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Last Epiphany C, 2019: Cloud Dancing Without Wings

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Honestly, I am more of a rabbi than a priest,
although I wouldn’t stack up intellectually
with most of the rabbis I have known.

I say I am more rabbi than priest,
because I am much more interested
in juicing the gospel stories
for all their practical spiritual wisdom
than I am ogling at the splashy supernatural stuff.
I want to know what Jesus taught
and where he pointed for us to walk,
rather than be asked to believe events from 2000 years ago
that have never entered the purview of my own experience.
Sure, I can handle the little mystical moments:
the still small voice
and the glimpse of something
through the veil of insight.

But don’t ask me to pass judgment
on water-walking without skies
or cloud-dancing without wings.

I have known plenty of people
graced with the ability to accept such stories
with open arms
and open minds
and open hearts
and I have marveled that they could do so.
I wish that was me,
but I am an unrepentant Thomas
who believes it
only when my own fingers
have felt the slick, wet wounds
and seen the blood stains move.

I am so much more comfortable
with Marie Howe’s description of an inkling of something.
“Once or twice or three times, I saw something
rise from the dust in the yard, like the soul
of the field – rise and hover like a veil in the sun
billowing – as if I could see the wind itself.
I thought I did it – squinting – but I didn’t.
As if the edges of things blurred – so what was in
bled out, breathed up and mingled…I saw it.
It was thing and spirit both: the real
world: evident, invisible.”

I wish Luke had done that with his transfiguration story.
Imagine Luke telling the story
from the poet Marie Howe’s perspective:
“Oh, about eight days after Peter
had sort of, kind of,
acknowledged Jesus as the Christ,
Jesus took Peter, James, and John
and went up on the mountain to pray.

And while Jesus was praying,
the disciples slept, as was their preference.
Peter, slightly aroused by his own snoring,
squinted open the slits of his eyes ever-so-narrowly,
and for an instant, he thought he saw Jesus
with two other people standing in a fog.
‘Once or twice or three times, he saw something
rise from the cloud there on the mountain,
like the very soul of the rock – rise and hover like a veil
in the sun billowing – as if he could see the Almighty itself.
He thought he did – squinting – but he didn’t.’”

You see, if Luke had only written something like that,
it would have been left to our own imaginations.
If he had made it more like a abstract painting,
or a poem
or a song
we could really get into it
and talk about how to interpret it.
Instead, it is more like a coloring book
where we are left to color inside the lines,
and if we don’t, we appear to be woeful scribblers.

Maybe it is just me,
and not very many of you share my struggle.
If so, God bless you for your patience.
Now that I have gotten that off my chest though,
we can move on
and knock on the door these readings lead us to.

Clearly, Luke knows that Jesus
stands in the shadow of Moses
and his story let’s everyone know
that while Moses went up on the mountain with God,
so did Jesus.
While Moses shined with the light of God,
so did Jesus.
While Moses received the commandments from God
so Jesus received wisdom from on high.

Trust me, this parallelism is no coincidence.
All through the gospel stories,
from the birth narrative
to the Passion of his last week and death,
the parallelism between Jesus and Moses,
and Jesus and Elijah, (the other great prophet)
is granular and intentional.

That is because,
in those first generations after Jesus,
Moses and Elijah
were THE frame of reference.
That was the comparison that mattered.
To say Jesus was like Moses and Elijah
was to say the best thing possible about him.

But we do not get it,
because Christianity does not care
about Moses and Elijah
even though Jesus was deeply rooted in a reverence
for both of them.
We care about Paul,
and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,
maybe even Richard Hooker and Karl Barth,
but we have nearly forgotten
Jesus’ frame of reference:
Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Micah, Amos, and Jeremiah.

So, whatever else this story
about Jesus on the mountain tells us,
it is telling us
Jesus didn’t come out of nowhere,
and he wasn’t the first of his kind.

It is telling us, that what he taught
was wisdom with deep roots,
and points to the prophets that came before him.
That is the first thing that we need to recognize
in this story in front of us:
that Jesus is a continuation of a millennia
of sacred wisdom.

The other thing we might notice,
is the idea that sometimes,
in some places,
with some people
and for a special moment,
that veil
between the human and the holy
thins.

I’m not talking about cloud-dancing
or water-walking,
though maybe some of you have had such spectacular views.
I am talking about moments
when we imagine we saw something;
or suspect that the insight or inkling we’ve received
had a source beyond our own brain;
or interpreted a suddenly fortunate connection
or turn of events, as something more than serendipity.

I doubt any of us here
have ever been enclosed inside a cloud
on top of a mountain
within a whisper of Jesus, Moses and Elijah,
but it would not surprise me at all
to hear many of us have had mountaintop experiences
when a long-term fog dissipated
and suddenly we could see clearly again…and
finally, we could breathe deeply again.

