The Story of Common Moments

Polar Opposites

2012-01-21T20:26:00.000-08:00

Do you have the same trouble with much Christian teaching and preaching as I do: the faith frequently being presented as something that is transparently clear and subject to no debate when you know perfectly well that nothing is quite so clear and that everything worth anything is worth at least a little wrestling and debate? Do you? Just asking.

As the psychologist Carl Jung, for one, and the philosopher Hegel, for another, argued, reality is not one-dimensional, but a set of contradictions or polarities that can be integrated or united, but which are still here to stay because neither pole can be eliminated and neither can be collapsed forever into its opposite. Life is made up of such polarities—good and evil, nature and freedom, the same and the other, matter and spirit, light and dark.

What leads me to start out this way is that the lessons ingeniously present us with a polarity today, one that can better be described in pictures than in labels—indeed, one that in some sense requires the medium of story simply to be halfway understood. On the one hand we have the character of Jonah, God’s unwilling little prophet, who is the picture of running away from God with all deliberate speed. On the other hand are the figures of the first pairs of disciples that Jesus called, all of whom, as pictured in Mark and captured in the words of an old hymn, “without a word rose up and followed” their new Master. How’s that for a polarity? “Ah!” some will say. “That’s no polarity. That’s just a pair of stories that illustrate what not to do and what to do in relation to God. Simon and Andrew, James and John model the proper, faithful response to Jesus, whereas Jonah totally illustrates exactly what not to do when God calls.” Well, you’ve got me there—so you may think. But I want to look behind the stories, and perhaps in front of them, and see beyond easy moralizing about “good” and “bad” responses that Jonah and the disciples represent and speak to a polarity that exists now and has always existed in human beings. It could be called by a variety of names, but for now I’ll call that polarity “resisting God” and “accepting God.”

Let’s start with Jonah. Some of you have probably not heard of Jonah, or, if you have, you got wind of the news that he was supposed to have been swallowed by a whale—which, since it isn’t even in the story itself is worse than not having heard of him at all. The little book of Jonah, only several pages long, is really quite unique among its neighbors in the Bible. It is in fact a novella, or a short story, if you will. The story starts out with the word of the Lord coming to Jonah telling him to go to Nineveh, a great gentile metropolis, and preach to the inhabitants that they should repent of their wickedness. Jonah immediately packs his bags and flees expressly to get away from the presence of the Lord. He finds a ship bound for Tarshish, pays his fare, goes aboard.

A terrible storm comes up. The sailors first throw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. The captain goes down into the hold and finds Jonah fast asleep. The captain tells him to get up and pray to his god, as everyone else is doing, so that the ship won’t perish. Meanwhile, the sailors cast lots to see whose fault it is that the storm has come up. Sure enough, the lot falls to Jonah. They want to know what on earth he has done, what is his occupation, where he comes from, what his country is, what people he belongs to. Jonah tells all, including that he is running from God. The sailors, instead of jumping him, ask him rather politely what he thinks ought to be done with him and Jonah rather suicidally says, “Well, just throw me overboard. That ought to calm the sea.” Interestingly the sailors defer, row as hard as they can to reach land, and only when they have no success do they themselves pray not to be guilty of innocent blood, and with that finally toss Jonah overboard. Sure enough, this calms the sea. The sailors, who must have been pretty pious, really are scared then, and offer a sacrifice and make vows to Jonah’s God—a god, by the way, whom none of them knows.

But Jonah does not get off quite so easily as he intended. Rather, the story goes, he is swallowed by a fish, in whose belly he takes residence for a total of three days and three nights. Now if this reminds you somewhat of Pinnochio, you’re on the right track, because remember that this work is a novella, and like all good stories it contains not a little humor. And part of the humor of this story (at least I find it funny) is that inside the belly of the fish, Jonah composes a psalm. The narrator-creator of the story probably is not so amused as I am—and the psalm itself is pretty good poetry—but surely that same author must have chuckled when he composed my favorite part, which is that immediately after Jonah recites his psalm the fish vomits.

Thus barfèd out upon the land, Jonah hears the word of the Lord a second time telling him exactly what it had said the first time: “Get up, go to Nineveh, and proclaim the message that I tell you to.” So he does. And he is successful beyond his wildest fears. The cussed Ninevites, heathen Gentiles all, hear, respond, repent, and proclaim a fast, don sackcloth and even dress the animals in sackcloth. And God, seeing all that, changes the divine mind and holds off thrashing Nineveh. That makes Jonah livid. He tells God exactly what he thinks and flatly states that he knew better than to come to Nineveh precisely because God was gracious and merciful and would do something really stupid like relent from punishing the heathen. So just let him, Jonah, die. Because after all, if believing in God didn’t get you anywhere, and if your status as one of the chosen did not in fact make you any better off, why live in the first place? Sulky Jonah goes out of the city, sets up a booth, and waits to see what will happen. Up grows a gourd vine that shades him. Jonah likes that. Along comes a worm that bites the gourd vine in half. Jonah doesn’t like that. Up comes a desert storm. Jonah has a pity party. “Let me die.” God asks him if he is right to be so angry and Jonah says, “You’re mighty right I’m angry. Angry enough to die.”

And this merciful, gracious, inclusive God replies, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand form their left, and also many animals?”

End of story.

What is the point? In a nutshell, it is that God is not a tribal deity who is the exclusive property of Israel, but is rather the God of all the earth, of nature, and of every nation. The irony is that serving such a God seems pointless when the wicked get off scot-free, so why not just wish for death? It is exactly that sort of desperation that the narrator addresses, calling out the self-absorption and sourness of people who want to cut God down to size so they can have God all to themselves. And the patent hope of the storyteller is to lure the hearer into changing heart, mind, and theology, ironically accepting without rancor the greatness of God’s compassion.

You will no doubt note that there is something very familiar about Jonah and the people he represents. We do not like having our gods take pity on our enemies, as a general rule. We much prefer a portable, tribal deity that our team can pray to and who will bring us a win. Not only do we prefer that, we spin various stories asserting that that is exactly what kind of god we have, and invest considerable energy in trying to get others to sign on to the team that clearly owns this god, for after all the team is made in the image of this god so they look and act exactly as he and vice versa, right?

We may protest that we believe no such thing. We are not even sure whether there is a god, let alone one that is a comic book caricature. But we probably will admit that such a god gets great press in the blogs du jour, either being admired or condemned. And that is enough to light a fire under us making us run as fast as we can to get away from such a demon. And there we have it. Whether we are running away from a compassionate God simply because we cannot stand the depth and breadth of divine compassion, or running from the god who we sense is the silly invention of small minds, there it is in plain view: the “God” from whom we want at all costs to distance ourselves. Say it isn’t so!

But then there is the other story. If we only had these few verses in Mark (1:14-20) and knew nothing else about these disciples, we might imagine that they were plastic figures who lacked brains or soul or common sense or something, which lack would account for their rising up and following Jesus without the slightest hesitation. But we do know more about them than that. We know that confusion, pain, sorrow, fear, and—if a mix of story and legend are to be believed—suffering and martyrdom awaited nearly every one of them and the others eventually called.

But Mark presents the calling of the first four disciples with the spotlight clearly on Jesus’ call and their response. We know nothing about them beyond the fact that they were fisherfolk, that they were brothers, that two of them were with their father, and that they were on the job. Whether it was raining or sunny, whether they loved their work or loathed it, whether they had succeeded or failed at other things, whether or not they had ever seen or heard tell of Jesus: none of this do we know because in the end it is unimportant. The Reign of God has come and the one who reigns is Jesus. His calling, “Follow me,” and their immediate response is the reign of God. The very response exemplifies what that reign is all about. They do not have a job description of changing the world by preaching, teaching, healing, or anything else, though before it was over with they would do all those things. They simply get up and follow. Life unfolds from there.

Chances are you know what that is like, because if you have lived very long, you have done it. You have given your heart to another because you could do nothing else. You have said yes to someone or to some task or to some love that called you, and you did it without calculating the pros and cons, without over-analyzing the costs and benefits. You gave yourself away because there was in the moment nothing else to do. And I would add—and argue—that you did it—we do it—because our desire to say yes to the Promise of Meaning is the other one of those two poles running right through our existence and experience.

Ask us in the abstract if we would, like Simon, Andrew, James, or John, rise up and follow Jesus, no questions asked. We would likely say no—not a chance, in all honesty. But the issue here is not whether we respond instantaneously or take some time to think it over. The issue is: will we respond to the Presence of God here and now? Will we follow the one whose life and death embodies that Presence? Will we follow him outside the margins of acceptable society? Are we going to follow him beyond the confines of common sense and provability into the world of mystery and wonder? Are we going to follow him in breaking down the barriers that separate human beings? Will we follow his shadow, even when we do not yet know him, to the point that we will come to call him our Way, our Truth, our Life, our Bread, our Center?

Some days we are Jonah, irritated with the very notion of God, impervious to any Word from God. Other days we are at the opposite pole, ready to give our lives to God. The polarity will never completely go away, because polarities never do. No use pretending. But there is good reason to hope that our experience of following Jesus will be so life-changing, so positive, so unbelievably good, that we will want more and more to follow in his steps, even when we feel the impulse to shut our ears to a new challenge to go to some new place simply because he bids us go and leads us there.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

Choosing

2012-01-07T20:42:00.000-08:00

Every year it seems a bit strange to leave Jesus in the crib one week and come back the next and have him be a full grown man going on his own to be baptized by John in the Jordan. Except for one story about the adolescent Jesus in Luke’s gospel, we have only legends and silence between his infancy and his ministry. Sometimes I think it is a kindness that we know nothing for sure about Jesus’ childhood and youth, because I suspect he would be presented as such a sterling example of goodness that we would not believe him to be a real human being. Or, if a tale or two had sneaked into the tradition about some mischief he got into, it would totally confound all those who have an idealized image of Jesus as thoroughly special. Better that we are left wondering, or at least spared the disappointment of having Jesus spoiled for us.

To Mark, writing his gospel before many questions about Jesus had gelled into full-scale controversies about his nature and identity, none of these matters seems to have been important, if they occurred to him at all. He has no birth narratives with shepherds or angels or wise men. For him, Joseph gets no mention, not even a biographical footnote. And Mary, far from being the Blessed Mother that she becomes in the three later gospels, is thoroughly dumbfounded by Jesus’ behavior and joins his other siblings in seeking to get him to leave off his preaching and come home, fearing perhaps for his safety, probably embarrassed or perhaps anxious from the rumors that Jesus was out of his mind (Mark 3:19b-17; 31-34; 6:3-5). Mark is definitely interested in showing us that Jesus is the Son of God, but that means something quite different to him than it generally means today, and even something different from what it would mean a decade or two after he wrote his gospel. The story of how Jesus was baptized and what happened to him then was of great importance to Mark, because for him the baptism was clearly the beginning of Jesus’ special status. The baptism was public enough, one supposes. But, unlike the account in Matthew’s gospel, all that happened—heavens opening, dove descending, voice speaking—were for Jesus’ eyes and ears only, not for the crowds. These elements of apocalyptic symbolism were enough to confirm Jesus’ sense of his own identity, from which he never wavers in Mark’s gospel, not even in his dereliction on the cross. From the moment of his coming out of the water, Jesus was a Holy Spirit-filled person. And that Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness on what you and I might call a search to unpack the meaning of it all.

But let’s not get ahead of our story! We were just noting that all of this happens, as it were, out of the blue—no tidy series of steps carefully bringing Jesus to the Jordan and to baptism, so far as we know. Yet we do know more than that. We know that Jesus, like any young Palestinian Jew of his time, had several options. One was, of course, to be totally submissive to the tradition of his time and society, dutifully bowing to received wisdom, essentially questioning nothing. (That is always a human option.) We know that, smart as he turned out to be as theologian and thinker, he could certainly have identified with the Pharisees, for example, the group most interested in applying the Torah, the Jewish Law, to life with unrelenting rigor. He had the talent to be a scribe, and no doubt could have made a name for himself (if for no one else) by becoming a religious lawyer. Moreover, since he was to give clear evidence of interest in communal life, it is entirely possible that he toyed with the idea of joining the Essenes, a religious community with a monastery not too far from the place where John likely did his baptizing. With the Essenes he would have had the chance to parse and ponder what we now know as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which they produced. Or with his passion for justice and compassion for the downtrodden, Jesus might well have become a Zealot, one of that band that wanted to foment rebellion against the Romans. Off to the hills he might have gone to join the political revolutionaries.

But none of these roads did he follow. Instead, he walked the dusty trail from Galilee down the river valley towards Jericho. He had either heard of John the Baptizer or he discovered him along the journey. Was Jesus searching for something? We can only imagine, we cannot know. But what we do know is what he found and what he identified with. He found someone out of the heart of the old prophetic tradition, straight off the pages of the Prophet Isaiah: “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, makes his paths straight.’” We know that he heard and identified with a call to repentance. And the story is that this John kept telling people that one was coming who was more powerful than he, and who by comparison was infinitely more worthy, one who would baptize multitudes with something way beyond the power of ordinary water—the very Spirit of God. One wonders. Did Jesus hear that statement, standing among the crowds? Did John’s words fall on him like a burden, pierce him to the quick, excite him, inspire him, galvanize his young vision for ushering in the Reign of God on earth? Was he already primed to believe he had a vocation? Did he, searching for a moment of clarity, hear what John was saying and immediately know that it was he who would be the one to baptize with Holy Spirit?

The Church has long had a habit of making up stories about Jesus, stories that fill in the gaps between the pages of scripture. And Christians have generally had the habit of believing those stories. One of the strongest and most long-lasting of those stories is that Jesus never had a moment’s doubt about anything. If you are one who believes that story, you probably have little interest in even imagining that he ever had to search for a thing, and certainly not a vocation, an identity. But there is some chance, perhaps even a large chance, that you are one who for whatever reason finds it perfectly plausible that Jesus was so uniquely powerful that existing scripts—Pharisee, scribe, conventional rabbi, Essene, Zealot—did not suit him or interest him. Perhaps you are willing to entertain the notion that he was a mold-breaker, or that God it was who broke the mold out of which Jesus was formed so that there was not nor could there ever be another quite like him. In that case, maybe you find yourself imagining that it was a restlessness that led him to leave his Nazareth home and make his way miles down the country to join a movement that dared to believe in things like radical forgiveness, utter dedication to the Reign of God, and the availability of healing and feeding for all comers. Perhaps something is going on in your own life, a dissatisfaction with things as they are, maybe even an anger at the conventions that people live by, which they use to pass as moral and upright. Maybe something is stirring in you that finds your own Nazareth far too confining, something that has made you strike out to make a difference in the world, maybe even by finding and living in the Commonwealth of God. Perhaps you see in Jesus a kindred spirit, a mentor too authentic to settle for half-truths and easy answers, and maybe you want to lurk in the shadows long enough to see if he might be the One to follow.

If that sounds like you, then the way to the Jordan is this way—right straight to the water of baptism. If you have never been baptized maybe you want to consider it. If you have been baptized, maybe you want to reconnect with your baptism. If you have been living your life faithfully, perhaps you want simply to say Yes again. In any of those cases, it is possible—not guaranteed, but possible—that you will be plunged into a totally new kind of life, one in which you will feel, even as the water is running out of your ears, the heavens split open, and an indescribable peace settling upon you, dovelike, as your Yes is answered by a Yes: “You are my child, my beloved.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

Christmas Present

2011-12-26T10:22:00.000-08:00

Luke 2:1-20

I often wonder when we come to Christmas what you out in the pews are thinking.

The cat leapt out of the bag last Sunday and suddenly the whole congregation knew that I was marking forty years that I have been a priest. That means for forty years I have been engaged each Christmas in examining the story, listening to it, pondering it, sometimes fretting over it, all with a need to open it up afresh and find in it the thing that will make the whole festival somehow come alive, move, inspire, speak to—to whom? To you, but equally to me. It is not unlike the annual drama of Christmas morning. People go digging into presents, tearing through wrappings and popping off ribbons, pulling out things that sometimes call for gasps—oohs, ahs, “Darling, you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have”—a tumultuous party of surprises and delights, if, of course, you’re lucky enough to be able to have all that. Well, that is the kind of experience, though in a spiritual idiom, that I itch for Christmas to be on this holy candlelit night. For that to happen, somebody, though not necessarily I, must arrange a moment of connection. That in turn forces the question of who needs and wants to connect, with what or whom, and how.

Over the decades I have gathered a little information on what you are thinking, though it seems awfully sketchy to me. It appears, for instance, that many folks assume that the tale of Jesus’ birth is a piece of biography, much like any birth narrative. And, since popular imagination stitches together the very distinct and in some ways incompatible accounts of the two gospels with birth stories, the popular mind imagines that shepherds, wise men, angels, Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus were all right there somewhat on top of each other. Add “manger” and soon you have a full-blown barnyard, with oxen, asses, camels, lowing cattle, even chickens and the occasional duck or goose. It is all quite a lot of fun; and preachers, for example, don’t get very far by trying to deconstruct the entire scene. “That is just the way it all happened,” the average worshiper might say.

Still, people wander into church on Christmas, looking for only God knows what, and I wonder about them—about you, if you are one of that number. Is it the power of the old carols to awaken dormant memories of your youth? Is it the smell of greens and the flicker of candles that can transport you to a space where Mystery does not have to elbow its way through mindless crowds in order to draw you in, warm your heart and stir your soul? Do such as you give a dip of figgy pudding about somebody’s doctrine of the Virgin Birth or the meaning of the word “Savior”? Or do you deep down wish someone would explain those things to you because you sense that they might actually have to do with the Truth you need to live your life by?

The default position of the Church has long been that it is up to us insiders, and especially the learned, professional caste, to put on the show and tell the story, and let the audience get what it will. And that might not be too bad an idea. But suppose we want to push the boundaries a bit. Suppose we might wish to pause the tape and rerun a slice of the dialogue, and run it again to get a closer, sharper view of the characters in the story. Is it possible that there actually might be a layer or two of meaning that we never have considered? And might one or more of those layers of meaning actually help us, change us, alter us so that we get to, say, New Year’s Day and find that our whole approach to life has shifted ever so slightly, or even more than slightly?

In some ways the most intriguing feature of Luke’s story is the presence of shepherds. It really is not strange, considering that Luke’s setting is Bethlehem, the City of David, who himself was out keeping the sheep when the prophet and king-maker Samuel came, obeying the Word of God, looking for a potential king among Jesse’s sons. The shepherd, who happened to be the youngest, was exactly the one whom Samuel was looking for, as it turned out. And now, centuries later, perhaps in those very fields, other shepherds were minding their business when suddenly an angel appears with a peculiar announcement. The story is different, but the parallels are obvious enough to evoke a connection between an ancient anointing and this birth of one who has sprung from Jesse’s root, a new Davidic king. But something else is in play, too. Shepherds in first century Jewish society were among the least powerful and respected people. That fits very nicely into the gospel that Luke is proclaiming, with its continual emphasis on the marginal, the misfits, the underestimated, even the despised. The words of the Magnificat, the pregnant Mary’s song, are still ringing in the ears of the reader: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the humble and meek.” The shepherds are a case in point.

They become the very first ones in Luke’s gospel narrative to go looking for Jesus. Imagine. In the middle of the night shift, nothing much going on, suddenly they are in the middle of an other-worldly episode, seeing and hearing an alien being, having an eerie experience which can only be described as “glory” shining round about them, filling them with fear. And after a multitude of angels have appeared and then disappeared, the shepherds say to one another, “Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing.” And they go in search of the child wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger.

It is not only the shepherds who are key to this story; it is the search they undertake in the middle of the night. It will not do simply to have a birth unremarkable and unremarked. The Messiah does not show up in any way that could be expected, much less in a manner that is self-explanatory. No, that is the point. The birth of this marvelous person is so ordinary, so commonplace that it could be entirely missed. William Cowper’s words are sometimes taken to be scripture themselves: “God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.” That is true. But the most mysterious thing of all is the way God performs wonders through very natural processes, like human birth, processes that are so much a part of the fabric of the universe that there is no reason to stop and pay attention to them at all.

Whether you have heard the message of Christmas so much and so often that it has become a part of you, or whether you have only the vaguest clue as to what it has to do with you if anything, the search is not only possible but highly rewarding. But be sure of one thing: it is a search. Bethlehem is even today not all that big a place, but you may be certain that running around trying to find a baby in a manger is no cinch. Luke does not tell us how many hours it took to find the Christ, nor how many alleys the shepherds ran down only to find nothing, nor how they might have made mistakes by following the sounds of other infants’ cries. We only know that the shepherds left their field and went to Bethlehem, seeking.

So the search is what ultimately leads to Christ and thus to the Great Joy which shall be to all people. That is a challenge for many people in our culture to get their minds around. We are not used to searching, but rather to having our desires instantly gratified. Even those who fancy themselves committed to a certain rigor in their faith and in their way of living have difficulty sometimes understanding that the meaning of the Messiah is not something that one can pick up by a quick internet search or a rapid read-through of a paperback edition of a paraphrased Bible. And why, you may wonder, does the search for Christ have to be hard? It is not the difficulty of the search that distinguishes it. It is rather the nature of the one being sought. Searching for Christ is not exactly like searching for the best bottle of wine for the money, or for precisely the right gift for the one who has everything. It is not quite like the scholar’s search for an obscure manuscript, nor like the researcher’s quest for the drug that will cure a disease, nor the explorer’s combing unknown territory to probe its secrets. Although searches are searches and share some things in common, the search for Christ is different because it is fundamentally a search for you.

And here is where the search of the shepherds is not necessarily the pattern for you and me. They are looking for something that matches the sign which has been given them by the angel. They are looking for somebody or something that, however important or even divine, is outside themselves. You and I can search for the Savior too, but the search means rifling through the bits and pieces of our lives, filtering the experiences that we have had and are having. If you are going to find God, you are going to find God in the details of your own life. True, you might decide to go on a pilgrimage to some holy island or sacred mountain. You can go on a retreat or go work among the poor—but these are only settings for your life, contexts for the search. The search itself, no matter on what island or mountain or sofa or desktop, is a search through the recesses and corners of your own life. The Bethlehems to which we go are inevitably the hard places in our lives. It is generally the places where we are sore from suffering, where we are most challenged, where some addiction is bleeding us, where some weakness has worn us thin. These are frequently the places we need to look for God’s gift. Don’t be surprised if these Bethlehems, these places where God shows up in your life, are not too far from the places where you are quite strong, where your passions burn the brightest, where your talents shine. For they, too, are places where you can and often will find the startling Babe.

This is what real Christmas, and therefore real Christianity, is about. It is not about going through the motions approved by society or family or even church. It is about searching for and ultimately finding Christ and therefore finding God and therefore finding this Peace on Earth and therefore discovering the One who can save us from uselessness and meaninglessness and deadly boredom and living hell. It is about opening yourself to the possibility of Mystery. It is searching for Christ even if it means fearlessly calling into question the points of view you hold dear, the habits that are the most comfortable to wear, the structures that frame your everyday routines. This baby lying in the manger, when he grew to become a man, said in one of his most shocking pronouncements, “except you become as children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” And that is what we are searching for: the child, the infant, the new life in ourselves, new life that is often struggling to be born in a dark night, new life that we find in unlikely places, like a manger, like a cross.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Americans and God - NYTimes.com

2011-12-12T06:52:00.000-08:00

Americans and God - NYTimes.com

Insiders and Outsiders | Connections

2011-12-07T11:58:00.000-08:00

Insiders and Outsiders | Connections

Meaning Exactly What?

2011-12-03T18:44:00.000-08:00

I want to spend this year with you examining the Search for Meaning. While it is true that a good many people in church on any given Sunday have found plenty of meaning in the Good News of Jesus Christ, many more are hanging around the edges wondering where they can find meaning, if there is any meaning, or whether the Church has anything to say that would help make sense of their lives. Even a great many people who already think of themselves as faithful Christians surely know that the journey with God in Christ is one that never settles on a particular meaning but always pulls us forward to explore possible meanings that we have not yet imagined.

Seeking for meaning will take us into all sorts of places. We will find ourselves looking at various stories, scratching around for the purposes in the story-originators’ minds as well looking at the features of the stories themselves. We will step back from various scriptures and ask how they connect with what is going on in our personal and corporate lives. We will also look at what I call the anti-gospel: the ever-present reality of things that promise meaning but which in the end rob us of meaning and purpose. We will meet shadowy figures and haunting themes that stalk through the Bible like ghouls whose echoing laughs mock the search for meaning, whose ploy is to seduce us into settling for easy answers and pious formulas so that we can steer safe of the risks of searching deeply.

Like any search, the one for meaning is a hunt with no guarantee of a trophy at the end. We never know whether we will find any meaning better than what we could patch together right now in the next five minutes. That is why so many people probably don’t want to fool with a search for meaning. To them—maybe you are among that number—there is no reason to search for meaning because it is perfectly obvious what the meaning is. After all, they were taught “the meaning” of things and of life in school or by their parents or indeed by the Church. All they have to do is to assume that whatever things mean is what they mean, and go on about their business. There is no scarcity of meaning, nor any dearth of systems that can supply it readily enough. We can go shopping for meaning just as we can go shopping for many things. Books and film, political parties and ideologies, a vast supply of things cooked up by the world’s various commerce systems, and a long parade of religious and philosophical alternatives provide a veritable bazaar of meaning. But most of those things, including some near and dear to my heart, are not in the end worth much unless they align with the Truth.

So this is not just the search for anything meaningful, which is not really all that hard to find. It is the search for meaning that actually lasts and outlasts everything else. If I were unconcerned about any but the stouthearted, I would stick a little notice up in the narthex that said something like, “Search for Meaning. Only the brave dare enter.” But my instincts are just the opposite. I believe that most of us are a little antsy, at least, if not downright scared, of beginning a search for meaning, unless we already have begun. And I want to sound a note of reassurance that comes out of the mouths of angels throughout the sacred story: “Fear not.” You have nothing to lose by asking questions. Not your balance, not your faith, not your life. But you have quite a bit that you might gain if you happen to discover along the way that there is a pearl of great price that you might have walked right past had your eyes not been open to looking for pearls. And should that one discovery change your life for the better, you will be glad you signed on to the search.

So much for prologue. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. What do we make of John the Baptist? He appears for two weeks in Advent each year, and then comes back for a reprise on the First Sunday after the Epiphany. Beyond that, we don’t hear much about him. He is here today proclaiming his baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins because his is perhaps the clearest voice we hear telling us what it means to prepare for the coming Reign of God. And that is what Advent urges us each year to do. The Reign of God, mind you, not the celebration of Christmas, unless you understand that Christmas has something to do with the Reign of God, which would make you a rare bird indeed. John the Baptizer lets his hearers know that he is not the focus of that Reign, but the forerunner of a more powerful One that was on his way. The Coming One would inaugurate the Reign of God in an outpouring of God’s Spirit that could be described as a baptism, so effusive would be his power.

Now the search for meaning is not the same as pigeonholing something like this story in a ready-made grid of ready-made meaning. Fully 65% of us here this morning could do that without even blinking. That is because the function of the story is obvious: it is a prelude to the story of Jesus. The figure of John is likewise obvious: he is an announcer, a forecaster, the opening act in a story of salvation that is to center in the ministry of Jesus. But stand further back and what do you see? Possibly you see that John is a game-changer. He articulates a message (repentance) and an action (baptism) that on the long haul were to reorder reality for an enormous number of people, one might even say the whole world. For this message of repentance went beyond personal rehabilitation and became a call to humans to change from self-preservation to sacrifice, from tribal protectiveness to inclusiveness. And baptism went from being an act of personal purification to being an entrance rite into the Christian community, which dared to believe itself to be living in union with the Risen Jesus and therefore with God. Simply by seizing the moment; by giving voice to the groundswell of discontent with the way things were going and the way people were living; by allying himself with the old prophetic tradition that spoke truth to power; by refusing to conform to the expectations of respectable society; by thundering a sermon of inner change to accompany the outward washing of baptism; and perhaps most of all in refusing to make himself the star of his own show: in all these ways John changed the game.

Do you see any meaning in that? Who is a herald of the Reign of God right now? Are you? Am I? If we know anything at all about God, we know from the human experience that we call “history” that God is on the side of the poor and the oppressed; that God is busy welcoming the outcast and the sinner; that God’s righteousness transcends the moral pettiness of convention and shakes the foundations of power. Whose are the voices that announce the essential claims of justice? And, by contrast, whose are the voices that decry nearly any motion to change things in the direction of greater sharing in the common weal?

Sometimes our life on this planet can seem inordinately complex, like the mass of wires and cords under my desk at home that form a clot of interconnections past all order and comprehension. But that is just an illusion. There are complex problems, but there are a few truths that need to be heard. One such truth is fairness. Another is honesty. A third is kindness. It is not possible for one to speak the Truth unfailingly and still be nice all the time. But we can make room for and recognize the Baptizer when he appears. We can even be the ones who are the baptizers ourselves, announcing the coming Reign of Truth and Righteousness. It involves not going to the store and buying a coat of camel’s hair and a new supply of health food so much as it entails calling people, beginning with ourselves, to account. The Reign of God is coming whether we like it or not. We can join the forces of Peace and Justice, or we can serve the old order which is always about protecting the interests of the powerful. The little baptism of today is just a foreshadowing of an outpouring of Spirit tomorrow. One is coming who is mightier than any you see or hear today. And that one is the both the Alpha and the Omega, the Source and the Destiny of all Meaning.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Advent Meditations

2011-11-30T05:27:00.000-08:00

Sunday, November 27: The First Sunday of Advent

Today begins a season of daily meditations based on the little book recommended by Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, Always We Begin Again, by John McQuiston II. In his introduction, the author briefly relates his discovery of the Rule of St. Benedict, and how he came to take a sixth century rule for monastic life and put it in contemporary language for ordinary people in the twenty-first century world.

As we begin Advent, ponder how it is that when we are sometimes unconnected from the world of religious language and ceremony, something will fall onto our path that blows our minds, totally altering the way we see our lives and the world we live them in.

What happened to McQuiston is not terribly different from what happened to a friend of mine, nor what happened to me. In the mid 1980’s I was searching for a way to spend a sabbatical. I talked with a person who put me in touch with a woman who lived in a neighboring State. When I contacted the woman, she told me the story of how one day, hunting for antique china, she happened upon a bookstore. After it fell from its shelf onto the floor three times in a row, she picked it up and opened it. It was The Rule of St. Benedict. It led her to discover Benedictine spirituality. I later joined her and about two dozen others for several weeks at Canterbury Cathedral participating in one of the first Benedictine Experiences sponsored by the Canterbury Cathedral Trust.

Sometimes the moment must be right. Ironically, I kept Always We Begin Again by my bedside for upwards of ten years. Only now that our new bishop has encouraged us to do so am I taking it and reading it, more than simply looking at it. The time is ripe. That is not a bad image of Advent. Open and read. Open and ponder. The Reign of God is at hand.

Monday, November 28: Feast of Kamehameha and Emma, King and Queen of Hawaii, 1864, 1885

The First Rule

The meaning of life cannot be learned, says Benedict. To think otherwise is a delusion. The meaning of life can only be discovered by living faithfully a life which transcends understanding.

Wow! That calls into question some of my most cherished assumptions.

“The first rule is simply this:

“Live this life
And do whatever is done,
In a spirit of Thanksgiving.

“Abandon attempts to achieve security,
They are futile,

“Give up the search for wealth,
It is demeaning.

“Quit the search for salvation,
It is selfish,

“And come to comfortable rest
In the certainty that those who
Participate in this life
With an attitude of Thanksgiving
Will receive its full promise.”

Tuesday, November 29

Each Day

Resolve on waking each day to treat each hour “as the rarest of gifts.” I am not what some call “a morning person.” I am becoming more of one as I get older; but for years I have done well to drag myself from bed and begin the day with mindless teeth brushing. To begin again living consciously, mindful that every day is a gift to be enjoyed, not a to-do list to be completed, is a radical change.

Every day is shot through with eternity, if only I can stop to hear it. Every day is a portal of the divine, if only I peer through it. Every day is a coming of the Reign of God into the present. Can I, shall I, be present to the One who comes?

Wednesday, November 30: Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle

Paramount Goals

To live fully is to embrace life thoroughly. There is nothing to fear in life, nothing to fear in death. Whatever comes we can greet gently and firmly.

Andrew was the first one that Jesus called. The first thing he did was to find his brother Peter to introduced him to Jesus. Practically every picture of Andrew in the gospels shows him bringing others to Christ. I need an Andrew, a messenger or a message, to turn me towards the Truth and walk me to it.

The Truth is that I need training. I need to practice turning my heart to Grace. I need to cut loose from the fears and desires that often drive me, centering instead on the deepest Truth of the universe, which is God, and on the deepest Truth of my Self, which is non-self, which is God. Here I am, old as I am, and I am like a kid. I have to begin again each day. I have to be born all over again.

What sustains me is the knowledge that if I simply let myself be brought to Christ, he who is Truth itself will make me free to be the person I am created to be.

Thursday, December 1: Feast of Charles de Foucauld, Hermit and Martyr in the Sahara, 1916

Good Works

Do good. For whatever good you do, you do not just for those for whom you do it, but for the life you thereby give yourself.

There are many things in my life I could regret, were I one to make regret a habit. But of one thing I am confident: never have I regretted, nor shall I regret, a good deed. Even when I have discovered that the one who sought my helped actually ripped me off, I would rather have erred on the side of generosity than on the side of meanness.

Good works are good even if the motive behind them is less than pure. For no motive we can conceive is ever totally altruistic. When we are conscious as best we can be, we can decide to do good without seeking a reward for doing so—not recognition, not thanks, not some pat on the back by a God made in our image waiting to congratulate us for making it into heaven. Goodness is its own reward.

Friday, December 2: Feast of Channing Moore Williams, Missionary Bishop in China and Japan, 1910

Teaching and Learning

We spend millions and billions of dollars in this country improving education, or so we think. So we hope. But ask nearly anyone to tell about a favorite teacher and chances are you will hear a tale about a man or woman who demanded excellence, who was fair, who cared about the student, and whose example inspired others to learn. We learn because of the relationship we have with whoever teaches us. We learn because someone asks more of us than we are aware we have. All the techniques and tests and standards in the world are no substitute for a relationship of trust and respect.

The things I have learned best are the things I have had to struggle with. The greatest learning experiences I have had thrust me into that awful place of confusion and frustration. And the very best learning experiences I have had are those in which I was tempted to give up somewhere about mid-way.

Teach by example. Learn by emulation. That is the way the disciple grows.

Saturday, December 3: Feast of Francis Xavier, Missionary to the Far East, 1552

Leadership

In his book Building the Bridge as You Walk On It: A Guide For Leading Change, Robert E. Quinn contrasts “the normal state” with “the fundamental state of leadership.” In my normal state, I am ego-driven, putting my interests ahead of the collective interests of my community. I tend to stay in my comfort zone, running no risks. I tend to define myself by how I think others see me. I usually seek comfort, which means that I stay in a reactive state, solving problems as they come along.

But I can move to the fundamental state of leadership, which comes not by my being elected or appointed a leader, but by my decision to accept my own creativity. Instead of fighting change, I begin asking what change I can create. I begin putting others’ welfare above my own, as I nurture trust in my networks of relationships. I move outside my comfort zone, seeking honest feedback, growth, and competence. I continually confront myself with my own hypocrisy, the gap between what I say I believe and what I actually do. And I pursue my life with confidence and a sense of purpose.

Is it possible for anyone to live in the fundamental state of leadership? Let’s hope so! Because another name which we could give it would be “living in the Spirit.” We could call it “walking by the Spirit,” a term St. Paul uses.

The irony in following Christ is that we become “leaders.” We move into that state of leadership which he embodies and exemplifies.

Lead without fear.

