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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.

 

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

 

 

 

 

Proper 25B 2018: A Story Full of Characters

by

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.

Proper 22B, 2018: It’s not about the legality of divorce, rather, the nature of marriage

by

Those readings from Job and Maya Angelou
are juicy and wonderful:

“We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.”

Man, just that sentence alone, is enough
to stutter over for a goodly amount of time.

Then from job,
we could spend this time
debunking the myth of Satan
the way I de-mythologized the idea of Hell last week.
But that would be boring
compared to Maya Angelou,
even if the story of Job is fascinating.

What we are stuck with, however,
is Jesus’ words on divorce
which cannot be left
unexplained and unchallenged.

Last week Jesus told folks
to pluck out their eyes
and cut off their hands and feet,
but I felt no compunction
to tell you that was bad advice.
I was pretty sure you wouldn’t go home and do it.

This week, however,
because divorce is common among us,
and because The Episcopal Church
clearly contradicts Jesus’ strict admonition
against divorce, I feel the need to address it.

Now, when I do this –
cover territory we’ve traveled down before –
I feel like I am repeating myself and
doddering on senility.
But that is not what’s happening.

It is because some things
cannot be allowed to go unsaid –
they are too raw or too much present
in and among us.
Like I said, there was little danger
that anyone was going home
to pluck out their eye last week,
but today’s excerpt from Mark on divorce
can set our teeth on edge
and also leave us with a very wrong idea
about Jesus and divorce.

In addition to all of that,
it is useful to consider today’s topic
in the context of how we treat Scripture differently
than fundamentalist Christians do,
and how we can arrive at a very different
conclusion about divorce,
than Roman Catholics do.

We can engage in coherent dialogue
with Fundamentalist Christians
about how to live in peace and wellness
as we share the earth together,
but we cannot have a coherent dialogue
with Fundamentalists about Scripture.
The reason is, we would be having an
apples to oranges conversation.

Today’s reading from Mark
is a portal through which to see
this very difficult problem
that faces many of us on a very personal level
as we find ourselves in uncomfortable
and even painful circumstances
with family members, friends and co-workers
who are Fundamentalist or Biblical Literalist’s.

The first huge divide between us
and those who believe
the Bible is the literalword of God –
given or even written directly by God –
is that they believe whatever is said in the Bible
is absolute, just as God is absolute.

Secondly, they believe the Bible
is the sole revelation of the mind of God –
that what is written in the Bible
is the only way we have to know for certain
God’s intention and hope for us.

But for The Episcopal Church
and progressive Christians,
the Bible is only onesource of revelation –
and the Bible is notabsolute.

Because of what Fundamentalists and Literalists
believe about the Bible,
their world is a closed system:
it is as if they live in a stone house
with each stone a dictate of the Bible,
held together by the mortar of authority
and fellowship with their Christian community –
emphasis on theirChristian community.

Take out even one stone,
such as Jesus’ words on divorce,
and the whole house will eventually fall down.

The Fundamentalist way of thinking about the Bible
it is truly an all-or-nothingproposition.

So, any discussion about theology
between our two perspectives on the Bible
is a comparison of apples with oranges –
in other words, we are not
even talking about the same fruit.

In talking with people who believe
that every word of the Bible is literally fact,
we imagine we are talking about the same thing –
the same kind of fruit –
but in fact, we are talking about
wholly different things
even though we are both talking about the Bible.

How our tradition understands the Bible
as distinct from Fundamentalism,
is clearly seen in how we understand
Jesus’ teaching on divorce.

First of all,
when we hear the words of Jesus
we must begin by listening to them in the context
of his century and his generation,
rather than begin by hearing them in our context.

Here is how we do that today.
“Some Pharisees came to test Jesus,” which means it was a hostile question.
“They asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’”

The question being asked of Jesus
that you and I do not hear,
because we are Christians
living in the 21stcentury, is this:
“Hey Jesus, do you agree with Rabbi Hillel
or are you on the side of Rabbi Shammai?”

I’ve talked about Hillel and Shammai before
because they were the elephant in the room
whenever Jesus was teaching.
They were the greatest thinkers of their day –
the leading authorities on how to interpret Torah.

Shammai was the conservative,
and what we might call today a Torah Literalist.
Hillel was the liberal,
who believed that
interpretationof Torah
was necessary and not otherwise absolute.

