Jesus

23 Pentecost: Eschatology or the Theology of Framing

November 17, 2019 by Cam Miller

Okay, this is about eschatology.
Yep, I knew that would move you
to the edge of your chair!

So, we are sitting between
Isaiah and Jesus this morning,
and it is like pulling at both ends of a cherry popper
or snap dragon – the fireworks are in the middle
and you have to pull at both ends.

Isaiah is all dreamy-eyed
and gushy
while Jesus is dark and morose.

Both are eschatological,
which traditionally is a form of theology
focused upon death, judgement,
and the final destiny of humankind.

Eschatology is a lens
through which we look at life on this planet
and proclaim what it all means.
We are tiny neck hairs
on a small planet lost in space
and with a growing sense
of just how infinitesimal and vulnerable we are.
Eschatology reels that in a little bit.

It can be grand and inspiring to sit on a mountain top
and savor the blue-green vista
and feel awed by the beauty
and intricate balance of nature
and our small part in it.
But it is another thing altogether
to sit naked beneath the stars
and recognize that beauty
is actually massive hot gaseous explosions
into which everything we know
will be incinerated
in a Nano-second.

It is a deep well of ponderance
we can easily fall into
and never come out of,
which is why taking one step at a time
is such sage advice
for little creatures like us.

So eschatology is a lens we inherited
to help us see the enormity of life
a little closer.
Like those funny glasses
used to look at a solar eclipse,
our eschatological lens
allows us to stare into something
that might otherwise harm our soul
if not our mental health.

A lot of Christian tradition
has treated biblical eschatology
as if it were the Farmer’s Almanac of Earth time,
a kind of folk art
that can predict with precision
what science can’t quite get right.

But eschatology
is not a sundial of the universe
that will tell us
how and when or why
all things come to an end.
Rather, it is an act of imagination
that seeks to understand
how and why the events of the moment
are connected to the movements of God.

Just like physics wants to understand the Big Bang
and everything that has taken place
between then and now,
biblical eschatology
wants to understand God
and the relationship of God’s best dream for us
with all that has happened
and is happening now.

It has to be an act of imagination
because we are too small
to truly comprehend the massive whole
in which we are but a teeny tiny part.

So Isaiah is imagining how it all works out
given the horrendous history he is navigating.
Jesus is imagining how it all ends,
so that God’s best dream for us
can finally come to pass.

Where they are standing
in the context of their own lives and nation,
and their own moments in history,
effects what they see
and what they say.

When Jesus pushes before the faces of his friends
his shocking and traumatic vision
he is standing at the end of his life.
His context is grim.
He is about to go toe to toe
with the Roman Empire
and get rubbed out.

His compatriots may not have understood
the trajectory of Jesus’ prophetic ministry,
but he surely did.
Jesus also likely understood
that many of his friends
were living close to their end too.

In the midst of such a grievous moment,
someone makes a stray comment
about the beauty of the stained-glass windows
– oops, I mean the glory of the Temple.

Their ogling at the glory of the architecture
sends Jesus into a wild-eyed explosion of emotion
with him muttering all kinds of images
related to his and our mortality.
It was as if to say,
“Stop!
Focus on what is important!
This thing you think is so great
is nothing.
This building
you think is so awesome
is meaningless and irrelevant.”

And then…that’s it.
That is literally the end of Jesus public statements.
He’s done preaching.

His dark prediction
about the demise of the temple
is end of the story for Jesus.

Now, every story has an ending.
We tend to think of the Gospel
as ending with the resurrection –
a kind of tortured happy ending.
But that is not how Jesus chose to end
the story of his public ministry
in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
His last public story
in each of these Gospels,
is the one we heard in part today.

It is a story about the end of time
and it is pretty dog-gone dark.

And in all three Gospels
Jesus’ last story is provoked
by a knuckle-headed pilgrim to the city of Jerusalem ogling at the Temple
and exclaiming over how beautiful it is.

Something about marveling at the Temple
sends Jesus into his darkened depths
to forecast what is going to happen
at the end of time
when God runs out of patience
or humans run out of options.

But honestly, we actually do not know if
Jesus ended his public teaching
with this little apocalypse,
or if the editors of the gospels
were the ones to use it as a period
at the end of his public ministry.