Monday, December 5: Feast of Clement of Alexandria, Priest, c. 210

Right Relationship

My whole practice of Christian living changed when I learned that the “righteousness” of which the Bible frequently speaks is not a kind of moral goodness, let alone purity, still less an unquestionable ethical rectitude. By “righteousness,” Scripture means right relationships. It is when those relationships are out of whack that the purposes of God are at risk. When, for example, I take on the role of God, I arrogate to myself responsibilities and privileges that do not belong to me. The same is true if I exploit others weaker or more vulnerable than I.

Our understanding of right relationships changes over time, and that is appropriate. There was a day when parents were assumed to be all-powerful over their children. We have come to understand that there are appropriate limits to parental power. Likewise in former ages people believed that the rich and the powerful had prima facie the blessing of God, and that those socially subordinate to them properly bent to their control. No longer do we believe that.

Preserving or restoring proper balance in relationships is what the work of the reign of God actually involves. We continue to goof it up, by such things as having too exalted a notion of our own importance, or too debased an idea of our own worth. The work of the spirit enables us always to begin again the task of bringing our relationships into balance.

Tuesday, December 6: Feast of Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, c. 342

Self-forgetfulness

Obedience comes from the Latin audire, meaning “to hear.” To obey is truly to hear, and to respond accordingly. It is no accident that Christian thought produced a powerful metaphor when thinking began to imagine Christ as “the Word.” It was not a new concept, but the notion took on new life when applied to Jesus. Word of the Father, in flesh appearing, announces that the Reign of God is at hand. It was then, and is now, at hand: the infinite wooing the finite, the divine penetrating the human, the eternal breaking into time. And the Word must be heard that his Way may be followed.
On one of Christianity’s most popular feast days, it is worth remembering that we know practically nothing about Nicholas, except that he was persecuted. If legends count for anything, he had a reputation for being particularly giving and especially good with children and seafarers. We can be reasonably sure that behind the reputation for saintliness lies the life of one who in his own way heard, obeyed, and followed his Lord. That he is remembered at all is not the point, nor would it be for you or me. All any disciple can do is to hear the call, obey the summons, and join him on his Way. Like Nicholas or those other disciples in the gospels, we drop our nets—our agendas, our plans—and follow.

He never takes our lives from us that he does not give them back again, whole and free.

Wednesday, December 7: Feast of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, 397

Silence

I once lived by myself for a month. During that time I wrote, I prayed the daily office, I had a minimum of human contact, I called and talked on the phone with my family regularly. But as I recall it, I never experienced silence. I don’t know that I ever have been silent. My “monkey mind” continually chatters inside my head, thinking this and that and the other, jumping from subject to subject, rehearsing speeches it will make when given the chance, re-running conversations that I have had or wish I had had.

Right now I feel the pull of the Silence of the night, the quiet of the inner processes of my cells and tissues, the white of the page beneath these words, the spaces that support the weight of the things in the room around me. I need to listen.

No more words now.

Thursday, December 8: Feast of Richard Baxter, Pastor and Writer, 1691

Humility

“The way to affiliation with the sublime is not to add, but is to take away more each day until we have been freed, even for desire for perfection.”

I hear that and it evokes from me a sigh of relief. I do not have to add things, activities, resolutions, prayers, projects, in order to be right with God.

I hear that again and I get a little nervous. What about the people, the things I care about? What about the fight for justice and equality? Does that count for nothing?
I hear it a third time and smile. Humility is not being different from me. Humility is simply being myself. Not being myself defined by my ego, nor presented by my various personas, nor given over to my indulgences, nor eager and zealous about my spiritual state, nor fretful about politics or economy, nor second-guessing myself because I am too happy about this or not happy enough about that.

Stop.

Shed, one attitude at a time, till having left old skin behind, I am simply the person of earth that I began by being and will end in being. A person of the earth, of humus, humble.

Real.

Friday, December 9

The Twelve Stages of Humility: 1

Keep consciousness alive. It is sacred. So is the time in which it exists and the space in which it lives.

There is a tremendous reluctance on the part of human beings to become a conscious species. We prefer to amble through life, repeating mindlessly the myths that others have spun, substituting things for relationships, developing armor to shield ourselves from our feelings. Those are not bad things necessarily; they are just the signs of massive unconsciousness.

Pay attention. Notice what is going on around you. Listen to your own heart. Do not judge. Just listen.

When are listening to things close at hand, including our own souls, we are practicing the humility that allows us to pay attention to others.

Saturday, December 10: Feast of Karl Barth, Pastor and Theologian; Feast of Thomas Merton, Contemplative and Writer, 1968

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 2

Distrust your own will.

Karl Barth and Thomas Merton, one a great Reformed theologian and the other a Roman Catholic monk, died on the same day in 1968. From Barth, who shaped much of the debate that dominated twentieth century theology, I have a story. Towards the end of his life someone is said to have asked him if he could sum us his rather vast theology in one sentence. He replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” From Merton, I have a prayer, a part of which is this: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so…”

It is clear to me that my desires keep me whipped into a state of excitement all the time. I do not mean just the desire for food or drink or sex. I mean the desire to be accepted, the desire to be effective, the desire to make some difference in other’s lives. Even this writing comes out of a desire to do something useful, a not insignificant part of my being.

And the fact that I think that I am following God’s will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

Notice what you crave. Do not judge; simply notice. Be aware that the second stage of humility is not to have no will, but to be very skeptical of your will. For chances are it arises from a clot of desire that might have nothing to do with the person you were created to be and are aching down deep to become.

Sunday, December 11: The Third Sunday of Advent

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 3

Accept our limitations.

The oldest characteristic of human beings, once we became a conscious species—if you can call us that—is the desire to be immortal. Most of our mythologies include a dimension, if indeed they do not center, on the obsession of human beings with immortality. Indeed many people today, Christian and non-Christian alike, assume that the whole thrust of Christian religion is to get the individual believer into heaven at death.

Still we die. And not just in the end, but all along the way. We die a thousand deaths, from the loss of innocence to the loss of memory, from the death of embarrassment when some family secret is exposed to the loss of a home or a driver’s license in our tenth decade. Much that happens to us is nothing that we can control.

Why fight it? There are fights worth having, but the fight against mortality is not one of them.

Embrace the fact that you will not live forever. It has nothing to do with what comes after this life. It has everything to do with coming to terms with who you are in this life.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a creature.

Monday, December 12, 2011

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 4

Be patient. Be thankful even for your injuries.

There is a fine line between embracing one’s hardships and being a masochist who seeks hardship for its own sake. A great many Christians take persecution in particular to be a sign of their own vindication, and thus are quick to don the robes of the victim, the persecuted, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

But there is something here not to be dismissed as neurotic or unreal. There are hard things that inevitably come our way, testing our mettle, causing us to question our motives, our abilities, our identities. Such things may teach us what we absolutely need to learn. While we are kicking and screaming at the fire whose flames lick and tear at our flesh, we might remember that absolutely nothing need be wasted. Everything, no matter how difficult, can be a means to bring us closer to God, and thus closer to the destiny that is ours to claim.

Richard Baxter, whom we commemorated last week, wrote a memorable line: “Take what he gives and praise him still through good or ill who ever lives.”

Tuesday, December 13: Feast of St. Lucy, Martyr, 304

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 5 and 6

Do not lie to yourself nor conceal your faults, but be ruthlessly honest.

Sounds good. The truth of the matter is that each of us lives by a story, one we tell ourselves about ourselves. Only rarely do we examine those stories, and more rarely still do we change them. One of my mantras is, “If you do not choose a story, a story will choose you.” Better make sure that the story we are telling is true.

My early childhood I lived in an alcoholic home where secrets were kept and bottles hidden. It took me years, on becoming an adult, to learn not to cover up mistakes or faults. Now and again I still encounter myself edging towards the needless lie (“I tried to call you;” “I was tied up in traffic”) which is nothing more than rearranging my façade to present a prettier persona to somebody else, who, if smart, will likely see through the lie immediately.

Confession is not bad news but good news. It is the practice of looking squarely at ourselves, neither exaggerating our faults nor minimizing them, taking stock of our lives, letting the light of Truth shine in all the dark corners, ready to own our defects, ready to make amends when possible and necessary, prepared to take a step towards becoming free and whole.

Wednesday, December 14: Feast of San Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross), Mystic, 1591

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 7 and 8

Our most profound idea is the merest fantasy.

Well that’s disappointing. I don’t know that I have ever had profound ideas, but I have certainly loved some of the ideas that I have had. I remember when I was about 27, I spent a week in an inter-personal relationships lab. At that point in my life, ordained less than two years, I cared deeply about making an impact on the world. To be honest, I wanted to make a name for myself. The little boy who used to read the encyclopedia voraciously in the fourth and fifth grades wanted to be in it. The idea I loved was affirmation, recognition. Fame.

Our culture teaches us that certain things matter, and that a few things matter a whole lot. One is success. We spend much of our youth gearing up to be successful: building résumés, making connections, getting into the right schools, knowing the right people, getting the right job, networking the right nets to get the right career move or change. And all of it turns out to be empty, a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Ask nearly anyone who has made it to the top. They will tell you that it is not the top, but the very things you have right now, that make life rich and full: friends, relationships, opportunities to give, moments of quiet, maybe even time with God.

I have lived long enough now to see that a great many mediocre people made it into encyclopedias, as did a great many wicked people, and a great many unhappy people. Finding one’s true path generally involves tuning out the siren-songs wooing us with things like success, fame, security, and listening to the true guides who can help us hear the Word.

Who are your guides, and where are they leading you?

Thursday, December 15: Feast of Robert McDonald, Priest, 1913

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 9

Refrain from judgment.

Most of us understand “judge not that ye be not judged.” I am not so sure that we understand what it is not to judge in a more general, global sense. We are deeply trained to judge. This is hotter than that. That is softer than this. This is good, that is better, the other is better still. And so on. Some would argue that not only language, but the structures of the mind that produce language, are intrinsically tied to judging.

To move beyond judging is at the very least counter-intuitive, which is why so few people are able to do so. We find it very difficult to look at ourselves, let alone other people, and not think such things as, “I could do better. I could do more.” Nor is it inappropriate or unhelpful to be able to do that. Still the challenge for us is to be able to be present to something or someone, whether a part of ourselves or some other person or situation, not evaluating but simply being. It begins by practicing such actions as replacing “I caught myself thinking such and such,” with, “I noticed myself thinking such and such.” I thus can begin to observe, to ask questions, to pay attention, to let the organism that I am absorb data, take in information, without having to label everything with a value judgment.

Thus we begin to develop the strength necessary to be humble.

Do not fear that you will never be able to make a value judgment again! Judging is a faculty that we will hardly lose, so much a part of us it is. But training in humility requires exercising something besides judging.

One word for that something is openness.

Friday, December 16, 2011: Feast of Ralph Adams Cram, Richard Upjohn and John LaFarge, Architects, 1942, 1878; Artist, 1910

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 10-12

Never take pleasure in the shortcomings or misfortunes of another.

I would not think of laughing at someone else’s misfortune. Would I?

I cannot imagine or recall a time when I smiled with glee when someone I knew slipped and fell from grace, nor a moment when I licked my chops when a competitor or an enemy stumbled or took a loss. Well, not since childhood. Or maybe college.

But what I wouldn’t think of doing in the face of one of my friends, I find myself doing all the time when I see political figures whom I dislike suffering setbacks. I rejoice to see hypocrites exposed. I chortle when I hear demagogues make fools of themselves. And none of these things adds anything to humility.

What would happen if I practiced seeing my “enemies” as human beings with flaws? Could I do that and still oppose what seem to me to be clearly wrong-headed and anti-gospel positions? How would I go about that?

I am beginning to see how far from humility I am.

By daily pursuing the habit of humility I might be able to become more humble, more open, kinder.

I think am beginning to understand why grace is something without which I can’t do it.

Saturday, December 17, 2011: O Sapientia

Routine

Routine is good. Not all routines are good.

Most of us have routines, because generally we are creatures of habit. The question is whether your routines are good ones that serve you well.

St. Benedict saw the wisdom in having some structure in which to live daily life. His rule, which of course is the basis of McQuiston’s book Always We Begin Again, divided the waking hours into times for worship, times for study, and times for work. This threefold division has tremendously influenced Anglican spiritual life. We are at our best when we balance worship with study and work or Christian action. We are not so strong when one or more of these is given short shrift. The same is true for individual Christians.

I go through seasons. Some years ago when living through “The Benedictine Experience” at Canterbury Cathedral, I identified the fact that there are times when my rhythms seem naturally to resonate with discipline and other times when they don’t. Almost always in the fall, for example, I find myself getting organized. Frequently in the warmer months, I slack off. I have also learned that I cannot sustain but so many disciplines at once. I used to pile on the disciplines like so many layers of clothing until I would find myself bowed down by their weight and suffocating from too many resolutions bearing down upon me. I have learned to go lightly with the disciplines, and to strike a happy medium between routine and flexibility.

As we begin the last week of Advent (the days of which are called by the name of the “Great O” Antiphons sung on the Magnificat at Evening Prayer) it may be helpful to remember that the Wisdom (Sapientia) from on high that orders all things is the power that enables us to sort out soul-refreshing disciplines from soul-withering habits.

Sunday, December 18: The Fourth Sunday of Advent, O Adonai

Stewardship

The real issue of stewardship is nothing more and nothing less than the issue of how to be a (successful) living organism on this planet. It is the matter of how we relate to the world around us.

We have a choice between two options. Either we can possess, or we can share. If we choose to possess, we have at our disposal an entire physical and psychic system that has evolved to do exactly that: to get what it needs, but not to stop with that; to go beyond need to control. It can be argued that control itself is a need that we have developed. Perhaps. The point is, it comes naturally. We have only to observe other animals to see how natural it is.

The gospel introduces a second possibility—and by “gospel” I mean the Presence and work of the Spirit of God. That possibility to live in a way that recognizes our contingency, that sees everything in our lives as a gift. We own nothing, not even ourselves. That is the basis of a life of sharing. Not only might we share what we have with others, we can accept what they share with us. Sharing is more than largesse, either yours or someone else’s. It can also be a sort of common ownership wherein we take responsibility for the things we use (including public spaces, for example) as if they belonged to us with the proviso that we never be stingy or possessive.

Monday, December 19: O Radix Jesse; Feast of Lillian Thrasher, Missionary, 1961

Service

Living life as if the pursuit of goods and recognition is its purpose destroys it.

Perhaps the clearest call of the gospel beckons us to give ourselves in humble service to those in need, sickness, or some other adversity. The woman whom we remember today is an example of what that means. Lillian Thrasher grew up in Georgia, heard the call of God as a young woman summoning her to a life of mission, and went to Egypt after she had read in her Bible, “I have seen, I have seen the affliction of my people which is in Egypt, and I have heard their groaning and am come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send thee to Egypt.” Would that it were always so simple to discern the call! Lillian probably thought it was anything but simple. She began an orphanage without any steady aid until the Assemblies of God gave her some. Despite hardships, political turmoil, and war, she kept her orphanage running, caring for nearly 25,000 Egyptian children during the course of her life.

In our struggles for justice, it is worth remembering that, while systemic change is difficult and necessary, along the way there are many times that the best, and perhaps the only, thing that we can do is to give a cup of cold water to the thirsty in the Name of Christ.

Tuesday, December 20: O Clavis David

Meals

What might happen if every meal we ate consciously as if it were a eucharist?

A trait that runs in my family is grazing. My mother grazed, frequently stopping by the refrigerator or a cabinet to get a handful of something that she could eat. My older brother seemed to have insatiable cravings. I am no stranger to the habit of grazing. The only way I seem to be able to avoid it is to make a conscious decision—and a periodic re-decision—to be absolutely ruthless in not eating mindlessly.

It is possible to eat mindfully. There are some simple practices that can transform mealtime. Choose one meal a day to eat intentionally and consciously, focusing on the act of eating. Refuse to do anything else—no texting, no emailing, nothing that will interfere with eating mindfully. Eat at a table. Appreciate the appearance of the food (it helps to eat healthy food that actually looks good!). Focus on each mouthful, its flavor, texture, and the feel of chewing. Don’t rush. Chew well. Use cutlery, and put it down between mouthfuls. Talk and share with someone, concentrating on the experience of eating as opposed to things that distract from mindful eating. Go for small amounts eaten thoroughly.

Eating is one of the most important activities that any living being can do. Let it nurture the life we seek to be living.

Wednesday, December 21: Feast of St. Thomas, Apostle; O Oriens

Worship

The heart of worship is thanksgiving. It is not an accident that eucharist means thanksgiving. There are other things that worship typically includes: confession, adoration, supplication. But giving thanks is central.

We can go nowhere where God is not. We can do nothing that is outside God’s awareness. God is nearer to us than the air we breathe, more accessible than our very bodies. But these are mere words unless we are open to the Presence that permeates everything we are and do.

Worship is not a matter of forms or words so much as it is being tuned in to the sacredness of life.

The Great O antiphon for today is, “O Dayspring, Brightness of the Light Eternal, and Sun of Righteousness: Come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.” Worship perennially invites the Dayspring from on high to come into our awareness (it is already around us and within us!) to enlighten our hearts and minds. There is no better way to invite the Light than to practice simply being thankful.

Thursday, December 22: O Rex Gentium

Guests

We are all guests in the world, and all equally present in time.

The most artificial distinction of all is the distinction between oneself and others. For practical purposes we make that distinction all the time. I am I; you are you; they are they. However practical that might be, it is indeed artificial, if not downright false. For we are all in this life together, part of one species, part of one history and part of one future. In perhaps his most frequently quoted lines, John Donne said, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Thus there is a sense in which every guest that comes into my house or my church is no more a guest than I. We are all involved in the human experience, and thus bound to one another in ways that defy easy categories and simple analyses.

Standing at the heart of profound and eminently practical truth is that we simply must do unto others as we would have them do unto us. I treat a guest as I would wish to be treated myself. I accord honor and defer to a guest realizing that I am giving away nothing—nothing at all—for the guest is as much a part of me as my arm or my face.

That is why humility, on which topic St. Benedict dwelt so much, is essential to living in accordance with deep truth. Humility is recognizing that the ego-drawn boundary between me and the next fellow is totally useless, not to mention false and demeaning. It is precisely when we give ourselves away that we discover our selves in the faces and hearts of those to whom we give them.

Friday, December 23: O Emmanuel

Community

Humans live in groups, and honesty and candor are essential both to the health of the community and the individuals in it.

What would happen if our public discourse took into account that we are all members of a single human community? Sometimes I walk by the Willard Hotel downtown and muse on the fact that in the Old Willard the term lobbyist was coined to name the persons who hung about the lobby waiting to buttonhole legislators for their own purposes. What took on a name (it certainly was not born then, in the Grant Administration) has now become an art form, or a science unto itself. Everyone has an interest—and the competing voices build to a cacophony that drowns out not only the weak but even the strong who refuse to use their strength to degrade others.

It is not a pretty image to paint these two days before the Church begins to sing of the Savior born unto us at Bethlehem, of him who is to come again in power and great glory to judge the world and to right all wrongs.

Something must change. And the change that must come is not one “out there,” but one that first must take root in your heart and mine. Indeed the phrase “Become the change you want to see” is wise. That change is a rebuilding of the human self. God, the Architect and Builder of the New Self and of the New Age, is also the Mother who gives to us New Birth. We must be born all over again, begotten from above, so to say. Instead of living to protect our interests, the New Birth brings us to live essentially for others. Instead of living to acquire things, security, status, we inch with birthpangs into a world of giving, risking, sacrificing.

And this New Birth is nothing less than Emmanuel’s being born in us. God with us, God for us, God in us: O come, O come, Emmanuel, and save us. Build out of our disparate desires your own beloved community. Be born in us today.

Thanksgiving Beyond Good Luck

2011-11-23T11:36:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving Day may be our least corrupt holiday in the United States. It is hard to make giving thanks into much of a spectacle, as one can do with Halloween, Christmas, or even Easter. There is somewhere in the cracks of civil religion and its twin culture religion an allowance for thanksgiving as a worthy thing to do.

I am not sure what they do with Thanksgiving who do not have a god to thank. Perhaps it is sufficient simply to take note of one's good fortunes and to rejoice that one is lucky. But for those who have any semblance of belief in God, thanksgiving poses no problem. For even if our lives are clogged and pent with an abundance of misfortune, without much trouble we can find something somewhere that has come our way through no particular merit of our own, through no heroism or talent or ability that we have exercised, some little or big something for which we can take no credit. Instinctively we want to say something like, "Wow!" or maybe even "Thank God."

Thanksgiving began in a world of agriculture, an industry that few people in modern America engage in--certainly not in the sense of the cultures in which it arose. Harvest festivals, like planting, engendered rituals consisting of prayers, chants, dances, and other acts. When life depends upon good weather, rodent control, a minimum of mildew and rot, managing various pests, not to mention having enough to plant and not having to eat seeds instead of planting them, then it stands to reason that one might want to curry favor with the gods in charge of the universe to get some help in a daunting task. And when there is anything to harvest at all, much less an abundance, thanksgiving seems somehow too appropriate to have to explain.

Thanksgiving is not a situational activity, however, so much as it is a way of life. It is a state of mind and soul. One does not have to live on the margins of planet earth in order to be thankful--nor does one have to break records of good fortune in order to find a reason for Thanksgiving. Rather, the thankful heart is not preoccupied with counting blessings, but in noticing the benefit in all things. The thankful heart embraces not only good fortune but misfortune as well, knowing that even those things which cause us inconvenience or even grief can be the very agents of growth. The truly thankful heart accepts whatever comes as exactly what it needs.

Can one be thankful amidst suffering? Can we be thankful even when our souls are grieving or in pain? Can we be thankful even if, God forbid, we should be slowly starving to death or slipping out of this world sped along by deprivation or cruelty? You will never know the answer to that unless and until you get to the edge and find out there in the direst of straights you might ever imagine that you have it in you to give thanks even in those things and for those things. You do not want to go there and neither do I. But it is certain that in the most abject of circumstances one can find it possible to be thankful only if one has practiced being thankful over and over again. In hard times and in good, in depression as well as in joy, we can open our minds and hearts to the possibility that in the leanest of years there is something to sustain us; in the darkest night, there is some angel bearing us up until the dawn; in the strangest of countries, a companion who knows and charts our way; on the bleakest day, the gift of becoming.

To live like that is to live eucharistically, thankfully. It is to lift up our hearts to the Lord of Life, not measuring our blessings, but rejoicing in all things. Only the loss of such a God could ring the curtain down on thanksgiving. And the God whose hand is open wide to fill all creatures with plenteousness, is so lasting, so true, so sure, so dependable that you can actually believe God's promise: I will be their God and they will be my children and I myself will be with them.

Could we ask for more?

Right Here Beside Us

2011-11-05T10:36:00.001-07:00

Calling up the Ancestors on All Saints

On a cool August morning with about eighty other people, I stood in front of a Buddhist shrine in a Colorado valley as a Native American drummed and chanted, calling up the ancestors to accompany us on a pilgrimage that would last for a week. We had gathered to explore the stories that bind us together for good or ill in the present world. I do not know much about my ancestors—specifically mine—who lived before the 19th century. I remember only two of my grandparents and none who came before them. My parents’ stories ran as far back as their grandparents, aunts and uncles, with an occasional anecdote preserved about Great-aunt Julia, because a piece or two of her jewelry came my family’s way when she died. But I knew a handful of names that I could call out loud and strong in the swelling tide of sound raised by that four-score people. We sounded like a chorus of great birds, a swarm of giant insects as we voiced our names that rolled out into the mist for a few seconds that seemed magnified and lengthened by the sheer power of the sound.

That was a very human moment. We were humans, not crows or bees or some other species. We were doing something that human beings alone among the creatures of earth do. With our memories we preserve stories from our past, and with our voices we tell them, passing on the information we need to survive. Along the way we have learned to sing, dance, paint, mime, act, carve, and write. Sometimes we look into the future and imagine what a new world might look like. But nearly always we tell stories and create scenes from our past. You can go the world over and find that what we were doing on that morning in Colorado is of a piece with what peoples everywhere do. We remember the dead. We honor them, sometimes even when we would think in sober moments that they did nothing to deserve honor. We set aside days and seasons to remember simple deeds that become more heroic as passing time gives them height and weight. They are important to us, because we generally have a sense that somehow they do not abandon us when they die. They hang around, unseen and usually silent. We imagine that what they learned they can teach us.

What we are doing on the Feast of All Saints is very like what that crowd of people was doing in Colorado. We have invoked the names of ancestors, some heroes and heroines in the faith, some even known for their opposition and challenge to the faith as they inherited it. We have called out names and placed on the ofrenda signs and tokens of people known mostly or only to ourselves. Not only have we thanked God for them; we have cried out for them to stand here beside us as we walk our journey.

As universal as is this habit of relating to the dead, not everyone does it nor does everyone approve of it. There are lots of reasons not to, if you are looking for one. First, aside from occasional ghosts and poltergeists, there is little evidence that the dead are anything other than dead and gone. Second, in a large swath of our rationalistic Western society, anything that doesn’t serve immediate materialistic goals is suspect if not disdained. Moreover, a host of abuses and not a little silliness has grown up over the years in lots of places when people have turned things like prayers for the dead into elaborate schemes for money making, encouraging a culture of superstition and ignorance. One could go on, but I don’t want to give you gratuitous reasons for spurning All Saints!

The deeper question, far more important than the issue of how human beings can take a good idea and make a mess of it, is why we have this need. What moves us to keep an annual feast for calling up the ancestors?

On the most basic level, we humans are conscious that we are who we are because of so much that so many have done before us. It is no accident that nearly all of our major stories and sagas and epics crystallize around the idea of a journey. We know we are going some place. And we realize on a very obvious level that we did not begin the journey. Others have brought us thus far. It does not take much for us to see, too, that each of us is a product of our parents who are products of their parents. If you are lucky enough to live to see two or three or four generations in your family, you can see before your very eyes how it is that not only physical characteristics are passed down from one generation to another, but how behavior has an uncanny way of replicating itself, too. I look into the mirror and am increasingly startled to see my father’s face looking back at me. I see a photograph of myself and can tell that my mother’s smile is the one I wear. Over my bed hangs a photograph of my great-grandparents and their large Victorian family, taken in 1902. In the center is my great-grandmother Burroughs, who died 19 years before I was born, yet whose expression I see when I catch a glimpse of my face in a shop window as I pass by, and whose eyebrow arch I frequently see my younger daughter bearing. I doubt that dolphins and dogs are aware of such things, but you and I are aware of them all the time.

But the Christian community knows a truth that is stronger, deeper still. We know that the whole story of the human race is a struggle of life against death. We know that the things that often masquerade as life-giving—like power and status and prestige and money—are often the very things that wring the life out of us. And we know that some things like crucifixions and martyrdoms and persecutions and bloodshed that look like things to be avoided at all costs are sometimes the very things that mock cruelty, that in a peculiar way advance the journey of the human race in giant leaps, and even sometimes set us free. We know that ultimately the dying we must undergo is nothing to fear because nothing in this world can take us out of the hand of the Living God, and thus we cannot fall out of the reach of Providence. We know that we live in a world thinly veiled from a powerful reality made of non-material stuff, a spiritual reality that underlies and overarches and supports all that goes on in this workaday life of ours. Not only do we know, but we celebrate the openings to that world when the veil is torn by things like baptism, letting us glimpse and feel the Presence of God in the form of acceptance, incorporation, renewal, affirmation.

We know, too, that though our eyes cannot see them, there are hundreds and thousands of people known by their witness to the Truth and still felt by the love they left behind, now marching in glory. We ponder their examples, believing them to be no more “dead” in the true sense of the word than our latest breath. We know that they are aiding us by their prayers because prayer is nothing less than conversing with the living God to whom they are united. We picture them now, a great multitude which no one can number, from every nation, from all tribes and people and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, singing, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Like most of the things in which we believe that encourage and strengthen us, like love, hope, grace, the image of our ancestors in the faith cannot be weighed and measured. But we capture enough of it that it drives us forward, confident that we, too, will get to the place where we will hunger no more, neither thirst any more, nor be struck by scorching heat. We have already taken our places beside the Lamb in the center of the throne, who is our Shepherd. You have a place there too, and he will guide you to springs of the water of life and wipe away every tear from your eyes, save perhaps those of sheer joy that has run through your marrow when you have called out the names of the blessèd dead, saying with all your might, “Stand here, stand here, beside us!”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Holy God!

2011-10-23T17:42:00.000-07:00

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18

Leviticus is not a name that engenders much applause among forward-thinking Christians. The third book in the Bible, in some ways the crown jewel of the Torah, with its elaborations of the Ten Commandments, is one that a number of us find nauseating because it has been hurled so frequently as a weapon against sexual minorities. But there are some things that are not so rough in the Book of Leviticus—not so rough, that is, unless you are really ethically challenged. Leviticus sees a deep connection between the nature of God and profoundly ethical behavior. The headline of the whole work is, “BE HOLY, FOR I THE LORD YOUR GOD AM HOLY.”

More than any other word we could think of, “holiness” expresses what we mean by “the sacred.” It is not something that is owned by one religious tradition. In his book The Idea of the Holy, written many years ago, German theologian Rudolf Otto noted that holiness is peculiar to the sphere of all religion, and is only secondarily transferred to the sphere of ethics as well. It is the experience of the holy that blasts the neat categories of the rational and puts us in the terrain of the inexpressible. We have come to use the word “holy” to mean completely good. Well, that’s not quite accurate. The holy is the real innermost core of any religion. Only in relation to that core can actions and behavior be said to be “holy.”

It is important to get our minds straight on what the holy is, because frankly it is not on the list of the top things that most Americans want to be. Or think they are. But the truth of the matter is we are created to be holy. Or, to be more precise, we are created with the capacity of being Godlike, else it would make no sense for God to issue the command, “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” Sometimes I muse about where we human beings get that idea. Of course, the tradition is that God actually spoke in revealing terms laying the notion out plainly. And that may well be. But you have to allow for the possibility that God could speak on and on about holiness—or this, that, and the other—and it would all be for naught unless human beings had the capacity to hear it. And that is to say that we carry around with us the idea that it is possible to be different from what we would be if we were just left to our own devices and desires. Left in the wild, so to say, we would revert to basic mammal behavior, looking after ourselves, our young, and our own kind, with loyalties only to our den, our pride, our herd, our flock, our warren. Left to ourselves, we could quite easily behave more as reptilians than gods. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is perhaps still the classic narrative of what happens to a community of humans that, with all constraints of civilization removed, goes down into the sinkhole of savagery. Boys will not only be boys, but savage boys if left completely to themselves.

But let us not make the mistake of thinking that there is anything necessarily godly about civilization itself. We continue to make that mistake by thinking and believing that anything that controls human behavior, that produces ostensible progress, that shapes human community is necessarily a good thing. We ought to know better. Crowns and thrones perish, kingdoms rise and wane, civilizations come and go. And while all that is happening there is in the center of human experience an impulse to live differently. And while that impulse may not in every instance equate with the current of holiness that comes out of the nature of God, still that impulse keeps surfacing. We humans keep grasping every now and then the idea that we are being called from outside ourselves to live differently, to lay aside some of our most intuitive and automatic behaviors. And the Book of Leviticus testifies that that call is from nowhere other than Yahweh, God, Lord. Yahweh frees and also commands, “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

The slice of Leviticus that we heard read today is not particularly hard to get a handle on. Indeed its ideas are very popular with many people, religious and non-religious. Don’t render an unjust judgment. Treat the poor and the rich alike. Do not go around slandering people. Do not hate your own kin. Reprove your neighbor, because you both are a part of the same community and what each of you does affects the other. Don’t be vengeful; don’t bear grudges. Love your neighbor as yourself. Who could take issue with those things? If this were all that is involved in being holy as the Lord God is holy, most of us would sign on without hesitation. We have Jesus to thank for teaching us that it is not so simple as that. Being right with God involves more than being ritually pure and legally flawless. And we have Paul to thank for hammering home the point that the essence of wholeness or salvation is not the keeping of a set of rules, no matter how sensible. We become holy by participating in the divine nature that Jesus embodies, and which through baptism and life in Christian community he shares with us.

And what is that divine nature, that holiness of God that God invites us into practicing and living? You won’t be surprised if I tell you that it cannot be neatly summed up, will you? No, it cannot be, precisely because the holiness of God stretches through all space and time and oozes as well into every cell of your body. We cannot cram it into the category of moral perfection, or even boil it down to right relationships, for holiness is like the source of all the energy in the universe, driving the entire cosmos. We cannot pick out a theme here or an idea there and say that we have laid hands firmly on what it means to be holy, because by its very nature, the holy eludes us. Nor can we reduce holiness to rational ideas or concepts, because what Otto called “the numinous” is trans-rational, mysterious, beyond our ability to describe and prescribe. If we had to choose some basic element by which to depict holiness, it would doubtless be the metaphor in which holiness most often appears in the Bible: fire. Like the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who saw the world itself as an everlasting ball of fire, the tradition sees the holiness of God as a consuming, purging flame, licking up everything opposed to the nature, truth, and faithfulness of God. So we may well scratch our heads and wonder what on earth or what for God’s sake does God mean by “Be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy.”

And yet, among all the ritual regulations and liturgical directions and sexual proscriptions in Leviticus, there is something that arises out of the Holiness Code that beckons us forward and upward in the progression from primal protoplasm to the God-nature shot through with glory. It is generosity. There is something about God that, when all is said and done, is exceedingly kind and generous. The fact that we would even be conscious of such a thing is itself a remarkable gift, for on our best days we realize that this life we are living can be so much better if we are not concerned only with our own safety and livelihood, but with the welfare of others, and that is a godly thing to think. “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien, for I the Lord am your God. You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; I am the Lord.” That is not all there is to holiness, but that is a key aspect of it. God’s hand is generously open with every gift humanity could possibly want, let alone deserve. And our hands are to be no less open. For we are to be holy, as the Lord God is holy.

And that brings us to the stretch of weeks which we inaugurate today, a season you have become accustomed to if you have been in this or some other church for much time at all. For this is fall, and it is the time when we talk about money and the virtue of generosity and such things. I want to level with you. I do not mind talking about money (Jesus talked more about it than any other single subject). I do not mind asking you to give generously to St. Stephen’s, where we try our level best to do ministry that we perceive the Body of Christ cannot not do. But I mind very much wrapping an exhortation to give your dollars for ministry in some kind of religious sophistry that constantly edges away from the plain fact that ministry costs. The older I get the more I realize that the things that cost much are not necessarily the things that are worth much, but the things that are worth much frequently cost a great deal. The relationships in my life that make my heart sing require gentle tending and nurturing. The things that I do that make much difference in mine and others’ lives cost time and effort. And the causes and communities that actually help make the world a better place for all God’s creatures deserve as much money as I can possibly share. The practice of stewardship is about nothing else than practicing the virtue of generosity–not just in church and to church, but everywhere. It has to do with how you tip the wait staff and how you give your time and whether you listen to someone else’s story as well as to how you give to St. Stephen and the Incarnation. It has to do with the attitude we have—or don’t have—which cherishes our neighbors the way we cherish ourselves, or ought to cherish ourselves. Generosity is the spark of holiness that lights the way for us to live intentionally the life of the One who says, “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Just Imagine

2011-10-04T06:29:00.000-07:00

Ignatian Prayer and Scripture

Isaiah 5:1-7
Matthew 21:33-46

Over the years I have heard about everything in the liturgy criticized for one reason or another. But this week I have wracked my brain trying to recall if I could remember someone’s suggesting that scripture not be read in church. Perhaps there has been such a time, but I cannot recall it. Some have wondered why we read three lessons, as opposed to one or two. Some devotees of The Great Vigil of Easter want to read as much scripture as possible. But virtually no one suggests that we ought to dispense with reading the Bible. The reason to read it seems obvious. It is the sacred story of the Covenant People. Nearly all Christians, although they may disagree on how to read scripture, assume that the Bible has something to say. And if you ask folks what they most want out of a sermon, they will nearly invariably say that they want the preacher to show how the Bible is relevant to ordinary daily life.