Shammai taught that Chapter 24, verse 1
in the Book of Deuteronomy
allowed a man to divorce his wife.
Hillel also taught that Chapter 24, verse 1
allowed a man to divorce his wife.

But they disagreed
upon the grounds and requirements
of divorce.

Shammai taught that adultery
was the only grounds for divorce,
while Hillel said that any reason was legitimate,
but that the man could only divorce his wife
if done in the proper and humane way.
Both taught that only the husband
could sue for divorce.

So that is the context
in which Jesus is asked this question.

We need to recognize that the legality of divorce
is not in dispute –
only the groundsfor divorce.
Jesus does not disagree with the legality of divorce;
he makes a theological comment
about the nature of marriage.

And by the way,
we should also understand that polygamy
was still legally practiced in Jesus’ day.
Having more than one wife
was not illegal,
irreligious,
or adulterous,
and Jesus never makes a case against polygamy.

What Jesus says,
is that Deuteronomy 24, verse 1
was given to us because God understood
our hardness of heart.
In other words, God ‘gets’ human beings.

God understood that we are human
and that there is no perfection
among human beings,
and that human beings may begin a venture
with the greatest of intention
but there is no guarantee we will finish it.
God, in Deuteronomy 24, Jesus says,
was letting us off the hook –
giving us an out and a backdoor, so to speak.

Now I can hear the perfectionist in me,
and those who are terribly scrupulous
and very hard on ourselves
about the slightest failure,
feeling uncomfortable that such huge backdoor
only leads to complacency.

But allow me to remind us
about the fundamental meaning
of one of the 10 Commandments
most associated with this issue.
“Thou shall not take the name of your Lord God in vain.”

We have been wrongly taught
to trivialize this commandment to mean
we are not supposed to saydamn
and other unsociable swear words.
That is not what this commandment was about.

What this commandment tells us,
is that we should never swear an oath
in the name of God.

For us, in our 21stcentury context,
that means we should use the Civil Oath
in the court of law, for example.
Why?
Because we are human.
Any oath we take,
no matter how earnest we are in our intent,
is never a sure bet.

We may mean what we promise
but not be able to keep our promise.
There are always forces beyond our control
that we cannot foresee.
And besides that, we are human
and we have frailties
and sometimes…we just don’t keep
the promises we make.

So, according to this commandment,
we are not to trivialize God-the-absolute,
by taking an oath in God’s name
that is anything but absolute.
In other words,
do not promise what you cannot guarantee.
Those ancients were very wise.

We need to be disabused
of the idea that when someone gets divorced
they have broken a promise to God.

In the Episcopal wedding ceremony,
we ask God to blessour promise to one another,
but we do not promise God
that we will never break our marriage vows.

So you see how interesting, complex,
and rich this seemingly absolute teaching
actually is?

But, having said all of that,
Jesus isn’t content to let us off the hook.
He always leaves us with some unique wisdom
on the subject,
elbowing his way to a position in between
Hillel and Shammai.

God understood you, Jesus says,
and gave you Deuteronomy 24, verse 1,
but remember Genesis?
God also created us male and female, one flesh.

Jesus insists that any conversation about divorce
include a reminder of the purpose of marriage:
which is to enjoin us
in a union that makes us one and interdependent.
And though the verbiage of Genesis
is male and female,
we have now said that this is also true
for men who marry men
and women who marry women.
Just another example that, for us,
the Bible on its own is not absolute.

What Jesus is pointing out
actually seems like an obvious truth:
marriage makes us one flesh
and even though we may get divorced
it literally rips us apart.

We know this to be true:
Whether we have been divorced
or had a deep and intimate bond broken
outside of marriage,
we know that divorce is not a separation
but an amputation.

Jesus is simply telling the truth.
The dissolution of a relationship
that follows the union of two people
in body, mind and spirit,
is an amputation.
It is painful and grievous
even when done for all the right reasons;
and even when the best possible healing takes place,
that missing limb will be with us in the next relationship
like an amputee’s phantom arm.

That is just the nature of things, Jesus reminds us.

It is his shorthand way of saying
we bring all of who we are
into this most intimate relationship,
so those with whom we have been intimate
will travel with us into the next relationship
whether we want them there to or not.

And as an aside,
this is also true of other profoundly intimate relationships,
like family – all of whom
migrate with us into our marriages.
Even if we were disowned by our parents,
and maybe especially if we had such a fracture,
they are a phantom limb in our marriage
still throbbing and sending signals
to our nerve endings.