Here is what I mean.
If it was Jesus predicting the Temple would be destroyed,
then he was doing it
in the year 30 or so of the first century.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke
are editing their Gospels 45 to 60 years
AFTER Jesus is already dead and gone.
In-between Jesus’ death
and the writing of the Gospels,
there is a terrible Jewish/Roman war.

The war lasts for three years
and ends with nearly every Jew in Palestine
killed or fleeing for their lives.
When the Romans march into Jerusalem
they destroy the Temple.
So, in the year 70 of the first century,
Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the Temple
comes to pass – forty years after he made it.

Now, the descendants of those first followers of Jesus
remember his prediction.
“Wow, it happened just like he said it would”
they marvel forty years later.
So all those early Christians
begin to attach other signs and meanings
to Jesus’ original prediction,
things like warnings about being arrested
and persecuted.

They attach those warnings
to the memory of Jesus’ prediction
because they are being arrested and persecuted.

The fact that Jesus’ prediction is born out
in their present moment,
even though it is through repression
and violence,
is a kind of twisted hope for them.
“Nation will rise up against nation,
and kingdom against kingdom…
and there will be dreadful
portents and great signs from heaven.”

So IF this dreadful apocalyptic vision
was something the editors
put on the lips of Jesus,
instead of some kind of verbatim memory
of his last teachings,
then they were saying it to their tormented
and targeted generation:
“There is hope.
After death comes resurrection.”

They can say that
because they know how it turned out
after Jesus was tortured and executed.
So it helps them FRAME their moment
and face their struggles.

What is happening here
is that the original prophecy
is contextualized
by the succeeding generation
to FRAME the crisis of their own day –
and as always,
each generation thinks its crisis is the last crisis
of human history.

Framing or contextualizing
is exactly what should happen with the bible.
Each generation
should take the ancient words of our wisdom
and contextualize them
for own day
and own crises.
The words of Jesus or Isaiah
are not to be pheasant under glass.
This wisdom is not frozen in time
with a meaning limited to a single historic occasion,
rather, it is to be made present
in each new generation.

The “So What?” in this sermon,
as with the implications
of the poem from Wendell Berry
and the visions of Isaiah and Jesus,
is to ask ourselves
how we are framing OUR moment?

How are we framing our lives
in this moment,
and is the way we frame it
empowering us to act
or disempowering us?

In every single moment
we face a life
and a world
that is at one and the same time
Isaiah and Jesus –
both hope and dread,
both life and death.
They are always the possible next moment,
and every breath we take
holds both possibilities.
How do we frame that?
In fear
or commitment?
In anxiety
or resolve?
In resignation
or passion?

How we frame the moment,
how we frame our lives in any given moment,
and how we frame the opportunities and challenges
of the moment we are in,
makes all the difference in the world.
It makes all the difference to the world.

I want to end with one of the primary
ways I frame my life –
especially when things get dark and wiggly.
It is really just a metaphor,
probably one you have heard me use before
in one form or another,
because it is my eschatology.

The light from the star closest to our sun
(Proxima Centauri)
takes four years to get here.
Light from the most distant stars we see at night
has taken up to ten millennia – ten millennia –
to reach us.

So while we see those sparkling orbs up there
the light we are seeing from them
was actually created
between four and ten thousand years ago!

In other words,
we are not actually seeing those stars
when we look up;
instead we are seeing the past.
Think about that…just hover on it for a moment.

What we see is not what is, rather,
what we see is what was –
what was years and years and years ago.
In some cases thousands of years ago.

We think we are seeing those stars
and that light as if in real time,
but we are only seeing what they once were.
In fact, some of that light
is emanating from sources
that no longer exists.
Some of that light is but the ghostly image
of what was
but is no longer.
And yet that light,
even the light we see from the sources
that no longer exists,
has lasted longer than all of human history
and will outlast any of us here.

If you will forgive a movie reference here,
it is Rick’s line to Ilsa at the end of Casablanca,
when he explains why he is suddenly
going to act against his own self-interest
and risk everything
to join the Resistance:

“Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble,
but it doesn’t take much to see
that the problems of three little people
don’t amount to a hill of beans
in this crazy world.”

Our lives are small
and our smallness is in fact,
part of the beauty of God’s creation.
What WE imagine is hopeful
or dreadful,
is not the last word.
And the point is,
we do not get to know the last word.
So how we frame our lives
on this planet, and in this vast cosmos,
will make an enormous difference
in how we live our lives.

As weird as it is to say, eschatology matters.