Likewise, it seems doubtful
that any of us have been handed tablets of stone
that set down in no uncertain terms,
the boundaries on our choices and actions.
On the other hand, I would guess
that more than a few of us
have received stunningly clear guidance
when we had been lost and without a clue
as to how we should proceed.
Such an experience is even more astounding
if we didn’t really understand the wisdom at the time
we received it, but
only later, when we were looking back on it.

Most of us, I am guessing,
would be hesitant to report that God spoke to us directly –
in an audible voice,
from out of a cloud
or the back seat of a car.
Yet we may be more willing to share an experience or two
with a friend we trust,
about when God spoke to us with clarity
in the audible voice of another person;
or through the words of a prophet;
or even in the whisper of a dream
or an inner voice.

It would not surprise me at all, in fact,
if there was near universal consensus
about an experience of the sacred
appearing “once or twice or three times”
rising up like dew
in the field of awe
over some natural beauty
or nature’s exquisite symbiosis.

People of faith
are precisely people of faith
because we have been there
when the veil thinned
and something of the holy
leaked through.
It cannot be manufactured
and it cannot be sculpted or controlled,
it can only be witnessed
and experienced.
Most of the time
it cannot even be explained
or described very well.
And, truth be told,
the more dramatic we are in the description
the less likely we are
to convey it.

We should not look
to the bread and wine of communion
to thin that veil,
nor the music,
nor the prayers,
nor the beautiful bond of community,
nor even Exodus and Luke.
But if we come to them with open hearts and minds,
at least in my experience,
we will routinely receive reminders
of those times the veil thinned,
and hints about where to look next,
or a vision of what came through
at some past moment
when the veil thinned between us.

And sometimes, in spite of ourselves,
the liturgy and the bible and the sacraments
do become the vehicles that thinned that veil.

Truth is, unlike my dog, we human beings
rarely live in the moment.
So we need reminders
and encouragement
and rituals.
We even need those difficult stories
like Exodus and Luke today,
so that we struggle instead of get complacent.

But how lovely it is
when those moments arrive like the next tick of a clock
and we become suddenly aware
that something in the moment
has shifted,
and there with us in real time is a presence
or a wisdom
or “a thing and spirit both” –
and we know in our heart of hearts
we saw it or felt it or heard it
and recognized it before it was gone.

5 Epiphany, Year C, 2019: Don’t turn your back on the moment

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“If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry
along to business as usual, it may lose you
the ball game. If you throw your arms around
such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save
your soul.”
Excerpt from “Listening to your Life” by Frederick Buechner

I love that piece from Fred Buechner
about not turning your back on the moment.
But there is a moment I know
from personal experience,
that is r-e-a-l-l-y hard
not to turn your back on.
It is when you have been fishing for a long time
and there has been no action,
not even a nibble,
or any hint that there is life below the surface.
You’re sitting in your boat
or standing out there in the stream
or leaning over the pier
but nothing is happening
and nothing has been happening
for what seems like hours.
That is a really tough moment
to “put your arms around and hug like crazy.”

But then, out of nowhere,
without warning you get a strike
and everything changes in that moment.
Your every tendon and corpuscle
is riveted to a single unseen event
that has pulled your line taunt
as your pole bends nearly in two.
Now, in an instant,
you are fully in that moment
and nowhere else.

That is the kind of rush and excitement
with which we need to tell this story from Luke,
so that we can get in the moment too.
It is not until we get in the story,
and hug it like crazy,
that we understand what is really going on here –
and just as importantly,
what is not going on
that we may have thought was going on.

First of all, it says that Peter and the Zebedee boys
have been up fishing all night.
Who goes fishing at night?
People who didn’t catch anything
during the day,
and because their income depended upon it,
they now have to get out there
and fish all night.

Luke doesn’t tell us
why they didn’t catch anything all day long,
and maybe he didn’t know.
Maybe it stormed all day,
or maybe there was a funeral they had to attend,
or maybe they ate some fish chowder that was bad
and they all got food poisoning
and were violently ill all day.
Whatever the cause of paucity in their daytime fishing,
we know they had to go fishing all night.

But, as the story goes, they got nothing.
Nada. Skunked.

I am pretty sure that if I had kept a balance sheet
over the course of my fishing life,
it would show more goose eggs
than numbers caught –
which is a good reason not to keep track.
So, I know what those boys felt like
and it wasn’t happy.
And besides the joylessness
of emptyhandedness,
any adult past the party-stage
who has stayed up all night,
knows how you feel the next morning.
Remember that feeling?
If you do, then drape that heavy sleepless sensation
over Peter, James and John.

On top of feeling just plain terrible,
they got nothing.
Work all day – nothing.
Work all night – nothing.
Money in their pocket – nothing.
Food on the table – nothing.
Cash to pay back the nudnik for their business loan – nothing.
They got nothing.

