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Three Pentecost/Proper 8C: The Movement

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s keep getting clean with Jesus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a little more Crossan about Jesus’ mission:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that is where we leave it for now.

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

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

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

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

 

Trinity Sunday 2019: No Throne, No Heresy

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An Arian baptistery build by an Arian king, Theodoric the Great, in Ravenna, Italy 5th century

What do these books have in common:
“Harry Potter,”
Marc Gellman’s, “Does God Have A Big Toe?”
and Martin Buber’s, “I and Thou.”
Give up?
They are the books I used
in the last three years
to avoid preaching about the Trinity.
Once again this year,
I am not going to talk about
the very sexy idea of the Trinity –
at least not directly.

One core reason I am an Episcopalian
is that we claim to be a non-doctrinal church.

Now that doesn’t mean
we don’t have any doctrines, because we inherited
a whole bunch of doctrines from before
the English Church broke away from Rome,
and before the American Church
broke off from England.
What it does mean
is that we do not have any new doctrines
that we did not inherit from ancient history.

But most important to me,
what this means
is that we do not have anyone
or any group of anyone’s
with the authority to create,
measure, or demand
conformity to any doctrine.
You see, The Episcopal Church
in the United States
was created by recovering revolutionaries
who were allergic
to kings and princes and ecclesiastical authorities
telling them what to do and what to believe.

In fact, the last time The Episcopal Church
was forced to put someone on trial for heresy,
it was a retired assistant bishop from Iowa
who had ordained an openly homosexual man
to the deaconate.
It was 1996, almost a quarter of a century ago.
Ten conservative bishops
brought the charges
and ten other bishops
were empaneled to be judge and jury.
All the attention of that 1990’s trial and verdict
was focused on the denomination
dealing with homosexuality,
but ordaining GLBTQ folks as clergy
was not the most monumental result of that outcome.

In their final verdict,
the judges drew a distinction
between the “Core Doctrine” of the church
and “other matters of faith,
belief, practice and morals.”

They said that while there were church laws
meant to protect core doctrine,
matters of faith, belief, practice, and morals
were matters of conscience,
and no ecclesiastical body
had the authority to direct individual conscience.

Further, matters of faith, belief, practice,
and morals are subject to change
whereas the core doctrine is not.

Here is the pivotal part.
They defined core doctrine
as “the story of God’s relationship
to God’s people
found in the New Testament teaching
about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.”

That is interesting on a number of counts.
Basically, by implication they said
that in The Episcopal Church
there is no one
and no church body
with the authority to dictate
or define
or prescribe doctrines and beliefs
for matters beyond the New Testament.

Well, we also know that all church doctrine
is well outside of the New Testament
and that both the Old and New Testament
are profoundly and endlessly interpretive.

This is where the Trinity comes in –
it was the first major conflict within Christianity.

It surfaced as a struggle between
Athanasius and Arius,
and their fight was over the concept
of what would become the Trinity.
It was a fight that caused riots and vigilantism
and spread across the Mediterranean.
Was Jesus human?
Was he God?

Was he God appearing as human?
Was he an illusion?
Was he a human who then became God?
Was he created by God
or did he exist eternally with God?
It was a huge fight
with a cacophony of answers, and
with people willingly violent
in opposition to one another.
The argument was only resolved
by the coercive power of Roman imperial authority –
and even then, not completely.

As we likely all know, the emperor Constantine
called together the first council
of the newly imperialized religion
in Nicaea in the year 325.
It was held specifically in order
to resolve the fight between the opposing forces
of Athanasius and Arius.
At first Arius was rejected
and sent into exile,
and Athanasius was embraced and lionized.
But before too long,
Constantine rehabilitated Arius and his theology
while exiling Athanasius.
The Creed went through a variety of version
and is basically a committee document
that took fifty-five years to draft.
Athanasius’s version of the Trinity won out.

But Arianism didn’t go away.
It was the form of Christianity
that converted the Germanic tribes,
who in turn, when they sacked Rome,
re-established it for a while
within the Roman empire.
Even today not all Christians are Trinitarian,
and not even all Trinitarian in the same way.

That panel of bishops installed
to hear that 1990’s case,
basically said that there is no heresy
if there is no one or nothing
with the authority to determine orthodoxy.
(Thanks be to God).

Now you may be thinking
that this has nothing to do with you and me –
just some esoteric church history.
Not so.
You see, like all religions,
The Episcopal Church
has inherited some stinky doctrines
that are products of imperial power
trying to imprint its own image on Christianity.
In fact, all the doctrines we inherited
are an attempt to define
the edges of acceptability –
guarding the entrance, so to speak,
to keep heretics out.
But that simply won’t fly in the 21stcentury,
at least not in our culture.