How we frame this crazy life
and our place in it,
really does make a difference.
And here is the money part –
since this is stewardship season
and I am really supposed to preaching on money.

What we do with our money,
at least that which is somewhat discretionary,
reveals better than just about anything else,
how we frame our lives.
Time and money are the currencies
in the economy of God.
How we spend them
and what we spend them on,
declares our values far better
than any words we use.

So it is worth thinking about
and actually doing a little research on
how we use our money
and what it may say about our values
and even our eschatology.

12 Pentecost C, 2019: Peace be with you

September 1, 2019 by Cam Miller

I went to a laboratory school.
It was kindergarten-through-high school
in the same building, and,
while a public school,
it was also operated by the teacher’s college
of the local university.
I mention it, because we did not have letter grades
until high school.
All through the first nine years of classes,
we had written evaluation that emphasized “the positive”
while allowing for comments
that identified “problematic areas.”
So, the end of the first semester of ninth grade
was a time of reckoning
when, for the first time,
there was a single letter staring up from the page.

That individual letter was very loud,
and somehow it seemed to say more
than the longest evaluation ever written
by one of our previous elementary
or middle school teachers.

I can’t swear to how many A’s I had,
but I think I had all A’s, one B, and a C.
That C was in Algebra and an absolute success story.
The B was in Spanish,
and considering my goof-off and Smart Alec behavior,
it was probably a gift.

My mom looked at my report card,
said nothing about the A’s I had received,
and told me in no uncertain terms
that the B and the C were unacceptable.
At the end of the second semester,
I had all A’s a D and an F.

That says as much about my psychology at the time
as it does hers, and was just a hint
of the problems to come.

Any of us who had a hyper-critical parent
know and recognize the problems and behaviors
planted within the garden of such relationships.
One of them is the voice of that critical parent
traveling with us over time and space,
no matter how we grow and change and flourish.
Struggling to keep that critical parent inside our head
as a small voice instead of a dominant one,
can sometimes be exhausting.
Which is also why, I sometimes read the gospel story
appointed for a given Sunday,
and say, “Ugh.”

I love Jesus,
and with all honesty,
the wisdom of Jesus is my life’s blood.
Some would be surprised to hear me say that
because I do not talk about Jesus or quote Jesus
like some Christian bobble-head.
But Jesus, along with his prophetic pals –
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, and Amos –
is my chosen primary lens
through which I decipher the world.

That said, sometimes I just sigh
because the negativity gets to be too much.
Or more accurately, when I am struggling
with that critical parent inside,
the hard medicine of Jesus
feels like too much.
That is the case today
with this reading from Luke.
I could easily go on and on about the prophetic witness
Jesus lets loose with this story from Luke –
or that Luke lets loose with this story of Jesus.
But not today.
You see, when I read the gospels
I understand that you and I
are the bad guys in the story.
I think there is a lot of Christianity around
that inserts Christians as the good guys,
which makes for a very different story.

But that is so strange to me, when we know
the good guys in these gospel stories,
especially in Luke,
are “the poor, the crippled, the lame,
and the Blind.”

That is Luke’s motto for “the good guys.”
The good guys are the marginalized
not the fat cats like us.

The poorest among us here
would be judged hugely wealthy in that society.
So, in these stories,
we should know that at best,
we are the Pharisee with the lavish banquet
that invited the wrong guests.
But at worst, and more likely,
we are the imperial citizens or senators back in Rome
whose agents are forcing peasants into bankruptcy
in order to amass wealth at the edges of the empire,
or worse, crucifying them.
It is a view of ourselves that is difficult to gaze at
for extended periods of time
if we take it seriously and want to know more.

Yet, like I said,
there is a majority of Christianity in this country,
that reads these scriptures very differently.

They see themselves,
even if middle class and quite wealthy,
as the marginalized and pure at heart
amongst a threatening horde of “secular atheists”
or the fearsome and alien “Muslims,”
or the strange and perplexing godless Buddhists
and polytheistic Hindus.
They domestic Jesus
in order to bring him into their polite company.

While it often doesn’t feel good,
I prefer to keep Jesus as the zealous
social and theological prophet that he was.
Even so, sometimes, like today, it is just too much.

Without going into it in detail today,
I would also say that part of our challenge
as Christians in the 21^stcentury,
is that the context of Jesus and his society
is radically different than us and our society.

That change in context
creates change in the wisdom,
and when we do not seek to understand those changes
and hear his wisdom in OUR context –
or when we over-simplify that wisdom for our context –
then we are not doing any better
than the Christians who think that they are the good guys.