Peter, James, and John are a wreck.
They feel awful,
their day-to-day existence is precarious,
and they dread going home
to wife and children
empty-handed in addition to being exhausted.

Suddenly, along comes a crowd
yammering and shouting and all abuzz.
Dog-tired,
back aching, bent over,
cleaning the crap off their empty nets,
they could have cared less
except that it was a distraction.
Except…except the local chair maker
gets into their boat.

That’s right, Jesus just steps into their boat
drifting by a rope
from its anchor on the beach.
He doesn’t ask, he just steps in and
waves them over
as if there was nothing unusual about it.

Maybe if it wasn’t so outrageous
Peter and the Zebedees
would have objected.
Maybe if there wasn’t a crowd watching
that included their friends and neighbors,
they would have wrapped that net around
the skinny little rabbi and tossed him
into the water like so much lake junk.

But instead, for whatever reason,
the go along with it.

I am not buying Luke’s account
that Peter says to Jesus,
“But master, we have worked all night…”

I think he says something like…well,
I can’t say what he says from the pulpit.
He says, “You…”
insert your favorite nasty adjective,
“You, ______,
we have worked our butts off all night long
and got nothing,
and you have the _____ nerve
to tell us where to throw our nets?
You, _______, _______, _______!
Where do you get off telling us
how to do our business?”

Now doesn’t that seem more like it?
All that tiredness just pushing its way to the surface
like a bubble under pressure, and ‘pop’
it explodes all over Jesus.

But Jesus practices non-anxious presence.
He does not get offended, and he is not reactive,
and all he does is tilt his head
and look sympathetically at those poor tired men.

Then Jesus, without speaking,
picks up one end of the net
and hands Peter the other corner,
kind of like you do with your partner or spouse
with a bedspread.
Peter, exhausted by his rant,
sighs, and takes the corner of the net
in total capitulation.
They heave it – Jesus with earnest intention
and Peter with half-hearted resignation.
Then, almost immediately,
like a bass bites a lure, the net heaves.

Suddenly the boat rolls
and Peter and Jesus struggle
to regain their balance and rock with the waves.

Now lift the flap on this moment
and take your own experience inside it.
Did you ever have someone tell you something
that you strenuously disagreed with,
and they turned out to be right?
Yes, you have,
and it made you fume, didn’t it?
Remember how that burns, that resentful feeling?
Sometimes in that situation,
even though our rational mind knows they were right,
we continue with a stubborn refusal to agree.
Now honestly, you’ve done that, right?

We hate ourselves for it,
because we know it is like a little kid
folding his or her arms across their chest
and holding their breath.
That little kid lives in all of us – we know it.
We can feel that little kid make an appearance
at the most inopportune times.
So, I am guessing that Peter
was standing in solidarity with that little kid inside,
when he tells Jesus to, “get away from me!”

The way Luke tells it,
Peter is acknowledging his own sinfulness,
and with that, they all go away happy.
But Luke tells the story that way
because he is telling the story
so his audience will follow Jesus too.

The way this story gets told to us,
it is a metaphor meant to deliver its audience
to a moment of personal decision,
in which we raise our hands,
wiggle them in the air, and say,
“Me too! Me too!
I want to be a fisher of men and women too!”

I think Luke has turned this story
into a motivational speech,
so that if the speaker tells it just right,
the audience is clamoring to sign up.
But I’m not buying it.
I’m the guy in the audience that says,
“Oh yeah, let’s hear what REALLY happened.”

Well, what really happened
is that Mr. Zebedee lost his work force.
And what really happened
is that Peter’s wife and kids were left
with a sudden income shortage.
And what really happened,
is that Jesus got three new recruits
with divided loyalty
because they kept thinking about
where they should be
and what they should be doing.

And, if I am right about this,
when Jesus asked them to follow him,
he did not mean full time and forever.

What? Whoa, stop right there.

Wasn’t Jesus asking Peter, James and John
to give up everything else
and follow him,
full time and forever?
That is the usual storyline
but where does it say that –
even in Luke’s actual words, where does it say that?

It doesn’t, but that is the usual
sermonic interpretation of the story
that has been preached ever since the first days
that the Jesus movement became
the Christian Church.

The way us preacher-types
and religious professionals
have told this story, it is about becoming
a full-time follower of Jesus, forever.
It has been told as a recruitment story.
We have made this story about a singular,
personal commitment to Jesus
as if he is the only truth, way, and light.
Follow Jesus and be blessed,
or reject him and be cursed.
Either/Or.

You see? We have made this story
into an either/or decision
meant to motivate or frighten.
If you want to be good instead of bad;
if you want heaven instead of hell;
if you want to be faithful instead of a reprobate;
then you will be like Peter and the Zebedee boys.

But let’s be honest.
You and I are more like Mr. Zebedee
or Mrs.Peter and the kids,
stuck at home with the chores and the bills.
If stories like this are to have any traction
for us in life as we actually live it,
then it simply cannot be so categorical –
the punch line cannot be a binary up or down vote
as we have traditionally interpreted it.

