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TEXT

Did you ever know something –
know it in your bones?
What I mean is the kind of certainty
deep down
where we know such things. But then,
you discovered it wasn’t true?

Truth.
Oh, how we long for it?Truth.
Oh, how we long for it?

Truth, that bedrock foundation
that does not shake
or move
or shift over time.
Where on earth
can we find such a thing as truth anymore?
When even the geological plates under our feet
move and shift
and the earth itself is never without motion,
how can there be a truth that stands still?
“I am the way, the truth and the life.
No one comes to God except through me.”
John places those words
on the lips of Jesus seventy-five or so years
AFTER Jesus was dead and buried.

Then those words become “the” truth
for an entire empire
and European civilization that killed, tortured, burned
and destroyed other people
who did not claim that truth.

In the year 2020
we can glibly say, as Marcus Borg did so often,
that yes, “Jesus is the way,
and the truth and the life”
and it is just the same “way and truth and life”
known in every religion in the world
by different names and from different spiritual sources.

Now, please allow me a brief break in the action.
We are in the midst of a pandemic,
so we are scattered and unable to talk in person
or in real time.

A better pastoral instinct than mine,
would perhaps suggest that preaching in this time
should not be challenging – and comforting only.
But my problem is, that if we are going to keep using
Biblical readings, and continue to use
liturgical language,
then there is little choice but to include
some challenging content.
To allow such things to stand uncritically
and without further comment, is not truthful –
or so it seems to this preacher.

I invite us then, to think about truth in the context of our own lives.

When I was in high school,
I witnessed the Klu Klux Klan holding a night time rally
carrying torches and a burning cross.
They had the way and a truth and a life,
and Jesus was his name.

Like many of you, I grew up in a culture
in which homosexuals and transgender folks
were harassed, humiliated, and beat up,
and unlike many people and places now,
few seemed to have a problem with it.
It was okay because we the way and a truth and a life,
and his name was Jesus.

When I was middle school,
my mom would not have been able to get credit on her own.
And we went to a church in which
she could cook and wash dishes
but not be a deacon, priest, or bishop.
We had the way and a truth and a life
and we proclaimed it, Jesus.

Without giving it too much thought,
people might believe that religion –
since it touts “the” truth –
would never change much.

I mean, if the truth is absolute, then
it is probably unchanging, right?
All those councils,
creeds and doctrines
have codified truth, haven’t they?
So now it is all done, once and for all.
How could Christianity change
when right there at the very bottom of the pile
of Christian ideas
is one that says God does not change?
If God does not change
then the truth cannot change. Right?

What happens to all that dogma
and doctrine, written and voted on
when we still thought that the sun orbited the earth?
What happens to us
when we begin to see
the vast expanse of interstellar space?

What happens when we read those
famous, brilliant theologians
and suddenly even an ordinary,
not-so-brilliant high school student
can recognize the cultural filters they wore?

What happens when we can recognize
the white,
male,
colonial assumptions
in our most cherished theology, and see how it
distorted Christian views of Judaism and Jesus,
and so corrupted much of what we thought was truth?

What happens when we start to read Isaiah or Luke
from the perspective of a Salvadoran compasino?

What happens if we listen to Jesus
from the point of view of an American feminist?

What happens if we see the Exodus story
from the eyes of a Syrian Muslim
rebelling against an authoritarian regime?

What happens when Biblical scholarship
from the first half of the 20th century
is undercut by archeological discoveries
in the second half,
and what we thought was the protective armor of truth
looks more like swiss cheese? Yikes.

Truth. oh, how we long to know it.

Truth. Where is that bedrock foundation
that does not shake or move or shift over time?

Do we hold onto our truths for dear life,
as if they are the only things that will keep us
from drowning in the brutality of an on-coming tsunami?
Or do we let go, hoping-against-hope
that surrender to the torrent
will reveal a new, deeper, truer truth?

“…Enter the turret of your love, and lie
close in the arms of the sea; let in new suns
that beat and echo in the mind like sounds
risen from sunken cities lost to fear;
let in the light that answers your desire
awakening at midnight with the fire…”
(Denise Levertov, from “The sea’s wash in the hollow of the heart”)

I do not know if Denise Levertov
was pointing to the same thing I am today,
but it sounds like it.

It is a tricky, demanding,
and grueling dance we have these days.
With one hand
we hold the truth of the ages
and with the other,
we wrap our fingers around the waist of the present moment
with all its cascading truths.

Who is supposed to lead?
Both of these partners
would jealously take us into themselves
and never let go.
But you and I must not allow them to lead!
We must lead
or we will be lost.
The Church,
and traditional wisdom,
has a conserving nature
and demands fidelity to everything she says.

The wisdom of the present moment,
capricious and seductive,
has the soul of a marketer
which is more intent on capturing us
than concerned with the content of his product.

Then there is us, you and me;
unsure of our step,
not confident in our own authority;
suspicious of our partners’ motives
but not at all clear
about our own.
We know it is still possible to self-medicate
with the sedatives
of an exclusive wisdom of ages past,
or the formless stimulants of new age wisdom.