Along comes a pair of passages like the ones from Isaiah and Matthew today on the theme of God’s vineyard. The meaning of them is not particularly obscure. The Isaiah passage, sometimes called “The Song of the Vineyard,” describes the House of Israel as God’s vineyard. As the planter and owner, God sees a vineyard that has not lived up to expectations. Instead of bearing lots of fruit, the vines have grown wild grapes. Thus God will destroy the vineyard. The parable of the wicked tenants in Matthew is even less obscure, since Matthew has taken care to put it in allegorical form. The prophets all come to Israel and one by one are rejected. Finally the Son comes and is thrown out of the vineyard and killed. It certainly conforms to what Matthew knew was the story and fate of Jesus.

Although their meaning may be fairly plain, what are we to do with passages like these? What are we to make of them? In a larger sense, this is the perennial question facing the community of faith in every generation: what are we to make of any scripture? How do we use it? How does it inform our life? One sermon, of course, cannot get into all the nooks and crannies of interpreting scripture. What I’d like to do today is to look at the way this image of the vineyard is used and to see what that has to tell us about hearing the message of scripture in general.

I

Picture a singer standing at the entrance of the Columbia Heights Metro station, singing something that sounds like a ballad. She begins with what sounds like an ancient couplet, “I will sing a song for my friend, a song of love for his vineyard.” We don’t have to know much about vineyards in Washington, DC, for such a singer to get our attention. What we need is for the singer to be good—good enough to get a couple of people per hour to pause and listen. But she is better than good. She is amazing. She halts our rush to Target or to Starbucks just to pause and listen to the sweet strains blending words and melody. By the time she gets to the second verse, we begin to realize that this is a tragic poem that she is singing. She begins to sing of how her friend who owns the vineyard despairs of vines that only produce sour grapes, good for nothing but to be spat out. The intent listener begins to wonder what on earth has gone wrong. Is the story about some disease that has invaded the vineyard? Is the singer an environmentalist making a point about the dangers of pesticides? We listen on. The riddle is solved, but in a way that is alarming. We, say singer and and song, we the people of Washington are the vineyard. And the lover who so sweetly planted us is the Author and Giver of Life. We are the ones who are his darlings. Then, in a plaintive, haunting lament, the singer ends the song, and by now several dozen people have stopped to listen. The vineyard planter looks to us to have produced justice but instead found only injustice. Instead of right relationships, he hears only a cry, only a cry. Only a cry. The singer stops, slips through the crowd and is gone.

Who was that singer? Where did she come from? Is she just another religious nut stirring up guilt? Shouldn’t we know the name of someone who is that good a singer? Her song hangs in the air; and the ending: what can we do about the ending? We walk away, not knowing exactly what, and get it out of our heads by continuing up the street, avoiding a street vender, ducking into Tynan’s for a cup of coffee, eventually being absorbed in the wave of people oblivious to anything but their own lists.

Look at what has happened, just in the last two or three minutes. A text—or even the oblique reference to a text—has caught our attention and in some way begun to work on us. You know what that experience is like because you have had it. You have seen a movie that has done slightly less than change your life, but that has entered your mind like hot steel, cleaving your soul, leaving you wondering, wondering. Or you have read a book that you can’t quite let go. That is what Isaiah intends to do. As he proceeds to show, the Song of the Vineyard was simply to get the attention of Israel so that they could identify with the plight of the vineyard, take responsibility for their own devastation, and know that the One to whom they owed their life was none other than Yahweh Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts. Isaiah then proceeds to articulate a series of woes—seven in all—that implicitly indict those who have betrayed the covenant by undermining right relationships and by subverting justice. And why does he do all that? Ultimately his aim is to bring his hearers around to changing. It could be said that he is foretelling the future, and that might be true. But equally likely, he is describing a situation that is unmistakably true and present in the community’s life. His short-term goal is to proclaim the absolute trustworthiness and righteousness of God. His long-term goal is to bring the people into a renewed covenant relationship with God.

II

Jesus might or might not have told the parable of the wicked tenants the way we hear it in Matthew’s gospel. An older version appears in Mark. Unlike most of the parables it is an allegory, wherein everything and everybody represents a person or an idea or an event. Whatever else Jesus did, it is quite likely that he used the image of the vineyard straight from Isaiah to make his point. His hearers, the authorities of Israel, knew well enough the Song of the Vineyard. But Jesus introduces the figures of tenants, suggesting that the problem was not the vineyard at all, which unlike Isaiah’s vineyard, produced perhaps bumper crops of good grapes. The problem was rather that those who had tenancy of the vineyard were scoundrels. When slaves come from the owner to collect the produce, the tenants beat them up. Finally the owner sends his son, who he is sure the tenants will perforce respect. Wrong! The tenants, perhaps knowing that as tenants they have rights of possession, proceed to assassinate the one who stands in their way, the heir.

As a good storyteller, Jesus then sets up his hearers for the inevitable response. What will the owner do? The answer is obvious. He will avenge the death of his son! He will put the tenants to death, the hearers answer (Jesus does not comment on that!) and lease the vineyard to other tenants who would give him his produce in due season.
Then Jesus does something that later tradition was to make much of. He quotes from Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.” He does not spell out the allegory but tells plainly its meaning. The kingdom of God will be taken away from the religious leaders (the tenants) and given to a people producing the fruits of the kingdom. He then issues a not-so-oblique threat, saying that the “stone” that was “rejected” will cause anyone who falls on it (stumbles upon it) to be broken to pieces and anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.

So here is another way that scripture is used. A metaphor, the rejected stone, referred to in scripture, is mined out of its setting and used to drive home a point, in this case a prophetic warning. The chief priests and the Pharisees get the point all right. They know that he is talking about them. And they react with characteristic and predictable rage, determined to arrest Jesus. It is absolutely fair to say that this was indeed the result that Jesus intended. The entire passage in Matthew’s gospel suggests that Jesus intended to press the point with the chief priests and Pharisees—and by extension the ones whom they led—that their days in charge of God’s community were numbered.

The story does not stop there, of course. Either the Church found in the tradition this nugget of a parable traceable to Jesus that it could confirm as a keeper precisely because sooner or later it came true. Or it doctored up the parable to bring it in line with recent events. Either way, it is a story that demonstrates what happens when those in charge of God’s vineyard are faithless, and a story of what happens in history when the rejected one (Jesus) becomes the keystone or cornerstone.

III

But the most important question perhaps is always, “So what”? That is indeed the question that The New Testament is forever addressing. One typical response to those who read the Bible, and especially to these kinds of things in the Bible, is to jump to a moral meaning, a “moral of the story,” as it were. That is not always bad or inappropriate, especially if one gets from Isaiah the message that we need to reform our ways and get ourselves on the side of justice; or if one gets from Matthew the message that we need to produce the fruits of the Reign of God. An unfortunate response that some make is to use such passages as anti-Jewish propaganda, projecting onto present-day Jews the profiles of ancient Israel ironically drawn from texts out of the heart of Israel’s own sacred tradition. A counter-response that liberals typically make is to silence Matthew and others from saying what they have to say because we are embarrassed at what can be and has been construed to be words and images that put Jews in a bad light. Another reaction can easily be that we treat all this material as far too abstruse to be of much use, all the historical issues having been settled, and the symbols and language too incendiary to risk using.

St. Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises uses a method of pondering scripture that could help us here. He takes a passage, like the parable of the wicked tenants, for example, and encourages the listener to move into the content of the passage with one’s senses. What colors, odors, sounds do we hear in the vineyard? And whom do we relate to? The tenants? The slaves? The owner? The son? Typically one uses one’s imagination to move into an experience like that being described, always for the purpose of coming closer to Jesus, clearer in one’s relationship with God. In that way, reading scripture is definitely a form of prayer, a piece of communication with God that is continuous with external life as well as with internal psyche.

IV

If the central question is, “So what?” surely the second question is, “What difference does it make?” What happens when we read scripture imaginatively, opening ourselves up to have the scenes, the words, the ideas make a deep impact upon our consciousness? Little by little—or perhaps on occasion, in a leap—we change, and that is the heart of what the entire gospel is up to. That can probably happen only when we begin to see ourselves in the stories. Are we the poor slaves who are just trying to do the master’s bidding, beaten and abused by the powers we confront? Are we the tenants who have robbed the owner by arrogating to ourselves what does not belong to us? Or are we some of both, depending on which day of the week it is and where we find ourselves in a particular pecking order? What is the Word that God is speaking and that Jesus is embodying right now? And do we rejoice at the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone, or become angry and depressed because in so doing he overthrows our own power? It is marvelous in our eyes or noxious to us, quite honestly?

The gospel, indeed the whole Bible, can be good news or bad news for us, depending upon who we are and where we are in any particular story. But that is part of, maybe the biggest part of, the challenge to which we open ourselves by opening the book in the first place. It is the likelihood that when we read or hear the scriptures, we will come to a moment of recognition. A split second later, we may well find ourselves having to decide exactly what we are going to do with this Jesus who shakes our foundations, how we are going to respond to this God who hounds us demanding justice. Such a moment came to the chief priests and Pharisees when they realized that he was speaking about them.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Lows and Highs

2011-09-24T20:13:00.000-07:00

Prayer and the Mind of Christ

Philippians 2:1-13

“Son, don’t act like you’re going to die just because you are feeling a little puny,” my mother said on more than one occasion. “You’re just like Uncle George. The minute he got to feeling bad, he was moaning and groaning and telling Aunt Nora that he wasn’t long for this world. Just like him.”

Although I am not one of these people who hasn’t been sick a day in his life, I have been remarkably healthy for the most part for over five decades. Yet when I feel the first scratchiness that presages a sore throat, and especially if I succumb to lying in bed with a virus, as happened twice several winters ago, I begin to hear Mama’s voice overriding my own moaning, “Son, straighten up. You’re just like Uncle George.”

Mine must not have been the only mother who says such things, nor mine the only family where people get pegged as copies of ancestors. We come to this earth not only trailing clouds of glory, but, like the little girl on the Morton salt box, pouring behind us indications of undeniable DNA. I hear myself talking sometimes and have to stop and think if the voice I hear is really mine or if it belongs to my father. Or my mother. Or Uncle George.

In a very real sense, the project of Christianity is the project of changing human beings. As a faith system, Christianity is about transformation, a remolding or remaking the human person to be different. Partly, of course, it has to do with our moral training, despite the fact that many Christians remain dreadfully confused about exactly what is moral. Simply put, the entire effort of the Christian Church is essentially about the creation of a community that so catches the Spirit of Jesus that we manifestly live in a way that is unmistakably like him. Not to put too fine a point on my mother’s dictum, it is as if someone might see or hear us, observe us as individuals or as communities and say, “You’re just like Jesus, no kidding.”

Now the second thing you may want to say to this is, “No way.” The first thing you may want to say is, “But how do we know what Jesus was like? How can we be sure?” Hold on a minute. There is something more fundamental at stake here than our rush to react to what might seem a dubious proposition.

That fundamental something is the fact that Jesus deliberately gathered a community. For the average Christian, this is so unremarkable as to be taken for granted or ignored entirely. But did you ever wonder why the disciples were even necessary? Forget the canned explanations. Ask yourself why Jesus would even have bothered with them. He selected what seems to have been a monumentally obtuse bunch, don’t you think? Yet the tradition is not the least bit in doubt about the fact that Jesus chose a community to share his ministry and in some sense taught them. He did not choose instead to be a lone ranger. Christianity is not about individual projects of personal salvation; it is about a community in where all the members work out their salvation together, even if it means doing so with some trepidation and nervousness. Why? Because we are all in this together. It is the nature of humans to form community because we are interdependent, no matter what some politicians or the financial establishment argue to the contrary.

So when Paul writes to the Philippians, in the warmest epistle he ever wrote to a community, he betrays a certain concern that perhaps they still have the a bit of the Old Adam in them, what Mark Twain called, “ordinary human cussedness.” It was likely coming out in the form of petty jealousies and rivalries, things that are the very best ways to undermine community. Why else admonish them to “be of one mind, being of one love, sharing accord” among themselves? Then he launches into one of the most sublime passages in all his letters, perhaps in the entire New Testament. Maybe he was quoting from a hymn that he knew churches like the one at Philippi frequently sang in their worship. Or maybe it was a creedal poem that he or someone else had written. “Have this mindset, or attitude, or frame of mind,” he writes, and then proceeds to describe the “mind” or “thought” that Jesus had. The community is to exhibit the character of its mentor and master. Or, to borrow from one of Paul’s metaphors elsewhere, the body was to follow where the head led. Since there is plenty of encouragement in Christ, since there is the incentive of love, since there is mutual participation in the life of the Spirit, since there is shared affection, there is plenty of reason and abundant strength on which the Philippians can build a more solid community.

This “mindset” or “orientation” that Jesus had is not so easy to get a grip on. The essence is this: Jesus had every opportunity to be or to remain exalted, since he pre-existed this life as God. But in fact he chose not to “grasp” or “cling” to equality with God, but did the opposite. He emptied himself. The rich for our sake became poor. The powerful divested himself of all power. He submitted himself so thoroughly that he became the willing slave of all, humbling himself to experience the totality of human life, including death itself. And not just any death, but death on a cross, the ultimate badge of rejection and dishonor. It is totally counter-intuitive for human beings even to imitate that, let alone to choose to do it because we want to. Quite the contrary. We are taught, especially in this culture, from day one that the goal of life is to succeed, to acquire, to compete. It is not too much to say that the very narrative of Jesus has been warped and twisted by knaves to seduce many a marginal population into servitude on the strength of the notion that to be relegated to scut work, to be underpaid, to be knocked around and ripped off is to be like Jesus, or at least to be like the poor who he said would be with us always. But the essence of Jesus’ community is not to be cringing dogs who slink away from abusive masters, but rather self-giving individuals whose identity is not what we can get for ourselves but what we can give for others.

The project does not extend only to the people who happen to sit in church on Sundays. It goes well beyond the borders of the community. The Church in fact exists not for itself alone but for the sake of the world that Christ died to save. If he emptied himself, so do we. If he gave his life for the sake of the world, so do we. This is what the Church has not learned terribly well. In many places we still cling to old behaviors and old mindsets, which, though not necessarily divisive and destructive, are desperate measures to hold on to what we have and to who we have been. The model of Christ is just the opposite. Let go, let God, let grace guide us into continually spending ourselves for the sake of the world.

Fine. We can say those things and even maybe believe them for a few moments during a sermon. But how can we actually live them? Can we actually live them? And, if so, how? Notice that Paul, who is no stranger to scolding people, does not wag a homiletical finger at the Philippians trying to shame them into behaving differently. The whole point he is making calls them to ground themselves right where he grounds his argument: in the foundational story of Jesus. Think as he thought. Do as he did. The community can hardly do that without being committed to serious prayer and assiduous practice.

The truth is that if transformation is to happen, we have to open ourselves to the process of change. Prayer pries us open. Praying opens us up, of course, to the suffering of the world when we notice and care enough to intercede for those who hurt and ache, indeed for the entire creation that is groaning in the pain of abuse and misuse. But praying is not just, or even primarily the opener of the soul in that sense. To have the mind that we see in Christ Jesus involves our constantly turning to and gazing upon Jesus himself. Obviously a place to begin is the gospels. But Jesus is not just found there. Jesus is also present when the community gathers to share bread and wine, his body and blood. Yet Jesus is not just there either. Jesus, if you believe what he says, is present when two or three are gathered together in his Name. But Jesus is more than that, too. Jesus is in the faces of the poor, the dispossessed, the oppressed, the marginalized, the condemned, the executed, the hosts of men and women who are dragged through the courts and sentenced to die just as he was. Prayer sharpens both our sense and our senses to behold the Body of Christ in every part and every cell of his creation, each of which bears the unmistakable stamp of the Word which calls all things and all creatures into being. And prayer can also be shutting off the lights, turning down the sensory data, stilling the tongue, putting down the pen, pulling the shades down so that we, retreating into our deepest selves, meet the One who is resplendently alive in the heart of darkness and silence. It is not one kind of prayer or the other, but both. Activists need contemplatives and contemplatives need activists, and no matter which we are, we probably need to practice some of what does not come so easily to us in our prayer, just so that we can learn something of the fullness of him who emptied himself and submitted to death.

It is interesting that the Philippians hymn goes on to say that God has highly exalted Jesus as a consequence of his self-emptying. God has given him a Name that is above every Name, that at the Name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father. You may think that that piece of it has nothing to do with you. And perhaps you are right, inasmuch as it really goes beyond what Paul is saying about unity in the Church. But maybe there is something embedded in this old hymn, this majestic poem that is so true that it goes beyond even the confines of the Jesus story. Maybe the Truth, as heavy as gravity itself, is caught up in the paradox that giving is oddly the way of receiving; that abasement is followed by exaltation; that emptying oneself of power and prestige is the true road to glory, not just for Jesus but for all. Don’t count on the world to document that terribly finely. But every once in awhile somebody bothers to believe it and it makes all the difference. You can almost count them on your fingers and toes, they are so rare. Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis, Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa, St. Margaret, St. Elizabeth,… No, you can’t count them. The numbers stack up. There are more than you would think, more than you can number. Some are sitting right here who have given up a day to be arrested in the cause of justice or who have given up an evening to intercede for Troy condemned to die, who have gone to Israel to wage peace, who slug it out for the spurned immigrant. Long grows the list of ways in which ordinary folk do not count themselves as the darlings of God, but empty themselves and become obedient to the most human of all things, the leveler Death. Wherefore their names, united to the Immortal Son of God, are written in heaven.

© Frank Gasque Dunn

Ten Years After 9/11/01

2011-09-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

The following is a speech I made at the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, on September 16, 2001. I shared the program with at least a dozen other clergy, most of whom invoked the Bible as a warrant for retaliation against the enemy. It was assumed by nearly everyone there that we would certainly go to war, which turned out to be accurate. But that is not the only thing that was accurate, as it turned out.

I speak in the name of God, the Creator of all, the Redeemer of all, the Sanctifier of all.

When the nation was clamoring for revenge and retaliation for civilian American lives tragically slaughtered by the enemy, and every avenue to avert war had been exhausted, the President of the United States signed the Declaration of War. Then he put his head down on the cabinet table and wept.

The President was Woodrow Wilson. The year was 1917. And the day was Good Friday.

America entered a war that had begun with a terrorist act: an organized assassination. It was the cruelest and ghastliest of all wars this planet had ever known. You can read the Books of Remembrance in British churches and see page after page of names of young men who were slaughtered in the trenches of France. Literally a generation of the young was wiped out in the horror that ensued.

I don’t know why the President wept on that Good Friday afternoon. Did he weep for himself? Did he weep for America? Maybe it was because he knew, as he told a veteran news correspondent and editor, “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance….” Or was it because he sensed the deep irony that on that very day when the Christian world was remembering the death of Jesus, he was signing the death warrant for Christ to die all over again in young doughboys who would lie beneath crosses in places like Flanders Field?

We meet today at the monument of the turning point of another great war. We meet in a town where an incredible number of young lives were wiped out in an invasion that ultimately would mean liberation from a regime of unprecedented horror and evil. America entered that war only when, on a quiet sunny morning, enemy bombs had made mincemeat of The United States fleet. President Roosevelt was outraged. The country was shocked. December 7, 1941, is still a day that lives in infamy.

Today we are faced with another momentous occasion. This time, another sneak attack. This time, an act of obscene hatred and violence carried out again against unarmed citizens. But this time, a complicated enemy hard to detect, difficult to pin down, capable of cloning its own violence hundreds of times. And an enemy convinced in righteous indignation that it has God on its side; that its acts of terror and destruction are not only justified but also holy; that its program of retaliation is compelling enough for its warriors gladly to yield their lives to fiery deaths, so right they are.

I talk today about history because human history is exactly what the Judeo-Christian tradition understands to be the sphere of God’s activity. And if we are going to speak about God, we have to look at history, God’s lesson book.

What have we learned? One lesson that we have learned is that violence breeds more violence, and terror begets more terror. We cannot play into that! If, in the best judgment of our leaders, this nation must engage in military action, no doubt the country will support them—no doubt at all. But do not be deluded into believing that that violence will not come at great cost! Far more than the lives we will lose in any one military action, the cost will spiral into an ever-broadening wildfire of hatred and revenge. Through our cries for retaliation and revenge, in so many throats this week, we need to hear and heed the words of Ghandi. He said, “If we live by the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be both blind and toothless.” Pour out instead your prayers for peace and healing as you have never done before. Envision a world wrapped in its Mother’s arms. If this dreadful attack is a wake up call, let it rouse us to double our efforts for peace: peace in our hearts, peace in our homes, peace in our nation, peace for our planet.

What have we learned? We have learned that religious intolerance and hatred, no matter of what stripe, are tools of evil. Hear me carefully. I speak in the name of the Prince of Peace. If we, individually and as a nation, turn against one another in disrespect and outright hatred, we are replicating the same bigotry and self-righteousness of the terrorists themselves. There is no difference between Islamic fanaticism and Jewish fanaticism and Christian fanaticism except the labels. All are life denying and peace shattering. God calls all people of this world into unity with God and one another. Let there be no place in this society, under attack in part because of our openness and acceptance, for finger pointing and blame laying and scapegoating. Reach out in support to Arab Americans. Join with Muslims as with all others in the family of religions and assure them of your good will. Live with courage the words of the hymn, “Who loves the Father as his child is surely kin to me.”

What have we learned? We have learned that God shows up at the least likely of times and in the worst stenches imaginable. Julia Ward Howe wrote that we have seen God in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps. Well, this week we have seen the face of God: in exhausted firefighters, in strangers reaching out to hold the grieving, in physicians and nurses and technicians aiding the wounded, in hands digging down into the rubble to clear a path for life where there is life. “Where charity and love dwell, God is truly there.” In the Persian Gulf War, when some Iraqi soldiers finally came out of their bunkers expecting to be killed by Americans, they found themselves instead washed and fed and treated humanely. That is the spirit of Christ. That is the face of God.

What we have yet to learn is that Jesus was not joking when he said, “Love your enemies.” “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who persecute you, pray for those who abuse you.” That is the lesson that the world needs to hear, and that is the way to the healing that we so deeply seek.

Whatever the reason, President Wilson was right to weep, just as he was right to sign the Declaration of War. Sometimes we have to do what we most fear. But, in the end, if we are as open, as humble, as loving as we can be, then, in the long march of history the world will become as God created it to be: free, and whole.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Good Behavior

2011-09-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

Praying and Living Forgiveness

Genesis 50:15-21
Matthew 18:21-35

When I was in elementary school, we got report cards every six weeks. Six weeks zooms by now, but in those days it was like a semester, a term of months on end. As the weeks dragged by, I was never ever worried about what grades I would get; but sometimes I sweat bullets about what comments the teacher would write on the back. The word “conduct” named the category that was my greatest challenge. Teachers would threaten to write bad reports to parents if we talked out of turn, broke into line at lunch or recess, took up unnecessary class time with silliness, or were generally impolite to other students. I am not sure what would have happened had we spoken disrespectfully to a teacher herself. Such was so far from anybody’s mind that it was never discussed.

One grading period, my second grade teacher, Eva Stone Long, otherwise known as “Sister Long,” wrote a comment on the back of my report card. Among a couple of compliments, she noted, and I quote verbatim, “…likes to talk too much.” I was horrified. Not because it was not true, of course, but because I knew I would catch it when my parents read it. And I was totally right. Interestingly, I cannot remember what Mama said, although I am sure it was plenty. But Daddy, I recall, virtually came uncorked. The message I got from his protracted lecture was that it was fine to make any grade I made, but what would never ever do was to get a “conduct” comment. The least I could do, he pronounced, was to go to school and behave.

Good behavior generally means conforming to somebody’s idea of deportment, like Mrs. Long’s. Those of you who have grown up in a more permissive society probably have no idea of the weight that people my age and older (and maybe some a few years younger) carry around in the form of ethical baggage. It really isn’t ethical, of course. It is internalized fear of being called down for misbehaving. Now, to be sure, some people have escaped that heavy burden by kicking over the traces and becoming utter nonconformists. Such people are not likely to show up in church, not at least until they have made a bit of peace with social expectations, even in a rather freewheeling place like St. Stephen’s. And the reason is rather obvious. They see the Church as being in the business of policing people’s behavior, and they don’t necessarily want theirs to be policed. It is all right, of course, for the Church, like other institutions—school and court, for example—to nurture good behavior in other people (including our children) inculcating in them good behaviors and sharpening their distaste for bad. At the same time, this idea that the Church is all about making people nice and culture gentler is exactly what draws some people to it.

Something is terribly, tragically wrong with all this. And it is wrong not because there is anything the matter with being nice and well behaved (I want to say nothing to discourage either), but because we have somehow managed to warp the notion of good behavior to mean conforming to prevailing social expectations and specifically to exclude several kinds of behaviors that Jesus seem to think were pretty important. One of those practices is forgiveness, a theme that fills our scriptures today. I do not mean to say that forgiveness is not integrated into the fabric of societal expectations, because to some extent it is. Polite society expects that folks will apologize for oversights and mistakes, and that generally those apologies will be accepted. But forgiveness in the radical sense described in today’s gospel or in the Genesis story about Joseph and his brothers is far past anything that can be described as accepting an apology. It comes out of a different way of looking at reality. It reflects values so qualitatively different from our cultural norms that this kind of forgiveness can be rightly called subversive.

As some of you are aware, my sermons this year all look at the practice of prayer from some angle, and today’s focus on forgiveness is no exception. In its simplest state, prayer is practicing the presence of God. It is practicing being Godlike. Right there emerges some boundaries of what we do and do not pray for. To the extent that we know anything about the nature of God—and we Christians claim to know a right good bit, inasmuch as we have identified Jesus as the embodiment of God—we can say with assurance that one does not pray for the destruction of one’s enemies for example. No, one may pray for protection, for the enemy to have a change of heart, for strength to withstand the assaults of the enemy; but the Christian stops short of praying for the destruction of enemies for the simple reason that Christ commanded us to love them. He did not, by the way, suggest that we do so because it would be immediately rewarding or because it would save us lots of time resolving conflicts or yet because it would be a popular practice or easy.

The parable of the unforgiving slave is crystal clear. The slave is enjoined to treat his fellows as the master has treated him. God shows mercy on us, therefore we show mercy on others. “Forgive us our sins” is a prayer that is predicated on the assurance that we will forgive those who sin against us. Now how it is that we can pray such a thing day after day, week after week, year in and year out, while harboring grudges, driving wedges between ourselves and others, collecting injustices, hating those who have wronged us is, well, not so big a mystery. Quite simply, we do not believe what we say. We do not believe what we pray. And when we come right down to it, we don’t believe Jesus.

Need I point out that ten years ago today the People of the United States of America—certainly not without exception, but on the whole—gave to their government permission to wreak vengeance on our enemies. You may argue that the teachings of Jesus are no way to conduct a foreign policy, and I suspect Jesus would indeed agree with you, disinterested as he was in the foreign policies of empires. But that does not get us off the hook, because the hook is consistency and honesty. If you are going to wage war, wage war; but don’t try to baptize it and call it “Christian.” It you are going to hate your enemy, whoever he or she is, go ahead and hate; but don’t turn around and expect that God will show you mercy when you show none yourself. Punish your enemy if you must; but be aware that it leaves you defenseless when you pray a hollow prayer, “…as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

That is strong stuff! You will no doubt point out to me that nobody can live this way; that the nation would be in tatters if we tried it and your own life would be untenable if you risked it. Moreover, I suspect that some sitting right here could point out that the preacher today has no earthly idea of what it is to suffer untold abuse at the hands of tormentors, that your own experience of victimhood qualifies you as an exception to the ethic of forgiveness. Fair enough. I could respond by saying, “You know, you’re right. This is too hard a teaching to take really seriously. It is after all an ideal, one of those many that the gospel—indeed the Bible—is packed with. God, being really sweet, has no intention of making us feel bad about our propensity to hate, but wants us rather to feel quite affirmed. Thus, the notion of being forgiving is a nice one but altogether unworkable, a fact of which our Omniscient God must surely be aware.” And so forth.

But something else is in play here. Look at it this way. Why do you suppose that God would actually care whether we are forgiving or not? What does it matter? Why would Jesus have put so much emphasis on forgiveness? For an answer to those questions, I turn to the last chapter of the Book of Genesis, in which Joseph and his brothers finally come to terms about the brothers’ dreadful misbehavior in selling him into slavery and then lying about it, and Joseph’s response to it all. Years have passed since the brothers conspired to get rid of their pesky little arrogant sibling. Still more years have passed since famine had driven them from Canaan to Egypt in search of grain, only to find there that the presumably lost Joseph has become vizier to Pharaoh. All this while the brothers have had an uneasy conscience about their guilt, and now with the buffer of their old father gone, they wonder if Joseph will cash in on the grudge he might rightly bear against them. So they first send him a message, restating what the old man had said about how Joseph ought forgive their trespass. Joseph responds by weeping. They get up the courage to go see him, and kneeling down, present themselves as his slaves. Then Joseph says something profound. “What you meant for evil against me, God meant for good.” With that statement the story utters a profound truth. God is bigger than our projects and prejudices. In the long sweep of human activity—indeed of the world itself—the very guilt behind the heinous crime, the evil intention, the awful deceit: God has pulled all this together into the great pageant of salvation in which nothing is lost. Through the whole tragedy, God has caused a remnant to be saved, bringing long-term good out of short-term evil. Joseph thus has no effective choice but to forgive his brothers, for to do otherwise would be to pose himself against the very Word that God had already spoken.

We do, I hope, get the message: that forgiveness is the very nature of God, because God’s purposes are always to bring about good. That is what the world cannot give through the machinations of empire and the assertion of one group or one person over another. For God’s good to happen on a human scale inevitably entails more than a few Josephs who can see beyond the moment to the overarching Providence that holds all souls in life and all the world in its healing embrace.

That is the real ethical agenda of the Church. It is to continue to be the community that God has created to express this urgent push towards life, to embody the fierce compulsion to save. One cannot join or long belong to the forces of good if one’s focus shifts from forgiveness to revenge, from community to tribalism, from merciful to unmerciful. God’s work is healing and wholeness, and so the vocation of Joseph and of you and me is that same healing and wholeness that conquers hate and evil, bit by bit, when we live the words we pray, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Desperate Housewife

2011-08-14T19:22:00.000-07:00

Prayer and Desperation

Matthew 15:21-28

America’s Four Gods is the name of a book I am reading. It is an intriguing investigation into what we as a people say about God and what that says about us. The authors, sociologists, in their research discovered that there are five types of people in this country when you divvy them up according to what they think about God. There are those that perceive God as authoritative, those who believe in a God who is benevolent, a third group who thinks of God as critical, another bunch for whom God is distant, and the fifth group who are atheists and don’t believe in God at all.

I suspect that, like many typologies, this one breaks down at several points. I simply say so based on the fact that I am not so sure I have only one basic view of God, but rather an image of God that shifts and changes depending on the day of the week. I doubt that I am alone. Still, the authors make a persuasive case that these four notions or images of God are swimming around in the minds of people in our culture, and that they have a great deal to do with the arguments we have in this country generally called “culture wars.”

It is not so much on culture wars that I’d like for us to focus today as it is the question of what idea we have of God and how that affects the way we pray. I should pause to point out to a great many of you who have joined us in the last several months that my year-long project in preaching is to look at each Sunday’s scriptures with a view to what light they can shed on the practice of prayer, a quintessential religious activity that we sometimes don’t understand very well.

There probably is no story in the New Testament that better illustrates the crisis of prayer than the gospel lesson we have today. The Canaanite woman in Matthew’s gospel (15:21-28) has a serious problem. In fact she is desperate. Her little daughter is demon possessed. But on top of that, the woman is an outsider, not in her own territory—that was Gentile and so is she—but because she stands outside Israel, and thus separated from the source of healing that Jesus brings. He is, as her address indicates, “Son of David.” If the woman were American, and were studied by the sociologists Froese and Bader to find out where she landed on the God question, it is quite likely that she would fall in the group that sees God as benevolent, engaged in the affairs of humans, but not a punitive, judging God.

How could we make that guess? Well, if her notion of God were that God is authoritative and thus judgmental, she would more than likely believe that he daughter was demon possessed as repayment for something the daughter or mother or somebody had done to anger God. If she believed in a critical God, likewise she would see that God was judgmental, but she would hardly believe that God had time to intervene on her behalf. If her view of God were that God is distant, God would be neither interested in her plight nor judgmental, but utterly unconnected with what was happening in her life. As it is in Matthew’s version of the story, the woman cries after Jesus and pesters the disciples with her cries and pleas. The disciples want her gone. Jesus does not answer her. Yet the woman keeps it up. Finally she gets a word from Jesus. It is not clear in the story whether it is to the disciples or to her that he says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel,” but either way that does not stop her. She comes and kneels in front of him, in the posture of worship and implores him, “Lord, help me.”

There are only three prayers—“help,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” So the Canaanite woman’s is pretty direct. “Lord, help me.” We could make up all kinds of things about the woman that might or might not reflect who she was. We don’t in fact know if she was rich or poor or somewhere in between; whether she was a single parent or not; whether she had other problems and issues or not; whether she had done anything else or seen anybody else to secure help for her daughter. But the point of this story is not to report a historical incident, nor to inspire speculation about the woman. The point is that this outsider, this Gentile woman, this mother, in her desperation takes Jesus on and stands toe to toe with him. So when for reasons best known to himself Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” she is undeterred. She comes back at him giving him as good as she gets from him: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Much else can be said about this woman and her role in Jesus’ life and ministry. But skip all that and simply look at her tussle with Jesus, for that is what prayer is, isn’t it? Is the woman not you in some hour of your own desperation? Is she not one of us, determined not to give up fighting for one utterly dependent on her and whose cause is a matter of life or death? Although Jesus is for us a divinity unseen, our prayers to him—to God—the two are interchangeable for the purposes of our discussion—our problem is that the concealed God is hard to get ahold of, hard to get an answer from, hard to move into action. That is of no great importance perhaps until the situation gets desperate, and then we’ll take whatever crumb we can get. Our Canaanite friend reminds us to beat God’s door down, to pester the living daylights out of disciples and saints and onlookers that stand in the way, or who look at us askance, or who try to shoo us in another direction. She exhorts us to stop at nothing until we get satisfaction from this unresponsive God who seems to mistake human beings for dogs!

OK. That is putting it a bit harshly, I admit, and maybe taking it all a little too far. But I think there is some warrant for believing that the story actually addresses the issue of desperation in prayer. From Luke’s gospel we can take a lesson from the little parable sometimes called “the importunate widow,” who pestered the unjust judge until he granted her request just so she would shut up. How much more, asked Jesus, will God grant justice to the ones who cry to God day and night? That message seems consistent with the Canaanite woman’s experience: keep on and don’t lose heart.

When we are desperate, someone hardly has to convince us to pull all the stops out. And more and more people are getting desperate as they approach the drowning point amid the tumultuous waves of this economy. People are losing jobs right and left. They are short of cash. They are out of food. They have no money for essential medicine. They are maybe a paycheck or two away from being unable to pay their mortgages or their rent or their electric bills. What has all that to do with prayer? Those who believe that God is engaged in the world, who believe God actually takes note of what is going on, whose eye is on the sparrow, have no trouble understanding that this is not a theoretical problem. And those who believe in a benevolent God—whose love is enduring and whose mercy is endless—do not get snagged by the notion that problems accrue because we have somehow angered a wrathful deity, much as one might foolheartedly arouse the anger of a mother bear by threatening one of her cubs. But what if you believe in a distant, impersonal, detached God? Do we need to convince you that prayer works? Do you need me to demonstrate how in your own desperate circumstances God is available and engaged?

The deeper I get into this, the more I realize that the way we pray—especially when we are between a rock and a hard place—is directly related to who and what we believe we are praying to. If you believe that God is actively involved in the world and in our lives; if you can even allow for the possibility that God cares about what is happening to you and me; then it does not matter much which of the four God-camps you belong to, God invites you to grapple with God and pour your heart out doing so. No room for niceties here, the careful phrasing of a collect or the beauty of liturgy. Just go to it. Pray, “Help, Lord, help!” If your God is distant and you have trouble seeing what sense it makes to pray, well, pray in whatever way you can, not in whatever way you can’t.