So you see,
Jesus does not question the legality of divorce –
that divorce is legal is presumed
throughout the whole conversation.
But neither does he deny
the deep and pervasive truth of marriage,
and its physical and intimate union:
It makes us one flesh
and stays with us wherever we go
and with whomever we are with.

And there is one more thing
in these words of Jesus.
People were bringing little children to him
in order that he might touch them;
and the disciples spoke sternly to them.
But Jesus went ballistic and said:
“Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God
like a little child will never enter it.”

On the surface of it,
the debate about divorce
and the little kid-thing
would seem to be totally disconnected.
But they are not.

As I pointed out recently,
in another such Gospel story,
in the ancient world children, like women,
had no rights.
They were on the bottom rungs
of a rigid hierarchy of social caste.
Children had nothing to give
and therefore they had little worth.
They were vulnerable and needy
and merely a necessary hassle.
Children were like women,
who men could dismiss and replace.
But Jesus says, “No.”

Jesus tells the powerful and the insiders,
all of whom were men,
that when we stand on the margin
with women and children
and all others who are marginalized,
that then we will become open
to the Kingdom of God in our midst.

That translates to us this way:
When we recognize our power,
and then willingly enter into our powerlessness,
and stand with others in their powerlessness –
it will open us to God
in ways we have never known.
It is our presumption of power and control,
and our lust for perfection,
that keeps us from knowing God’s presence
even though it is always present
within and among us.

Jesus’ teaching on divorce
is really about the nature of marriage.
And his teaching on marriage
is really about sharing power and powerlessness.

21 B, 2018: An Ugly Protocol

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Iron prosthesis 1560-1600

I had a recent facetime call
with a friend who is in seminary.
She was exhilarated by the intellectual stimulation
of learning about the Hebrew Scripture
as well as New Testament literature,
discovering all kinds of things she never knew before.

Biblical scholarship and archeology
is alive and thriving these days,
offering us new and renewed perspectives.

She did not seem troubled
by the startling implications her new knowledge has
for doctrines and long-held beliefs.
But it did make her nervous to realize
she would eventually be a preacher
who would be called upon to share things
that might be troubling
to members of her future congregations.

I told her not to worry too much about that, I don’t.

It is possible I have become jaded
as a result of preaching too long.

You see, when I re-read Jesus
as he appears in today’s Gospel,
and think about all the biblical commentaries
and sermons over the years
that bend themselves into complicated yoga
positions in order to make Jesus
sound better,
I feel like a parent
peering into the kid’s room in total chaos
and thinking, “enough of this!”

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off;
if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off;
if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out.
Better to maim yourself than go to Hell.”
But kids, don’t try this at home.

Couple Jesus’ very bad therapy protocol
with the story from the Book of Numbers,
and it is a real horror show.
We have a scene in which thousands of people
are weeping with hunger
and in response to their pitiful vulnerability
and serious discomfort,
God gets “very angry.”
Not only is God without compassion here,
Moses is too!
He wants to know why he has been
saddled with these woeful people –
if I am supposed to change the diapers of these
whimpering, needy people,
just kill me right here, and right now, he says.
Nice.

Jesus’ diatribe from Mark,
and the grumpy Oz behind the curtain in Numbers,
are like an abstract painting we keep turning
to figure out which way is up and which way is down.
I want to use this moment to pick on “Hell.”
Hell is an idea used by bad religion
as a fear-mongering cudgel.
If Hell is anything, it is poetry
not a piece of supernatural real estate.

The word Hell comes from the word, Gehenna,
which actually was a piece of real estate.
Gehenna was the site of ancient Canaanite sacrifice –
ritual human sacrifice.
Children were sacrificed at Gehenna.
Not to be too gruesome about it,
they were cut open and bled like a lamb
in order to access the Canaanite gods.

Israelites were horrified by such a brutal custom
and as they became the dominant culture in Canaan,
human sacrifice was outlawed.

Remember the story in Genesis,
of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac
and then in the nick of time,
replacing Isaac with a sheep?
That was an anti-child sacrifice story.
It was told to explain why Israelites
did not sacrifice their children
the way some of their neighbors did.

Take a leap forward 700-1000 years,
and we have essentially the same story
told about Jesus being sacrificed for our sins –
this time God did not intervene
and Jesus replaced the sheep
only to became the lamb that saved us from Hell.