That is just a little tease for the weeks ahead this fall,
when the sermons will seek to examine
the wisdom of Jesus
and how it changes from his context to ours.
But today, I have a few words
about that critical parent inside.

It is important to note
that I am talking about the critical parent “inside”
and not the actual parent in our life,
whether living or dead.
You and I know that at some point
we cross a line
after which our parents are no longer the issue.
Rather, it is how we internalized our parents
and we have some control and responsibility with that.
I know it is no longer my mom talking to me
when I beat myself up inside
for failing at something,
or when I am getting a C
and unwilling to recognize that in this case, a C is success.
Whether it is a critical parent
or critical boss
or teacher, friend, or grandparent,
their voice fades over time
and it becomes our own.

It is then the voice of OUR perfectionism
or OUR negativity
or OUR overly-critical judgments.
And we know all too well,
that if that voice becomes the dominant, lecturing voice
inside of us, it will ooze and bleed outside
and get all over those we care about and love.

So what would Jesus have to say
to a slave-driving,
perfectionistic,
haranguing voice of criticism
whose hot breath is on our neck
and leaning over our lives?
I think what Jesus would say is, “Peace.”
“Peace be with you,” he might coo into our ear.

While I doubt that Jesus
would have cared about us Romans and Pharisees
as much as he cared about “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,”

I do believe he cared about us.
If he is the personification of the love of God,
then no matter how many C’s and D’s and F’s we have
on the scorecard of life,
then we are cared for and loved.
I think the theory goes,
that if we ever finally come to realize we ARE loved,
then we will start doing better on the scorecard
when we are able.

But I do not think that Jesus
can take away the presence of that niggling voice of negativity
once it has gotten inside us.
I do not even think WE can exorcise it.
We can, however, moderate it.
We can quiet it
and make it just one of the many voices
we hear every day inside our busy heads.
“Peace” is how we do it.

That is why Jesus kept saying that
to his disciples, especially
when they were anxious and afraid.
“Peace be with you,” he would say.

Truly, when the dominating and the ugly
are loud in our hearts
and taking up too much room in our minds,
we need to stop and breathe in peace,
and to stop and exhale peace,
because it is the only thing I know that truly does the job.

When my own voice saying “peace” is not powerful enough
to quiet the big voices or sometimes the army of voices,
I can recruit Jesus in my imagination
to come along and add some strength.
I can recruit the memory of affirming elders
and I can recruit the wisdom of teachers.

There are a whole bunch of people you and I have known
that want nothing more
than to be the source of peace in our lives.
We need to let them.
We need to activate them.
We need to give them voice in our hearts and minds.

Peace be with you.

Three Pentecost/Proper 8C: The Movement

July 7, 2019 by Cam Miller

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 12^thstep
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.

6 Easter 2019: A Note in a Bottle

May 26, 2019 by Cam Miller

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

Proper 25B 2018: A Story Full of Characters

October 28, 2018 by Cam Miller

The Gospel of Mark
is the shortest and most dramatic
of the four authorized gospels.
Mark is not only the first and earliest
of the four gospels,
he creates the pattern for the others.
But most importantly,
he is the best story-teller.

The tale I just read is not much to bark at,
just a homely little story
told in ten sentences,
but those ten sentences we just heard
are the hinge
upon which Mark’s whole Gospel swings.

Here is what I mean.
Mark takes ten chapters
to tell us about the last three years
of Jesus’ adult life.

Remember, Mark does not bother
to include all that mythology
surrounding Jesus’ birth.
Instead, Mark begins with a fully-grown
and mature Jesus
who is suddenly swept up
into an amazing spiritual awakening
at his baptism.
It starts with a bang –
all of a sudden, one day a spectacular
event changes his life
and the history of the world going forward.

Then Mark takes ten chapters
chocked full of stories that
leads up to Jesus’ fateful decision
to take his road show to Jerusalem.
Mark takes TEN chapters
to tell us about three years in the life
of the adult Jesus.

But then, he takes SIX chapters
to describe the last WEEK
of Jesus’ life.

So, ten chapters for three years
and six chapters for seven days.
The hinge, between these two episodes,
is the story of Blind Bartimaeus.

This ten-sentence story
is a microcosm
of everything in the ten chapters
leading up to it;
and it is a foretelling of everything
that will be told in the next six chapters

Here are the pertinent bones on this skeleton.