Maggie Ross, who is an Anglican solitary, wrote a book some years ago that I cannot part with, called The Fire of Your Life. In it she says that when she was living in Manhattan she had trouble praying and asked a friend what she should do. “Oh,” he said, “pray for things like taxicabs when you need them. If it makes you feel safer, don’t ask God for them, but pray to something inanimate like a fire hydrant.” So Maggie says that she spent several weeks experimenting with that and, when she was late for an appointment, she would pray to the nearest fire hydrant for a cab. Taxis would appear from nowhere. If ten people were along the block signaling for a cab, the one taxi that appeared would pull right in front her. She could get taxis at rush hour, in the rain, on the Friday of a three-day weekend. Then there ensued the dark night of the taxicab, and the joke was over.

That may seem bizarre to you, but I think I understand it. The reality of God has little to do with what we think of God—and that is true no matter what one of the groups, including atheist, that you might fall into. Prayer is giving ourselves over, heart and soul, to the great Mystery of the universe, crying out our need, doing what the Canaanite woman did when she interceded for her daughter, clamoring in the darkness for the Bread of Life or for healing. That God would turn and listen, respond, get with us in our weakness, hear our panic and soothe our fears is as improbable as praying to a fire hydrant would produce a taxi. But time after time, person after person, reports that it is true. For those who doggedly stick to their notion of God—whether that God is a strict judge or a critical impersonal deity or a remote force not interested in us—it takes perhaps more of a leap than they are willing to take. In the end, it does not matter what you think or what I think. Reality is reality. And until we throw ourselves on the mercy of the universe tossing ourselves upon the breast of the universe’s God, we’ll never know what works or what does not.

But you and I both know that it is not so simple as all that. At the end of the day we cannot just pray in desperation expecting God to appear out of the sky to rescue us from all our ills. A friend of mine once said that it is easier for the Holy Spirit to get you somewhere if you are already in motion, not inert. If you are hungry, either for bread or for spiritual sustenance, do something about it. Probe, investigate, ask, seek. Keep moving, talking, looking. If you are looking for work, network, talk, do all that you can to keep moving. If the Canaanite woman had sat at home and said her prayers and done nothing else, chances are her daughter would never have been healed. When she got herself up and out and on the street, determined to find the healer who could help her, she found Jesus and eventually got the assistance she sought.

And perhaps that is what prayer mostly is anyway. It is not technique or formula or theology or philosophy. It is simply moving into the Presence with audacity and courage. It is wrestling and struggling with whatever is tormenting us and giving voice to the deepest desires and yearnings of our hearts. It is taking God to task without fear and without groveling. It is letting fly with gusto and doing everything we can with the energy we have. It is when she did that that our Canaanite friend heard his word, “O woman, great is your faith. Be it done to you as you desire.”

Who knows? Will you push on and out of desperation until you hear that too?

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Hope Springs

2011-07-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

My very first sermon in seminary was on the text Romans 8:18-25. Somewhere in the bottom of the barrel I probably still have it. But I don’t have to dig it out and re-read it to remember most of what I said. Like many a fledgling preacher, I did my best to do justice to the text, and did my darnedest to make it interesting to my theoretical hearers. Many people would say that, when it comes to St. Paul, you can do one or the other but not both. Either you can unzip his writing and do your best to figure out what he was talking about; or you can seize some spark that flies off his words and use it to shed some light on contemporary life or perhaps to create some heat of excitement about God or Jesus that people can get worked up about. But it is highly unlikely that the preacher can do both these things.

So, lest you mistake my purpose in preaching today,I am going to let you in on the fact up front that I would like to spark you to get fired up about the gospel if you already aren't, excited about Christian living, enthusiastic about what Jesus Christ means for you and your world. And to come quickly to the point, the key to the message I hear is this verse, which I translate slightly differently from what you have already heard: “When an object of hope is seen, there is no further need for hope. Whoever hopes for what one sees already? But if we hope for something that we do not see, we wait for it patiently.” This slice of Romans is about hope, and that is where we begin.

One of the reasons that a number of people have great difficulties with St. Paul is that their view of life is so different from his that much of what he says makes little sense to them. I might also point out that one of the reasons that some people love St. Paul is that they assume what he is talking about is what they are talking about—and that he therefore agrees with them. But the truth is that Paul’s outlook on the world, history, and the future are hardly at all in sync with what the average person—even the average Christian person—even the biblical literalist—thinks and believes in the 21st century. In short, Paul believes that Jesus Christ, especially through his death and resurrection, has brought about the swift end of the world as we know it and has inaugurated an age that is radically new. Paul has sense enough to know that the world “as we know it” has by no means disappeared. He believes, however, that it is on its way to conclusion. Christ has made possible an entry into a new age by those who believe in him. This is not a matter of going to heaven when you die, as a great many people would in time come to believe. It is a matter of living a qualitatively different kind of life here and now, a life that will continue past death but which begins not at death but with our union with Christ through baptism.

If you will stop and think about that for a minute, I believe you will recognize that you have heard something like that before. It is not entirely strange language. But it surely is different from what a lot of folks think Christianity is about. It is clearly not about living a pretty decent life with the hope that you will be rewarded with eternal life in heaven when you finally die. And it is definitely not about having God at your beck and call so that when you have a physical or spiritual need God will jump to answer you the way you want. All of that may be fine, but it certainly is not what Paul has in mind.

Now it is important to see that the core of what Paul is driving at if we are to understand anything much about hope. If for Paul, hope is not about going to be with Jesus when you die, let alone doing so because you have been good and deserve to live in heaven forever, neither is hope about extending your prosperity or your influence or your position here on earth. Hope is what keeps us going towards the realization, the fulfillment, of this new age that Jesus has begun. Hope has to do with the redemption of our bodies from the old world—the one we presently live in—and the transition of our bodies to the new world, a world which he describes as “glory.” That world is indeed a world that has not yet fully come into being. And it is indeed a world that, like Christ himself, will never end. We are on our way to its fulfillment, but be sure of one thing: that world has already begun. We, if we are “children of God,” believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, are right now living in it.

All this is not a matter for preachers and theologians to slug out. It has practical impact for everything the Christian does from Monday through Saturday, as it were. Now here is the thing: you do not have to understand or even agree with Paul’s world view in order to see that the important dynamic here is hope. Paul sees hope as not just a factor in human psychology—the thing that keeps us moving towards a better future that we can imagine either in this or some other world—but a dynamic built into the very fabric of the universe itself. He sees that the entire natural world, while marked by a bondage to decay and death, is groaning in anticipation of being renewed, liberated, brought into a new life of freedom that the children of God share through Jesus. That is important for a couple of reasons. One is that the natural world is not just a disposable playground for the human race, but is itself thoroughly redeemed through Christ and therefore has some lasting importance. I don’t know that we can argue that Paul sees the world as being put in good shape the way modern ecologists would imagine that, but it certainly has an importance that rules trashing it totally unacceptable.

The question is: what are we hoping for, as Christians, and what difference does our hope make? If we take Paul seriously—even if we have a different view of the world from his—it seems to me that we will see that the essence of our hope is for a radically different future for ourselves and for our world. When Paul goes to spell out what Christians actually practice, he uses such phrases as “walking by the Spirit.” By that he means that we give our allegiance to a Christ who brings us into a life that is vastly different from the way the world ordinarily lives. Instead of greediness, it is a life of sharing. Instead of a life of self-preservation, we live lives of compassion. Rather than a life of fear, it is a life of confidence. We do not behave inconsiderately or arrogantly, but with understanding. We understand that whatever sufferings we endure for the sake of living this life in union with the Risen Lord are nothing compared with the glory that we are on our way to sharing fully, as little by little our very selves are transformed. Rather than being motivated by the fears and divisions and ethnic clashes and economic fluctuations and political rivalries that fill the workaday world, we are directed by the Spirit of God that lives within us, producing such things as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Day by day we hope to live more of God’s life and less of a godless life. And we see ourselves moving into a future that looks more and more like the risen Christ. Paul calls it “glory.”

So our hope is not about pie in the sky by and by. It is about a thorough transformation of life right now, not because we think that by living in a new way we will gain eternal life, but precisely because living in this new way is eternal, unending life. That kind of hope cannot help but make a tremendous difference in the way we view the meaning of our lives. And the more we live in this kind of hope the more the whole world changes. The more we practice working for justice in the world, the more just the world becomes. The more we struggle for equality for all those who are oppressed, the more equitable the world becomes. The more we give ourselves to be living sacrifices, totally dedicated to God’s purposes, the more light shines through even our cracked places, illuminating the world with God’s goodness. When we bless those who persecute us, when we love our enemies for the sake of Christ, the more we add to the total energy of Christ in the world. When we live as peacemakers and reconcilers rather than warmongers and hotheads, the more chance of the world reflecting the Spirit of God more strongly.

Be ablaze with light and joy as you live out this hope! The darker things get, whether economically or politically or socially, the more the world needs you to walk by the Spirit in the apparently foolish hope that your life can make the world a better place for all God’s children and creatures. Keep the vision of the future before you, and don’t let those who pit tribe against tribe, race against race, who rouse the rabble for their own ends, enlist you in their service. Remember your baptism, and spend as much time as you can making every life you touch feel the glory of the Spirit of God which is the love which lives in you. Let every pain you ever feel unite you to the suffering of the Lord Christ, and turn each ache into a new occasion to shower compassion on the aching world.

About the bleakest, most hopeless novel I have read in the last few years is one by that wonderful author Cormac McCarthy. It is called The Road, and pictures the world after an apocalyptic catastrophe has destroyed civilization. A father and son cling together against terror and the constant specter of death as they pursue the long road to the sea. Their very journey is a journey of hoping against hope that they can somehow find a way to survive, drawing on everything they have ever learned and all that they can remember. At the end of the road is death, but also the promise of life in the form of a small human community that might be able to make a new start. It is small, but it is a hope. Most of the time, thank God, our lives have not come to quite so stark a place. But even if they should, we have those things that abide—faith, hope, and love—and the one that keeps us moving towards God’s future is hope.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Numbers Game

2011-06-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

Trinitarian Musings

In a remote forest miles from the nearest Guatemalan village, on a windy and downright cold morning in August five years ago, I stood in a group of indigenous people, descendants of the ancient Mayans, curious about the religious rite I was about to witness. They had a great idea on that cold morning during the rainy season, also known as “invierno” or winter there, and that was to build a bonfire. Shivering in my summer clothes, I could hardly wait. Women clad in colorful native cottons, began laying the fire, placing incense discs in a cruciform pattern. They scattered ample grain around the circle that was to be the base of the fire. On top of that they placed the pastel petals of bunches of chrysanthemums. After the wood was gathered and laid on the fire, shamans, including at least one woman, oversaw the burning of various objects—including cigars, beans, coffee, grain, and various liquid drinks, all poured on the sacred fire. Facing in turn the four directions, the assembly invoked the winds and the gods, summoned the spirits of the ancestors, and ultimately had what looked to me like a Christian healing service, the shamans taking persons one at a time and laying on hands over their whole bodies, praying for healing, prosperity, success, wholeness.

It didn’t feel so strange to me, this ceremony with roots more ancient than Christianity. Partly, no doubt, that was because it included any number of elements contributed by Roman Catholicism and various other Christian expressions from the past several centuries. I came away with the distinct feeling that I had worshiped that morning, though the language was one I did not know and various ritual practices were outside my experience. I would not want to do those modern Mayans a disservice by calling their ceremony “Christian,” because it clearly wasn’t. And yet I recognized elements of my own community’s practice, including the building of the New Fire at the Great Vigil of Easter, that bore out the fact that so many religious symbols and practices are the dances that human beings do around One God.

And that brings me to the occasion we are here to celebrate today: Trinity Sunday. Anglican Christians have been rather reserved in celebrating doctrines and dogmas. The Book of Common Prayer makes some provision for celebrating Corpus Christi, for example, but ten to one, half of you don’t miss it or even know what it is about. No reflection on you; that is just par for the Anglican course. Not so with the Trinity. Every year, joining with most liturgical Christians, we celebrate the Blessed Trinity a week after Pentecost Day. Most of the time, in my experience, preachers on Trinity Sunday either try to explain the doctrine of the Trinity or complain that it is so hopelessly complex that there is no earthly use in trying to do so. Both approaches, frankly, irritate me to the point that I usually arrange to take Trinity Sunday off, or, if not, like today, preach on it myself.

I presume to understand what the doctrine of the Trinity is driving at, which is different from saying that I presume to understand the Trinity. But understanding is not my aim today, but rather what I would call encouragement—or perhaps exhortation—or maybe, with luck, even inspiration. I would like to convince you of the value in assuming that God is so great that we cannot possibly understand God in limited rational categories. And, if that is true, then the question I pose today is how come it is “Trinity” Sunday, rather than “Plurality” Sunday? I’m not joking. Why only three ways—primary ways—of thinking about God, as if somehow God can be squeezed into that particular formula? Hold off, all ye who are traditional theologians! Give me a little room here. Let me press my point before the wheels come off your wagon.

As far back as the Priestly document that we read today as Genesis 1, and much farther, the ancient Hebrews were using “Elohim” as one of several words to denote God. The word is plural, no doubt a vestige of an even more ancient past when before “God” our ancestors had a pantheon of gods. But even when Moses molded Hebrew monotheism, there were some aspects of God that couldn’t be quite neatly pressed into the container. They were not other gods, but certainly they were dimensions of the One God that were somehow more than characteristics or descriptors. Take, for example, the Hebrew word “Shekinah,” which in later Hebrew writing is a circumlocution for the holy nearness of God to God’s people. Although we don’t find the word itself in the Bible, we do find the idea. And it comes to have great importance in the New Testament, because it is akin to the belief that God peculiarly dwelt in the person of Jesus.

While the presence of God is connected with various places, and above all with the Ark of the Covenant that goes before Israel in battle symbolically representing the presence of Yahweh, God in the Old Testament frequently appears as “the Angel of the Lord.” In a number of stories, it is clear that “the Angel of the Lord” is a way of talking about God, as is the case, for example, when Jacob wrestles with the angel. It really is God that Jacobs wrestles with, as Jacob himself says, “I have seen the face of God and lived.” In fact, the “face of God,” while clearly a metaphor, is another way of talking about the divine presence, in perhaps a stronger, more intimate way. And a third way is to speak about the glory of God. Ultimately, that is what “shekinah” comes to mean perhaps most directly.

Now, to be sure, these don’t come close to being rival gods, or different beings. But there is still another term in Hebrew literature that becomes the focus for a whole body of literature in itself. That is wisdom. You have encountered that notion. In fact, it played a part in the Great Vigil of Easter. The books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and Wisdom depict Wisdom as a helpmate to God in fashioning the world. Wisdom is clearly God, even possibly an aspect of God, but at the same time she can be spoken of as a separate person. She is the one who fashions the works of God. One can see similarities between the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit and Wisdom, as well as similarities between Wisdom and the Word of God, which becomes incarnate in Jesus.

And this is just the beginning. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all have traditions of Names of God. And in each of the monotheistic religions there is a tradition of disclaiming that any one of them is absolutely definitive or descriptive. We are heavily agreed—certainly Judaism and Islam are—that there is but one God, no matter how many names that God can wear. Christianity is slightly different because we talk of God in three persons, while insisting that all the persons are expressions of a oneness that we call—guess what?—God.

Human beings are remarkably united in the belief that there is a “higher power” or some “higher powers” in the universe. When it comes right down to it, is there any difference between the Mayan ceremony out in the woods of Sacatepequez and us who are singing “Holy, holy, holy” today? Is there any difference between the 99 Names of God in the Quran and the various names we give Jesus and the Holy Spirit, not to mention God the Father, in Christian tradition? Have we simply taken the old pantheon of divinities (such as the Greek gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus) and rolled them all into one? Is our monotheism functionally different from, say, the Hindu understanding of Atman, Brahman, and Vishnu, and all the many avatars that Vishnu, for example, can assume?

Maybe it really does not make much difference at all what we take God to be. But I have a slightly different take on it. And here is where my exhortation comes in. It is possible that the worst disservice we can do to God, or at least to the idea of God, is to assume that God is small enough for the human mind to contain God. That may be far worse than our getting mixed up and thinking the wrong things about the Trinity or getting confused about what is an aspect or what is an avatar or what is a persona of God. God is not much on being domesticated, trained like a pet or controlled like a not-too-bright friend, always doing our bidding. To live in God, far more than merely believing that there is a God, involves opening oneself to mystery, to the power of story, to the presence of paradox in life. In other words, there is no way we can get it all down to the very simple so that we can move on to the next thing. God is far more than we can sketch out with textbook definitions.

And here is what inspires me and what I hope inspires you. There is no part of life, no experience, no feeling or thought, no problem or challenge that somehow doesn’t involve God. This marvelous and messy life we are living is a process where everything and everybody is caught up in things like light and shadow, good and evil, struggle and peace, giving and taking, failing and succeeding, dying and living. God is involved in all of it in one way or another. God’s business, so to say, is not just with the nice, polite and tame parts of life, the kinds of things your grandmother thought you ought to be preoccupied with when you come to church. God is also down and dirty, in the grit and grime, in the tick bite and poison ivy, in the untamed sexual expression and the hideous birth defect. There is no place that God is not, and no part of life where God is somehow above showing up. But the Good News is that in all these things, the nature of God is community. The crucible for discovering community is relatedness. And the goal of human relationships is to express love.

And before you know it, we are back from a list of a thousand things and from a list of 99 Names to a very short list of basics. Three, in fact. There is the undifferentiated creation and the God who is present in it all. There is the marvel of community, made possible when Love emerges in human flesh. And there is energy that keeps forming human community mirroring that Love we keep striving for and which, though it eludes us, still drives us onward.

And when you give a name to those three things, they are not a proposition to be debated but a way of life in a community of utter belovedness. You can call them Creator, Savior, and Life-giver. Or you can call them by the ancient names of Abba, Son, and Holy Spirit. Put aside words and labels, and draw closer to the Fire. It is the Truth that warms and changes you until you become aflame with love itself.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

In-Flow

2011-06-12T10:37:00.000-07:00

Experiencing Pentecost

John 20:19-23

We still have a few hours of Easter left. The alleluias still ring. The Paschal Candle still burns. Pentecost is a part of Easter. Indeed, John’s gospel folds the heart of Pentecost—the giving of the Holy Spirit—into the story of the Day of Resurrection itself. Luke and later tradition break them apart, and there is a good deal of value in that. But John and much of the Early Church saw Easter as encompassing all the mighty acts of the Risen Lord, including the coming of the Holy Spirit.

A part of the Resurrection story is that the Jesus empowers his disciples to carry on his work in the world. To take that out of the Easter story is to leave Jesus risen, but high and dry. The whole point of the Jesus story from conception to ascension is that it is as much about us as it is about him. We are united to him. We are infused with his spirit, Holy Spirit. We are alive with him, sharing his Divine Life.

But wait a minute. You have heard all that before, certainly if you have been hanging around St. Stephen’s for very long. What difference is it making? What does it mean in your life and in the life of this community?

I think you have had the experience of Pentecost, and I don’t mean coming to church on Pentecost Day. I believe that, perhaps more than you realize, you have experienced the infusion of power. On some occasion you have been faced with something quite beyond your known capacity. You might have been fearful, overwhelmed at the thought of doing something so strange and daunting. You have had a speech to make, an athletic feat to perform, a role to play, a song to sing, a particularly challenging interview, or possibly the problem of coping with an illness—yours or someone else’s—that totally knocks the props from under you. Somewhere there comes to you an uncanny power, perhaps an unexpected calm, a surge of confidence, or perhaps a kind of “zoning out” that curiously positions you to drive the ball or sway the crowd or do the task you simply would never have imagined you could.

What does it feel like? Does it feel as if something came and settled on you, some power from an external source? Or does it seem that you have been able to reach deep inside yourself and grasp a hidden strength you may never have known you had? I want to suggest that it hardly matters whether the sensation is that help comes from outside or inside. Either is an experience of “Holy Spirit.” And that is to say that both are experiences of God. God is not external to us, nor internal to us. God cannot be nailed down to such categories, but transcends them.

A few years ago Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published his popular study called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It is a fascinating attempt to articulate what happens when we get “in the zone” or “in the groove.” Going with the flow, in that sense, is more than likely what Tiger Woods feels when he hits the sweetest of shots, or what Joshua Bell must feel like when he makes the violin practically weep for his audience. I think a good argument can be made that “flow,” while an optimal experience, is indeed a relatively common one. On the one hand, we cannot be coached into getting into the flow—it is a gift. But we can be taught how to do things, how to perform or play golf or preach or write, so that eventually something extraordinary begins to happen. Skill and temperament, passion and delight align in such a way that an enormous joy abounds. The human being is peculiarly alive and able to do quite astonishing things.

That is a good percentage of what the event of Pentecost is about. It is about stepping outside one’s fears and giving oneself over to the flow of the Spirit. When that happens, power is unleashed and we are able to do astonishing things. That is in fact what Jesus promises in John’s gospel when he repeatedly teaches the disciples that he lives in them and they in him. They will do, he says, the works he does—and in fact greater works than he does—because he goes to the Father. The Father will send the Advocate who will teach them all things, bringing to mind all that he has taught them. Jesus gives his life for us; we give our hearts and minds to Jesus. Jesus comes from Abba and goes to Abba. Abba sends the Spirit to us enabling us to be the community of love that lives out the commandment that Jesus gives us to love one another and so prove to be his disciples. You can see that all of this is about our being connected—to Jesus, to Abba, to the ever-present Spirit, to each other.

But this is not quite all of Pentecost. Jesus comes into the midst of the scared disciples and greets them with Peace. Then he breathes on them, imparting his breath, his pneuma, his Spirit to them. They are overjoyed on seeing him, and they are empowered by him. Being in the flow of the Spirit means authentic peace, incredible joy and amazing power. And that is what I think is a well kept secret. It is about time we blew the lid off and let each other and the world know that this thing of living in community with Christ is not essentially about onerous chores associated with organizational life. It is rather a wild ride of sheer gladness. Sometimes it is being deeply centered in a way we can only speak of as being peaceful. At other times it is hilarity and great fun. At still other times it is incredibly stunning, this life, in its capacity to speak Truth to worldly power, to fight for justice instead of giving up, to insist on equity instead of capitulating to prestige, to resist making pacts with oppression. Being in the flow of the Spirit is not just about an optimal experience for the sake of the experience (though there is nothing wrong with that!). It is being centered, charged, and empowered to do the right thing. It is about being in the forces aligned with the Truth of the Universe, which is nothing less than God.

Yes, there is scut work to do. No, it is not all attractive. Yes, if we don’t watch it we can get burned out and become relatively useless. No, we don’t have a guarantee that we won’t become self-righteous and have to be taken down a peg or two. Yes, there are days when we tire of stomping grapes in the vineyard of the Lord. But every time one of you speaks up for justice, the Spirit of the Lord has found a voice. Each time you opt for kindness instead of arrogance in public spaces, the Spirit of Jesus walks again on the earth. Every occasion when St. Stephen’s opens its doors to the homeless and musicians and artists and truth-seekers and the hungry and the jobless literally welcoming the world to come find a home in this place, the Spirit has inched closer to changing the face of the world into the face of Christ. Every time we proclaim the gospel in words that may be strange to some but which communicate with a new population, including those who have not yet met Jesus, a new outbreak of Pentecost occurs. When we look for ways to put it all together, so that Peace and Joy and Power all find a nesting place here, then Wind of the Spirit blows through anew, shaking the foundations, drawing us tighter into its mighty flow, sweeping us forward to the future of the One who still stands among his disciples, nail-scarred but dazzling, saying, “Peace.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Them Sheep

2011-05-14T19:14:00.000-07:00

Acts 2:42

I have confessed to you before that I am not a fan of sheep, though I must say that it is only roast leg of lamb that ultimately will stand between me and being vegetarian. Lambs are one thing; sheep are significantly different. There is all the difference between lambs and sheep as there is between teddy bears and great big black bears. Every year I have to go through a kind of uncomfortable adjustment on the Fourth Sunday of Easter trying to figure out a way to deal with the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd and my implicit role as a sheep.

You have no doubt heard, or perhaps have personally experienced the fact that to be called a sheep is not a high compliment. Sheep are not bright, are easily led, quite nearsighted, subject to all sorts of dangers, and rather defenseless against predators. While they have been for ages a highly valued commodity, they do have some notable drawbacks, one of which is, at least to my mind, a rather unpleasant odor, though in so saying I do not wish to offend any shepherds, certainly.

Nonetheless, the image of Jesus as a shepherd is one that stuck in the mind of the Church, and lots of Churches of the Good Shepherd are quite happy today on what is their equivalent of a patronal festival. The church in which I was ordained priest has a stained glass window depicting Jesus as the Good Shepherd. I used to look up at it as I was celebrating the Eucharist as a young priest and see something that reminded me of the pastoral vocation to which I had been ordained. Pastor, of course, is the Latin word for shepherd, so all those traits of sheep that give me pause are ironically the things which define my vocation in a way.

Today, which happens to be our Annual Meeting Day at St. Stephen’s, I want to shift the image from the Good Shepherd to the sheep in the pen. I want to climb right down and get with the sheep, hearing their bleating and smelling them, seeing them jammed into their small space. I want to look into their gray-blue watery eyes and feel the cockle burrs stuck in their fleece. I want to imagine for just a brief moment that the feelings I get at being with such animals—the curiosity and fascination, interest and some pity, concern and a slight revulsion—are not unlike the feelings that any good shepherd, or even a not-so-good shepherd might experience. I imagine that the Good Pastor himself might register such a range of feelings with his flock of human beings on any given day.

For purposes of comparison, let’s take the line from Acts 2:42 that we hear fairly frequently because it occurs in the Baptismal Covenant which we renew with some regularity. “They continued in the apostles’ teaching, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers.” Human flocks, of course, do that; sheep don’t. But let’s say that human flocks, specifically Christian ones, need to do those things in order to be good flocks as much as the sheep in a sheep pen need to bleat and grow wool and rub up against one another and compete for food and water and set about grazing when the shepherd opens the door of the pen and leads them out to pasture.

In this human sheepfold called the Church are packed a fair number of Christians, some of whom are prize-winners, but most of whom are just ordinary. Several weeks after Easter, when Jesus had finished his work, had risen from the dead, and appeared in glory, all the angels are said to have gathered around, asking him how things went on earth, and what the high points and low points were. Jesus recounted his ministry, putting it in terms that the angels understood, describing his community as a flock and himself as their shepherd. “Oh,” asked an angel, “so what are the flock up to now, seeing that the shepherd has come home?”

“Come see my flock,” said Jesus. “These are the ones that are going to do greater works than I did!” The angels peered down from on high and saw a little band of people that Jesus referred to as his “sheep.” A look of horror spread across the faces of angels, who exclaimed in unison, “Them?”

“Them,” said Jesus.

Centuries went by. Jesus is said to have been walking about one day when an angel stopped him and asked for an update. “So, Jesus, how is that flock of sheep coming on?”

“Oh, they have their good days and their bad days,” said Jesus. “On the whole, they do some pretty stunning things. They continue in my teaching. They break bread together. They pray for one another. And they constantly talk about how they can widen their little sheep pen to include more and more people in it. You should see them.”

“Well, let’s,” said the angel, summoning some of his fellow angels to the moment.

Jesus led them to a precipice. They looked over and saw a scrawny bunch of somewhat sheepish people in a pen called “St. Stephen and the Incarnation.” A look of horror spread across the faces of the angels.

“Them?” one of the angels cried.

Jesus, gazing at his sheep, said, “Them.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Gone to Hell

2011-05-08T16:43:00.000-07:00

Grief and Easter

Luke 24:36b-48

It is easy to forget, when we are two weeks past Easter Day, that despite all our trumpeting of the resurrection of Jesus, Easter begins in an experience of profound grief. Not only is the crucifixion the background and necessary prelude to resurrection, but between Good Friday and Easter Day there is a descent into hell. I am not talking about a mythological notion of Jesus going to hell on Holy Saturday and preaching to the dead—whether he did that or not is neither mine to argue nor the point I wish to make. Rather I am talking about the hell that is thorough loss of the divine companion, hell that is total loss of knowing what to do, hell that is the gut-wrenching grief that rises up with a metallic taste in the mouth about a day after the funeral when the fact that he or she is no longer living begins to sink in. Say “alleluia” all you want, and it won’t make hell go away, not if death is real and not if grief breaks your heart.

Tempting as it is to gloss over such painful stuff and certainly to keep it out of any sermon whose purpose is in part to convince you that faith pays dividends—just you wait and see—we need to stick with hell for awhile just to make sure we are being ruthlessly honest. So it is to Luke’s gospel that we turn today to get a glimpse of this profound grief that Jesus’ community is going through in the wake of his horrible execution. Cleopas and his companion are headed to Emmaus, presumably their home. Back to business as usual, just as in John’s gospel Peter says after it is all over, “I’m going fishing.” Back to the familiar, except that instead of filling the void, home is in this instance more like the place where we crash when there is nowhere else to go.

Two disciples they are, on the road and talking about all the things that had transpired. This is what humans do, particularly in the aftermath of tragedy, but then, really, all the time. I sometimes wish it were different, but I doubt that it ever is going to be. When Bin Laden is captured and killed, we have to have day after day after day of stories about what happened, how it happened, how it didn’t happen, how it happened differently from how it was first related to have happened, how it should have happened but didn’t, how it might have happened. And the story keeps changing. That is not only a function of news media, it is the way human beings consistently make sense of the world. We work something over and over again, trying to get it to fit a narrative framework wherein it can possibly make some sense. We tell ourselves things such as, “Everything happens for a reason,” and, “There is something to be learned from all this,” though we do not know what the reason might be nor what it is that we should learn from it all. That is what the two disciples are doing as they walk along.

A stranger appears so subtly that the two seem not to notice anything out of the ordinary. Sometimes strangers do such things—on the bus, for example. They seem to be reading their novel or diddling with their phone, oblivious to the world around them; yet sometimes one will interject a comment into what would seem to be an utterly private conversation. It might or might not fit, and it might or might not be welcome. “What things are you talking about?” the Stranger asks. When you are grieving, you imagine that the world must register what seems to you to be a seismic event. They stop, looking sad.

“Are you the only stranger…?” Cleopas finally asks. Stranger. Must be one of the people who has been in Jerusalem for Passover and is now, like them, returning home.

“What things?” asks the Stranger. Thus begins a conversation. It is a great story, because we know more than the two disciples. We know who the Stupendous Stranger is, and thus we anticipate a moment of revelation when the Stranger’s identity will be disclosed. Luke lets us overhear the conversation. The Stranger gives his fellow travelers the space to tell their tale, their version of the events.

“We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they say, giving a hint of their sorrow.

He upbraids them for being so foolish, so slow to believe. That might have tipped them off at once, since Jesus has at least in parts of the gospels a reputation for upbraiding disciples for their lack of faith and their slowness to believe. But, of course, the story is not quite ready for the climax. We have a way to go, and so do the disciples, who have not yet arrived home, and in any case, are kept from perceiving who the Stranger is because their eyes frankly can’t behold the mystery.

That, too, is one of the ways grief works. We simply don’t see clearly when the world has stopped turning and the birds have hushed singing. Of course it could be quite the opposite. Sometimes when grief is intense we imagine that the dead are right before our eyes—indeed there are stories galore of how they do appear as clear as day. It is hard then to know the difference between what is real and what is imaginary.

“Won’t you stay with us?” the disciples ask. This is not Washington, DC, where it would be fine to say thank you and goodbye and walk on one’s way. This is the Near East, and the Ancient Near East at that, where hospitality suggests, if does not dictate, asking a conversation partner to supper at nightfall. He makes as if to be going—in retrospect one wonders exactly why—but they insist. In a minute we will know why they are so insistent. But first, this strong urging on their part sets up the scene for the climax. Somehow—we are not told how—the guest becomes the host. Suddenly he is the one not being served, but in the role of taking, blessing, breaking and giving the bread. And that is the all-important moment. Immediately the disciples’ eyes are opened and they recognize who the Stranger is. This is what must happen for hell to be vanquished. And, frankly, it seems impossible that that something could ever come to pass. It is nothing less than a revelation of the Risen Jesus himself.

Why had they insisted so strongly that the Stranger come stay with them? Because their hearts had burned within them as they listened to him expound and interpret the Scriptures. His had been the words that had not only opened their grief but began to make some sense out of what seemed nonsense. Little wonder that they were not eager to let go of him! And of all the things that both make Christianity appealing and at the same time threatening, it is this peculiar mystique of Jesus. Not everyone experiences it, of course. There are some to whom Jesus is little more than a historical figure, a dead hero from ages past, or even as Algernon Charles Swinburne once called him, “A Pale Galilean,” with whose breath the world has grown grey. But for countless others, he is not dead but living, not pale but robust. And there is nothing theoretical about resurrection. It is a present reality, just as he is a present reality. How is it that we can go with the heaviest heart to the Table, hear again the story of what he did on the night in which he was betrayed, and do those four familiar things—take bread, bless bread, break bread, and give bread—and find ourselves healing on levels we cannot explain in ways we cannot quantify? How is it that a bite of bread and a sip of wine can be so much more than bite and sip—a feast, a wedding of soul and God, a passageway into a parallel universe, a healing of grief, a forgiveness of sin, a taste of something more real than our very flesh and the blood coursing through our veins? Partly, of course, it is that we choose to believe it, and thus it becomes a ballast that gives our lives a kind of steadiness. But partly it is that when we have gone the distance we can go with rational thought, we come to the great abyss of mystery. We either stare into it paralyzed and disbelieving, or we step forward into the fog, sure that we will either cross the chasm by grace, or fall into it and ironically find ourselves finally at home with the universe and the universe’s God. There is no explaining mystery, no justifying it, no rationalizing it. Like all the states we know well enough but cannot explain—such as love in a time of fear and courage in the face of annihilation—the simple Supper served by the Stunning Stranger persistently renews us, we know not why.

Yet that is the way that hell keeps being conquered, the way grief keeps being healed, the way we keep growing beyond the boundaries we erect to keep ourselves safe and sane and usually stunted, too. Just about the time we can say, “Ah! Jesus! It’s you after all!” he vanishes from sight, and we are left to ponder the mystery, usually second-guessing ourselves and wondering if we were taken in by some sleight-of-hand by the Trickster in our own mind.

Then is the hour we need to get up, go find some other disciples, share with them what we have experienced, and entertain the possibility that the Resurrection is for real, again and again and again. No one can convince you to do it. But once you invite the Stranger into conversation, you’ll find yourself exclaiming, “Did not our hearts burn within us?” And even when he eludes you, that burning will suffice.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Widening the Circle

2011-04-25T20:43:00.000-07:00

John 20:1-18

Don’t miss the Resurrection!

It is possible to do that, you know. Like poking around in high grass for creatively hidden Easter eggs, hunting for what really happened on that Sunday morning long ago is bound not to turn up much. That is no way to find the Resurrection. In fact, it might even be the best way to miss it.

Like many things that we puzzle over, stand in awe of, find ourselves totally overwhelmed by—things that defy easy belief and yet also persist beyond easy dismissal—Jesus’ resurrection is not so much complex as it is totally at odds with anything we would ordinarily expect. We can understand the physics of tsunamis and appreciate the behavior of sub-atomic particles. We can document the appearances of ghosts and the occasional resuscitation of a corpse. But the resurrection is one of a kind. Ghosts do not eat and drink. And resuscitated corpses do not pass in and out of rooms at will. So all of our stories about the resurrection of Jesus point to its uniqueness. Little wonder that we often don’t know quite what to do with it. And even less wonder that in trying to make sense of it we are likely to ask the wrong questions and look in the wrong places for answers.