So, let’s step back for a moment and remember
that traditionally those doing the interpreting
have a professional bias
and are deeply invested in you and me
and everyone else,
jumping up and down yelling, “Me too! Me too!”

We know what Luke’s editorial bias was.
He wants his audience to sign up and follow Jesus,
full time
and forever.
And we know what angle Church professionals
are telling this story from.
They want us to sign up
and follow Jesus
full time
and forever…
and oh, by the way,
the Church claims it is the current
incarnation of Jesus, so follow it
full-time and forever.

But I have a different take on this story.

Here is my take.
We may get skunked during the day.
We may work all night
and discover it was for nothing.
We may be dog-tired and morose,
and angry and bitter.
BUT…

if we allow ourselves to get stuck there
we are in danger of missing
the big catch
waiting for us underneath the boat
at every moment we breathe.

I don’t think it is magic
or any kind of supernatural juju.
Instead, it is much simpler and more direct.
The wisdom of Jesus will give us access
to the catch below the boat
when otherwise we would have just
followed our tiredness
or bitterness
or frustration
and missed the opportunity.

Following the wisdom of Jesus,
which is indeed infused with the presence of God,
will give us a resource
or capacity
or perspective
that allows us to keep fishing
when everyone else has been skunked
and we don’t really feel like trying any more either.

You and I may think we know more about
our own business than
God or Jesus or the other wise guys,
but the fact is,
most of the time we have no idea of the abundance
that is swimming under our own little boat.
That well-known Inuit metaphor is a perfect fit
for Luke’s story:
We a riding a whale
while fishing for minnows.

So we have doubled-back around
to that Buechner quote:
“If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry
along to business as usual, it may lose you
the ball game. If you throw your arms around
such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save
your soul.”

It is much more difficult
to hug the moment like crazy
when we have been up fishing all night
and caught nothing,
than in those intense moments
when the fish strike.
It is for all those hard, empty,
and monotonous moments
that the wisdom of Jesus gives us a lens
with which to see the abundance
under our own little boats.

That is the punch line I hear
in this story – at least the way I want to tell it.

 

 

 

4 Epiphany C, 2019

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The prophet Isaiah’s Lips Anointed with Fire by Benjamin West

Somewhere in the recesses of your life
burrows the memory of a time
when you angered your family.
I do not know what you did, of course,
but I am pretty sure whatever it was,
they got doggone mad.

For some of us, there is more
than a single memory of such times,
and those memories can’t burrow
far enough down into the forgotten to hide
because they are too fat for cover.
But I would put money on the table
that every one here
has angered
those we have lived with
and loved
and been closest to.
It is just an ordinary event in the human domain –
an elementary property of the physics of love.

Not only have we angered someone,
but someone with whom we are close
or closely related,
has gotten US
hot under the collar –
more than once, if I am not mistaken.

We are never so lonely
as when we feel alone with those we love;
and few moments make us more isolated
than being angry with those we love
or feeling their anger toward us.

Jeremiah and Jesus lived the restless,
perhaps even tortured life,
of those steeped in the anger
of their peers and contemporaries.
But Jeremiah and Jesus
could not have been more different.

Jeremiah came from money –
the small power elite class of his society.
Jesus came from dirt, as in dirt-poor.
Jeremiah was educated,
and it shows in the exquisite images
and parallelism of his poetry.
Jesus was likely illiterate
and it shows in the pithy, earthy parables
so easily recitable from memory.

Jeremiah was a priest
before he was a prophet,
and his father was a priest who taught him the trade.
Jesus was a peasant who made doors
and wheels, and tables and ploughs
just as his father taught him to do.
But both of them, Jeremiah and Jesus,
separated by almost six hundred years,
knew from a very young age
he would be in trouble.

Both of them knew
that the wisdom they were given
would cause those who loved them
to become very angry.

WHAT they knew, was what God
had given them to speak.
Both of them were what we would call, preachers.
Just like the Bible is more sermon than text,
(as I talked about last week),
the main characters of the Bible, its prophets,
are more preacher than magician or guru.
Whatever magic they had
came from their lips more than their hands.

But this idea is hard for us.
The idea that God speaks on the lips
of an ordinary human being
is not something we believe today.

We know that if someone were to walk in that door
and tell us that God
had told him or her to come in here
and give us a message,
our knee-jerk reaction would be to think
he or she were crazy.
And yet, that is the idea of a prophet.

A prophet had the unenviable task
of speaking God’s mind to humans,
and sometimes
speaking the mind of humans to God.
The prophet was a mouthpiece:
not welcomed to speak his or her own mind
but to articulate GOD’s vision
or dream
or judgment.