First, the story of Blind Bartimaeus
takes place on a stage dripping with drama.
Jericho was an incredibly opulent resort city.
It was, in Jesus’ day,
home to the summer palace for King Herod.
We have descriptions of several palaces
in Jericho, where even just some of the homes
had magnificent sunken gardens.

It is no accident that the hinge
upon which the big story swings
takes place in Jericho.

Jericho was the intersection of the world
in those parts. Literally.
No kidding, at Jericho two Roman roads
met like cross hairs in a sniper’s scope.
There were only a few roads in the world
that could host chariots
and heavy traffic, not like today
when we need GPS just to decipher
which varicose vein
will take us where we need to go.

One Jericho road
went straight to Jerusalem and Damascus,
while the other Jericho road
went all the way to Rome.
It was the point of decision –
for Jesus and his followers.
It was the very moment
that split past and present,
safety and danger,
control and vulnerability.

Turn back, and they could go home
to the people and places they knew best:
the smaller villages and towns
where Jesus’ rural images
and down-home zingers
aimed at the principalities and powers
were appreciated.
Turning back
would take them to the people among whom
he was popular and well loved;
it would be safer and wiser.

But if he turned the parade toward Jerusalem,
that urban citadel of Roman occupation
and religious authority,
it was unclear what might happen.

In that caldron of political and religious power,
Jesus would be viewed with suspicion,
and it would be dangerous
because trouble-makers and agitators
were rubbed out like bugs on a picnic table.

So, the stage could not have been
more dramatic or evocative:
opulent playground of military
and political power
where past and future intersect.
It was the very moment, we could say,
where Time stood still.

There are such moments
in human history,
those with a longer hang-time
in which momentous events seem to stand still
just a little longer,
and just a little more pulsating
than the moments surrounding them.
Though we do not have any real-time record of it,
Blind Bartimaeus and Jericho
was that kind of a moment.

Lurking in this thickened moment
are several of Mark’s central actors
who I want to shout out.
These are important characters
who actually tell the story
throughout the chapters of Mark’s gospel.

First, the Roman Empire is a character
and is always lurking around between the lines
in all of Mark’s stories.

The empire does not always have a line to deliver,
but it is always there
because it was a foreign occupying force
making every day miserable
for Jesus and every other peasant.

Another character of course, collectively,
are ‘the disciples:
Jesus’ students and close associates.
We know the twelve famous ones
who were important enough to be named,
but there was also a bigger group –
sometimes numbered at 70.
In Mark’s stories,
the disciples are almost always present
and, whether an individual or group,
they serve as a foil or the brunt of humor.
Mark caricatures the disciples
as bubble-heads
who should know better, yet never do.

The disciples, above everyone else,
should “get it” but they just don’t.

Then there is ‘the Crowd’
which is also a unique feature of Mark.
It is another collective character,
a legion of faceless, nameless, odorless people
who are dependable in their demeanor.

The crowdis especially graphic
in this Bartimaeus story.
Jesus and his disciples AND the large crowd
were leaving Jericho, it says.
The crowd, as in many of Mark’s stories,
serves here as a narrative witness to the events.
Butthe crowd,
whether in Jericho, Nazareth
or Jerusalem, also share common characteristics.
Usually they are hungry and thirsty,
if not for food thenfor a miracle or a magic trick.
And ‘the crowd’
won’t take “no” for an answer.
In this sense ‘the crowd is also a foil.

Jesus, according to Mark,
routinely tries to flee or avoid“the crowd”.

So, there are the bad guys: the Romans.
There are the clueless guys: Jesus’ disciples.
And there are the needy guys: the crowds.

Then, just to make it a little more complex,
there is the marginalized guy,
often a female or child,
poor or ill, and in this case, Blind Bartimaeus.

There is always a Bartimaeus in Mark’s Gospel
but usually unnamed:
a leper,
a bleeding woman,
a woman with a dying daughter,
a widow…
a quadriplegic carried on a mat,
a possessed lunatic exiled to a cemetery.
They are quite colorful,
and often these marginalized ones
are the key to the punch line.

So, all these characters appear
in the ten little sentences of this hinge story.
Each one has at least a cameo
in this scene so thick with drama
it is a bug in amber perfectly preserved for us.

Bad guys,
clueless ones,
the urgently needy,
and the outsider:
All on the same stage of history
all at the same time.