To make matters more interesting, we have not one or two but four—count them—accounts, not to mention what you might call a very personal account that we owe to the Apostle Paul. Each account is different, though quite clearly they stem from traditions more ancient than the gospels themselves. The story we hear today is from the pen of the Fourth Evangelist. It is in some ways the most detailed. Its account of the encounter between the grieving Mary Magdalene and the Risen Jesus is among the loveliest stories of all, simply as story. We can almost feel the early morning darkness, imagine the sounds of Mary weeping, sense her shock and surprise when she hears him call her name, picture her reach for him and his drawing back saying, “Do not hold me.” The scene is, in fact, so clear and the story so artfully told that for a minute or two, we can put aside our hunt for the meaning of the resurrection and simply relish the scene.

But our scene comes from John the Evangelist, not John the novelist or John the producer. His aim is to evoke the response of faith—belief—not to garner a Pulitzer Prize or an Oscar. And for John, “belief” is not just intellectual agreement that a resurrection took place and all that goes with it, but a giving of heart and soul to Jesus. Belief for John is the key to connecting with the Risen Lord. John has in mind that other disciple, the Beloved Disciple, the one who, though not the first to go itno the tomb, is the first to see and believe: he is the model for you and me.

We are beginning to get close to what the Resurrection is all about. Notice that the people to whom Jesus appears (like Mary Magdalene) and the people who have not yet seen him (Peter, the Beloved Disciple, and the other nine) are Jesus’ community. That is key. The Risen Lord does not waste time, so to say, appearing to those who never believed in him in the first place. No episodes recount an appearance to Pontius Pilate, to the Sanhedrin, to the Roman soldiers who a chapter ago mocked him with purple robe and crown of thorns. The resurrection is not about proving anything, still less about validating Jesus’ life and miracles. It is about the creation of a community that—to borrow a phrase from St. Paul—will be his body in the world. “By this all shall know that you are my disciples,” Jesus says during his last supper, “that you love one another. As I have loved you, you are to love one another.” And the point of that, of course, is not that the community of disciples simply be a little fraternity enjoying their own special bonding rituals, but to become an ever-widening circle of believers that lay down their lives for the world, who follow Jesus to the cross, who risk all to live the paradox that letting go of their safety and security will assure their lives, while clinging to the familiar is a sure way to lose them.

The Resurrection that draws us here to celebrate today is less about what happened to Jesus than it is about what happens to us through Jesus. The surest way to miss the Resurrection is to confine it to stained glass and lock it up in tabernacles thinking that somehow we honor Jesus by according him a status so special that he could not possibly be emulated, so far from us that we could not possibly follow him let alone catch up with him. The Fourth Gospel is quite clear that Jesus’ entire ministry, the point of his death, the thrust of his glorification was to become the source of life to his community. Jesus prayed, “As you, Abba, are in me and I am in you, may they [the community of believers] also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one,…”

And why does the community exist? So that the world may believe. And if the world believes, truly believes, then the boundary between community and world gradually disappears. The goal of the community is to draw the whole world into itself, just as Jesus, when he was lifted high upon the cross, did exactly that: he drew the whole world to himself. So the circle gets wider and wider as more and more people are drawn into the community of Beloved Disciples. The community that mirrors Jesus’ self-giving love becomes nuanced enough that it is no more bound by definitions of “church” or “institution” than the Body of the Risen Lord is confined by locked doors. The community, empowered by the Spirit breathed into it by the Risen Lord, becomes as courageous as its Lord on his way to glory, carrying his own cross, confident to the last of what he was doing and where he was going. It is ready to get down on its knees and wash the smelly feet of adolescent boys and the lame feet of old diabetic women. It understands more and more that its purpose is not to get to heaven but to proclaim that heaven is here and now because the Eternal God is here and now, having broken into human life by blasting open the tomb of the buried Word and raising him to New Life.

Don’t miss the Resurrection, because it is going to happen twice more in this liturgy this morning. First it will happen when we encircle the font and bring into the New Community of Beloved Disciples two sisters and one brother who will share in the death of Christ by being buried in the depths of baptismal water. They will proclaim Christ’s resurrection by learning to live the life of love so well that somebody and maybe more than one or two will say, “I see in them Jesus Christ, and I believe.” The Resurrection will happen a second time when we encircle the altar to receive what to us tastes like bread and wine but which to our God and Lord feel like flesh and blood. It means the same thing as baptism. One is a bathing and the other is a feeding, but the meal is more than food just as the bath is more than water. They are outpourings of Spirit to make us—what? To make us one—one with each other and one in him. That is the Resurrection you don’t want to miss!

Every one of you, and dozens and hundreds more have a place in our circle at font and altar. We will not cease until every possible soul that we could embrace knows—knows—that he or she has come into a community where there is welcome for the sinner, and more graces for the good, and mercies for the hurting, and healing through the Blood that makes us new and makes us one. Our home, this building, will keep opening its doors the way we open our arms, bidding all to a great banquet where things as varied as square dancing and working for justice, hip-hop and tutoring, demonstrating against torture and chowing down on different ethnic foods, listening to Shakespeare and honoring the art of neighborhood children, singing Bach chorales and Negro spirituals and Latino love songs will be as natural here as picking up a hymnal or opening a prayer book.

You might notice that all of those things are happening now. Yes, they are, because the circle has been widening for some time. Back in the 1950’s when St. Stephen’s was a lily-white congregation, the neighborhood began changing as white people fled to the suburbs after court-ordered desegregation of the schools. Into the neighborhood went Father Stuart Gast, inviting new African-American neighbors to come into the circle. Three years after 1954, St. Stephen’s had remained here, the church declared itself integrated, and the circle was wider. A dozen years later when the nation was torn by the Viet Nam War, protestors and peace advocates found a place to sleep in St. Stephen’s. The circle grew wider. It grew wider still when a woman ordained priest celebrated at our altar for the first time ever in The Episcopal Church. It grew yet wider when gay and lesbian couples and later transgender and other sexual minorities were embraced. It grew wider five years ago when Misa Alegría was born, our Spanish-speaking congregation which has grown to about 15 times the size of the original seed group.

Today, after months of conversation, thought, and prayer, we choose the Day of Resurrection as the time to share with you the direction of St. Stephen and the Incarnation. It is called “Widening the Circle,” because the circle must and will become wider still. We know where we believe God is leading us in the next few years—and what we together have decided we need to do together to widen the circle. But we have no clue as to where the Spirit may lead us beyond that or as a result of our attempts to widen it. But we know that God’s Life is real Resurrection, and we are ready to run to strange places where death is said to be, knowing that resurrection happens most frequently there. We know that any resurrection worth going to is an event that will test our patience and probably find us saying from time to time, “I miss my Lord. By God they have taken him away and I don’t know where they have laid him.” We know that there will be moments when, despite our best efforts, all will seem useless and we will know all over again just what the Magdalene felt like standing there in the chill, sorry and probably angry. And we know, as surely as anything, that when we least expect it, we will hear a familiar voice, calling our name, and we can wonder how we ever have thought he wouldn’t show up as we exclaim, “Rabbouni!” which means, “My Master.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

No Hay Amor Más Grande

2011-04-21T18:54:00.000-07:00

La Santa Eucaristía y El Lavatorio de Pies

San Juan 13

Tal vez ustedes saben que Jueves Santo es el día que Jesús nos dio La Santa Eucaristía. Pero, es un poquito extraño que el evangelio que nosotros leemos y escuchamos esta noche no dice nada sobre la Santa Eucaristía. En la cuenta que San Juan nos da, la cena no es la Pascua. Pascua no llegará hasta mañana, viernes, a puesta del sol. Por supuesto, Jesús estará condenado a muerte a mediodía de viernes, exactamente a la hora cuando los corderos van al matadero para la Pascua.

San Juan es diferente de los otros escritores de evangelios. Nos da historias más o menos largas de conversaciones, a veces argumentos y disputas, entre Jesús y sus oponentes. En estas conversaciones, San Juan nos da su interpretación del bautismo o de la eucaristía.

Por ejemplo, una vez un miembro del grupo de fariseos, llamado Nicodemo, vino de noche a reunirse con Jesús. La conversación estaba una exploración de los temas de la enseñanza de Jesús. Jesús dijo a Nicodemo que es necesario ser nacido por agua y espíritu para entrar en el Reino de Dios. Nadie puede ver el Reino de Dios sino nacer de nuevo desde arriba. Inmediatamente, cuando escuchamos estas palabras, pensamos en bautismo, por qué el bautismo es nuestro nacimiento por agua y el Santo Espíritu.

De manera similar, San Juan da cuenta de cómo Jesús dio de comer a cinco mil personas por multiplicación de pan y pescados. Cuando un grupo venía buscando a Jesús, él les dijo, “Yo soy el pan de vida. El que viene a mí nunca tendrá hambre, y el que cree en mí nunca tendrá sed.” Además les dijo algo muy interesante: “El pan que yo daré es mi carne, y lo daré para la vida del mundo.” Entonces, hay una conexión entre Jesús, tu, la muerte de Jesús, y la eucaristía.

Si bautismo es nuestro nacimiento, la eucaristía es la manera en la que crecemos en Cristo por recibir regularmente el alimento de pan y vino que nos dan la vida nueva. Jesús ha hecho la posibilidad de compartir en él, y en su resurrección, por medio de su muerte en la cruz.

El secreto es este: para vivir totalmente en el espíritu de la eucaristía, debemos seguir el ejemplo de Jesús lavando los pies de los discípulos. Según San Juan, no hay otra opción si queremos comprender y practicar ni solo el signficado de la eucaristía, sino también la vida y el ministerio de Jesús. Él vino para servir, no para ser servido. Él lavó los pies como un servidor, también murió en la cruz, sirviendonos y sirviendo al mundo.

El misterio el más grande del evangelio no es un gran milagro, pero la verdad que escuchamos repetidas veces: “el que quiera ser el más importante entre ustedes, debe hacerse el servidor de todos, y el que quiera ser el primero, se haré esclavo de todos.” También hay la promesa, “El que ama su vida la destruye; y el que desprecia su vida en este mundo, la conserva para la vida eterna.”

Cuando lo oímos, ¿quién no quiere decir, “Aparta de mí esta copa”? Y contestamos a Jesús, “Tu, Señor, ¡jamás me lavarás los pies!” Pero el Señor nos responde, “Si no te lavo, no podrás tener parte conmigo.” Luego llega nuestra hora que ser glorificado, nuestro momento para rogar, “Señor, lávame no sólo los pies, sino también las manos y la cabeza.”

Laying Down

2011-04-21T18:51:00.000-07:00

Eucharist and Washing Feet

John 13

Ask nearly any average informed Christian what Maundy Thursday is all about and chances are you will hear the response, “That’s the day of Jesus’ last supper, when he gave us the eucharist.” And so it is. But don’t you think it is rather strange that the gospel we read tonight does not once mention the eucharist?

Instead, we have Jesus at supper, which in John’s gospel is clearly not the Passover seder, because Passover does not begin until Friday at sundown, according to him. Indeed the Lamb of God will be sentenced to death at noon on Friday, the very hour when the bleating of lambs being slaughtered for Passover will split the ears of all Jerusalem. Thursday night in John’s story is the last supper, but there is no accent at all on the supper, its menu, the significance of bread and wine. Nothing. Complete silence. Instead we have a story about the washing of feet.

Many heads wiser than mine have puzzled over John’s omission of any account of something so central to Christian practice as the eucharist. Noticing that he does not explicitly tell us anything about baptism either, some have figured that John was not all that keen on sacraments. Others have suggested that all John has to say about the eucharist is packed into his account of the feeding of the five thousand, and the long discussions that follow. Actually, those things give us a clue as to what in fact John has in mind, and thus help us to hear the Word he is speaking to us tonight.

Recall that in John’s story one of the Pharisees, Nicodemus by name, had once gone to Jesus during the night to discuss with him the substance of his teaching. The conversation became a discussion of being “born from above,” or of being “begotten from above.” Jesus tells Nicodemus that neither he nor anyone can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. We immediately and instinctively know that John is telling us something about baptism, that central and major practice of the Christian community which is a symbolic way of being born anew—not just a bath is it, but an outpouring of Holy Spirit. In baptism we are remade thoroughly, a project that extends throughout our lives. It is so radical a remaking that it can only be described as a new birth, a second birth; or, as the other gospels put it, becoming a child all over again and starting life anew. Life in the Spirit is, for the baptized, life built day by day in the image and likeness of the Son of Man, to whom we increasingly and repeatedly give our hearts.

Something similar happens in John’s story after Jesus multiplies the loaves and fish to feed the multitude. Crowds come looking for Jesus. When they find him, he tells them that they have come looking not because they saw divine action in the feeding, but because they had eaten their fill of bread. They must work, he tells them, not for perishable food but for the food that endures to eternal life. That food is Jesus himself. “I am the bread of life,” he tells them. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Giving one’s love and life totally to Jesus (John calls that “believing”) is the way to eat the Bread of Life. When one eats it, one has eternal life. Then Jesus says something very astonishing: “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

So there is a deep connection, then, between Jesus, you, the Living Bread you eat in the eucharist, and Jesus’ death. If you make those connections, you catch on to what John is up to. If baptism means that we are born in the Spirit, eucharist means that we continually grow by feeding on the one who makes possible our union with God by his death.

Though this does not solve the puzzle as to why John tells us nothing about how Jesus instituted the eucharist, it does point to the relationship of washing feet, Jesus’ death, and what the eucharist means. More than once in the gospels we encounter Jesus’ teaching that he is among his followers as one who serves. He came not to be served, but to serve. That is exactly the picture John gives us of Jesus when he washes his disciples’ feet. The whole episode is set firmly within the story of the Passion. Jesus does more than give us the model for Christian love and service, though he does that. He relates that to his own laying down his life for his friends. As the evening goes on, he tells them that this new commandment he has given to them to love one another is what he himself does in laying down his life.

To live that way is to live eucharistically. To be willing to wash feet is to follow the pattern of the Master and Lord who stoops to wash the feet of his disciples. To be willing to have one’s feet be washed—to let yourself acknowledge your own dependency and vulnerability—is to have a share in Jesus’ person, in his life, in his ministry, in his death. To live in the eucharistic fellowship is to serve, not fundamentally to be served. The greatest mystery of the gospel, perhaps, is nothing miraculous and dazzling, but this truth that keeps turning up that the last shall be first and the first last; that the servant must follow the way of the master who follows the way of a servant; that the way of life is the death of self which is paradoxically the way of life.

It is a hard truth, to be sure. Something in us says no, let this cup pass me by. When this truth is offered to us, we instinctively say, “You will never wash my feet.” If you don’t recoil at the idea of giving up your life in order to gain your life, you are one of a rare breed of human beings. Have patience and hang on, for the one who is offering that truth says, “Otherwise you have no share in me.” Then comes your hour to be glorified, believe it or not. Then comes your hour, your moment to pray, “Not only my feet, Lord, but also my hands and my head as well!”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Working Wonders

2011-04-09T18:14:00.001-07:00

Prayer and Miracles

John 11:1-45

Ironic––isn’t it?––that the very things that might have inspired faith in the first century or the second are some of the things that can create obstacles for twenty-first century people. For instance, the only story told essentially the same way in all four gospels is the story of how Jesus fed the multitudes with five loaves and two fish. I don’t know if people a generation or two after Jesus would have found that particularly easy to believe, but it is a cinch that none of the gospel writers considered it a stumbling-block to faith in Jesus as Christ, else they would no doubt have quietly edited it out. Yet no one who serves meals at our Loaves and Fishes kitchen thinks of saying grace over a couple of chicken breasts, multiplying them to feed the crowd downstairs of several hundred. And anyone who came off the street, even I dare say, some Senior Priest or other, offering to do so would be promptly reported to the police, likely banned from the building as a danger to others, and shipped off St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. We have a hard time taking the supernatural seriously.

If you have a hard time with the notion that someone literally fed 5,000 people or more with five loaves of bread and two fish, then I suspect you have a big-time issue with believing that Jesus actually raised the dead Lazarus—after the latter had been carefully buried for four days, long enough for rot to start. Some of you will tell me that you have no problem with that at all precisely because Jesus is God and can thus do anything. Yes; but what do you say to Pat, a young man who once said to me when his father dropped dead of a heart attack, “I know that if we believe strongly enough that Jesus can bring back my dad from the dead, isn’t that right?”? I think you will concede that, well, Jesus is alive and well and Resurrected but that does not exactly mean that we can get the same results from him that those people back then could and did. Others—I myself on many a Fifth Sunday in Lent—have dodged that whole issue, taking this story of the raising of Lazarus as a theological tour de force, highly symbolic, seeing it as a testimony to the truth that indeed Jesus—God—brings us out of various dead places and into new life. Still others will say that the raising of the dead to life actually happens in our world (people who are as good as dead are sometimes resuscitated with wise and timely use of CPR). So, they would point out, we really do the same thing that Jesus did (sort of). We just go about it a little differently.

Are these matters just “academic,” with little relevance to us? I think not. For both the believer and the unbeliever, the supernatural presents a challenge, and not only because it occurs with some frequency in the Bible. How many times have you heard or said, “We’re just praying for a miracle”? When pushed against the wall, and when someone’s life is at stake, like Mary and Martha we send for Jesus or for someone who can intervene and work a miracle. We get ourselves in the frame of mind that if we can call on the right Power, anything is possible. Granted, that shakes out to getting the right professional help, if we are able to afford it. Go to Mayo, Cleveland, Sloan-Kettering, Johns Hopkins, Duke, the Menninger Clinic, Hazelton, if you are financially blessed enough to do so. Still, we are sometimes willing, if one of those things works, to say that the Hand of God was in it. And that may well be true.

But what of the poor folk who don’t have the resources? Are they left just to bang on the door of heaven hoping to God that someone somewhere will hear their desperation and respond? Or don’t we want them to feed on the wonderful mysteries of their religion and ours, replete with stories like healing lepers and blind people and raising the dead to life? That is a roundabout way of saying that miracles are more attractive the fewer resources you have. If you can buy your way through intensive care, you might not find yourself quite so frequently in need of a miracle. But when you are out of resources (and that can happen to the rich, too, by the way), divine intervention can seem like a good idea.

So here we are, a week away from Holy Week and almost two away from Good Friday. It is as good a time as any to deal with how we pray in the face of death—or more generally, how we deal with suffering, tragedy, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. What might help us is to look carefully at a few aspects of this story about the raising of Lazarus.

If we are wondering about whether we ought to pray for miracles, the story suggests that we might be asking the wrong question. One of the major points that the Fourth Gospel makes is that the presence and power of Jesus (and thus of God) is quite different from what we might imagine. Mary and Martha send for Jesus, presumably hoping that he will come and heal Lazarus whom he loves. When Jesus comes, too late for a healing, both of them express their disappointment that Jesus was not there. “Had you been here, my brother would not have died.” No doubt. Martha goes further, saying, “Even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask.” It is not clear what she has in mind, but it is quite probable that it is not her brother’s resuscitation. She must assume that the time for miracles is over. Something more like the healing of grief, perhaps, or dealing with life after the male on whom the family depended had died: these might have been on her mind and in her prayer.

But look at it from another angle. Observe Jesus. He knows from the moment he gets the message, that Lazarus is dead or soon will be. (That is so characteristic of Jesus in John’s gospel. He is clairvoyant, omniscient.) Then he stays an additional two days east of the Jordan, which is a good day’s hike from Bethany. He says that the glory of God will be revealed through Lazarus’ illness, and specifically that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” I suspect you see immediately that that is exactly what John’s purpose is: to narrate how Jesus is glorified more than to spotlight Lazarus himself. Yet there is a larger truth here. Many times we approach life, quite naturally, from the point of view of what we want, what we need. “We need a miracle.” “I want to be healed.” “Do what you have to, Lord, to make this situation better.” I am not saying that there is anything necessarily wrong about that; but I do think we might acknowledge that we do not always—indeed frequently do not—see the larger picture, including where God’s Presence and Power are already at work. The effectiveness, the dependability, of God’s being in a situation does not preclude our praying for healing or rescue or spectacular intervention. But the point is that God is present whether we are praying for those things or not. One of the prayers of the Book of Common Prayer refers to God’s doing “better things than we can ask or pray for.” Exactly. Practicing prayer involves growing out of the idea that God is largely passive until we start pushing God’s buttons by praying. Prayer includes acknowledging that God is, that God is active at all times and in all situations, just as surely as air silently surrounds us, and just that close.

All the Bethany people in the story are grieving, and ultimately Jesus joins them in one of the most memorable scenes in the New Testament, which we nearly always remember at funerals: “You wept at the grave of Lazarus your friend.” In the King James Version of the Bible, that is the shortest verse of all: “Jesus wept.” He is human, he feels deeply. Perhaps there is a hint here that before this mighty act Jesus is on edge, emotionally raw. But there is a sentence in here that doesn’t make it into English very well. Instead of saying that “Jesus was deeply disturbed in spirit,” the text actually says something more like, “Jesus was inwardly angry” or “Jesus was royally irritated.”* At what? It is not clear, but a good guess is that all the cavorting and crying and carrying on did not set well with him. You might remember another story from the Synoptic gospels in which Jesus goes to Jairus’ house ultimately to raise his little girl from death, and he summarily puts the wailing mourners out of the room. Jesus apparently did not like that kind of drama. Perhaps that was just a personal preference, with no particular implication for us. I think, however, that it might be a commentary on how easy it is for people caught up in their own tragedies, to miss the larger point of God’s presence and power in a situation.

Then notice something else. Jesus himself prays. It has been said, “It is because he is one with God that he prays, and because he prays he is one with God.” Thomas Aquinas wrote, “When the Father does the Father’s will, the Father does the Son’s will.”** What strikes you about Jesus’ prayer? Does he ask for special power? Does he confess that he is nervous? What strikes me is that his is a prayer of thanksgiving. “I thank thee that thou hast heard me.” This, too, is a clue as to the relationship of prayer and miracle. The miraculous, if you want to call it that, is going on all the time, and most of it is wrapped in what we call the commonplace. The supernatural, so named because it does not fit our understanding of the natural, is just more from the same God who is constantly sustaining us and all creation. I myself have known of unexpected joy, surprising healings against all odds, startling rescues from tragedies and disasters. Many of these came on the wings of prayer, and a few occurred without pleading or warning or both. Miracles happen, but never because God has to be convinced to work one, as if somehow God sits on God’s hands until we get worked up enough to mention the possibility of a miracle. “I thank thee that thou hast heard me,” prayed Jesus. You can pray that prayer, too. Avery Brooke, who for years had an astonishing ministry of healing in the Church, taught me to end prayers for healing with, “Thank you God, for hearing our prayer, and for the healing that you have already begun in this person.”

John’s gospel is clear about the place of the raising of Lazarus. It was the tipping point in Jesus’ ministry. We shall be again at Bethany next week on Palm Sunday, because it is from there on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives that Jesus will take the fateful journey into Jerusalem. Raising Lazarus was for John what ultimately convinced the authorities that Jesus had to die. “Better that one man die on behalf of the people than to have the entire nation destroyed,” warned High Priest Caiphas. So Jesus ultimately went to his death. But yet another stone was to be rolled away and another body to be raised from death, this time not to be a resuscitated corpse, but to be the glorified body of the Risen Lord. Sometimes we pray for miracles, and sometimes they happen. But the thing not to miss is that sometimes it is the very cross we would most like to avoid that turns out to be the thing that saves us. The more we learn to trust in a surrounding and sustaining God, the less we might find ourselves praying for miraculous things, yet giving thanks in all our tragedies, doubts, terrors, and deaths for the Presence of the One who is himself our Resurrection and our Life.

*Rudolf Schnackenberg,The Gospel According to St. John, vol. 2, (New York: Crossroad, 1990), pp. 335-336.

** Ibid., p. 517, note 66.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Conversation Starter

2011-03-25T18:49:00.000-07:00

Prayer as Dialogue

John 4

“Have a little talk with Jesus,” suggests an old gospel song. “Tell him all about your troubles. He will answer by and by.” Today’s gospel is a gem of what happens if you really do have a talk with Jesus.

Don’t you think that the anonymous woman at the well in John 4 is one of the most attractive and interesting characters in the entire Bible? She is earthy, she is real, she is salty. She can keep up with Jesus, even though she is not at all sure of where the conversation is going. She loves easily, yet she is no fool overly eager to sign on to a novel religious idea out of sheer credulousness. You have to respect a woman who does not shrink in timidity when a strange man, especially one of a rival ethnic group, starts a conversation. And when that same man begins talking about her private life, which is nothing of which to be particularly proud, she has the audacity to wrest the conversation from him and turn it to religion. You have to respect that kind of spunk.

While I wouldn’t want to suggest that the conversation of Jesus and the Samaritan woman is in any sense “prayer” as we normally think of it, I think we can see, as we listen to the story, a handful of really important clues as to what prayer is and what prayer might do.

For starters, let’s assume that most of us think of praying as praying “to God.” That certainly is not true for everyone, but it is probably true for most. There is nothing the matter with that at all. It seems to me that one of the perennial problems that beset religious people is that we nearly always have to cut God down to slightly bigger than human size in order to relate to God much at all. Thus we trivialize “God” by calling “him” things like “the man upstairs.” We sometimes imagine that God is little more than the magician in charge of the world, mostly for our benefit. We thus can get really snagged when things don’t go especially well for us and begin believing that the great God that rules the universe is somehow disappointed or downright angry with us. (Else why do things go so poorly for us?) Generally, in my experience, we sometimes go on to fantasize that “God” is far more interested, for example, in the details of our sex lives than in whether or not we support governments that consistently engage in warfare that they themselves have great difficulty explaining.

I pause to point out that it is precisely such issues as these that frequently invite the thoughtful skeptic and the non-believer to dismiss religious people and our “God” as hopelessly out of touch with reality, and well beyond being simply confused.

But let’s not digress too much. Let’s instead look at the figure of Jesus. We see in Jesus not “God cut down to human size,” but rather a full, complete human being that embodies for us the nature of God. We have in Jesus a person who expresses what we perceive to be the Truth of God, and thus the moral Truth of the universe. Jesus, for Christians, is our connection to that Truth and thus our connection to Ultimate Reality, a name for which is God. If you don’t get that, you really never get the heart of Christianity—which is not to say you can’t be quite a good, ethical, devout Christian nonetheless. But the unique center of it all is there on the page where we read the epistle today. Paul says, “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.” In other words, the place where humanity and divinity come together in thorough harmony is Jesus. It is not the Law for Paul that defines our relationship with God. It is Jesus, specifically Jesus’ death and resurrection. That has opened up a not only a new perspective on who we are and who God is; it has opened up an entirely New Age. Keep that in mind as we listen to more of the gospel story.

Notice that Jesus is the one who begins a conversation with our neighbor, the woman who has come to draw water at the well of Sychar. That is an important clue as to how the relationship between God and us first takes shape. It is a relationship that God initiates. In simplest terms, the Creator creates us, puts us here. Yet that is not the last of it. Whether we look at life on a macro level or on a very personal level, the same thing holds true: through nature, through our experiences, through our stories, in the medium of whole traditions, God is always initiating contact with us. As some of you know, my favorite theologian in many ways is the writer Alice Walker. According to her character Shug in The Color Purple, God is always trying to get our attention, carrying on a flirtation with us. Shug says to Celie, “Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?” Even more memorably, Shug says, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.” We see in Jesus at Jacob’s Well precisely this kind of reaching out. Frequently we fool ourselves into believing that our relationship with the deep truth of the universe depends upon our intentions, our consciousness, our intelligence, our capacity to understand. We are in a relationship with the divine before we ever know it, just as we are in relationship with the world about us, or the family encircling us, before we even become aware.

So Jesus asks the woman for a drink. That’s interesting. A Jewish man asks a Samaritan woman for a drink. All kinds of hell could pop loose from that little transaction. Man talking to woman, Jew conversing with a member of an enemy group, religious man presumably not observing some ritual regulations about washing vessels before using them: all point to something quite extraordinary about having a talk with Jesus. Jesus-—and let’s go ahead and say God, for that is who he is—-God-—God the Son—-is cutting across a whole stack of prejudices to meet the woman where she is. He who did not shun the Virgin’s womb nor the hard wood of the cross does not shun someone who dwells in the shadows until high noon when everyone else is preoccupied or napping when she traipses to the well unnoticed by the neighbors. Instead he begins a dialogue, which cannot happen except the woman willingly participate. She is in her world where at the moment the paramount thing is drawing water, which, if I remember my boyhood farm days, is not the easiest task on a hot day. “If you knew who it is who is asking, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” The woman, stuck in, shall we say, a materialist frame of mind, sees no evidence of fresh water and takes his comment to mean that somehow he has his own water supply, which to her must seem stupid. That is to say, she is in one frame of mind, Jesus in another.

Dialogue is a kind of dance between humans, who are frequently on different levels. The same is true of dialogue with God. I am on one level, God on another. Jesus neither gets defensive nor dismissive. Instead, he reaches out to bring his dialogue partner to where he is. Yet his language eludes her. She has no earthly idea of what he means when he says, “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” That sounds like a good idea to the woman, who either seriously or superciliously (I would guess the latter) says, “I want some. I’d like not to have to keep drawing water.” Conversation with God inevitably means that we keep hearing things that don’t exactly make sense. One response is to shut off the conversation and to tell ourselves that it is all imaginary anyway, that there is no reality to a “God” that is unseen. But another possible response is to thrash it out with God. The psalmists sometimes did that. “How long, O Lord?” they asked. “Why do the heathen rage?” they raged. Vexed, they cried, “O God, why have you utterly cast us off? why is your wrath so hot against the sheep of your pasture?” It should not surprise us that any God worthy of the name would have a perspective different from our own. Prayer is the place to wrestle with the Dazzling Stranger who calls all things into question. God is not put off when you call God into question. Witness Job, whose honest questioning far surpassed his proverbial patience.

Then Jesus takes an abrupt turn. “Go call your husband.”

That hits a sore spot. “I have no husband,” she claims. Jesus knows. The clear implication of the story is that Jesus is all-knowing. God knows our hearts’ desires. As an old hymn put it, “Jesus knows our every secret; take it to the Lord in prayer.” At this point the woman understandably takes charge of the conversation and changes the subject to religion. “I perceive you are a prophet, so let’s talk about religion.” Jesus lets her get away with it. He goes with her. “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…. The hour is coming and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.” Then comes the moment of self-disclosure. “I know that Messiah is coming,” says the woman. It may be a kind of Sunday school creed parroting what she has heard or been taught. But it might be an honest expression of heartfelt faith. “I know,” said Job, “that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted.” At the end of the dialogue, we sometimes find ourselves confessing our terminal smallness. We stand in the face of mystery, whether of galaxies or of quarks, with minds stretched to the limit in the face of suffering we cannot understand or of evil we cannot explain or of beauty and joy of inexpressible sweetness. And in the silence following the last thing we voice, Jesus says, “I am he.” The great “I am” speaks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes through an insight, sometimes through an unexpected peace.

If enough dialogue goes on, day in and day out, we find ourselves in the company of One who we are sure knows us perfectly, with no condemnation. Yet the very conversation proves over and over that God keeps calling us to live on a higher level, where our desire for a mere thirst-quencher morphs into a thirst for Living Water. We might even find ourselves called to be and do things that seem totally beyond our habits, outside our comfort zone. You can love your enemies. You can forgive and move on. And so dialogue bring us to the point where we leave the everyday task we’ve brought along with us, and run to say to some others, “Come see a man! Come see a man who knows me better than I know myself. He can’t be the Messiah, can he?”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Ashes and Glory

2011-03-09T18:19:00.000-08:00

This year an uncommonly late Ash Wednesday has given me more time to think about Ash Wednesdays and Lents in the past. I remember some fondly, others not so fondly. I spent one Ash Wednesday in Jerusalem, and remember imposing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful in a high wind as we stood in the night overlooking the Old City. I recall Ash Wednesdays in Connecticut where the ice was so thick you practically had to use a pick to get out the front door. My favorite Ash Wednesday was probably the one I prepared for on a Caribbean beach, lying out in the sun when a couple of dozen youth swarmed around on a work-study trip.

But the Ash Wednesdays that run together in my mind are those that felt like the beginning of something new, something big. “This Lent,” I have often said to myself, “This Lent I am going to get it right.” So I have vowed to begin a discipline, or to resume one that I had discarded. And those vows and promises go up in smoke, and come to so many ashes falling from the sky and covering me on Ash Wednesday.

You may know that the ashes of Ash Wednesday come from the palms that we waved last Palm Sunday, or some other Palm Sunday. They were signs of victory, emblems of triumph. Altar guilds all over the place go outside on Shrove Tuesday and fire up their hibachis for burning palms. They get a little cupful (a few ashes go a long way). And we smudge the foreheads of the faithful, veiling the baptismal cross marked on us when we are sealed by the Holy Spirit in our New Birth at the font. Those ashes we are told are signs of our mortality and penitence. They are reminders that we are but dust and to dust shall we return.

But the ashes are more than remains of palms and reminders of mortality. Ashes are what is left from all the resolutions we made and did not keep, the vows we vowed and broke, the covenants we entered into and found we could not keep. Ashes are, for sure, signs of our humanity, our fallibility, our weakness.

And ashes are reminders of not only things that have been burned up and destroyed, but those that need to be burned. There are things that cling to us like beggar-lice in a winter field: passions that deflect us from our calling, anger that warps our dispositions, self-absorption that blinds us to injustice and cruelty around us, worldviews that keep us enthralled to our own prejudices. We need to cast them into the fire and burn them up. We need to put just enough ashes on our foreheads to remind ourselves that none of these things makes us pretty.

But ashes are not all there is to us. We are not just dust. We are glory, too. The ashes may veil our shiny cross of chrism, but they do not dim it forever. Glory shines through dust and ashes. Dust may bring us to our knees on Ash Wednesday, but glory makes us ache for the God we adore. If we are inspired to seek God, it is the glorious part of us breaking through the crust of ashes wanting to be something truer, something nobler. If we are inspired to love God, it is the glorious part of us erupting from the earth of which we are made, trying to grow, to blossom, to flourish in the light and warmth of our Maker. If we are inspired to serve God, it is the glorious part of us responding to the movement of the very God that came among us as one who serves.

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. But remember that you are glory, too, and your glory will not rest until it beholds the Author of Glory, as face beholding face.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

My Sermon on the Mount

2011-02-26T20:39:00.001-08:00

Prayer and Worry

Matthew 6:19-34

In the middle of composing my sermon for today, which I have capriciously entitled “My Sermon on the Mount,” I found myself wondering if Jesus worried as much about his Sermon on the Mount as I was worrying about mine. Well, if you know much about Jesus, I am sure you will agree with me that I outstrip him in the worrying department.

Jesus had some things to say about worrying. In the process, he did not bash worriers and say that they were bad people. But if we take the Sermon on the Mount seriously, especially this slice of it we heard as the gospel today, it is hard to come away with some impression other than that Jesus is doing his best to talk us out of worrying. And, in no small measure, to be honest, that is what I want to do too. I want my Sermon on the Mount to reduce the total amount of worrying, or anxiety, that most of us keep going.

Some people are natural worriers. I have known a few in my lifetime. I suppose if you are a worrier, you might not appreciate having the homiletical spotlight shine on you, especially if you should not look too attractive under that light. You might want to point out to me, for example, that people who worry a lot simply cannot help themselves, in which case there is little good to be gained by suggesting that they change. Or you might point out one of a number of recent studies that suggest worrying is a good thing, and that the matter with a lot of us is that we don’t do enough of it, or at least don’t do enough of the right kind of worrying.

Jesus actually does not address what some psychologists would call “the good kind of worry.” Not, at least, in his Sermon on the Mount. I think it is fair to say that he would have advised the Scribes and Pharisees of his day to do a bit more worrying about the plight of the poor, to worry somewhat more about the marginalized and dispossessed, and to worry about the effect of burdensome laws and regulations upon a sin-conscious and spiritually oppressed population. That is not the kind of worrying he focuses on in the Sermon on the Mount. There he talks about worrying which is antithetical to a life of prayer.