As I keep pointing out,
we live in a scientific culture
and it permeates everything.
It doesn’t matter whether we hated science
in school and never took another class
after biology,
you and I have been formed
and shaped by scientific culture
as if we loved everything about it.

If we take it apart
and really look at it,
scientific culture
is utterly corrosive to religion,
and that is not all bad.

Let me give an easy example.
Let’s pretend we are scientists
whose research has turned up a new finding.
We are pretty doggone excited about our finding
because it could bring us a lot of recognition,
and research dollars,
as well as promotion.

So what is the first thing we do?
We submit our research and findings to scrutiny.
We publish it.
We lay it out in a completely transparent
and vulnerable way.
Why?
Because we don’t get any credit
until our peers and colleagues
have been able to verify our work independently.
If our findings are important,
they will be attacked and inspected and probed,
and attempted to be disproven
or proven.
That is a crucial element
in the culture of science.
Proving and disproving ideas –
manhandling them
and kicking them around like
a soccer ball.
That is part of the scientific method.

On the other hand,
in traditional religious culture
an authority makes a proclamation
and expects all followers to tow-the-line and agree,
and in both history and the present,
religious groups have been known to savagely
attack those who dare to question it.

In fact, if we question authoritative proclamations
about theological truths,
we may be subject to ejection,
rejection, even
eternal damnation.
Now aren’t you glad science doesn’t have
eternal damnation
in its quiver of weapons?

So whether it is the pope or the Dali Lama,
anyone who proclaims a truth
and expects the world to follow along
just looks foolish in the 21st century.
Religions keep demanding
that people fit in if they want to belong.
But the more that religious authorities
insist that followers adhere to their doctrines
and point to the authority of their own voice,
the more ridiculous they seem in our world.

So this is not just history,
it matters to how we become
and act like community today.

I want to end with an idea
beautifully voiced by Brene Brown
in her book, “The Gift of Imperfection.”
She talks about the difference
between “Fitting in and Belonging.”

She points out that when we are trying to fit in
we are adapting our behavior,
our ideas,
our way of thinking,
our customs and
worse of all, even our self-image
in order to be accepted.

But when we belong,
we belong because we are fully accepted
for who we are,
just as we are.
So, belonging is a healing experience –
because we are able to be ourselves
in our common brokenness,
with our personal insecurities
and pain showing.
As a result, we not only grow in self-esteem
we deepen in compassion.

But sadly, the traditional way
of becoming a member of a Church
is to fit in
by accepting and adhering to
pre-determined beliefs and behavior.
We have to believe the right things – orthodoxy –
and we have to act the right way
according to a morality pre-determined
by those in religious authority.
We have to love the right kind of people
and not the wrong kind of people,
determined once again,
by those in authority.
We have know how to think
and how to act
in order to fit in.
In short, we have to change
and become somebody else in order to belong.

Now every denomination and every congregation,
has unspoken requirements
based upon
class
race
ethnicity
sexuality,
gender,
and theology.
While we have broken down
many of those barriers
in many Episcopal congregations,
the very idea of “Church”
still smacks of fitting in rather than belonging.

I still struggle personally
after all these years,
with this tension between
fitting in and belonging in The Episcopal Church.
I accept the doctrines we have inherited,
like the idea of the Trinity.
I accept them as historic features of our tradition,
and I think of them as heirlooms
that have been passed onto us.

But they are not the lenses through which
I perceive and interpret the world or God.
Sure, they have some influence,
but not nearly as much as 21stcentury
theology and science.

Can I be myself in the Church
and acknowledge before
my brother and sister clergy
the full spectrum of what I do and do not believe,
and the very small wisdom
I can commend?
No, not really, not most of the time.
But it is important to acknowledge
that a big part of that is me:
as in a lack of courage to be myself.
When we are unsure of ourselves,
or when we harbor self-doubt
and wounded self-esteem,
our Church or family or friends
cannot make us whole.
All they can do
is welcome our whole selves in
and not require us
to be someone or something
different in order to belong.
So part of the work is always ours,
our own inner work
of self-acceptance.

Belonging begins with accepting ourselves,
truly accepting ourselves
as we are
and not as we think
we are supposed to be.

Then, when we get a little bit of that self-acceptance,
we can step out and take the risk
to see if we truly belong
to family, faith community,
or another part of the community.
Do we truly belong
or are we are just fitting in
by adjusting who and what we are
in order to be accepted?