But of course, there is one more character
we haven’t named yet: Jesus.
Jesus represents God’s agenda.

So, we have all the characters
in their places
all on the same stage
where history and time are about to intersect.

Let’s see what happens.

The bad guys are indifferent.

The Romans merely observe the festivities
at Jericho, benignly, and only later,
in the days ahead,
when it perceives a threat,
does it act.

But when it does act, it acts swiftly
and with sufficient violence
that the irritant is immediately snuffed out.
Coercive authority, Mark may be telling us,
does not risk its hold on power.

Less in the background and holding the moment,
The crowd also watches.

The crowd, amoeba-like,
moves around the scene
and gives definition to its edges.
Dogs bark.
People shout.
Children kick.
Some jeer some cheer.

The crowd is content so long as it has
a good show.
It gets surely though,
when it does not have enough
to feed its attention.

The crowd in this story,
is following along being fed,
holding in its fingers the insiders,
the outsiders,
the bad guys, and
the hero.

The insiders, of course,
are the dunderheaded disciples
who play the fool.

How many times
have the disciples witnessed Jesus
respond to people at the margin?
How many times
has Jesus lectured them
about their indifference to suffering?
How many times
has Jesus reminded them
that the first will be last and
the last will be first?

Still, even after ten chapters
and moving into the crescendo of the narrative,
their knee-jerk reaction to Blind Bartimaeus
is to stifle him: “Shut up!” they bark.
All they can see is their own parade
and that Jesus is too busyon the stage of history
to stop for some miscreant beggar.

It is as if all of Jesus’ words and deeds
have been to no avail, and
have not changed those disciples one iota.
Mark might be saying
out of the side of his mouth, that insiders always
have a steep learning curve.

The outsider, of course, is Bartimaeus.
He will not shut up.
He may be marginalized but he is not powerless.
He does not whine.
He does not fall back under his coat
or cover his face
or whimper “Woe is me.”

He refuses to act like a victim
even though he has been victimized.
In fact, he takes a huge risk.
Here is one of those details
that can be easily missed
if we only read the story from 10,000 feet.

The only thing Bartimaeus owns
in the whole wide world,
is his coat.
That was standard for beggars
and just about any outsider in those days.

Your coat was your blanket,
the only thing you had to sit on in the day,
and the only cover against the cold at night.

It was priceless.
For those who had nothing else,
their coat could be the difference
between life and death.

Given that he was also blind,
for Bartimaeus to throw off his coat
and run forward,
where he may never find his coat again,
was an act of radical trust or bold desperation.
It was an all-or-nothing kind of play.

For Bartimaeus, Jericho that day,
was an earth-shattering moment of decision –
just as it was for Jesus
in relationship to his future.

Okay, everybody is in place
and we are frozen in that moment
when history and time
hang like LeBron James
for an extra second or two: Jesus stops.
On the stage of history,
at the intersection of Past and Future,
Jesus stops.

Jesus stops for one lousy beggar.

Like the more ancient story of God
hearing the cries of puny Hebrew slaves in Egypt,
Jesus hears;
through the noise of the crowd
and through the protest of the disciples,
Jesus hears.
And like God in that Exodus story of old,
once he hears,he stops.

Jesus turns his attention away from history,
away from the drama of the moment,
and asks, “What do you want me to do?”

That is the nub of the story.
There are all kinds of possible conclusions
we could draw from Jesus stopping,
and among them could be,
that Mark wants us to act on our stage in history –in our own stories –
the way Jesus acted in Mark’s story.

In other words, we need to be listening
as Jesus did,
and when we hear,
we need to be stopping
as Jesus did.

To act like Jesus
instead of the other characters in this story,
our focus needs to be lifted away
from the drama of our own parades,
and with keen ears,
listen to hear the people and events
for which our stopping, and our acting,
may be needed.

I do not know what that looks like
in your life
any more than you know
what that looks like in my life.
But both of us know, that in those rare moments
when we have listened and heard,
and when we have actually stopped
our own parade to respond to others in need,
that we suddenly found ourselves
on new avenues we never expected to travel.

I think, if we really want God in our lives,
that is how to make it happen.

23 Pentecost: Eschatology or the Theology of Framing

12 Pentecost C, 2019: Peace be with you

Three Pentecost/Proper 8C: The Movement

6 Easter 2019: A Note in a Bottle

Proper 25B 2018: A Story Full of Characters

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