In poor Jeremiah’s case,
he was given the words of ‘doom and gloom’
to speak to an affluent society
that was ‘partying like it was 1999.’
600 BCE in Judah,
was like the 1920’s in the USA:
a big party before the big bust.
In the middle of it was poor old Jeremiah
lobbing stink bombs and water balloons
on everyone’s good time.

Fortunately, he got some good news
to spread toward the end of his life.
I say fortunately,
because I do not think Jeremiah
loved being a prophet of doom and gloom.

At the end of his life,
when Jerusalemhad been torched
and ground down to rubble,
and his peers and contemporaries
brutally carted away into exile,
Jeremiah was finally given a vision
of restoration and hope
to spread among the survivors.
He was given a vision
of how it would be
when God welcomed them back
with open arms.

Jesus was more like the prophet Amos,
a peasant sent into the halls of power
where he did not belong;
sent to deliver both judgment against
the status quo
and an alternative vision
for how God wanted us to live.
We know that didn’t end well.

But here we are in 2019,
and I’m pretty sure anyone claiming to speak for God
would be thought of as nuts,
or a shyster.

This very idea of speaking for God
puts us smack up against our trust in God –
or more specifically, our trust that there IS a God.
It has to do with our willingness to believe
that God has any input
or influence
in life as we live it,
rather than as some nebulous concept of a Creator
who exists at great distance from creation.
Let’s face it,
many people who attend church each week
are functional agnostics.

While we or they may believe in God,
or the ‘idea’ of God,
we are also fitted so snuggly with a secular lens
that we can’t understand how God
could actually DO anything real –
anything that could be measured, quantified,
or replicated.

And truthfully, God
does not make much of an appearance
in a world defined only by
what we can touch and hold and measure
within the grasp our instrumentation.
Because, let’s face it,
on the other side of this equation
is our very limited instrumentation.

But in such a world as ours,
prophets do not exist
because there is no actively involved God
to give them an utterance or vision.
Yet, for some of us,
just as surely as we have a memory
of our family being angry with us,
we also have a memory snuggled deep inside,
of God breaking through.
It probably is not a Bollywood spectacular, rather,
something quieter –
as in the crisp air off frozen lakes;
or in the warm salty tear
magically drawn
by love we can see but not measure
in the iris of a friend;
or in a tender green shoot reaching out
from dark moist earth;
or in inextricable kindness or even
life-threatening heroics between strangers…

God’s presence breaks through
our modernists lens, and when it does
we suddenly have to decide
if we will trust it or not.
Very often,
the vehicle of that presence breaking through,
is the voice of someone
whose words we have discovered over time,
point to a power greater than ourselves.

The prophet’s voice could be
a big voice,
like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malala,
someone whose wisdom seems even wiser
after having put their body on the line
for the words they speak.

Or it could be a small voice,
one that few people hear in the way we do –
a grandparent
or teacher
or that person who always sits across
from us at a 12-step meeting
or a book club.

And a community can be that kind of voice –
those people we admire
who are always doing something
or witnessing to something
or quietly showing something
to anyone who will listen.

Well maybe that is a good place to stop
on a day we have our Annual Parish Meeting,
and to remember those folks
who have spoken wisdom and insight in our lives,
and those folks who we have gotten angry with
because they told us some truth
we didn’t want to hear.

It is a struggle in our world
to give credibility to any voice,
let alone suspect that God has laced it
with some wisdom
or perspective we needed to hear.

On a day like today,
it is well that we consider
who those voices have been for us,
and whether or not,
as a community of faith,
we can be such a voice for others.

And now,
sitting or standing as is our custom for prayer,
we voice our own prayers and hopes
as a community of faith.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Epiphany C 2019: The Presumption of Solitude

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I am going to do two things
I normally do not do in a sermon.

The first is to read an extended bit of prose,
and the second is to “proclaim.”

I know preachers are supposed to proclaim,
but I do not like to – at least not explicitly.
To talk about anything is to proclaim something,
of course, but we all know
I have no more right
to stand up here and tell you what to believe
than you have to tell me the gospel truth.

Rather, I hope, what I do
is poke and prod and ponder
and share the results of that with you
for your own consideration.

I know that in 2019,
just because I went to seminary
and got zapped by a bishop,
does not make my words any more
authoritative than anyone else’s.

But today, because of the subject,
is a little different,
I am going to do some proclaiming –
but I feel safe knowing you will disregard anything
that you need to.

Okay, here is an extended excerpt from “Prodigal Summer,” by Barbara Kingsolver.

“She (the coyote) stopped to listen, briefly, for the sound of anything here that might be unexpected.  Nothing.  It was a still, good night full of customary things.  Flying squirrels in every oak within hearing distance; a skunk halfway down the mountainside; a group of turkeys roosting closer by, in the tangled branches of a huge oak that had fallen in the storm; and up ahead somewhere, one of the little owls that barked when the moon was half dark.  She trotted quickly on up the ridge, leaving behind the delicate, sinuous trail of her footprints and her own particular scent.