The idea of a ritual sacrifice to God or the gods
is not very compelling in the 21st century,
but it was an idea powerful enough to
change the world in the 1st century.
Mixed up in the midst of that idea about
human sacrifice, is also the idea about Hell.

Let’s go back to those ancient Israelites for a moment,
the ones who scorned the idea of child sacrifice
and rejected human sacrifice altogether.
They created a garbage dump at Gehenna.
They created a garbage dump
on the very spot where Canaanites
practiced child sacrifice.
That is a pretty dramatic denunciation
of the Canaanite practice.

In Jesus’ time,
Gehenna was still a garbage dump,
but at that point it was the municipal dump
for the city of Jericho.

So imagine if you can,
the image of an arid climate
in which dirt is baked by the sun
to a clay-fired hardness.
With no modern earth-movers,
imagine what that municipal dump looked like,
and maybe more disgusting,
what it smelled like.

In the ancient world,
that was the place where dead bodies
were abandoned by families too poor
or indigent to claim a space in a burial cave.
Human and animal carcasses
rotted and were burned with other refuse there.
Gehenna was an endlessly smoking pile of trash
baking in the sun
where charred and worm-eaten human remains
fueled a fire that was never quenched.

While Dante is still the primary source of images
used for the threat of Hell,
they are images rooted in actual real estate,
in a smoking pit of nastiness
outside of Jericho.
It is a bitter irony in today’s international politics
to realize the very idea of Hell,
of a place of eternal judgment,
actually comes from Persia, modern day Iran.
It was an idea that exiled Hebrews
brought back with them from Persia,
and to which images of Gehenna came to be applied.

Hell as a piece of real estate
somewhere in the supernatural,
where a vindictive and parsimonious God
condemns the misbehaving for all eternity,
really ought to be updated
if we are going to continue to wield it.
Images of Hell based on an ancient trash heap
should become those of Buchenwald, Auschwitz,
Cambodia, Rwanda, and Sudan.
We have too many graphic and terrifying images
from within our own generations
to remain content with Gehenna.

Personally though, I reject the idea of Hell.
It seems absurd to me
and I simply cannot make sense of it.
Pew Research indicates a majority of Americans
still believe in Hell, even as a majority also,
conveniently, believes they will not end up there.

Mostly I cannot get my head around a god
who balances the scales of justice
in ways we would insist on them being balanced.
A god sadistic and vindictive enough
to torture us for our moral failures,
including the mentally deranged
who were victims of their own physiology.
That is a god who stands in painful contrast
to the ancient prophetic notion
of the God of Israel who loves mercy more than justice.

But on top of that, we live in the 21stcentury
when the idea that human beings occupy
the center of God’s attention
seems as odd and quaint as a flat Earth.
Knowing what we know about the Cosmos,
and knowing how much we do not know
about the Cosmos,
the image of God as a moralistic accountant
keeping score on our lives with a golden abacus,
seems, well, it seems utterly implausible.

But who knows? I could be wrong
and that is exactly how God manages things.
Still, I doubt it.

I could, and have in the past,
found ways to make these stories
from Numbers and Mark
rest easier with our 21stcentury domesticated religion,
but these days I find myself disinterested
in trying to perform such reconciliations.
The common theme between these two stories
is not a bad one,
even if surrounded by troubling imagery and ideas.
Clearly, the punchline that comes from
Eldad and Medad,
as well as the stranger casting out demons
in the name of Jesus,
is that we need not be from
the same tribe
or the same party
or the same group
in order to all be about the same mission.
Our socio-economic status,
our ethnicity, gender, and race,
all are neither here nor there
when it comes to serving as agents of God’s love.

Rather, we are who we are
and we need not attempt to be someone else
so long as we do not harden the membrane
of our community
to only welcome and include people like us.

I dare say there are agents of God’s love
in every army of every nation on the planet;
agents of God’s love
in every religion,
in every political party,
in every tribe;
there are agents of God’s love
living among the billionaire class
and among those poor as dirt;
agents of God’s love
living every life-style imaginable,
and those life-styles we can’t imagine.
They may not look like us,
or talk like we do,
or have the same ideology or theology,
but if they are doing the work of God’s love,
we are with them
and they are with us.

It would be a very simple truth to agree on
if only we were better at recognizing one another.

 

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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