It is not a one-and-done process, of course,
nor is it a finite place we get to.
It is an ongoing and moving target,
this sense of belonging
that comes from a combination
of self-acceptance
and hospitality.

Doctrines and proclamations
belong to an earlier era of Christianity.
What we know and acknowledge now
about Jesus is that he hosted a community
in which anyone belonged –
a radically open community for anyone
who could bring themselves to the table.

Jesus’ community
was not about fitting in
it was about belonging.
Jesus’ community was about coming to the table
as we are in the fullness of our personhood
and being embraced and loved.
Jesus’ message
was all about how we already belong –
about how we belonged
even before we could accept ourselves.
His community was all about demonstrating
that gracious sense of belonging.

So we have our work cut out for us,
you and me and Trinity Place.
We have the inner work of self-acceptance,
and we have the community work
of authentic hospitality.
They require courage,
tenderness,
compassion,
perseverance,
and the gracious presence
of a power greater than ourselves.

I believe that we all share an ache to belong –
to be with people and in a place
in which there is absolutely no question
that we are fully embraced
with all of our woundedness,
and all of our weirdness,
and all of our peculiarities.

The only way we ever get to such a place,
is with a deep and courageous
self-acceptance
that can bring us into belonging;
and then, to meet a community
that knows how to extend authentic hospitality.

I pray that is who we are.

 

3 Pentecost: Practice Resurrection

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Texts for Preaching: Luke 9:51-62 and
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry

For most of my time in Buffalo,
Kevin was the secretary at the church I served.
I associate today’s Gospel with Kevin,
but not because he would ever tell anyone
to let the dead bury the dead.
Rather, it is because
I once called in from the tail-end of vacation
and didn’t know what the gospel was
for the coming Sunday.
I didn’t have a computer, or bible,
or any other way of knowing.
So I asked Kevin to read it to me over the phone.
He did, the whole thing.
The grim tone of Luke’s gospel
left both of us speechless.

Kevin was the first to break the silence
when he said,
“Jesus must not have been a morning person.”

I think Luke wants us to see Jesus
as a homeless mendicant
who embraced poverty as a way of life,
Siddhartha style.
That is not my take on Jesus.

Don’t get me wrong, I recognize it is arrogant of me
to suggest I know Jesus better than Luke,
but look, neither one of us actually knew Jesus
and there are in fact dozens of views of Jesus
emanating from that time in history.
Many of those views contradict one another.

So, you and I get to choose our Jesus too,
and it does not have to line up exactly
with Luke’s Jesus.
I like Mark’s Jesus better than Luke’s,
but that’s just me.
Lots of people really like John’s Jesus…for some reason.

Luke’s Jesus has a militant quality about him:
“No one that puts their hand to the plow,”
Luke has Jesus snarl,
“and looks back,
is fit for the kingdom of God.”

What we see in all the different versions of Jesus
are echoes of the ancient Jewish primal narrative
to which Jesus and Christianity are rooted.
Judaism was, almost from day one,
torn apart by dueling influences:
the purists and the prophets.

Jesus was a prophet,
and even the otherwise discordant Gospel authors
agree with that labeling.

The purists,
often referred to by Old Testament scholars
as the priestly caste,
see the world as a set of God-given rules:
keep those rules and all is well.
Break those rules and all is lost.
When the rules are broken,
there are other rules for repairing the fracture.
Every offense had a prescription for repair
and every prescription had a secondary solution.

It was a tightly constructed world
built like Lego’s with a hierarchy of rules.

This vein of purity running through Judaism
is not unique;
we are all familiar with Christian traditions
that seem to rest upon a spider web of intricate prescriptions for making God happy –
as if God thinks our job is to make God happy.

Every religion has a purity tradition within it,
and often, the purity tradition is the one
that finds its way into power and control.

Worship traditions for example,
are absolutely rampant with liturgy-Nazis
that want to bind everyone
to their way of worshipping –
as if God is heart-broken by our expressing
gratitude some other way.

The prophetic tradition on the other hand,
sees the world differently from the purity tradition.

Instead of an intricate web of prescriptions
for making God happy,
the prophetic vision
looks out at the human landscape
and measures faithfulness by whether or not
the web of relationships
leads to equity and justice.
God is happy, they believe,
when the bounty of the earth
and services of society
are distributed well.

But it should also be said,
the prophetic tradition has caught the purity virus
more than once throughout history,
and within the Bible as well.
John the Baptist, for example,
while also a prophet like Jesus,
was utterly convinced that righteousness
was connected to purity.
John’s whole thing was purity,
but his claim to fame was an attempt
to break-up the monopoly
wielded by the temple over the purity system.
Baptism, for example, was his ingenious way
of dismantling the temple’s control
over who was morally clean and not clean
and as such, it was a prophetic witness
against an unjust system.