If someone in this forest had been watching the coyote – a man with a gun, for instance, hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees – he would have noticed how quickly she moved up the path, attending the ground ahead of her feet, so preoccupied with her solitary search that she appeared unaware of his presence.  He might have watched her for a long time, until he believed himself and this other restless life in the (sight of his rifle) to be the only two creatures left here in this forest of dripping leaves, breathing in some separate atmosphere that was somehow more rarefied and important than the world of air silently exhaled by the leaves all around them.

But he would have been wrong. Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.  Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.”

Well, that is a beautiful piece of writing
but the gemstone I want to extract
is her observation that, “solitude”
is a human presumption.
To say it another way,
our standard operating procedure
that God is absent,
or at the very least quite distant,
results from a human preoccupation with itself.
But the apparent distance
between God and us
is a function of our lack of depth perception…
and simple self-preoccupation.

I mention it
because we are staring into baptism today –
the baptism of Jesus in particular,
but that is a mirrored image
in the gospel pond
in which we are invited to see
our own reflection.

Here comes the proclaiming.

Because Christianity became an empire,
and because for two hundred years
it has been the establishment religion of our nation,
baptism became a cultural nicety –
something one did for their kid,
like piano lessons.

There has also been some superstition
that collected on baptism
like barnacles on the hull of a ship.

Let me hack away at both of these.

No one hasto be baptized.
Baptism is not some powerful magic or voodoo
that opens the pearly gates like an ATM card
accesses a bank account.
Baptism is not about gaining the love
and acceptance of God that is only available to those
with a watery cross on the forehead.

Baptism is about relationship with God. Period.
It is about disabusing ourselves
of the presumption of human solitude.

No one needs to be baptized
to be loved and accepted by God.
No one hasto be a Christian to know God
or be loved by God.

This universalism is not just Cam
barking his proclamation either.

Even our own Episcopal Baptismal Covenant
says as much, when we say that we promise to
“seek and serve God in all persons.”
God in all persons –not some persons,
but all persons.

Surely, we have gained that much perspective
after all the wars and internecine hatred
of the past centuries.
So, baptism is about what kind of relationship
we are going to have with God.
It presumes the presence of another
within,
around
and among us,
rather than solitude.
It even presumes we are, from the beginning
and to the end,
already in relationship with God.
The question is what kind,
how deep
how broad
how intimate
how meaningful?

Now for the exclamation mark at the end of the proclamation.

The relationship that God invites us into,
at least if the prophets and gospels are right,
can be characterized by one word:
Mishpat.
We translate it, justice.

But let’s be careful here.
Mishpat is neither ideological or legal
in its substance.
It is neither Marxist or Jeffersonian.
Mishpat is not an idea around which
we can form a legal system
or create a plan for redistributing wealth.
Rather, it is a highly nuanced ancient Hebrew word
that points to the relational nature of the universe –
and always, with the knowledge
that it is a universe created by God in the first place.

So, Mishpat is the idea
that justice is always shaped
and determined
by what is expected
and needed
and promised
within a particular relationship.

In other words, justice
is always contextual
because it depends upon
the specifics of the relationship:
God and prophet
God and nation
God and gentiles
God and Israel
God and Jesus
Parents and children
Domestic partners and their extended families
Employer and employees
Trinity Place and Geneva…
Mishpat, justice, is not the same thing
in each relationship, but rather,
the fulfillment of the promises
that creates and are created
within each relationship.

Mishpat has to do with doing the things
we have promised to do
in order to meet the rights and needs
inherent in a given relationship.
It is not necessarily egalitarian or universal
but relationship-bound and specific.

This notion of justice
also includes what it takes to restore relationships
that have been violated
by neglect or betrayal of our commitments.
So, whenever the justice in a relationship
has been lost, an opportunity
needs to be created for those in the relationship
to restore the justice.
This is true for societal relationships
as well as interpersonal ones.

The relationship God desire with us
is one in which we do justice
to the promises we have made,
and when we fail to do those promises justice,
that we restore them.

Baptism is that kind of a relationship.
It has promises based upon
what we as Christians in general,
and Episcopalians in particular,
understand God wants from us.
So, your baptism and mine,
are about doing justice to those promises,
restoring the failures when they happen –
and of course they will happen –
and trusting in God’s presence rather than
presuming Solitude.
Like love itself,
Baptism is way more than we bargained for.

Our baptismal covenant
offers a description
of what the promises are
that create and sustain
our relationship with God.
It is not a prescriptionbut a description.

They are five rounded and simplified
guides for spiritual practice
that, if pursued, do justice
to our relationship with God.

1)The first promise is that we stay in community with one another,
and nurture our community with the wisdom of Jesus,
and the sacred meal, and prayers together.