And that brings us swiftly to the topic of My Sermon on the Mount. For, like all the others that I am preaching for the time being, this one is about prayer. Jesus says some things about prayer in his Sermon on the Mount, but not in the passage we are examining right now. He talks elsewhere about how when we pray we are to go into a private place and not to “heap up empty phrases.” He then gives us the model prayer, which we have come to know as The Lord’s Prayer or the “Our Father,” as an example of the way to pray. But in a larger sense, prayer, as we have noted before, is a way of life, a pattern of continuous communication with God. So in that sense, worry very much gets in the way of prayer because worry wears away at one of the cornerstone elements of life with God. That element is trust.

Worry and the stress it engenders were not invented a few years ago when people entered a post-industrial world. Worry has been around a long time. In fact, one can make a case that worry, if anything, was even more prevalent in times like Jesus’, because proportionately a great many more people lived on the edge of starvation or some other cause of death. On top of all that, they, like many in the underdeveloped parts of the modern world, lived much of their days in the shadow of political oppression. So Jesus and his listeners knew something about worry. It does not make much difference if you are worrying about what you are to eat because you are a first century Palestinian peasant or whether you are worrying about how you will pay the bill in an entirely too expensive restaurant to which you have taken your spouse for Valentine’s Day. Worry is not going to prove too helpful in either situation. The constant thing is that, no matter what our circumstances, we always have a choice as to how we are going to approach life. We can either live out of the context of the lilies of the field or we can live out of the context of the rich fool of another gospel, who amassed a great many things to give him security but which availed nothing when he suddenly died. We can either live out of a basic sense of trust, or we can live out of a basic sense of fear.

Now fear is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on what we fear and how we fear. As the Collect of the Day—one of the best in the Prayer Book, in my opinion—says, God wills us “to give thanks in all things, to dread nothing but the loss of [God]....” So there is at least one thing to fear—and that is the loss of God, which means the loss of an awareness of God’s Presence and utter reliability. And there are some fears that function to keep us appropriately cautious of things that can harm us or others. But runaway fear, basic fear, all-encompassing anxiety, even if it is well masked, gets in the way of doing what we pray for in the same collect: it gets in the way of casting “all our care upon [God], who care[s] for us.” The “faithless fears” and “worldly anxieties” we ask to be spared are those things that can “hide from us the light of that love which is immortal.” And that, you see, is the crux of the matter. The heart of prayer—the prayer that we live, not only the prayer that we say—is letting go of those things that, if we hold on to them, become the center of our preoccupations and thus our gods.

Why is it so hard to let go, even if we are not worriers by nature? The psychologist Erik Erikson posited a basic stage in human development, which he called “infant trust.” The very first stage in psychosocial development is the crisis of trust versus mistrust, a crisis out of which the little human being either learns or does not learn the fundamental dynamic of hope. If the infant does not learn that he or she can trust caregivers, then that crisis is not resolved. In a sense it colors the rest of life, until in some sense it is resolved. Viewed through that lens, the phenomenon of worrying, or chronic anxiety, might well be traced to the lack of completion of that very first developmental task: learning to trust. If we have not learned that, it is quite likely that we will have trouble trusting generally. It is even more likely that we will find it difficult to trust that the world is a basically good place, let alone trust a God whom we do not see.

I would argue that we can indeed learn to trust. Like most things learned, trust is best learned by practice. We don’t get very far from chronic worrying if we simply give in to it all the time. Many find that meditation is a powerful antidote to worrying. Some find help through counseling or psychotherapy. Others turn to spiritual direction with a skilled soul friend, and learn to reflect on their lives in the light of God’s Providence. But I think there is a way, in addition to all of these, that is available to every last one of us. And that way is simple prayer. And here I am talking about prayer in the narrow sense of focused thoughts, if not words. Often prayer is generated directly out of anxiety as we whisper or scream or mutter or cry out to God, “Please help me!” It does not necessarily make anxiety or fear go away, but sometimes it can lead us to unexpected grace.

Something happened to me about a dozen years ago that captures what I am talking about. I had gone on a cross-country trip, a sabbatical I had dreamed about for years. The first week into this three-month journey, I was hiking alone and found myself quite suddenly half-way up a rock formation that was far steeper and sharper than I had imagined. I froze about fifty or sixty feet up a wall impossible for me to continue scaling, with nothing to hold on to. The thought of backing down the rock petrified me and the thought of continuing was equally paralyzing. I literally hung for minutes not knowing what to do, palms sweating. I visualized myself falling all the way down, breaking a leg, arm, back, or neck. Never in my life to this day have I been more frightened. You don’t need a lesson in prayer at a point like that. You just pray, hoping to God or whoever is out there that something will save you. Out of my mouth came, “Lord, save me!” and in my head or heart or somewhere I heard, “He will not suffer your foot to be moved.” To my left, about fifteen feet away was a crevice in the rock. I took a breath and, thanks to some good hiking boots and a gust of trust, I scampered (I lack a more accurate verb) over to the crevice, grabbed its jagged edge, and backed down the rock formation. Then I had to go about a quarter of the way up again to retrieve my hiking stick, which I had thrown down. Thank God, such moments of abject terror do not come too often in my life. But when they do, there is nothing much to do but cry out in utter helplessness, believing that on some level, the Great Consciousness of the Universe (I nickname it “God”) will hear the cry and come to aid. Do you have to put it that way? No. Do you have to believe in God? Not really. Do you have to trust? Absolutely. And in my book, it all amounts to the same thing.

Prayer does not have to be that nail-biting, palm-sweating experience, however. And usually it isn’t. Prayer can as easily be what you do when you sit down to pay your bills, or when you wring your hands over what your daughter will do on her first date, or when you think about how you will get through the morning of tough meetings, or when you start cleaning out the attic of your mother’s house that she didn’t touch the last thirty years of her life. And even those things are more dramatic than prayer needs to be. Little by little, day by day, it is practicing letting go: a little bit here, a little bit there, until we come to find ourselves a bit freer than we were last year this time, a bit more able to trust that the one who clothes the grass of the fields, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, will clothe us of little faith.

And as for the birds, I recall a rhyme I heard as a child, which still inspires me during the times when clouds darken and fears mount:

Said the robin to the sparrow,
“There’s one thing I’d like to know—
Why these anxious human beings
Rush around and worry so.”

Said the sparrow to the robin,
“I think that it must be
That they have no heavenly Father
Such as cares for you and me.”

Even in our darkest hour, whether of our own making or despite our best efforts or quite by cosmic chance, we are undergirded by a fundamental Goodness, protected by countless throngs of ancestors and spirits, loved everlastingly by the Mother of God and the hosts of heaven, saved by the strong hand of the Son of Man, shielded by the Love of a Provident God who values each one of us as if we were the one and only inhabitant of the world. Then when Fear knocks at the door and Trust answers, Trust always finds that no one is there.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2011

Shining Light

2011-02-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

Ethics and Prayer

Isaiah 58:1-9a
Matthew 5:13-20

When three- and four-year-olds in the day school of a parish where I was priest gathered for daily chapel, they used to compete to light the two candles on the small altar. Our standard ritual was my question, “Who did Jesus say was the light of the world?” For the first several weeks of the term or maybe longer there would be a choral answer: “God!”

“That is a very good answer, but not quite the one I’m looking for,” I’d say.

With a little training, they learned to say, “Jesus.” And I would affirm that Jesus did say that he was the light of the world.

“But who else did Jesus say was the light of the world?”

“We are!” they would shout out.

We do not know what preschoolers will remember, or whether or not down the road it will make much difference that they were taught this or that. I suspect that it is a very uneven thing, some children remembering things that others quickly forget. But it was my prayer that somehow, as those little ones saw the two candles burning on their altar, they would make the connection that Jesus and we were in this together. He who said, “I am the light of the world” also said, “You are the light of the world,” howbeit in two different gospels.

Because this year I set myself the task of looking when I preach at each Sunday’s texts with you through the lens of prayer, I am hearing all of these scriptures today in a different key from how I have heard them before. The passage from Isaiah, for instance, is one we frequently read on Ash Wednesday. Fasting is no good if it is divorced from the ethical behavior that God enjoins. It is easy enough to make the connection between the Lenten fast and the ethical imperative to do right by the poor and the oppressed. And the piece of the Sermon on the Mount that we hear in today’s gospel: it really is about integrity, isn’t it? Tasteless salt or a smothered light are contradictions in terms. If we are salt, we have something to flavor. If we are light, we are the means by which people see. We have to exercise our properties in a way that is congruent with who we are. In other words, we are not worth much if we do not have and act with integrity. The “righteousness,” of which Jesus speaks, the righteousness that his community must have that exceeds the so-called righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees is a sense of right action. It involves the practice of justice. That righteousness is different from moral priggishness or pious fussiness. It is the righteousness of profound integrity.

What happens, however, when we start hearing these things in relation to prayer? We find, first, that prayer itself takes on a fresh meaning. Often we assume prayer to be the words we say in the context of a talk, formal or informal, we have with the Divine. But that is only a fraction of what prayer is. Prayer is a way of living. In the Christian sense, prayer is a way of maintaining our relationship with God. I would put it even more simply and say that prayer is the Life of God in us. But in a larger sense, isn’t it possible that our prayer is our life with our god, whichever god we happen to have? Think about it. Somebody asked me just this week what the commandment on idolatry meant. “What is it to have an idol?” he asked. “Idol” is only a word denoting whatever it is that is the god we bow down to, other than the Author and Giver of Life itself. Those gods can be security or money or education or family or sports or career or one of a couple of thousand other things. But whatever the god is that we are worshiping, the substance of the life we are living with that god is our prayer. That is, by the way, what is so sad about idols, and even sadder about prayers to idols. Idols have no way of doing much for us, except by giving us a temporary fix that meets a need such as self-assurance or the staving off of fear. As the psalmist says in once place, “…eyes have they, but they cannot see; ears but they cannot hear; noses but they cannot smell….” And when we give our lives to what cannot give life back, we are the ultimate losers. So the question is not whether we are going to pray. The question is to whom we are going to pray. And you know already that the biblical deck is loaded. There is only One worth praying to, for there is only One who is living and true.

All of that is well and good, until we start trying to figure out what life with God actually involves. I’ll tell you right now that I have discovered no way to get even all the important pieces of the answer to that question into one sermon. I invariably skip something. Yet there is no question that the Law, the Prophets, and Jesus himself leave little doubt that God’s life involves right relationships. To put it that way brings us squarely into the sphere of ethics. When we start thinking of prayer as a deeply ethical activity, or ethics as prayerful, the whole notion of ethics takes on an interesting meaning. Much of the time, “ethics” seems to mean conformity to a standard of professional conduct, such as medical ethics or congressional ethics (don’t laugh), or the ethics of academe. But the Bible knows nothing about that—which fact doesn’t mean that a code of ethics, for example, is a bad idea. Instead, prophets like Isaiah know a good deal about integrity. The great insight of the old prophets was that spirituality without ethical behavior was vapid, hollow, useless. You can fast while you are oppressing your employees, but it won’t do you any good at all. To put it in human terms, God does not even bat an eye. Fasting while quarreling and plotting schisms and sewing the seeds of division? Don’t waste your time! To put it in human terms, God does not hear as much as a grunt from you. But, true fasting is humility. It is loosing the bonds of injustice, undoing those things that keep people down, coming down on the side of the oppressed, exercising power for the sake of right. To live a life like that is to live the life of God, because those are the ethical things God is interested in. To be absolutely clear, Isaiah does not say that these things go hand in hand with a good fast—and if you aren’t into fasting, read “general spirituality.” These things are fasting or “general spirituality,” if the latter is worth its salt. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, being available to those “strangers” who really are our own kin: these things are the fast that God desires.

So, then, is prayer as we usually think of it a waste of time? In the total context of the prophets, even the book of Isaiah itself, it would be wrong to suppose that the prophets condemn all liturgy, all ritual, all prayer as we practice it in the formal sense. No, when the people are wrapped up in religiosity and are all fascinated with how spiritual they are, the prophets remind them that there is a world out there that sweats under the yoke of bondage and groans from pure physical hardship—a world God calls them to care about. But when the people (that is to say the majority) are beaten down, depressed, hopeless, the prophets, like Malachi and Zechariah and Haggai, call for a renewal of the worshiping community.

Interestingly enough, Isaiah winds up his sermon on true fasting by talking about “your light,” and “your healing,” meaning ours. When we have integrated the practice of justice and the practice of worship, we in fact will have arrived at the place of true prayer. Our light will shine, not on us, but on the One whose life we are living, the One whose life is in us. It is the life of the One whom Jesus calls “our Abba in heaven.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Spoken Word

2010-12-26T11:23:00.000-08:00

Prayer as Transcendent Experience

John 1:1-18

John’s gospel begins with a majestic prologue, in which almost anybody who has ever cracked open the Bible will hear an echo of the very first words of the very first chapter of the very first book. “In the beginning.” That is, in fact, what Genesis means. And genesis—the genesis of Jesus, the genesis of creation, the genesis of life, the genesis of regeneration, the genesis of faith, the genesis of knowledge—is very much the central theme of the fourth gospel. “In the beginning,” begins John, and with one gesture he pulls aside the curtain of time and steps into a world behind the shadows and scenes of the present. Like the Pevensie children in The Chronicles of Narnia, we follow John through the wardrobe into a strange and yet somehow more real world than the one in which we daily live.

John did not invent that world. But you won’t find it sketched out in some other part of the Bible either. The cosmos known to the writer of Genesis in the sixth century before Christ looked very different from the cosmos that John understood. Sometime around the beginning of the Christian era, a Jew named Philo who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, came up with a blend of Hebrew and Greek thought. Among other things, Philo talked about a “logos,” which to him meant “creative principle.” Greek philosophy tended in the direction of seeing matter as imperfect. Hebrew tradition, on the other hand, saw God as the creator of everything. “Logos” for Philo was a way of bridging the material world and God. The Logos was God’s creative power that brought the world into being. If you have ever heard the Prologue of St. John’s gospel, and most likely if you have ever heard a sermon on it, you know that “the Word” is that Logos. It is that creative power of God that was with God in the beginning. When Philo heard God speaking, “Let there be light,” he was hearing the Logos, the Word.

So John pulls aside the curtain of the present and lets us see what is happening outside time and space. Now the interesting thing about the Logos is that, although it is beyond the world that we see and live in, it is responsible for the whole shebang. All things came into being through the Logos. Not one thing came into being without the Logos. And, like Philo, John sees that what has come into being in the Logos was life. The Logos has brought the world to life, in other words. Not only that, but the Logos is the light that enlightens every person. Don’t miss the importance of that. All persons, not just Christians or Jews or intellectual or spiritual persons, are enlightened by the Logos.

Imagine that right now you could step inside the space, as it were, where the Logos lived before being born in Jesus. Suppose you could just slip right now between your pew and the one in front of you and just disappear to the rest of us while finding yourself in another dimension. What do you think you would call where you were? Heaven, perhaps? All right, maybe not. But would you say that God was there? And, if so, then it really is what we call “heaven,” isn’t it? Would you be aware that if you could do this right now you would not have had to die to go to heaven? You would have simply slid out of this world and into another world. Or, to put it slightly differently, your body would be right here but your consciousness would be elsewhere.

Now some of you will not believe that that is possible. Others will say that even if you do fancy things like this with your consciousness, you have by no means “left” the ordinary world, because anything that the human mind does is by definition in the ordinary world. Fair enough. I’m not here to quibble. But what I am driving at is, first, that there more to reality than we commonly suppose; second, that God is everywhere and everywhere accessible; and, third, that you are perfectly capable of an experience that transcends your ordinary bodily existence. There is a common word to denote that transcendent experience. That word is prayer.

Most of us are used to a couple of notions about prayer. One is that it is a matter of asking God for one thing or another, or telling God something of which we think God might not be aware. Occasionally it is telling God thanks for something wonderful, and from time to time it is telling God that we are sorry for something we have done or left undone. Well, all of those can be prayer and often are. But at its heart, prayer, whether here in church or somewhere else, is not talking to God as if God were a great big Ear somewhere out in the universe, but actually entering heaven—which I am using as shorthand for the presence of God.

In one of Charles Williams’ novels some of the characters are looking for a London address. They go to the street where the building is located, but they do not find it. There is the number before and the number after. But the building is on neither side of the street and is nowhere to be found. Others, however, are able to find the building and enter. There is nothing particularly mysterious about it at all. They simply happen to be attuned to a dimension of existence that others are deaf to. It is not at all unlike the situation in the Harry Potter novels where to catch the train to Hogwarts one has to step courageously into a space between platforms 9 and 10. Muggles, oblivious to the world of magic, do not see Platform 9½. I don’t think that these images of Williams and Rowling are a bad way of understanding prayer. Prayer is stepping into that dimension where the Logos lives both prior to and after the Incarnation.

The whole story of the Incarnation of the Logos is the story of the Word becoming human that humanity might become divine. The Logos bridges heaven and earth, God and humanity. The point of the Incarnation is not to leave us interminably separated from God, but quite the opposite: to unite us to God. The Word joins together things earthly and things heavenly. As John puts it in the Prologue, “as many as received him, to them he gave power to become the children of God.” What the Word, or Logos, is by nature—child of God—we become by grace—children of God. Baptism brings us into union with the Logos. Eucharist keeps us there. Prayer is the practice by which the bonds of the union get stronger and stronger. Remember that prayer is not just “saying your prayers,” but entering that dimension where, as one of the collects of the Prayer Book puts it, the Spirit might lift us to the Presence of God, where we may be still and know that God is God.

As you know if you were here two weeks ago or again on Christmas Eve, my focus for preaching over the next number of months is going to be prayer. So there is no way and no need for me to unpack all that this might possibly mean right now. I hope you will be a part of the ongoing conversation about prayer as we explore it.
Some of you already have forgotten more about prayer than I will ever know. I do not pretend to be a master of prayer. But I do believe that we are created to be in tune—united in purpose and spirit—with the deepest truth of the universe. That the Logos would become one of us is magnificently wonderful. It is even more wonderful that the Logos would unite us to himself so that we can be as authentic, as real, as loving, as grace-filled as the Logos is. Don’t think that it will never happen. The most stunning thing of all has already occurred, namely that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Coming into his presence through prayer is not impossible. It is exactly what happens when we are born not of blood, or of the will of the flesh, or of human will, but the will of God.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2010

Heart Warming

2010-12-25T10:29:00.000-08:00

Christmas as Prayer

“But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” –St. Luke 2:18

In Advent last year, Marcus Borg, known to many of us as a refreshingly honest New Testament scholar, came to Washington to address us Episcopal clergy in a diocesan quiet day, a custom for which we gather in early December. Borg began by asking us quickly to recall some of our memories of Christmas when we were children. Several hands shot up including mine. Like the eager schoolboy I once was, I unrestrainedly confessed to my colleagues that when I was a boy, I was the decorator in my family. I saw nothing particularly funny about that, but my comment brought the house down, so much so that Borg commented that something must have been going on that was escaping him. When the laughter abated, I reminisced that every December I would go through the woods surrounding our farmhouse gathering holly and pine boughs which I would use to decorate the front door and the table in our living room, as we had no mantle.

Of the many things I remember about Christmases long ago, the strongest memories cluster about that holly, green at first but rapidly brown because my grandmother heated the living room to something like 80°. Taking my cues from the best source I had, namely the sentimental pictures on the Methodist bulletin covers at that time of year, I would place the family Bible in the middle of the living room table, open to the second chapter of St. Luke’s gospel, flank it with red candles in silver holders, and surround it with holly.

And, long before I knew the word “liturgy,” I liked nothing better than to gather the family in the living room and either read or orchestrate the reading of Luke 2:1-20. On some level the verse that struck me as perhaps the most mysterious was towards the end. “But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” I have a vague memory of my mother commenting on that at some point. And perhaps I heard our pastor, Mr. Hedgepath, preach on that text. It is somehow connected for me with the very first image of the Blessed Mother that resonated with me: a large, oak-framed sepia print of Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna,” which hung in my Sunday school classroom while I was out gathering holly.

Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. I imagined that the woman I saw on my Sunday school classroom wall was pondering, thinking about, the child she was holding, remembering all the strange things that were said about him and all the weird dimensions of his birth. What I could not have known at that age, but know now, is that Mary’s pondering all those things in her heart was her prayer. And it is prayer more than anything else which spells the difference between getting at the meaning of Christmas and forgetting it or never getting it.

Luke says that Mary “preserved” all these things. What things? What the shepherds reported that the angel had said: “born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” This proclamation fits with what the angel had said to Mary herself at the annunciation: “…and now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” But then Luke goes on to say something that nobody fully understands. He uses a verb that we hear in English as “pondered.” But that is probably too weak a way of conveying the meaning. It is more like, “she tossed them together in her heart.” Somebody looked into the matter further and came up with the probability that the whole sentence might mean something like, “But Mary treasured all these things, tossing them over and over in her heart, trying to find the right meaning of it all.”

That’s interesting. Most folks I listen to, or whose ads and cards and donation requests I read, have it all figured out. I hear phrases like “the true meaning of Christmas” and it would surprise me if anyone has tossed much Christmas around trying to figure it out. Typically, Christians are used to hearing scripture like this and, unlike our Jewish cousins, assume that we are hearing history, not myth and poetry and symbol. The Nativity is too large to be understood factually. It is beyond the scope of The Washington Post, CNN, or even Fox News. It exceeds all that can be neatly computed and quantified. And here, embedded in the story itself, is a clue as to what must happen if we are ever to find the right meaning of it all: ponder it, savor it, chew on it, over and over in your heart, until it becomes a part of you.

Madeleine L’Engle authored an exceedingly lovely book telling in her own masterful words the story of Christ, inspired and illustrated by Giotto’s famous frescoes in the little Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. She entitled the book The Glorious Impossible, and wrote, “Possible things are easy to believe. The Glorious Impossibles are what bring joy to our hearts, hope to our lives, songs to our lips.” And I would add: the only thing to do with the impossibles is to take them into your prayer.

Notice that I do not say “prayers.” For the first several years that I lived in Washington, I had a spiritual director, a very wise woman, who would ask me periodically what I was doing with thus and such an issue in my prayer? I would typically take her to be asking me what or how I was praying about whatever it was. “No,” she would say, “not what are you praying—as in the words you think or say—but what are you doing with it in your prayer?” It took me many months to learn that “my prayer” was not the content of my meditation, let alone the words I say that begin with “Dear God” or something of the sort. My prayer is my continual pondering, cogitating, ruminating, considering, tossing around the events and images and sounds and patterns of my life, trying to find the meaning of it all. Some of it is words, and sometimes those words are anything but typically religious ones. But sometimes the only thing I can do about the beauty of a relationship is hug or kiss or hold. And sometimes prayer is a formal thanksgiving. But just as often it is humming a song or whistling as I walk down the street or singing something at the top of my lungs when I am in my truck and no one but the Maker of the Universe can hear me. Sometimes such pondering takes me to the piano and my oldest art becomes the medium in which I express myself. I have known it to drive me to a canvas, where something takes hold of me and delivers in color and form what eludes my reason. I have known it to happen in the garden or washing dishes or running or hiking or—yes!–decorating!

In Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna,” two little putti, who have been reproduced ad infinitum on Christmas cards and all manner of angel paraphernalia, are hanging on the balustrade, looking up, their backs turned to the action, yet still aware of the Mother and Child. One cherub is cogitating, its chubby finger on its lips. The other is enchanted, perhaps, or mystified, or adoring, or maybe even a trifle bored. I imagine that the faces of the putti, more than anything else in the painting, betray the prayer of the artist himself, painting this towards the end of his life. Like his little putti, he does not yet know what to make of it all. The magnificent birth eludes him. It is too wonderful for him, so high that he cannot attain it. In a way he is tossing around and around in his paint and form the possible meaning of the Gloriously Impossible, just as the Virgin herself is doing.

Now I know that what I was doing when I was eight or nine years old plucking holly from the woods was my prayer. Some part of a little boy was adoring the Christ Child as really as the Christ Child was adoring the little boy. He had to open the Book and place the holly around it because that was the only way he knew to weave together story and symbol. He could not grasp the beauty of his flesh any more than his little hands could grasp holly without getting stuck and bleeding. But bit by bit, over the years, the story told itself, and things began to sink in. He learned that the flesh which the Word became in being born was something to rejoice in, not to be ashamed of. He learned that the Savior born that day in the City of David had a peculiar pull on him that he could not shake. And he treasures now so many things that do and don’t have to do with what happened on the hillside outside Bethlehem or in the cave where Mary and Joseph camped with the animals. Little bits of boyhood, like the memory of a Christmas shopping trip with his grandmother; the memory of giving an engagement ring when he thought his life had finally come together; one Advent spent working to build a homemade substitute for the Barbie Dream House for his little girls, wondering if they would be at all enchanted by their parents’ creativity or put off by the substitution of craft for expensive toys (they were appropriately impressed!); falling asleep on Christmas morning in the arms of his beloved, too overjoyed at the goodness of life to say much more than “Thank you, God.” Sheep and shepherds and angels and New Life: the glorious impossible he treasures and keeps turning all of it, all of it, Christmas and brokenness, Christmas and healing, Christmas and joy, over and over in his heart, where the boundaries between story and symbol, heaven and earth, Jesus and the boy fade and disappear.

Take your life tonight and all that is in it into your prayer. Memories and hopes, forgiveness and irritations, surprises and boredom, excitement and joy: take them all into your prayer. Keep asking what the Child that was born that day in the city of David has to do with you, and how you ever came to hear the great glad tidings of the angels, and how the mystery of the universe ever became your own Glorious Impossible. Treasure it. And toss it around and around in your heart until you come by grace to your own moment of meaning.

©Frank G. Dunn, 2010

Pray Tell

2010-12-13T12:05:00.000-08:00

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with you and the Holy Spirit be honor and glory now and for ever. Amen.

There are three touchstones that keep me connected to the heart of my Christian practice: hymns, psalms, and collects. Of the three of these, the third is far and away the most peculiarly Anglican—if that interests you. If it doesn’t, you probably have no earthly idea of what a collect is. “Is he talking about the collection?” you might wonder. Or, you might have noticed the word c-o-l-l-e-c-t in the bulletin or Prayer Book and have wondered what it is, why it is called that, and where it comes from. Don’t think for a minute that I imagine this to be of enormous importance to anybody. But you would not be wrong in supposing that I am in the process of opening a door that I’ll bet you’ll at least want to look through if not walk through. But hold on a minute.

Back to collects. Collects are so called because they are a specific form of concise prayer offered over the “collecta,” the assembly, of worshipers. The one perhaps most familiar to us is the so-called Collect for Purity: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid….” Nearly always they comprise an invocation, (Almighty God), a description of the one being invoked (to you all hearts are open, all desires known…), a command (cleanse the thoughts of our hearts), a result (that we may perfectly love you…), and a conclusion (through Jesus Christ our Lord).

The reason I like collects is the reason that many people do, and maybe the reason they have outlasted many another feature of Christian worship. I like them because they are short, memorable, and useful. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child without any words to pray, even to speak under my breath to myself. And when I feel the need to connect to Something larger, I draw on the words of collects that I have known since I was a boy and hear myself saying, “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts…” or “Remember, O Lord, what you have wrought in us and not what we deserve…” or “… that our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found….”

That brings us to today’s collect. For many years, and still in some parts of the Anglican Communion, the “stir up” collect was used on the Sunday Next Before Advent. It was one of a series of old collects which for a long time were used on all five of the Sundays before Christmas that began with the Latin, “Excita.” In many an Episcopalian’s kitchen on or about the Sunday before Advent, spoons and egg beaters began whipping and whirring overtime to stir up puddings and fruitcakes, which has about as much to do with the content of the collect as Jesus has use for Jacuzzis. But that is why “Stir up Sunday” grew in popularity. The collect is a prayer that God will “stir up” power, and with great might come among us. And, it notes, because we are sorely hindered by our manifold sins, we implore God to let God’s bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us.

I want to side-step, just for a little while, the figure of John the Baptist and his message of preparation for Messiah long enough to look carefully at this collect. The door that I want to open is the whole matter of prayer. This is as good a prayer as any to initiate that discussion—to raise serious questions about what prayer is, why it is the quintessential religious practice, and why it is enormously important to Christians and to those of other faith traditions.

The most basic thing about the collect, it seems to me, is the phrase, “because we are sorely hindered by our sins.” Before you retch at the idea of sin actually being in a sermon, stop and consider. Don’t you know that it is true? Before you leap to cataloguing those personal thoughts and actions that you might call sin (either things that you are ashamed of or things that you think are nobody’s business but your own), think of the enormous power that seems to hold the world in its grip. Your list might be different from mine, but mine would include things like willful ignorance that tries to silence the truth of the global climate crisis, self-absorption that turns a deaf ear to the cries of the wretched, power hunger that tramples on the vulnerable, pride of race or nation that justifies killing and unspeakable cruelty, the delusion that any of us is able to be who and what we are without depending upon the rest of the human community, the thoughtlessness or worse that leads to the trashing of the natural world. That is enough to put me in clear mind of how it is that we—the world, the whole lot of humanity—are indeed sorely hindered. Tragically, we hinder ourselves and could easily let up if not stop the behaviors that defeat us. Add to those things the innumerable ways in which we as individuals allow our desires to take control of us so that we lose our balance, falling into various kinds of excess, fear-driven greediness, competition for affection, manipulating others’ emotions and usurping their freedom. Tell me we are not hindered by our sins!

But then we pray that God will stir up God’s power and with great might come among us. It is not a request. It is an imperative. The collect doesn’t fool around with a nice address to God, nor with the customary descriptor. It just goes straight for the verb, the command: “Stir up your power!” What on earth is that about? What do we mean when we pray such a thing? Do we seriously think that God is like some dragon hiding in a cave at the end of the world, snoring through the centuries, ignorant of all that is going on in the universe? Do we think that our prayers, for example, are sharp darts we shoot between the dragon’s scales to arouse her so that she will roar to life, snort some fire, wing her terrible flight through time and space, come to wreck our world, rid it of evil, fix it for all time? Is such a prayer in fact a piece of fairy-tale fiction? Suppose it were true that God is the Being that we hope to heaven will intervene and fix things (we are used to believing that about politicians, for example). Who do we think might suffer, if not we ourselves who are our own chief hinderers? Are we really sure that we want that? There are those that we would laugh to see punished for their wickedness. But are we ready to pay the price we might ourselves owe were our hands pried loose from all we grasp and squeeze and cling to?

This is not what the collect envisions, however. We find ourselves praying that God’s power having been sufficiently stirred up, God will with great might come among us not to beat us up, but with bountiful grace and mercy to help and deliver us. What do you think that might look like were the prayer “to come true,” as my six-year-old daughter once put it? The truth of the matter is we do not know. We can dimly imagine, perhaps, what it might be like if the world were really at peace, if people learned to get along, if we did not go around picking fights with one another, if people were courteous even to strangers, if in short human beings lived on an even slightly higher level than we generally do.

You may take me to task here, voicing the position of the orthodox Christian, claiming that of course we know what it would be like if God came among us with great might because that is exactly what God did in Jesus. Well, yes. And look what happened to Jesus. All that grace and all that mercy that Jesus embodied and modeled and talked about just seemed to evaporate like the dew under Good Friday morning’s sun when the forces of darkness revved up and got poised for a crucifixion. In a sense that is exactly what the gospel today is telling us. It is not only possible for the seriously wicked to miss the point and presence of God’s might in Jesus. Why it was none other than John the Baptist himself, Mister Forerunner, Prophet of the Kingdom-of-Heaven-is-at-hand who was shaken by Jesus’ performance! “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” This is enough to tell us that we would not necessarily recognize God’s great might among us, especially if that might did not match our preconceptions, as clearly happened when Jesus appeared.

Now I must tell you. This sermon will not fully answer the question of what we think we are doing when we pray. I don’t know that any sermon could. But my purpose today is to crack open this subject so that we can begin thinking and discussing what we think we are doing when we pray. To some of you that is obvious. To others of you it may be pointless. But to many of us, skeptics and believers, agnostics and orthodox, prayer must have a point or else it, and the God it is addressed to, deteriorate into utter triviality, leaving us mired in the stuff of sin and shame (though we may try to excuse it), or else trapping us in a silly religious charade that only pretends to be real. I want to spend at least from now until Pentecost pushing us to be ruthlessly honest about prayer; to look at all the various pieces of the Christian story through the lens of prayer—healing and prayer, forgiveness and prayer, desire and prayer, art and prayer, ethics and prayer, resurrection and prayer. I want to see if we can come to understand prayer as less about words we say or even ideas we form than it is about living and behaving in the presence of Truth, that Truth we see most clearly revealed in Jesus Christ.

So this is only the beginning of the discussion. But it is a beginning. Which is to say that this is a kind of Advent in itself. And at its core Advent is not just a season of the year but a season of the heart. Advent is when the heart yearns, sighs, groans, prays, prays, prays to God, please for God’s sake, stir up your power and with great might come among us. Come among us. We have made a royal mess of things, but we know deep down that we can do better. On our best days we know that we do unimaginably splendid things, like giving up ourselves for the sake of others and treating other people as if they are sacraments of your very own divine presence. Come among us with great might, dear Lord. And let your bountiful grace and mercy—which we see in various ones among us, like the Schweitzers and the Mother Teresas and the Buddha and the Prophet and most clearly in Jesus and occasionally in the pew beside us and in the mirror––let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us. So we pray.

So we pray.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

¿El Fin del Mundo o el Fin de Temor?

2010-11-12T22:19:00.000-08:00

San Lucas 21:5-19

Me pregunto: ¿que piensan ustedes y que escuchan cuando el evangelio se estaba leyendo esta noche? ¿Imaginan ustedes que Jesús está advirtiendonos por esas palabras? Y, si la repuesta es sí, ¿qué es su propósito?

Este pasaje es un buen ejemplo de como podemos hacer una pausa para reflexionar sobre como leer y entender la Biblia. La Biblia es un libro un poquito complejo, por qué en la Biblia hay muchos pasajes cuyo significado no es exactamente lo que se podría pensar.

En primer lugar, San Lucas escribió su evangelio después del acontecimiento posible lo más importante en la historia de Israel, la destrucción del Templo en Jerusalén durante la Guerra Romana. Entonces, cuando los primeros lectores escucharon esta profecía de Jésus, ellos saben que ya había sido destruido el Templo, más o menos así como Jésus habido predicho. La profecía se habia cumplido. Por otro parte, ellos se habían encontrado muchos de los desastres y persecuciones que Jesús habia dicho. Muchos de los Judíos cristianos habían huido a las montañas durante la guerra. Ellos se habían negado a luchar por la causa judía. Y por eso ellos habían causado la ruptura definitiva entre los cristianos y los Judios. Los lectores de Lucas sabían lo que era para sufrir la situación de ser entregado por los padres, hermanos, parientes y amigos. Ellos conocieron gran sufrimiento. Entendieron lo que Jesús describió que ser odiado por todos a causa de su nombre. Las congregaciones que leyeron o escucharon el evangelio de San Lucas supieron todo de eso. Las palabras de Jesús sonaban tan claras como una campana.

Además, Jesús no tenía la intención que sus oyentes tengan miedo de las cosas espantosas que continuarán sucediendo hasta el fin de los tiempos. Al contrario, Jesús daba a su comunidad un razón de tener esperanza y coraje durante las dificuldades y los tiempos dificiles. Tambien el les daba un aviso. No creyan ustedes a todas las personas que van diciendo que el tiempo está cerca para el fin del mundo. Especialmente, no sigan a ellos que usurpa mi nombre diciendo, “Yo soy el Mesías.” Jesús asegura a sus oyentes que hay todo tipo de catástrofes que va a durar mucho tiempo. Ellos no deben ser alterados o extraviados. Se trata de recordar sus palabras. Se puede recordar quiénes son. Se trata de recordar su fe. Ellos no deben ser desviados por miedo.