But the place where John and Jesus agreed
with one another
was that those in power were corrupt and unjust.

The thing about Jesus we need to remember,
is that he was a peasant.
He was impoverished by circumstance
not by choice.
He was an outsider to begin with,
but even so, he had a home –
an actual house and a business.
We are told in the earliest Gospel, Mark,
that he had a house in Capernaum,
which is where he lived and worked
when he wasn’t preaching.

At the same time,
and we are not told how,
Jesus had some wealthy friends
who funded his public ministry.
Lazarus, Martha and Mary, and others not named
or hard to identify because of too many names,
provided money and food
that supplemented whatever he was able to collect
with the various sermons he preached –
and I bet he did pretty well with preaching donations.
My point is that Jesus
was not some homeless beggar.
He was an organizer.
He was strategic.

He was a reformer with an agenda and goals.
He was notorious for breaking purity rules.
Two thousand years later,
a high percentage of the stories
we still tell about him
are related to how he violated the rules for purity.
So thinking about a peasant
who rose to become popular,
at least among the poor
in the villages of rural Galilee,
it is hard to imagine Jesus barking
such hard demands
as we heard from Luke today.

This is the guy who ate dinner
with treasonous tax collectors,
people who were collaborators with Rome
and also enriched themselves
by over-taxing poor people.

So Jesus turning around from those scoundrels
and rebuking a would-be follower
for wanting to say good bye
to his her parents,
just seems like a harsh disconnect
from that other Jesus.
That’s why I think what we heard today
is heavily filtered
through Luke’s editorial bias.
But of course, Mark, Matthew,
and John filter him too,
which is really the bigger point here.
I have said it before:
Jesus is a huge drive-in movie screen.
He is a massive canvass
upon which we project our own desires;
our own beliefs; our own hopes.
Whether it is Luke’s projection of a militant healer,
my projection of a reform-minded organizer,
or Paul’s projection of an eternal Christ figure,
none of us get to know the ORIGINAL Jesus.

History, especially ancient history,
is buried beneath a veil we can never
truly, or finally pierce.
But even if that were not the case,
someone like Jesus was surely
more like Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer
than a reveal-it-all, tell-everything
modern celebrity.
“As soon as the generals and politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it.”
I suspect Herod and Pilate,
when they finally got to interrogate Jesus,
were pretty sure he was out of his mind.

“Leave (your mind) as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.”
Surely, “let the dead bury the dead”
and “if your eye offends you pluck it out”
were false trails rather than
some insane penchant for purity.

“Practice resurrection.”
Death is the trickiest of false trails
when you know doggone well
that what you have taught
and what you have done
and what you have practiced
will outlive you by a mile.

Practicing resurrection
can sound like some kind of Harry Potter
magical thinking,
but all we have to do to know that it is true,
is bring to mind just one person in our lives
who was especially good at teaching us to love –
most likely, it was someone
who loved us really well.

They are living on in us,
and probably in some of the other people
they loved too.
Whether they knew it or not,
in how they lived and how they loved
they practiced resurrection.

Communities do that too,
the ones that love really well.
It is never about how well we keep the rules
or how precisely we make the secret handshake
or which physicist we embrace
or how we fold the flag –
it is about how well we love.

And it isn’t even how MANY we love
or how BIG of a foot print we leave behind
as a community or as an individual.
It is possible that in loving one person
or a few people –
at just the right time
and in just the right way –
we change the course of history;
and so our lives
and our love
echo further and further into the distance
whether or not anyone
even remembers our names.

You see, when we remember
that practicing resurrection is ego-less,
then whether we are remembered by name
or simply that our love keeps rippling forward in time
beyond the years we breathe,
it does not matter.

You and I,
the lives we lead
and the love we give,
are mere microbes in that two inches of humus
accumulated slowly over a thousand years
beneath the giants.
In the thirsty bladder of our ego
such an accumulation does not seem sufficient,
in fact, it horrifies us
with our potential insignificance.

But that is exactly
how to practice resurrection.
One love,
well loved, at a time.

 

 

Day of Pentecost 2019: Seeing Red

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Pentecost.

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

 

 

 

6 Easter 2019: A Note in a Bottle

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Ptolemy World Map 1467

To my grandson.

My Dearest Declan,

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

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

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

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

That pulse is Hope.

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

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

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

Authentic hope lives in between.

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

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

On the other hand, memory can serve us well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we can imagine we can achieve.

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

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

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

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

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

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

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

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

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

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,
Granddad

 

 

 

 

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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