So, our relationship with God is, at its core,
a communal relationship. It requires partners, not solitude.

2) Secondly, we promise to resist evil as best we can,
and when we do not, that we honestly acknowledge it,
and then find a way to turn around and not continue to do it.

So, our relationship with God requires an ongoing and fearless moral inventory
that leads to change.

3) Third, we promise to strive for integrity, keeping a close distance
between what we say we cherish and believe, and how we live our lives.

So, our relationship with God is rooted in how we act rather than what we believe.

4) Fourth, we promise to seek and serve God in all persons,
loving our neighbor as ourselves.

So, our relationship with God leans on compassion and service to others,
and a generous acceptance of ourselves.

5) Finally, we promise to strive for Mishpat and peace among all people,
and respect the dignity of every human being.

So, our relationship with God is interconnected
with our relationships to friends and strangers alike.
This last promise is the most challenging of the five
because it means we cannot do justice to our relationship with God
when we are not doing justice to our relationships with others.

Notice please, in all of this,
that there is very little promised
about what we will believe,
and a great deal promised about what we will do.

Doing justice to our relationship with God,
like fidelity to any human relationship,
does not happen because of beliefs we hold
so much as because of how we act.

Although presuming God’s presence
is a kind of belief,
and a kind of belief that changes things.

We probably do not always feel
the presence of God,
and in fact, feelingGod’s presence
may be an exception rather than the norm.
But presuming that presence
rather than solitude,
will make all the difference in the world.

To me, that is the best reason to pray.

Keeping God in my thoughts,
presuming that presence in my routine,
verbalizing even,
what I make of a given situation
because I presume God’s presence
instead of my solitude –
all of that is in fact, a spiritual practice
that keeps us mindful that we are not
in solitude;
that we are in the presence
of a power greater than ourselves.

It is in such small, ordinary actions
that we do justice to our promises –
small actions,
accumulating over time
are what deepen
and strengthen the relationship.

So, the season of Epiphany
is a great opportunity to be mindful
of the promises of our relationship
and ways we can do justice to those promises.
And most specifically,
to actively presume the presence
of a power greater than ourselves.

 

 

Epiphany C, 2019: How to Win Back Your Heart (Not for the Faint of Heart

by

Codex Vaticanus, from what is considered by many to be the oldest Greek text of the Bible in existence today.

There is an experience in seminary
I want to slice open
and so share its fruit with you.
But I doubt I can do it justice.

It has to do with the Bible –
with entering into the text for the first time
and feeling its utter ordinariness
as well as the power of the tide
surging beneath the surface.

In the ensuing thirty-some years
since I went to seminary,
much of our innocence has been peeled away
by wonderful folks like Marcus Borg,
John Dominic Crossan, Walter Brueggemann,
Amy-Jill Levine, and John Spong.
But even now, I am told, encountering the heartbeat
inside the bible remains an unnerving moment in seminary.
It is an unsettling encounter with the unexpected,
and at the same time,
with nagging implications
far beyond the moment.

First, like an archeologist, you learn
there are tools for digging.
Then, as you dig,
you discover there are layers and layers
of historical interpretation
that dramatically changed the shape and character
of whatever is buried down there in the original text.
Then you learn whatever is down there,
was also shaped and painted
by centuries and centuries
of what came before it.

Then, finally, you discover that between
the stratified debris below
and the stratums above
is an empty shell of an extinct moment –
that there is no “original” text to get back to.

In other words, whatever original text of the Gospel
there might have been,
we do not have it.
We have scraps and pieces of text
in a wide variety of languages,
none with a reliable time-stamp
but each with an estimate of how old it is.
The longest, most intact versions of the gospels we have,
are of course much younger
than the little scraps and pieces left to fit together
like a jigsaw puzzle.

So, as it turns out, we have no eyewitness account –
something written in “real-time” as we would say today –
by people who were there to report the details.
Instead, we have echoes across the earliest generations
of people who told people
who told other people
about what happened.

The Gospels themselves, are edited rather than authored
by Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
But what that means, is that the Gospels
are collections of stories and sayings
gathered or received by people in four separate communities, decades and many miles apart.

Many of those stories were told without a context
so the editor, Matthew for example,
had to figure out the sequence of the stories,
and in what context Jesus actually said something.
So, they were editing,
stringing together sayings and events
and creating connections where there may not have been any.
All the time, they were interpreting
and building a narrative to reflect their own beliefs
about Jesus, God, Israel, Rome, and salvation.

The realization is that we only get to see Jesus in a mirror,
never do we get to look upon him directly;
and never do we know for certain, if it ishisvoice
we are listening to, or his voice
filtered through somebody else’s.

Then on top of that,
even to get to the mirror,
we have to dig and scrape through all that historical topsoil,
and sift through all the historical context
that came before the mirror.