El propósito del pasaje es inspirar a los nuevos cristianos a mantener centrada, a permanecer fieles durante los tiempos difíciles. Ustedes entienden este mesaje, ¿no? Casi todas las personas en esta congregación han tenido mucha experiencia en tiempos difíciles. ¿De qué piensan ustedes cuando escuchan, “…los tomarán a ustedes presos, los perseguirán, los entregarán a los tribunales…”? Supongo que ustedes recordarían el viaje peligroso a EEUU, o imaginarían la situación de vivir sin documentación, con el temor constante de ser arrestados o deportados o peor. Y aunque no exactamente podrían ser perseguidos por causa del Nombre de Jesús, ya saben lo que es tener la fe puesta a prueba.

¿Qué conclusion sacaremos? Que el mayor mensaje de la Biblia se puede decir, “Con todo, ni un cabello de su cabeza se perderá.” Dios nos ama. ¿Por qué tenemos miedo? ¿Por qué debemos dudar su gracia? Su amor por nosotros se manifiesta en la muerte y resurrección de Jesucristo. El punto no es calcular el fin del mundo, sino permanecer firme en la fe a fin de que nosotros podamos ser salvos. Aun no tenemos una causa para ansiedad por eso. Pues, como San Pablo dice en otro lugar, “Quién nos separará del amor de Cristo? ¿Acaso las preubas, la aflicción, la persecución, el hambre, la falta de todo, los peligros o la espada? Pero no; en todo eso saldremos triunfadores gracias a Aquel que nos amó. Yo sé que ni la muerte ni la vida, ni los ángeles ni las fuerzas del universo, ni el presente ni el futuro, ni las fuerzas espirituales, ya sean del cielo o de los abismos, ni ninguna otra criatura podrán apartarnos del amor de Dios, manifestado en Cristo Jesús, nuestro Señor.

Amen.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Plain View

2010-10-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

Luke 19:1-10

I met Zacchaeus some years ago. I had known about him for a long time but I had never known him. In fact I had discovered Zacchaeus as a child. He was one of my favorite characters in the whole Bible in Sunday school, probably for the reason that most children like him: “Zacchaeus was a very little man and a very little man was he.” (So goes a children’s song which, incidentally, ends with a very Anglican notion as Jesus stops and calls the little man down out of the sycamore saying, “I’m going to your house for tea.”) But beyond this I did not know Zacchaeus.

Perhaps it helped that I at least knew his name. We don’t know the names of many people in the crowds that Jesus encountered. They are for the most part an anonymous parade of individuals whose personalities and biographies are lost to the ages. But a few made it into and through the oral tradition and finally onto the pages of scripture. They are so rare that we have to wonder why. In Zacchaeus’ case, there was no particular reason why he should have been known at all. He was neither a leader nor a person with a special place in the narrative of Jesus’ life. Nor was his city, Jericho, especially important, located as it is fairly far from Galilee where the bulk of Jesus’ ministry took place. Of course, the story itself tells us why Zacchaeus was well known in Jericho. He was well known because he was well hated. He was among that despised lot of people known to first century Palestinian Jews as tax collectors, cogs in the wheel of Roman occupation and oppression. Not only that but he was head of the local tax office, and thus a profiteer. That was why he was rich—rich off other people’s money and misery. But every town had its tax collectors, and we may suppose that Zacchaeus was no richer and no more despicable than the rest.

So what was it about this man that makes him memorable to the point that people prerserved not only the story but the name of the man in it? If you ask me it is because this episode is functionally Luke’s version of John 3:16. If you ever were a Baptist you learned that verse by heart; and if you grew up in The Episcopal Church prior to 1976, you heard it every time you went to communion. “So God loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” It has frequently been called “the gospel in miniature” because it sums up the whole message of the New Testament. But that is John. This is Luke. Luke is interested in a cluster of themes, but none more clearly than the punch line which he gives this story: “For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” Consummate storyteller that he is, Luke anchors the greatest theme of them all in an episode made more memorable because we know the name of the quintessential lost man.

Interesting that Zacchaeus does not fit the profile of many another character on Luke’s pages. He is not poor, not sick, and not a woman. He is rich, however, and Luke is very much interested in what rich people do with their possessions once they come into contact with Jesus. And he is an outcast, made so not because of leprosy or mental illness but because of his status as a tax collector and thus a “sinner.” Zacchaeus is thus “lost.” But how “lost”? Lost because he is short, lost because he cannot see. Don’t miss the double-entendre here. He “was trying to see Jesus,” but could not because of the crowd. People get lost when their vision is blocked. Few things can be so frustrating, or so effectively marginalizing as the inability to see and thus to connect. But even more interesting is that Zacchaeus does not give up on the notion of seeing Jesus. He forfeits dignity (grown men of some prominence don’t run and climb trees, even in first century Jericho) for the sake of seeing Jesus. And, doubtless, on his perch the last thing he expects is to be spotted, called out, called down.

But Jesus comes to the place, looks up, and sees him. Maybe there is more in that detail than there would seem to be. Zacchaeus ironically has found a way in his life to compensate for his stature. He has climbed to the top of the heap in Jericho. Whether he is liked or respected or not, he does have some power and money. It is not stretching a point to say that Zaccheaus is strangely exalted, and not only in his sycamore situation. And Luke is ever interested in seeing how the exalted are humbled and the humbled exalted. So it is not exactly surprising that Jesus would come to the place and “look up.” One can imagine two feet dangling from a branch, a face partially hidden behind leaves. Jesus calls him by name. Luke no doubt wants us to think that Jesus has the kind of omniscience that would supply Zacchaeus’ name. But you might well imagine that on seeing the dangling legs, Jesus stops, points, and forms a quizzical look as if to say, “What’s with the legs? To whom do they belong?” Heads turn. Suddenly the little man is explosed. “Those legs?” someone says. “Oh. They belong to Zacchaeus. He’s our chief tax collector. [laughter].” Whatever. Jesus seizes the moment. He calls him by name.

And that is when I met Zacchaeus. On hearing that feature of the story, I realized that Zacchaeus was none other than I. Because I have heard that voice myself, sometimes when I have least expected it or least wanted to hear it. And though it has never been exactly an audible human voice, there has been that moment when I have realized that some pedestal I am on of my own making is vulnerable to something or to someone who calls me to come off it. Or, by the same token, when I have taken to hiding behind status or convention or regulation or some form of pretense, I have from time to time heard a distinct voice saying something that sounds like, “Frank,” the way my mother might have said it or “Frank,” the way Joe might say it when I am being uncharacteristically absurd or uncommonly outrageous. Jesus invites Zaccheaus to come down, and in so doing he immediately has a relationship with him. That he would invite himself to stay at Zacchaeus house should strike us as the bizarre thing that it is. But this twist, too, is not to be missed. That is what incarnate deity habitually does. It takes up residence in the life and soul and “house” of the one it has called out of anonymity into its own marvelous light. And strange things begin to happen.

Jesus does not lecture Zacchaeus on the requirements of salvation, nor does he squeeze out of him some confession of faith or sin. From what storyline we have, Zacchaeus needs no more than to be accepted to become accepting, no more than to be welcomed to extend a welcome. While the crowd is still grumbling, he immediately knows that his life is all wound up in ways that don’t sit well with the hospitality that he has received as well as given. So a reckoning begins. Luke makes it very clear in story after story that the gospel opens up not only our mouths but our wallets. The very experience of Jesus is antithetical to hoarding, withholding, self-protection at the expense of others, accumulating power or wealth or influence. Not very many people seem to understand that, which is I suppose what “lost” actually describes. But I would want to go further than the generosity dynamic and suggest that fundamentally the conversion of Zacchaeus, and therefore of me or you, is about something more basic. The Son of Man who seeks us out challenges us by his very example to live according to the Truth. Salvation comes to the house of Zacchaeus precisely because it does not leave Zacchaeus merely a short man with a short man’s attitude. There is a Truth and this exchange of hospitality between Jesus and Zacchaeus fleshes it out. The Truth results in changed lives. Generosity is one result. Wholeness is another.

So salvation can come to the house of Zacchaeus, who as a child of Abraham, has as much chance of being at God’s table as Jesus is at his. Male Jewish tax collectors can come into the reign of God and practice the life of God as much as anyone. There are no distinctions in that realm, only a banquet to which all are invited. The point is never who we are that qualifies us, but who we become once touched by God’s grace.

Perhaps that is enough of Zacchaeus and his story. Maybe nothing more needs to be said. Yet I can’t let it go without asking, “So what?” It could be that the point of the whole thing is a moral one: change your life and your lifestyle and make sure that they accord with the values of the Lord you serve. But I think it more than that. If the Zaccheaus I have met is as familiar to you as he is to me, I suggest that he suggests you find yourself in his story and therefore where you are in your own. Maybe you really can’t see what all the fuss is about. Maybe you have some inchoate suspicion that there is something about Jesus and his gospel that could mean something, or something more, to you if you just could lay your eyes or your hands on it. Or perhaps you are either watching the spectacle from a safe distance or indeed hiding comfortably above and out of view, detached, let’s say. Or maybe you are even this moment hearing something that sounds like a voice but feels startlingly like unimagined joy bidding you to come join a life where you will never be quite the same. When at times the noise of the crowd seems to drown out even your inmost thoughts that slither down the crevices of a life you never have completely figured out, you just might see yourself standing and saying things like, “Yes. This is it. This is really it. And I am it and it is now.” Then you know, don’t you, that salvation has come to your house. Today.

Today.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Sinking Feeling

2010-10-02T21:51:00.000-07:00

A little known passage stuck in one of the more obscure books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, is this little tidbit:

There was a little city with few people in it. A great king came against it and besieged it, building great siegeworks against it. Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that poor man. So I said, ‘Wisdom is better than might; yet the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heeded.’ [9:14-16]

Forget wisdom, just for a moment. Just get in touch with what it is like to be the lone voice crying out in a desperate situation. What is it like to be inside a city that is virtually helpless against immeasurable odds? Have you ever been there? Have you ever felt thoroughly inadequate, worse than inadequate, totally choked by the enormity of some wrong that held everyone in its fist?

A part of my story that I rarely talk about is that I grew up in an alcoholic family. I suppose I don’t talk about it much because, for one thing, over the decades a great amount of healing took place. Daddy’s sobriety took root about the time I was in my mid-twenties, although there had been a stretch of good years while I was in junior high and high school. Although the resolution and the healing delivered me from an unspeakable burden of shame and certainly from massive anxiety, I have very clear memories of being a little boy in a family that was consistently besieged by a formidable demonic power, not knowing what to do, feeling utterly powerless to affect any positive change, scared, bewildered. A few times I have been in less dramatic, and certainly less protracted scrapes, some of which I have had some means of controlling. Yet a part of my psyche, my soul was shaped on those hot and tortured nights when I was a child shaking with terror, a sinking feeling in my young gut.

I suspect that a good many of you can relate to my vignette. You have no doubt been there too, on that proverbial ocean so great in your boat so small. Small, yes, and being swamped by billows past any bailing. Or, to return to the Ecclesiastes metaphor, a little lone person in a city being battered by forces that any minute will vanquish it and utterly lay it waste. Do you think it is too much of a stretch to suggest that that is very close to the way I feel, and the way you might feel, up against the enormity of global climate disaster? We can argue from now till the cows come home about the degree to which human beings are contributing to global climate change; but there is no arguing with the fact that earth’s climate has changed and is changing dramatically. Nor can anybody sane argue against the effects of global climate change in increased drought, far more frequent and severe hurricanes, rising sea levels, more extreme temperatures, and the all but certain disappearance of species, especially large mammals, who will be gone in a few decades if trends continue, unable to adapt to the swings in weather.

Add to that the weighty problem that there are hosts of people who believe that the climate crisis—global warming—is a bunch of claptrap invented by American liberals. I am never quite clear on why it is supposed that people would want to make up a lie about such a thing or what it is that would be gained by doing so. I suppose if you yourself are used to making up lies and disseminating them for popular consumption it is relatively easy to believe that everyone else is doing the same thing. If you doubt the strength of such reaction, I suggest you simply spend a little time on YouTube, for it is full of documentation that the whole so-called global warming is a total hoax.

The whole thing gets me down. It appears that the words in Isaiah 24 were written sometime about three days ago:

<4> The earth dries up and withers,
the world languishes and withers;
the heavens languish together with the earth.
<5> The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.
<6> Therefore a curse devours the earth,
and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt;
therefore the inhabitants of the earth dwindled,
and few people are left.

Except for the “few people are left” detail, this is fairly descriptive of the situation at hand. The situation is far graver than “just” global warming. The amount of non-biodegradable trash in the world is astonishing. I have been in some developing countries where the streets and streams are full of plastic, styrofoam, metal, glass, and all manner of things in piles mounting higher and higher. Of course, some of that happens in this country. Indeed it happens in Washington in places. But the scale of the trashing of creation is monumental.

It is precisely at such a juncture as this that faith makes a difference. We have every reason to despair, simply because the mounting disaster is so terribly severe and its threat so impossible to defuse. But, as Koheleth, the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, saw, wisdom is stronger than might, witness that one poor wise man in a besieged city. Koheleth does not tell us what the wise man did to deliver the city, only that he was wise. Wisdom and faith are certainly not synonymous; but faith can take a chapter out of the book of wisdom, so to say. Certain forms of faith can be awfully foolish—such as the notion that it does not matter what we do with the natural world, God is going to end it all soon anyway. Or the notion which is just about as bad that God is going to pull us out of the mess we have made of the earth so that we won’t have to reap the consequences. We need not just to be faithful, but to wise up.

The current issue of Time carries an article about Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In 1977, long before apartheid ended, Bishop Tutu, 45 years old, addressed a crowd of 15,000 at the funeral of a murdered black consciousness leader. “The powers of injustice, of oppression, of exploitation, have done their worst, and they have lost,” he declared. “They have lost because they are immoral and wrong, and our God…is a God of justice and liberation and goodness. Our cause…must triumph because it is moral and just and right.” If you know anything at all about Desmond Tutu, you know that he did not fold into a little heap of piety believing that God was going to intervene like the deus ex machina making a surprise appearance in an ancient play. No, Bishop Tutu worked tirelessly to deliver a besieged people from the weight of a powerful oppressor. He built alliances. He thundered against oppression. He refused to submit to a racist curriculum and lost his teaching career. He kept on going. In the nasty fights in the days of apartheid, he would walk between protestors and armed police, persuading both to walk away. He disarmed people with humor, laughing, dancing, taking God very seriously and himself not seriously at all. Certainly he did not bring down apartheid single-handedly, but like the poor wise man in the besieged city, he had a peculiar combination of faith and wisdom that helped to seal the fate of oppressors. “In the end,” says Tutu, “the perpetrators of injustice or oppression, the ones who strut the stag of the world often seemingly unbeatable—there is no doubt at all that they will bite the dust.” And he laughs, saying, “Wonderful, wonderful!”

That is exactly the kind of dedication, the sort of courage, the quality of faith, the exercise of wisdom that needs to inform those of us confronting this giant global challenge. One by one, parish by parish, diocese by diocese, community by community, we can raise consciousness, build alliances, start letter writing campaigns, explore ways of living green, pressure the politicians to act and industry to change. I’m far less certain that the planet can be rescued from environmental disaster than Desmond Tutu is certain that the forces of repression will ultimately be vanquished. But I refuse to believe that despair and paralysis and gloom are a better alternative. Blog. Talk. Call. Write. Organize. Give. Pray.

Already a couple of people have surfaced in the last couple of weeks who are willing to work seriously on changing the face of energy use right here in St. Stephen’s. They don’t yet know what we’ll do and neither do I. But it is a start. And when the forces of carelessness or greed or hate or stupidity are banging against the gates of a fragile, vulnerable planet, the only hope we have is that there will be at least one wise person whose wisdom will mean the planet’s deliverance. In South Africa, one such person was Desmond Tutu. In 2010, that person just might be you.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

All Creation

2010-09-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

Every once in awhile the Church does something that must leave people wondering, “What on earth was that all about?” I suppose you might ask, “So what are you smoking that would have you thinking that it is only ‘once in awhile’?” Those of us who plan liturgies, who preach, who are the “professionally religious,” together with those who as someone has aptly put it have church as their hobby, frequently make the mistake of imagining that what we do is crystal clear to all who come. Or we sometimes have been known to think that a little mystery is a good thing—that it never hurt anybody to puzzle a bit about religion.

Probably the most frequent remark I have heard made over the years about sermons, for instance, is something akin to this: “I want a sermon to connect with what is happening in my daily life.” I hear it as a more general ache that somehow religion might try to come into our lives and connect with us rather than work to get us out of our lives and into some ethereal space in which, for heavens’ sake, we can’t do much earthly good.

I would say it is precisely for that reason that we are embarking today on a six-week venture to focus on probably the most quintessentially relevant topic you could imagine: the future of this planet. We are calling it “A Season of Creation.” Rather than have you after one, two, or all six weeks shaking your heads wondering, “What is all that about?”, I’d like to answer that at the outset.

The future of the planet is, of course, rooted in the past. In order to understand what is at stake, we have to look at how we got to where we are. One of the most interesting accounts of human history is the recent Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Diamond’s research shows how civilizations have grown up in relation to the spread of plants for food; and how they have died because invading conquerors, notably Europeans, brought germs that debilitated whole societies. Weaponry is probably the biggest single development ensuring the ascendancy of some humans and the demise of others. Human history is complex, as is the more general geological history of the planet, and there is much we don’t know. What we do know is that throughout the world, peaceable peoples have been no match against marauders. Perhaps not all invading tribes of all times have been arrayed against the natural world—the Celts come to mind as a particularly nature-centered group—but the truth of the matter is that in the Western world ultimately there came to power a civilization that understood itself as being fundamentally different from, superior to, in control of the natural world. That is the irony of Western culture, both its gift and the seeds of its destruction.

Christianity has done more than its share in aiding and abetting this western proclivity to power and domination over creation. There are several reasons why that has been true. First, there is built into Judaeo-Christianity the notion that God is primarily interested in human beings, not so much with the rest of creation. And human beings have long told themselves the tale that the natural world is their playpen and its goods theirs for the taking. Second, Christianity and its Jewish parent long ago bought into some eastern dualism that essentially saw the world sliced into two: the material world and the spiritual world, the physical seen as clearly inferior to the spiritual. A third reason why Christianity has frequently fed a deep suspicion of the worth of creation is that there has been an element of thought—sometimes a major one—that holds to the notion that this world is passing away, soon to be replaced by a better one. One version of that belief is the notion that what human life is about is principally getting into heaven, that other world, not about fitting into this world.

This is not all there is to Christianity, however. Some of our formative stories, frequently misunderstood as support for the domination dynamic, are anything but that. The creation stories in Genesis, for example, make clear that human beings are set within a larger context of the natural world. Not only that, they are given a permission (eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden), a prohibition (except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), and a vocation (till and keep the garden). Clearly there are limits on human beings. While it is true that in the first creation story, God gives dominion over the earth and its creatures to humans, it is clear that humans are accountable to and subordinate to God.

Without an appropriate understanding of creation, Christianity gets into a heap of trouble. We need to understand that, as today’s epistle puts it, everything in creation is good. Not just the purple-headed mountain and the river running by and the tiny little wings of things bright and beautiful. Included are the snail that eats your caladium’s leaves, the wasp that stings, the copperhead lurking behind a log, the wind’s tempestuous shocks, the hurricane’s high tides. The creator made them all and pronounced the whole thing good. There is nothing the matter with matter. It is not inferior to spirit or to energy. This is key to our understanding of the work and nature of Jesus Christ. When we say in the Creed “by him all things were made,” we are talking about the Second Person of the Trinity, namely Jesus. We perceive him to be the Word, the creative expression of Godhead, who existed long before all worlds, the one by whom they came into being. Why is that important? Because when we discuss who he is in the flesh, it is critical to proclaim that the human body of Jesus was as important to his identity as his spirit, his soul, his personality, his divine nature. That is why the bookends of Christian theology are the doctrines of incarnation and resurrection. Both have to do with the physical. Both have to do with the body. Both are interlaced with a doctrine of creation that holds that the one who made all things was the one who thoroughly identified with creation by becoming a part of it and who thoroughly healed it by uniting not only human nature but the whole physical world to the divine life he embodied.

Don’t think that we are talking literally and historically here. We are instead talking on the plane of symbol and metaphor. But that is not a cheap brand of language, less reliable than the language of fact. It is exactly by means of the language of Christology that we are able to paint a picture of how the created world is intimately connected with God and humanity.

You might well be wondering if I’m not straining at gnats and swallowing camels here. Why the fuss? Is it not quite enough to assert that we have an obligation to be stewards of creation? Actually, that is not enough, and I am not sure that “stewards of creation” adequately describes what our calling is. We are, by reliable accounts, standing on the brink of environmental disaster. Some argue that we have already gone over the brink. Species are struggling to stay alive. Oil is running out. We are so committed to fossil fuels that we cannot extricate ourselves from their use without seriously damaging our fragile economy even further. Climate change wreaks havoc in weather patterns. Land use becomes more and more problematical as the need to house and feed the planet’s human population becomes more difficult each year. Potable water is still a serious problem in much of the world, the poorest regions being the most vulnerable to polluted and disease-carrying water.

What’s a body to do in the face of so much planet-wide distress? Over the next six weeks we are going to be looking at that question and trying on some answers. One thing is to take care that we are living in a way that reflects the value that our faith tradition places upon the natural world. Another thing is to work towards amassing sufficient political power that we can together make a difference in the future of the world. A third thing is to practice living out of the context of Sermon on the Mount, which is the source of the gospel for today.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you--you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

That is where and how Jesus solidly comes down on the side of living in simple harmony with creation, which is the alternative to living in a spirit of acquisition, control, and domination. It might be that we simply do not believe that we can live differently—and for people whose whole culture is based upon domination (of resources and people) that is a great challenge. But the life of earth depends upon it. And the vocation that God gave humans is still the same: till the garden and keep it.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Real Presence

2010-09-04T20:16:00.000-07:00

Psalm 139

Q: What is the most frequently read book of the Bible?
A: The Book of Psalms. It is read at nearly every liturgy in nearly every church, at Holy Eucharist, Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Noonday Prayer, Compline. Monasteries and convents use the psalter four or more times a day. And since the Psalms belong to both Jews and Christians, it is quite likely that no other book is quite so widely read the world over.

Strange, then, I say to myself, that in nearly forty years I cannot remember ever preaching a sermon on the psalms. But today I break with precedent and offer to guide you in reflecting on one of the most beautiful poems ever crafted, and hands down my favorite psalm of all the hundred and fifty: Psalm 139. Some years ago I spent something like a month daily poring over the verses of Psalm 139, savoring them, using them as grist for meditation, as launching pads for journaling. As I frequently do when I find myself attracted to a poem, a song, an object, a place, or a person, I wonder what it is that my soul is rising to respond to. What do I see there, feel there, hear there that speaks to me deeply and powerfully?

It is a profound sense of Presence. We have no way of knowing just how or when the consciousness of humans developed to the point of imagining that the gods were not remote from human life, or localized in some particular place, or capricious deities that darted in and out of human experience leaving us baffled and fearful. But the composer of Psalm 139 clearly has grasped the idea that God is spirit, unlimited by time and space, pervading all creation. God is closer to us than the air we breathe.

That is not necessarily good news for those who believe that “God” is purely a convenient construct with no objective basis in reality. Nor is it especially happy news for those who imagine that God is essentially a moral police officer interested in keeping score of all the good and mostly the bad things that human beings do. Having God pressing upon us behind and before, laying a hand upon us could be a terrifying thought. (Which is enough to nudge the skeptical into the camp of thoroughgoing unbelievers.) But for me, and maybe for you, it is good news that the universe is not just the physical world. There are other dimensions of reality, too––probably more than we can count. And at least one of those dimensions we may call “presence.” There is something intensely personal that responds to us out of the vastness of the universe.

I am not asking you to believe that if you already don’t. Or at least I don’t think I am. Some of us seem to have receptors for such a Presence and some of us clearly do not. A few years ago I read The God Gene, by Dean Hamer. His and a book by Nicholas Wade called The Faith Instinct both discuss the possibility that human beings have a certain genetic predisposition to religion. Hamer had to admit that there is no conclusive evidence for a “God gene,” but that there is plenty of reason to suppose that there might be. It could be that, if there is such a gene, religious meaning might be limited to those human beings who carry the gene. Exactly what the gene does or might do is not at all clear. Wade, on the other hand, sees that religion has a kind of utilitarian purpose in the whole evolutionary scheme of things. He argues that we are social because we are religious, not religious because we are social. In other words, religion helps people get over things like selfishness in order to live in community. Whether he is right or not, his arguments certainly seem to occupy a very different space from what we believers would say we experience, both negatively and positively. All this is very interesting, but what is the point? The point is that if our minds and eyes are open to the possibility of the Presence of God, we can begin to understand and to appreciate that that Presence is at once something that far transcends our individual selves and is also something quite intimately connected with us.

Like the Bible, I am not interested in asking the question of whether God exists. I am interested in asking this question: God exists; so what? If God makes no difference, I cannot see the point in wasting time worshiping, pondering, worrying about, musing about, imagining God, any more than I could justify inventing the notion of a Great Big Rabbit, let’s say, and building one’s life around something that is fundamentally optional to say the least. But in fact, the God that exists is not a million light years remote from my world; God is in my very being. And yet God is not just another name for the stuff of which I am composed. God is Presence. “Lord, you have searched me out and known me,” says the psalmist. The older I get, the more I know that there is something at the bottom of my being that is the bedrock of my spirit, my soul, my personality. And I’ll bet that is true for you, too, be you believer or skeptic. When we are young, we imagine that we know a good deal about ourselves (I seem to recall). When we grow older, we become at once more familiar with ourselves and simultaneously more surprised at parts of ourselves which surface unexpectedly. (I’m thinking of the mid-life crisis, which is no more a joke than adolescence is a joke.) Thus the notion charms me that there is a Presence so thoroughly knowledgeable about and conscious of me that I can say of that Presence, “you have searched me out and known me.” I do not know myself all that well; but you, Lord, know me perfectly. You see the coherence of my various parts, often clashing discordantly, that leave me confused and bewildered. “So what?” is a question that has an answer. And the answer is: so there is a Presence that understands me. And thus there is the possibility that I might come to understand myself, or at least live with myself in a more or less peaceable way.

The Latin Vulgate, incidentally, translates that first verse in a way that has been rendered into English as “thou knowest my death and my resurrection.” Imagine! God has in mind your death as well as your life, and already holds in the eternal mind, as it were, your own eternity, your own resurrection. The psalmist then builds on this experience of intimacy. “You trace my journeys and my resting-places, and are acquainted with all my ways.” He means that there are no back alleys that he can go down, no racetracks he can cut loose on, no secret passageways that are hidden from the all-seeing Eye. I used to think that such a thought served to put the so-called “fear of God” in me, to make me scared not to keep my nose clean. Now I understand that the “fear of God” is not at all about being afraid—it is about living in awe that this strange and wonderful Presence never leaves me. I am as close to God in the DC Eagle as I am in church, as near to the divine in Bed, Bath, and Beyond as I am in Sunday School. Why? Because there is not a word on my lips (including my curses as well as my prayers) that God does not know. And the Presence is the one dependable thing in the midst of so much that is undependable, a whole lot of which is fast passing away.

Such knowledge, I will admit, is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain to it. In fact, thinking about it moves me to tears. I cannot fathom living in the presence of such a Presence! And stranger still is the idea that I am living in the hand of One who, though knowing everything about me, loves me as if I were the only being on the entire planet. I cannot flee the Presence, because the Presence will not flee me. If I climb up to heaven, lo, God is there. And (as the King James Version puts it) if I make my bed in hell, God is there. That is an astonishing thought! Don’t you wonder what all the folks who are forever threatened by hell, and threatening others with it, make of that? Neither heaven nor hell, neither sea nor darkness, neither night nor day can separate us from the Presence of the one who created our inmost parts, who knit us together in our mothers’ wombs.

But, so what? To believe, or even to consider believing such a possibility as the psalmist’s sense of trust, is almost certainly to move towards seeing that we are as present to God as God is present to us. I don’t mean that as a simple tautology, but as a way of pushing the thought of the psalmist to a new level—one that I hope is not incompatible with his majestic poem. The psalmist edges beyond the comfort zone of his culture and his religion by seeing that God is both transcendent and intensely personal. But we now can see that ours is (if we allow it!) the consciousness gazing back at the Presence which is gazing at us. It is not unlike what we say about icons. They are windows through which the Divine beholds us and through which, just as really, we behold the Divine.

In their book entitled Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society, Peter Senge and his fellow-authors play with the idea that the whole is manifested in its parts. A human organization is not a whole that is made up of many parts because living systems, such as your body or a plant or a river or an eco-system, create themselves. They are constantly growing and changing. They note that for the 19th century German writer and scientist Goethe, the whole is “something dynamic and living that continually comes into being ‘in concrete manifestations.’” That is not far away from Psalm 139. The Presence which we know as the all-embracing God is not apart from the creation, but dispersed throughout it. And we creatures, in turn, can practice that Presence by gradually opening ourselves to its gentleness and its power, letting go of our fears and defenses, and becoming more like the Presence that embraces and loves us.

Maybe that is what impels the psalmist to say, at the end of his poem, “Search me out, O God, and know my heart;; try me and know my restless thoughts. Look well whether there be any wickedness in me and lead me in the way that is everlasting.” The entire point of the Presence is that all the parts of creation, including you and me, can in fact become more and more like the one who made and knows and cherishes us through and through.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Good Faith

2010-08-07T19:19:00.000-07:00

A sermon preached in The Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, Episcopal, Washington, DC, August 8, 2010

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Faith. If only I had it.

Have you ever heard yourself saying that? Or somebody else saying it?

Let me ask you something. If you had more faith (assuming you want more), what would you do with it? What would it do for you?

Once upon a time, according to Luke, though not in today’s gospel, the disciples asked Jesus: “Lord, increase our faith.” And he answered them, “If you had the faith of a mustard seed you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘be uprooted and planted in the middle of the sea,’ and it would obey you.” Another version of that story appears in Matthew’s gospel. Jesus is provoked at his disciples for having so little faith. They have tried unsuccessfully to perform an exorcism. After Jesus upbraids them and takes over the project himself, the disciples ask Jesus why they weren’t able to cast the demon out. “Because of your little faith,” he said. “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.’”

So is that what we want if we want more faith? To be able to do the impossible? Or is faith something else?

The writer to the Hebrews clearly had some idea of faith, and I am not sure that his was exactly what Luke’s Jesus had in mind. That writer (whose identity we do not know and can only speculate about, but who was most certainly not St. Paul) wrote out a long, sustained argument, the longest in the whole Bible. He set out to demonstrate conclusively that Jesus on the cross had performed once and for all the sufficient sacrifice that had never been done and could never be done in the Jerusalem Temple. The writer with good reason takes his time in recounting what might be called the “faith history” of Israel.

We do not have to guess what was in his mind. He tells us. Christ is the great High Priest who has made atonement, unlike any “high priest” that there ever had been. By a single offering Christ has reconciled humanity and God. Sins are forgiven. There is no need for any more sacrificial offerings for sin. Incidentally—and this is totally parenthetical to this sermon—that is an extremely good piece of news, even if you don’t understand or buy into the Hebrews theology of sacrifice. What he is saying is that Christ’s sacrifice is full, sufficient, complete, unsurpassed, perfect. This should relieve quite a bit of anxiety about how we stand with God. That a great many people remain anxious, or that some are totally uninterested, does not detract from the goodness of the news.

Christ’s sacrifice is thoroughly effective. “Therefore,” states the writer, we have confidence to enter the sanctuary (that is, the presence and life of God) by the blood of Jesus. And we can approach with a “true heart in full assurance of faith," simply because all the barriers to our being with God and living in God have been removed by Jesus. But there are some cautions. (How could it be the Bible and there not be?) We must know that if we willfully persist in sin after having received knowledge of the truth, we bring judgment on ourselves. Still, the author calls his audience to remember the struggles they have been through, the abuse, the persecution. He exhorts them not to shrink back, but to live in full confidence that the loss of nothing is nearly as great as what God has promised. This, he says, is how the righteous live and have always lived: by faith. He begins calling the roll of those who in the holy history have been examples of faith: Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sarah. “All of these,” he says, “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.” They were, he says, like foreigners on earth. They knew that they belonged to a different land, a different reality. They could have looked behind and moaned sentimentally about all that they had lost and left behind, and could even have returned. But they kept pressing on towards a better country, a future with God, a heavenly country. And indeed God had prepared a city for them.

What is his point in all this? To get his Christian audience to take heart! To inspire them to keep on moving, going, growing; not to give up; to follow the examples of their forebears, not to mention the example of the pioneer and perfecter of their faith, Jesus, who pressed on through cross and shame and suffering to be seated at God’s right hand in glory. “You can do it!” he says. “Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet….” Faith is the quality, very closely related to hope, that keeps people from giving up.

But that is not the only thing that faith is. Not, at least, according to the Bible, which is something of a textbook on faith and faithfulness. Let’s consider faith a verb, first. To have faith can mean to believe in something, to be convinced of something. It can also mean to give credence to a proposition, an account, a possibility, or someone’s story. More than that, to have faith frequently means to put one’s trust in somebody. Are you beginning to get the picture? It is beginning to dawn on me that maybe we don’t really know what faith is. When we say we want or we need it or we have it, might it be that we are talking about just a sliver of this rather complex thing called “faith”?

Press on. Think of faith as a noun, a something, a quality. Faith can be a solemn oath, a promise, a proof, a pledge. It can mean trust, confidence, especially in God. It can mean giving your heart to somebody, even at the risk of having it trampled and trashed. Faith can be believing something that you have no evidence for, only a hunch about, or less, or more. Faith can be practicing piety like saying your prayers and going to church, or it can mean the things you believe or the persons you follow, whether they are religious or not. Faith can be virtuous or it can be pig-headed. It can make life sweet when it works like a charm, and it can be a bitter disappointment when faith turns out to have been sadly misplaced.

Are you still sure that you want some faith? Or more of it? Or are you totally turned off by the whole idea? Some of you will tell me that you have all the faith you need and that what you have works perfectly fine for you. I’m sure you do, and I rejoice that it works well. Others may say that you don’t see what it is all about. Faith is about as appealing to you a root canal. The truth of the matter is that we can’t live very well without faith. By that I do not mean a particular set of beliefs, let alone a specific body of dogma. I am talking about faith as a matter of trust. I am thinking even more specifically about faith as a quality of taking risks, like Abraham and Sarah, the practice of striking out occasionally into the unknown, for which you have no guarantees, and in which you have no charts or road maps. It is true that a great many people—you may be one of them—have an aversion to taking risks, and who can convincingly argue that they do very well staying on the safe side of things. I’d be lying if I didn’t say to such folk that I’d like to rattle their cages a bit! But this gospel we proclaim is not one that we can use to slam the timid and retiring—or anyone else—suggesting that somehow they count less than the brave-hearted. Yet, the writer to Hebrews has a point. People did not get to be models of faith by hedging their bets and pulling punches. The way of God demands some element of cutting loose and letting fly, for God’s sake! No one in the entire roster of faithful people gets to be in the Bible because he or she sat musing on the possibilities of adventure, vacillating about whether or not to join the innumerable caravan moving into the future with determination, analyzing to death the pluses and minuses of getting balled up in the hard stuff that comes from a challenging God.

If we, two thousand years later, were to add to Hebrew’s gallery of faithful heroes and heroines, we would quickly see that faithfulness is not a matter of particular content, nor of a particular vocation. We would find all sorts of people who have lived faithfully, from the hermit, St. Seraphim of Sarov, to the wandering Johnny Appleseed, from the cloistered Julian of Norwich to the activist Dorothy Day. So the problem is not that Hebrews, or I, or the Church, or the Bible, is setting up some kind of high bar of special performance or personality characteristics that assures only those who reach it can be in some kind of exclusive club. The idea is that whoever you are, you can be faithful. You can be a person of faith.

