter
answers will suddenly pale in comparison.

So on Good Friday,
we are invited to live into the Why
rather than proclaim the answers.

So I invite us to bring our “Whys”
into these special Good Friday prayers we now offer,
and then to light a candle
for the “Whys”
that are burned into your heart.

4 Easter: A voice without self-interest

3 Easter 2017: When you stop is where you stop

2 Easter: The Terrifying Trauma of an Encounter with God

Easter 2017: When the small blue flame of love moves down the candlestick

Good Friday 2017: Who, What, and When but not Why

Good Friday.

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