So there comes a moment for many seminarians,
usually in the first or second semester,
when the surge of passion that delivered him or her
to seminary in the first place,
is suddenly quieted.
In the stillness comes an uncertainty
and confusion, and
questioning about what can we know.

And yet, con-current with that rattled insecurity,
is shock and awe about the heartbeat
that is nonetheless in the text.

When the innocence is shattering,
and the cheap confidence is becoming unglued,
there is also an encounter with the text.

In it
are parallels, insights,
and voices
so eloquent and profound
that the seminarian’s grief over what has been lost
is buffeted by the presence and echoes
of things not yet understood.

The doves that remained at home, never exposed to loss,
innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness;
only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free,
through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery.

“The Dove that Ventures Outside” by Rainer Maria Rilke

As Rainer Maria Rilke writes,
the ball that we dared to throw into infinite space
returns heavier by the weight of where it has been.

What I am unsuccessfully trying to describe is a loss
and the heart won-back from that loss.
So, for example, three kings.
It is the best story of Christmas, filled
with powerful images for the imagination.
It is so evocative that myths ancient and modern,
including the Star Wars saga,
are rooted in it.
But as an historical moment
it unravels when we begin to see that Matthew
has carefully constructed a narrative
in which Jesus is the new Moses.

Pharaoh slaughters the first-born boys of the Hebrews
and Herod slaughters the first-born of Judah.
Moses is saved from the slaughter and so is Jesus.
Moses brings the children of Israel out of Egypt,
and Joseph takes Jesus into Egypt
so that it can be said he came out of Egypt too.
There are five books of Moses,
and Matthew has the five discourses of Jesus.

When we dig into it, the parallel Matthew creates
between Moses and Jesus,
beginning with several details of the three king’s story,
makes it clear there is no coincidence about it.
Rather, Matthew has created a narrative
to convince his contemporaries
that Jesus is the new Moses.

It is all the more startling
when we compare how different Matthew’s narrative
is from Luke’s, Mark’s, and John’s.
Each editor constructed his story,
with the Jesus stories and sayings he had on hand,
to paint a bigger picture about Jesus
and to make his own theological point
the dominant one among his contemporaries.

As I said, at first this realization is disconcerting.
Even if one enters seminary with little knowledge of the bible –
which I confess was true for me –
the obvious narrative construction
and theological agendas
poking out of the Gospels
is startling.
But then, so are the deep truths those narratives tell.

Take the three king’s story, again.
What are we to hear in it?
Well, in this beginning of the Jesus story
we hear a truth that echoes all the way to the cross:
Human beings resent God,
and we will seek to destroy any effort to limit our control
even if it means killing God.

Where the power of God
is its simple presence among us,
human power is wielded with coercion,
and we will attempt to coerce anyone
and anything
that threatens our hold on power.
We see that at the kingdom-level all the time,
from those who hold authority in government and business.
But tragically, we can also see it at the micro level
within our own households
and friendships
from time to time.

The truth of the three king’s story
is that, while we sing and worship and proclaim
our love of God,
if given the chance,
we are more likely than not
to kill God.

It is right there in the three king’s story.
And it is right there in the Moses story.
And it is right there all the way through the text,
from Genesis to Matthew.

This horrible truth,
in which we lose innocence about who we are
as well as understand that God knows who we are,
is there in the text with unvarnished honesty.
When we encounter it,
and the many other astounding truths
which call to us from out of the text –
some of which we are much more pleased to receive –
it is unnerving
and disconcerting
and ultimately, amazing
and awesome.

We lose innocence and magical thinking
as we encounter the text this way,
but our won-back hearts
gain something
with much more weight in return.

Part of the fear and trembling
that rises up within seminarians,
is what will happen
if we are honest about all this
with people like you?
The party line
and conventional wisdom
is that we should not preach with such honesty.
We should not de-mythologize the bible
for fear that the laity
will either lose their faith
or string us up.
I have had a different experience.

While there is loss and struggle,
grief and even anger,
there is also the possibility
of the won-back heart
that receives something in return
with much greater weight.

The secular culture
has already undercut the authority of the text,
and we have known for many years
that what we were taught as children…
well, it was for children.
So doing the work,
and creating a space in which we can be honest
with our questions and doubts,
and openly ponder new directions for our faith,
is liberating.

It is not for everyone,
but for those who find it liberating,
it can be powerful.

So, while I cannot stand up here
and tell you the three king’s story is historically accurate –
that it happened just that way –
I can tell you that it holds truth,
and the truth it holds will shake us to the core.

But all of what I have been saying about
this story in particular,
and the bible in general,
is a metaphor for the doves that dare
to fly the coop
and soar into the great adventures.
We’ve done that here, you know,
and are doing it
through our community at Trinity Place.

Yes, there is loss, but the won-back heart
that throws itself into infinite space,
returns with the weight of more wisdom and hope
than it left with.

Welcome to the season of Epiphany.

 

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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