We know it, because we see people drug themselves.
We see people holding tight to the old
or clutching the new
even though it requires them to deny
their own experience.

We have done it ourselves,
every single one of us, I suspect.
We have held tightly to truths we were handed
because we fear being alone in the dark without a light.
It is very tempting to fold ourselves
into the old or the brand new truths,
pretending that the blanket under which we hide
provides real safety.

But if the bedrock of our faith
is in an idea or a belief,
whether ancient or new,
our faith will not weather the tempest headed our way.
Suffering and death makes a liar
out of every religion and every religious idea.

When we sit atop a pile of life’s manure –
when our most cherished relationships
are broken or sour,
and when our best efforts are rewarded with loss,
or careful health strategies didn’t stop disease,
then our bitter question becomes, “Why!”

It is a statement more than a question,
and “Why!” echoes unanswered
in the darkness.

Whether Jesus, Buddha or Mohammad
is the way and the truth and the life,
the truth of an IDEA
will not get us through.

When you and I are the one lying on the hospice bed
hosting the convoy of people coming to say good-bye,
and life has been too short,
and the suffering has been too painful,
and all we want to do is call for a re-run,
religion and religious ideas
will not be enough to give us our wings.

What in God’s name are we going to do
without “the” truth as our bedrock?

Well, first of all, we start by packing it in.
We need to stop looking for the sure and certain truth.
We need to give it a funeral
and grieve for it.
We need to finally just let it go
so we can move on with the other stages of grief.
I am not kidding, that is an important thing to do
if we haven’t done it already.

Truth be told, we will likely have to do it
more than once
because we are clinging to all kinds of truths
we are not even aware of –
and the awareness comes in waves,
not all at once, nor once and for all.

So, once we have made this terrible
acknowledgment about the death of truth –
at least the sure and certain kind –
we start by opening our minds
and opening our hearts
and opening our friendships
and opening our search
and discovering the loss of sure and certain truth
brings with it, enhanced senses.

When we have let go of the sure and certain,
we can feel more,
and intuit more,
and imagine more,
and apprehend more.

When we have opened our pores
we also create more portholes to the holy.
The first thing we will discover
as our grief for “the” truth begins to abate,
is that we become more experiential with our faith.

Then, as we become less idea-and-belief oriented,
we gain the awareness of a need
that may have been only abstract before.
You see, when we leaned on and trusted
the authority of ideas
and their authors or institutions,
the community of faith was just people
with whom we worshiped.

But as our own experience
becomes more authoritative,
we have a greater need of other people
to help us discern the meaning of our experience.
It is no longer a dance
between tradition and innovation,
it’s moshing and WE are in the mosh pit.
Or if you have never moshed,
it’s a rugby scrum
and we’d better have a good team
while we are in the thick of it.

Encounters with God,
ordinary experiences of the holy, are tricky.
On the one hand, we can get carried away
and think they change everything!

On the other hand, with time and distance,
we can begin to lose confidence
in our experiences of the holy,
as if maybe they were just our imagination.

We need other people around us
who we can talk out loud to about God-stuff,
people who aren’t so rigid with truth
that they can’t listen to us,
or so fearful
that they can’t return the intimacy.

We need to be able to wonder out loud with people,
and to imagine out loud,
and to feel out loud,
and to open our hearts and minds to life with other people.

If we are not going to wear the traditional
sure and certain truths
of the past or the present like chainmail in battle,
and if we are not going
to ricochet like a cue ball
from new idea to new idea,
then we have to have people to share our wonderment and experiences with,
and with whom we can learn from and grow.

We need those others more than ever,
not just family and friends,
but people engaged in the same spiritual process
we are engaged in.

Ideas and doctrines,
sure and certain truth,
do not carry us through a time like
the one we are in right now.
What holds us,
in times of crisis and endings,
is the experience of God’s love.

The IDEA of God’s love is lovely,
but the EXPERIECE of God’s love is transforming –
confirming and affirming in small doses,
and rattling and terrifying up close and personal.

Our experiences of the holy
may be big and splashy
and what people normally think of
as religious experience, OR,
it can be the accumulation of many small,
ordinary moments of presence
that forms a preponderance of holiness
across our lives.

They may not be big and splashy experiences at all
but quiet threads
weaving our life’s experiences together.
In the end, or in the middle for that matter,
it is not the truth of ideas and beliefs
that hold us –
it is the love of God that holds us.
It is other people
who have also experienced
the love of God, that hold us.

So the way, the truth and the life changes.

Experiencing the love of God,
and our need for one another
as we seek to encounter and understand it,
goes on and on and on.

This time of social distancing will end
and access to spiritual community,
and all kinds of human solidarity, will be easier.
But the love of God is made known now
and always, in big moments and quiet ones,
and it begs to be shared.

http://trinitygenevany.org/2020/05/10/1073/

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.

 

Trinity Place

Our vision…to be 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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Visit “savetrinity.org” which tells the exciting story of historic re-use striving to be born. You can help us save this magnificent building by visiting savetrinity.org and signing a letter of support! Thank you.

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