A great many people have stopped believing that. Some have been jerked around by the religious establishment to the point that the have spiritual whiplash, and only want it to stop. Others have wandered away from the faith, convinced that the requirement of being faithful means to tax their brains with credulity (the readiness to believe about anything without much or any evidence) and their consciences with confessing falsehoods. Still others only slowly wake up to the realization that there is more to life than conforming to social expectations (be they set by gangs in the ghetto or Vogue magazine or Oprah), totally unaware that life is a many-layered thing, and that some of the best layers are invisible to the naked eye, known to make the heart quiver, and the spirit do a somersault. It is just this kind of insight that nearly everyone on the Hebrews all-star line-up exhibits. Our author says that they knew their true native land was somewhere besides the front porch. They listened to a Voice that called them away from the familiar towards another country, a heavenly one.

My own take on most of the people on the Hebrews list is that they were not in fact motivated by a dream of an afterlife. Most of them did not know what that was, including Abraham, the prototype of faithfulness. But they did have a notion of “heaven,” if by “heaven” we mean where God is and if heaven and therefore God is everywhere including as close to you as your nose or your forehead or your buttocks. Being faithful is not dreaming of some airy fairy world. When it comes right down to it, being faithful is taking the presence of God in your own life quite seriously.

We need people of faith, real faith, as never before. I say that quite deliberately and literally. We are facing issues and battles today of unprecedented proportions. This dreadful oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a mere harbinger of what is going to happen if we continue to rape the natural world. The arguments that are flying back and forth about the economy ignore some very difficult truths that the entire planet is still perilously near economic trauma. Given the way things in this country are currently structured, General Eisenhower’s warning about a military-industrial complex is hauntingly observable, as even would-be Peacemakers find it practically impossible to extricate us from never-ending war. The planet heats up and people either refuse to believe it, or believe it and refuse to alter their attitudes. Meanwhile we let the religious crazies, at home and abroad, hijack our faith traditions and dictate the terms on which we decide to be faithful or not. We are looking at every bit as dangerous a time as Hebrews ever saw: a slow collapse of social institutions, a debasing of education, the triumph of anti-intellectualism, a fickle electorate that is run largely by fear, cynical people who lie big enough and long enough and steadily enough that hosts of people find it easier to believe the lie than to pull up stakes, like Abraham, and hit the road for the One who is True.

What will you do? Turn aside and fiddle? Turn back and regress? Turn and follow the one who has gone before you and opened up a sanctuary that is no longer the province of the professionals, but one where you can boldly enter yourself, and be yourself, and find in so doing that God is not ashamed to be your God?

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Why We Lie | Psychology Today

2010-07-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

Why We Lie | Psychology Today

Letting Go

2010-07-30T08:26:00.000-07:00

A sermon preached at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Dupont Circle, Washington, DC, on Sunday, July 25, 2010, on the occasion of the leaving of The Rev. John Dwyer

Hosea 2:1-11

I am greatly honored to be here today at Nancy Lee’s invitation to preach. It is a bittersweet occasion for me as well as for St. Thomas’s Parish. There is a part of me that does not want to see John Dwyer leave here. Partly that is because I know how much he means to you and how much you mean to him. Partly that is because I have a hard time saying goodbye to anything and anybody. Even after many years of trying to learn how to let go, I feel something in me instinctively stirring to grab and clutch when a familiar part of my world breaks off and begins to float freely away.

For the last couple of years I have had the privilege of serving on a three-person team supporting and mentoring John on the first leg of his journey as an ordained person. Along with Dean Martha Horne, recently retired from Virginia Seminary, and Bishop Michael Creighton, retired from the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania, I have come to know John as a colleague in ministry. And precisely because I have seen John grow at close range, another part of me understands, approves, even cheers his leaving, because I know that growth demands it. But true as all of that is, it does not sweeten the experience of parting, does it?

Getting going with the unfamiliar seems to be the theme of life. We can make an argument that most organisms in fact flourish in familiar surroundings where the work of adaptation can go on somewhat smoothly. And yet significant leaps in evolutionary progress come about when organisms are tested by unfamiliar challenges to which they must adapt, not by a trouble-free environment which spares them the challenge of adapting. You may know, as I do, people who find a niche, get comfortable in it, and stay there all of their lives. A friend of mine lives in a community where I once lived too. We used to hang out a lot together. Every now and again I would suggest that we go to a restaurant that was out in the country, but couldn’t have been more than seven miles from his house. “Why do I want to go all the way out there?” he would say to me. “It’s outside the city limits.”

Sometimes in order to get a new compass reading of exactly who and where we are, somebody has to venture beyond the limits. Do something strange. Experiment. Stretch. Hosea, one of the prophets in ancient Israel, heard a very strange voice one day urging him to get a move on. “Go take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom,” said the voice. That, even by biblical standards, is odd. “The land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” Oh, so that’s it. This is one of those parables that is acted out. It is as if God is saying, “Do you want to know what it is like to be the God of Israel? Well, I’ll show you. Go marry a whore.” I feel a little embarrassed about that. It sounds crude, don’t you think? It also sounds sexist and politically incorrect and maybe even misogynistic. And imagine—if you have to imagine—what you would be experiencing if you were all a congregation of people, say, in a half-way house or a jail where a good slice of the population were or had been prostitutes. But shake that off, for the moment at least, and hear what Hosea is trying to tell us.

Hosea, of course, does what he is told. That is how he got into the Bible. He goes and marries Gomer. Immediately she has a son, then a daughter, then another son. Hosea names them the symbolic names that he hears in his head the Lord telling him to name them. And they are god-awful names. “Jezreel.” “Not-pitied.” “Not-my-people.” Little wonder with that kind of family dynamic that Gomer quickly has about all she can take of this weird man Hosea. She misses her trade. She leaves Hosea with the dishes and the children and promptly takes up, as my grandmother would say, with somebody else. From all of this Hosea is learning. This is what it is like to be God? This is what it must be like to be Yahweh, God of Israel, in a relationship with a people who have forsaken the Covenant with Yahweh and adulterated it with Canaanite Baal worship.

Then the plot thickens. “Go, woo her back,” says the Voice. Get a taste of it, Hosea. See what that’s like! So Hosea goes looking for Gomer and gets the message that this is what God is doing for Israel. God goes hunting for the lover that has swapped the true God for false gods and who has an appetite for their ritual raisin cakes. Fifteen shekels of silver pays Hosea for Gomer, together with a homer of barley and a cask of wine. In other words, Gomer is not cheap.

He brings Gomer home with him. They put their marriage back together. And that is the way Israel will do, Hosea sees. They will return and seek the Lord their God. They shall come in awe to the Lord. And God will have pity on her who was not pitied, and to the poor child who was called “Not my people,” God will say, “You are my people.”

Before dismissing this as just a bizarre biblical tour de force, think of what a reality show this is: a high-risk marriage, an untamable partner addicted to tricking, a persistent husband with a serious case of religion, a quixotic journey to locate and entice out of active prostitution someone who is probably bringing in quite a bit of income to her pimp, an unlikely bargain that buys Gomer’s freedom, a rehabilitation conducted by Hosea that includes sexual abstinence, the rebirth of a marriage against all odds. When you get past the barley and some of the other details, this all sounds fairly contemporary to my ears.

What is different about this is not plot but theology. Hosea’s learning through all of this is that his experience mirrors God’s experience. In the process he does a couple of interesting things. First, he gives us a theology of marriage. For it is here, like nowhere else in scripture, that we find the notion that marriage is a covenant. But Hosea does something even more radical. He adopts the idea from Baalism that a god has a spouse and thus gives a unique twist to Israel’s theology by seeing that God is married to Israel. They had had a wedding on Mount Sinai, when the covenant was sealed. These two ideas ultimately come to mean that marriage is a primary metaphor which captures the nature of the relationship between God and humanity: God is in love with God’s people. And nothing will stop God from pursuing every avenue to win Israel back!

All of this, of course, is about faithfulness, and that is the whole point of Hosea’s biographical essay. Faithfulness is a quality of God. We might be unfaithful, turning to this or that idol or to some god-substitute. But God is faithful in pursuing us. God is true to the God-nature, and we can carry that to the bank. But what of our faithfulness? It is not about what we believe. (We’re wrong about what we believe about half the time anyway, if not more so.) Faithfulness is about whom we give our hearts to. And whom we give our hearts to we become like. We follow. We emulate. We begin to mirror. (That is true no matter who you are or whether you are the least bit religious.) So if we, like our forefathers and foremothers of ancient Israel, give our hearts to false gods, listen to the voices that whisper promises of security or success or painlessness or unmitigated pleasure in exchange for our souls, we will begin to look and act like the gods we bow down to. If, on the other hand, like Gomer, we find ourselves bought out of slavery and we come home with the one who loves us ravishingly, we begin to take on the characteristics of the Great Lover who sets us free.

Ironically, this movement in following God continues to bring us to places where we find ourselves shedding things that keep weighing us down. For Gomer, it was a life of prostitution. For others of us it might be addiction or destructive behavior or drivenness to achieve or the desire to play it safe and not run any risks. And always it comes down to some decision, such as John’s: to search, to grow, to live; and like yours, to let go, to trust. William Blake put it in a memorable quatrain:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

We never can tell where the Journey will take us, and that is not the point anyway. What we do know is that the Journey is led by a faithful God who never stops searching for paths and ways to bring us home. And we know that the more we follow, the more we come to embody the faithfulness of the selfsame God who loves us far too much ever to give us up.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Vintage Wine

2010-07-24T17:31:00.000-07:00

To Paul Crego and Isaiah Poole, on the occasion of their marriage in the Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, Washington, DC, July 24, 2010

John 2:1-11

What you have just heard is quite possibly the most widely referenced biblical passage in all of Christianity. Scarcely a wedding takes place in any of the major Christian traditions that some reference, however slight, is not made to the wedding at Cana, where Jesus performed his first miracle (according to St. John’s Gospel). If you were to listen carefully to the opening address in the Book of Common Prayer, the model for all those other marriage rites in the English language, the one that begins with the familiar “Dearly Beloved, we have come together in the Presence of God,” you could see that the Church is footnoting its sacrament of Holy Matrimony with a reference to the Bible showing that Jesus obviously approved of marriage because he attended one. And not only did he attend one, he saved it from being a total flop by miraculous changing water into wine.

The reason that the Church got into the habit of giving a lengthy rationale for marriage at the beginning of every wedding was that, believe it or not, there was always some question as to whether marriage itself were something that the Christian community ought to be blessing and calling holy. It took something like thirteen centuries before the Church officially numbered marriage among its sacraments, so deep ran the understanding that marriage had to do with property and contracts and families and heirs—not to mention sex—and thus belonged to a part of life that did not seem to fit nicely into the Church’s business. You would never know all that listening to American debates in the last twenty years where scores of people assume that marriage itself floated straight down from the clouds with God’s signature on it as the principal plan for everybody.

But, like a lot of things, the story of the wedding at Cana started out serving one purpose and today serves a slightly—or perhaps very—different purpose. For in choosing this story to be read as the climactic lesson in their wedding today, Paul and Isaiah have given us the quintessential story about the miracle of change. It is in fact perhaps the very best story in the whole book about how the ordinary is transformed into something quite extraordinary. It is Christian alchemy at its highest: the dazzling news that there is a Power in the universe that takes the common and makes it holy. And this Power is none other than the Word made flesh, the one who looks and acts like every bit the human being that he truly is, and yet at the same time is the sublimely creative energy that brought all water and all wine into existence.

If this wedding today is about anything, it is certainly about change! Who would have believed, even a year or two ago, that in a church in the District of Columbia a group of people would gather to witness and bless the joining together of two men in marriage? And yet, water has become wine! The gloriously impossible has become real! And those of us in The Episcopal Church have been filling the water jars for the rites of purification for a long time. They have been standing, waiting, waiting, waiting for the moment to come when those who have had no taste of marriage joy could at last drink the same sweetness that all the other guests imbibe.

None of us thinks that this wedding is principally about the politics of marriage, or even about the wondrous social change that makes the marriage of two men or two women legal. It is about something far deeper. For Isaiah and Paul’s marriage is about their being transformed. Their transformation has less to do with the government of the District of Columbia than it has to do with the Holy One who soaks their life with meaning, who works quietly and mysteriously to produce growth, who opens their hearts to unexpected reconciliation, who touches common moments and makes them sparkle.

In his novel What’s Bred in the Bone,* one of my favorite writers, Robertson Davies, made the wedding of Cana the symbol of almost unimaginable power. Francis Cornish, dead before the story begins, came from a strange, mixed-up, somewhat shame-blighted family. But at an early age he knew he was different. He had a talent: painting. So off he went from his native Canada to England and then to Central Europe where he learned to paint in the style of the old masters. He became an internationally known art critic and specialist, and wound up in the center of intrigue, saving great masterpieces as the European art world was being ravished by the Nazis. In the center of all this was a mysterious painting that no one could exactly date, a stunning statement of the union of opposites that seemed to belong to the Reformation period. Was it real or was it a fake? And if the latter, who could have pulled off so marvelous a fake, and why? The painting depicted the wedding at Cana, the changing of water into wine. It turns out not to have been a forgery, but deeply authentic—though the world is never sure it can trust real authenticity. Francis Cornish himself was the artist. The genius that was bred in his bone came out on the canvas in a composition so stunning and colors so rich that people would have never believed that anyone short of a Rembrandt, say, could possibly have created something so powerful.

Isaiah and Paul, the wedding of Cana is the marriage of God and the human soul. The wedding of Cana has been going on in your lives now for some time, as you would be the first to say. Your wedding, this wedding, is the wedding of Cana, where the Power that created you and sent you forth on a journey has finally brought your marriage to the place where you can fully and freely celebrate who you are, where with all your guests you can serve and drink the very best wine of all—the wine of authenticity. No longer is your life a rich work of art that the critics can cheapen by questioning its legitimacy or its reality, let alone dare imagine that yours is a clever copy of the real thing. Yours is a marriage which is touched by the Master’s hand, the great Creator who made you the way you are and loves you as if you were the first two human beings or the last two on the planet. Yours is a marriage where ordinary stuff becomes holy, where bodies convey spirit, where the cracks in your hopes and deeds become the places the light of God shines through. You and your marriage are the authentic thing, this wedding of Cana. And through it and through you the rest of us are able to glimpse the unexpected joy of the young Lord whose hour has come and now is.

• Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985).

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Good Neighbors

2010-07-10T11:22:00.000-07:00

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, July 11, 2010

Text: Luke 10:25-37

“Something there is that doesn't love a wall,” begins one of Robert Frost’s best known most often quoted poems. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

…That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. …

What it is that doesn’t love a wall is, of course, frost. The poet is punning on his name. It is frost that destroys walls. But more than that it is Mr. Frost himself that doesn’t like walls. He says as much to his neighbor:

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'

The neighbor is a bit conservative, one might say, repeating his father’s proverb, savoring it, handling it like a stone from the dark stone age. Of this neighbor, the poet says,

I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."*

Many people quote Frost’s poem as they do the Bible, imagining that the proverb at the end is a chunk of common sense not to be disputed. The poet might think so, too—since he participates in this annual ritual of rebuilding the stone wall—but he is ambivalent. Something in him doesn’t love a wall.

“Who is my neighbor?” is one of two questions that dominates today’s gospel lesson. The other question is one that lies silently beneath Jesus’ story. “Why the walls?” The first century religion into which Jesus was born was as convinced as Frost’s neighbor that walls were necessary, and not only to make good neighbors, but precisely to keep some people from being neighbors. Some of those walls had to do with honest attempts to order society. Priests and Levites, temple officials, did not touch corpses without becoming ritually defiled (and quite possibly disease carriers, although that was not exactly the point). Something there is in people that does love walls. It is that part of us that wants to make sure that power and privilege are secure. Funny thing about that. As it turns out, one does not have to be a person or a member of a group that boasts of power and privilege. The powerless and the underprivileged sometimes have as big a stake in erecting, repairing, and maintaining walls as do those who demonstrably profit most from them. It seems to be, like Frost’s annual wall-mending day, something that human beings just do, whether they profit from walls or indeed like them much.

Walls keep people in and they keep people out. They make us at least feel secure, whether we are or not. And they advertise the boundaries that one dare not cross without considerable peril. The robbers who terrorized travelers on the Jericho Road had their own kind of walls, and not just the rocks they could hide behind to plan and execute their ambushes. They, like their gang descendants in Maratrucca-13 in Washington, had staked off their territory which one entered at one’s peril. The Samaritan lived behind another kind of wall. It was a wall of discrimination and hate. And when one is discriminated against, one colludes with wall-building. You hate me, then I’ll hate you. Leave me alone behind the wall you have built, and there I will nurse my pain, my un-belonging, build my bombs, get back at you.

Storyteller Jesus ingeniously sets up his hearers to expect a third traveler who would break the pattern of the first two. And since the first two are clergy, who better to break the pattern than a normal Israelite lay person, someone who might do a neighborly thing because that is what normal Israelites would do? Don’t stick your head in a book and pull your burro over to the other side of the road; go, check out the man lying in the ditch. But, surprise! It is not the average, faithful Israelite neighbor who acts in compassion and mercy or even curiosity. It is somebody from the other side of the wall. It is a Samaritan.

Remember the way the story got started. Jesus has had a conversation with a lawyer who, testing him, asked him a question about the Law: “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus returns the question with a question: “What is written in the Law. How do you read?” The lawyer answers correctly by quoting the Shema: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all you soul, and with all your strength, and with all you mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” But unable to let it go, the lawyer, seeking to justify himself, asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

So the story tells us that neighbors are frequently those behind walls. Neighbors are the ones who are frequently invisible, often alien. Now the interesting thing about the story is how it ostensibly answers the question, “Who is my neighbor?” but really focuses on “Who does the neighborly thing?” It really does not matter whether one sees the Samaritan or the wounded man as “the neighbor.” They are neighbors to each other. But the only way that can happen is for at least one of them—in this case the Samaritan—to come from behind the wall. He does precisely what the priest and the Levite do not do: he crosses the boundary and acts as if the wall is not even there. Not only does he dismount and get involved; he treats the wounds, carries the hurt man to an inn, stays there and takes care of him overnight. On top of all that, he gives two day’s wages to the innkeeper with instructions to take care of the man until he comes back, and makes an open-ended promise to pay whatever more the innkeeper charges (trusting, I suppose, that the innkeeper might not be inclined to rip him off just because he is a Samaritan).

Given the way we pigeonhole people, we are inclined to give the lawyer in the story little more of a break than his tribe is willing to give Samaritans. He is a lawyer, very possibly a smart-aleck lawyer, trying to trip up Jesus with his fancy schmancy questions, a member of the religious and social elite—all the things that make us want to see him cut down to size. But Jesus will have none of that. “Which of these three proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” he asks. And the lawyer replies, “The one who showed mercy on him.” Jesus replies, “Go and do likewise.” Don’t be too quick to imagine that the lawyer turns away, disgusted at the thought of behaving like the Samaritan. This might have been the moment when he heard the Truth, and this the story that let him in on it. For after all, that is why Luke is telling the story to you and me: to let us know what the Reign of God is like, to let us see how it is that eternal life is not something won by maintaining walls but by practicing living as if there were no walls.

None of us is likely to think that boundaries are a bad thing, or in Frost’s terms, that all fences have no use. I certainly do not think so. But boundaries do not have to be walls and walls do not have to keep us captive. The life of God—eternal life you might call it—the only life worth living––requires behaving like God. And behaving like God means finding that part of us that does not love a wall. It means coming from behind the fences and daring to believe that the man in the ditch is as really a part of us as our own arm or leg or eye. It does not take much to see in the face of the Samaritan one whom we recognize. For the Samaritan is none other than Jesus himself, healing the wounded, caring for the stranger, taking the trouble to get involved, creating a relationship that could never happen if fences were paramount, behaving like God. “Go and do likewise” is not a judgment or a sentence. It is a statement of what the lawyer, you, I, all of us, have to practice and practice and practice until we become the place where the Spirit of God makes a dwelling.

* "Mending Wall," Selected Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1963), p. 23.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Independent Church

2010-07-03T20:57:00.000-07:00

A meditation for the Fourth of July

The first time I remember being conscious of the Fourth of July falling on a Sunday was 1976, when we were celebrating the Bi-centennial of the United States. The natural thing to do was to scrap the usual lessons and to make that Sunday a celebration of Independence Day. As I recall, the whole Episcopal Church did just that. Today it happens again that Independence Day collides with Proper 9 in the Book of Common Prayer, and the 234th anniversary of the nation is a less auspicious occasion begging for comment and celebration.

The very nature of our constitutional commitment to the separation of Church and State casts a strange light on what preachers make of the nation’s chief holiday. And because the relationship between faith and politics has never been thoroughly settled, maybe this July 4 gives us another crack at asking the question of what religion—specifically the gospel of Jesus Christ—has to say about and to America.

On this Independence Day the United States of America has much to celebrate and a good deal to be concerned about. Two years ago, after Joe and I had spent two weeks in Italy and Switzerland, we walked along the intersection of 14th Street, Park Road, and Kenyon St. I was stunned by the number of different colors of people, the various accents I heard, the socio-economic variety so obvious. This was the America that I loved, this great big improbable, noisy collection of all sorts and conditions of humanity. I felt as if I had eaten a heavy festive meal enjoying all the art in Florence and that I had come back to meat and potatoes in my neighborhood. Europe was good; this was comfortable. Italy was exciting; this was sustaining. Although Europe is quite multi-cultural these days, it is still nothing like the United States in most places. We truly are one out of many, and that is something to celebrate.

And there are many more things to celebrate. We can celebrate accomplishments like our technological advances, our industry, our agriculture, our musicians and writers and artists. We can celebrate our athletes and some of the world’s best educational institutions. We can celebrate qualities and characteristics like our generosity, inventiveness, and openness. We can celebrate the fact that still one can make it to the Presidency or to the top of a corporation or can remake one’s life without relying on birthright or connections. We can celebrate the fact that we can celebrate our nation not with military parades and goose-stepping soldiers and a shows of armaments but instead with hamburgers and hot dogs and watermelon and frisbee-throwing kids and flies that are surpassingly happy. And doubtless the list could go on. But nearly everything that I have just named that we can celebrate is either in jeopardy or has a shadow side that renders it unstable, negative, or even destructive.

Let’s get down to basics. We Americans have a story that we tell ourselves—actually a collection of stories—and those stories are dangerously limited and fast running out of credibility. Thomas Friedman, with whom I sometimes agree, gave one of his books the memorable title, The World is Flat. His major point is that a number of factors have come together to even out the world. We no longer are a United States that dominates world industry and technology. India, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, and other nations are claiming a bigger and bigger slice of center stage. Our myth that military might was the key to world peace and security has been savagely undermined by the emergence of terrorism as a significant and explosive force in world politics. Our engagement in longer wars than any before, with either no end in sight or no effective resolution, proves the point. Our virtual worship of capitalism as the means of securing happiness and security is beyond shaky as we see the world in the tightening vice of a recession that shows few signs of ending any time soon. Meanwhile, some of the stories we tell that have propped up our worldview are suspiciously vapid. It is not in fact true that everybody can have a job who wants one. It is not in fact true that if people are uninsured it is their own choice and fault. It is not true that corporations have our best interests at heart. It is not true that the government (whether federal, state, or local) has expertise for dealing with any crisis. It is not true that any one who tries hard and plays by the rules can make it in this society, let alone be successful. None of this is necessarily news to anyone. Yet an astonishing number of Americans, not just our politicians, believe elements of all these lies. It is not too much to say that we have built a house on delusional foundations, and we live in it at our peril.

And this is precisely the place where religion actually has something to say to the nation. It is probably true that any religious tradition can legitimately be expected to critique society. That is what religions do at their best. They call into question prevailing notions that, if left unexamined, lead to destructive policies, harmful habits, and terrible behavior. But that certainly is specifically true of the Christian tradition. The Christian Church does much better when it is not allied too closely with the State, and incomparably better when it keeps its distance from the State, just so that it can exercise a prophetic function of calling political practice into question. The single biggest problem with the Church dates back at least as far as Constantine in the fourth century. For from that time forward Christianity adopted the trappings, the rhetoric, the behavior, and the mind-set of empire, and thus lost its edge in being able to call the world to being halfway honest. We made some attempt to untangle the complicated religion-empire knot when we severed the church-state symbiosis in the infant American experiment. But hosts of people still haven’t quite caught on to that, and continue to dream of a state that caters to Christians. No, it is not protection and favor that the Church needs from the State. Rather, the Church needs to speak the truth to the State and to society.

But that is more easily said than done. There is little consensus among Christians as to what that truth is. Practically speaking, I do not see any way of forging a consensus. There are going to be Christians who believe that the Truth has essentially to do with personal morality. Others are going to believe that the Truth has to do with transforming society. Some are going to come down on the side of belief as being all-important. For others it will not be belief but behavior. And so on. But I do think that it is possible for communities of faith to be in constant conversation around the question that Pontius Pilate so eloquently put to Jesus: “What is Truth?” We might not come to complete agreement, but at least we can from time to time find ourselves aligning around certain principles drawn from the gospels and from the larger Tradition. Among those principles are such things as welcoming the stranger, having compassion on the poor, and practicing generosity. We will find ourselves, like Jesus, questioning authority, and like our forefathers and foremothers of Israel, sometimes rebelling against oppressors. We might find ourselves divided over whether or not to fund the military or whether to become conscientious objectors, but there will be no room for Christians to support cruelty nor gratuitous violence. We may vote differently, but we cannot but be committed to justice. And, when you stop to think about it, while Christians are always apparently dividing amongst ourselves, we are at the same time coming together more and more. Even this country’s opposing camps of mainline Protestants and evangelicals have begun to coalesce around facing war and social injustice. Consensus may be hard to achieve, but there are some Truths that are inescapably evident.

So we in the Church need to be in constant conversation about our own faith tradition, constantly testing our understanding, sifting the core of the tradition from popular and passing fancies, becoming articulate and reasoned critics of our society and culture, including our government. But, to be honest, I get a little nervous when I hear anyone, including myself, talking about taking a prophetic stance in society. My fear on the one hand is that we will be too timid, to prone to wait until we have a consensus before doing anything, too shy about naming injustice, too reticent to call war into question, too deferential to authority. My fear on the other hand is that we will do any of that without examining our own complicity with the forces of evil that operate largely outside our consciousness to corrupt and destroy not only human beings but the rest of creation as well. We cannot in good conscience make prophetic announcements to government and society if we—corporately and individually—practice the same sorts of arrogance, injustice, exclusivity, environmental obliviousness, degrading behavior ourselves that we would rail against in others. To be a community speaking the Truth to the nation commits us to be a community that lives under judgment ourselves. That is why it is deeply essential that we take the second of our baptismal promises as seriously as any: “to persevere in resisting evil, and whenever [we] fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.”

St. Augustine formulated the notion of the “City of God,” believing that all human history is a struggle between two realms or two forces: the Reign of God and the Powers of this World. But by the time that Augustine wrote, the Church had already hitched its fortunes to those of the Empire. And though the Roman Empire was finally falling, it would keep a hold on Christianity like a ghost uncommonly strong. In recent years, Craig Carter, a Canadian theologian, has argued that the Church needs to be about undoing, or re-doing, our history that is largely a history of living out that story of Empire rather than that of gospel. I agree. We need not a new wedding of Church and Empire; we need a divorce of Church from Empire. Does that mean we need to be in opposition to our country, or non-conformists in society? Not necessarily. But it does mean that we need to get straight on where our loyalties lie.

One of the ways—indeed a way made possible through our Constitution itself—in which we can practice Christian virtues is through being responsible citizens. Bring every value you have into your life as a citizen. Fight for those things that you believe accord with the gospel of peace and justice by getting involved in the political process. Refuse to opt out through cynicism or hardness of heart. Work for change that mirrors the compassion, humanity, mercy, forgiveness, love of Jesus your Lord. Do your best to make your country a place that does not cater to religions but clearly and unapologetically reflects the values that all religions cherish: honesty, peace, humility, justice, compassion, temperance, wisdom, fortitude.

And let us remember what it is that causes us to rejoice on Sunday, the Fourth of July. Yes, it is that we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But it is even more because our names are written in heaven, in the very heart of God. A century ago, William Merrill penned a hymn, as relevant now as it was then, despite the too-masculine language:

Not alone for mighty empire, stretching far over land and sea,
Not alone for bounteous harvests, lift we up our hearts to Thee.
Standing in the living present, memory and hope between,
Lord, we would with deep thanksgiving, praise Thee more for things unseen.
Not for battleships and fortress, not for conquests of the sword,
But for conquests of the spirit give we thanks to Thee, O Lord;
For the priceless gift of freedom, for the home, the church, the school,
For the open door to manhood, in a land the people rule.

And in a land where people can be ruled by the Power that makes the common holy and a world to mirror God.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2010

Facing Death

2010-06-06T19:08:00.000-07:00

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 6, 2010

Text: Luke 7:11-17

Somebody asked me one time why the Church had nothing much to say about death. “I thought we did,” I answered.

“Only around Easter and at funerals. Did you ever hear a sermon about death any other time? And even then,” he went on, “all I hear is about resurrection taking the sting out of death. It surely hasn’t done that for me.” He, like most of us, had struggled through untimely deaths, difficult deaths.

“Well, I have preached about death at other times,” I said a tad defensively. And today is one of those other times.

But, I have to admit, preaching about death is itself a strange concept. What is the point? Certainly not to talk people out of death. We might assume that people are scared of dying, and to be sure some are. But many people of faith and some of no faith at all have long since determined that death is nothing to be afraid of, at least not our own death. We are afraid of other things surrounding death: long, difficult illnesses that drain our resources and leave us limp; not having enough money to afford a decent funeral; or going through the death of those we love the most. Ah! That is what scares us to death! Pondering the possibility—and sometimes staring in the face the reality—that there is nothing we can do to stop somebody we love and care about from dying. No matter how we deal with our own mortality, the truth is that saying goodbye, turning loose, letting go of someone else to die is the universal human dilemma.

The widow of Nain undoubtedly felt that, too. She had already gone through the death of a husband. When we meet her in Luke’s gospel, she is surrounded by a large crowd of mourners, weeping as she carries to the grave her only son and therefore her only means of support. Luke is silent on what kind of death he died—accident? illness? murder?—and leaves us to wonder what his mother might have gone through prior to his death. This incident in the life of Jesus closely parallels the one you heard earlier this morning from the life of Elijah (I Kings 17:10, 17-24). That widow, too, had a son who died. We do get more of a glimpse of her. Grief-stricken, she lashes out at Elijah, accusing the prophet of being out to get her, to bring to mind her sin, and to punish her by causing her son’s death. In one sentence we pick up the unmistakable scent of guilt, fear, and a God-blaming anger that death not infrequently kicks up. “What have I done wrong? What might I have done that I didn’t do which would have prevented this death? If God were any god worth salt, things like this wouldn’t happen. Maybe the widow of Nain felt some or all of those things. Surely she would not have been the only one. They are all a part of grief.

But neither the focus of the Elijah story nor that of the Jesus story is grief, or even the circumstances surrounding death. Both are stories told to proclaim the greatness of God. The first makes the point that the prophet Elijah is, in the woman’s words, “a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.” The second story not only makes the point that, as the people say, “A great prophet has arisen among us,” but that Jesus has the power not only to heal but also to resuscitate. Ultimately, of course, Luke’s proclamation will be that he has the power over death itself.

So certainly on one level, the point of preaching about death is to say something about how God is greater than death, and how in fact God holds death, like life, in God’s own hand. But before we get there, we need to deal with a couple of other things.

First, death, whether we like it or not, is simply built into the fabric of creation. We could not have life without it, literally. Stars die, plants die, animals die. And we are animals. We sometimes behave as if death is somehow wrong. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that most of the practice of modern medicine is about keeping death from happening, or at least keeping it at bay as long as possible. Nor is it hard to see that the motivating factor behind the vast industry having to do with diet and exercise is about lengthening life and keeping old age and death as far away as possible. I am not arguing that either effort is necessarily misplaced, but rather that our own built-in aversion to death can sweep us into an unconscious denial of its reality and certainly an ignorance of its goodness. What fuels our struggle to work out our neuroses is a failure fully to embrace our bodies, and thus to affirm our mortality, which means seeing death as a friend. Much of our art, a great deal of our literature, and an overwhelming amount of our religion sees death as nothing of the kind. Death—physical death—is seen to be, as the widow of Zarephath said, a punishment for ours or somebody’s sin, and thus the work of the great Death-dealer, the dark power in the universe who is God’s rival. But death is not God’s rival—not if you see God as the all-embracing Creator who knows best how to make a world and who has made it with a polarity of life and death running right through the middle of it.

But, somebody will argue, Christian religion explicitly calls death an enemy. St. Paul said it himself: “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Let’s put aside for a moment the question of whether in this instance Paul did a favor to us, to God, and to the gospel of Jesus by putting it that way. Let’s instead see what sense we can make of that. The “death” that is an enemy is not just the physical act of dying, but the possibility—the real possibility—of being closed to the renewing, life-giving power of God’s spirit. In other words, the death that is the enemy is more than—one might even say different from—physical death. It is critical to understand this. What seems like death is very often not death, and what seems like life is not truly life. Letting go, saying goodbye, turning loose of some old habit or soul-deforming behavior feels like death, or a surefire way to die. Instead, we discover (often after the fact) that it was what led to a new kind and quality, and sometime quantity, of life. Things that frequently feel good, such as winning, taking, achieving, acquiring, amassing, controlling, might as well wear the death mask, for death can be what lies behind them each and all.

Still, we have inherited an elaborate mythology that physical death exists in human experience only because something is radically wrong in creation—something that we call sin. In all honesty I have to say that such a notion is tragically wrong. We all must die, and, as Ecclesiastes says, there is a time to die. And it has nothing necessarily to do with how much or what we believe, or how good we are, or how faithful we are. We are simply mortal, and there is no getting around that. It is the other death, the metaphorical death, the death of the spirit that saps us of life and promise and vibrancy.

There is something else about death that we must get. All physical deaths are not equal. They are unequal in tragedy, unequal in effect, unequal in proportion. This week’s Washington Post carried photos of a young body killed in a shoot-out, mourned by scores of young people: a senseless death with little redeeming value. How different from the death of an aged person who, having finished a long course of this life, quietly passes from this world. Contrast the death of little Oscar from violence, whose funeral drew hundreds to this church last fall, with the death of civil rights activist Dorothy Height at the age of 98, whose funeral drew hundreds to Washington National Cathedral in April. We do not respond to these deaths with the same thoughts and the same emotional intensity.

There emerges from the story of the raising of the man in Nain a portrait of Jesus that informs the way we deal with death. We see him taking notice of the death that had occurred. We observe him moved with compassion for the widow-mother. We see him violating custom and ritual law by actually touching the coffin. We hear his utterance, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” We see the power of this simple command. The reason Luke gives us this picture is clear. It is to let his readers and hearers understand the unexcelled power of the Spirit at work in Jesus, to inspire faith in him as the risen and ascended Lord. But Luke’s purpose also is to move us to fashion our lives, our values, our behavior after the model of our Lord. Luke believed in the power of the Church to heal as Jesus healed. He also believed in the power of the Church to approach death with the same calm majesty that Jesus exhibited. In his second volume, the Book of Acts, Luke tells us a story in which Peter raises Tabitha (Acts 9:36-43), carrying on the work of Jesus. It is no secret that the Church has been slow to accept its healing ministry during most of its two millennia of life. And, though there have been exceptions here and there, the Church has shown little sign of a vocation to raise the dead. (Most of us have no thought of trying that.) But we can follow Jesus’ example of discerning the import of death, as he obviously did in Nain. And we can take our cue from him in stopping what we are doing and extending compassion to those who are grief-sick and sorrow-worn. And we can utter words of life, comfort, power in situations where death has been particularly cruel or gratuitous or tragic. We can, in our struggle for human dignity and freedom for all persons, bring the full weight of our witness to a culture that often condones official killing, that colludes with the forces of death often masquerading as forces of life but which in fact corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.

Ironically, we and our efforts are not of much use in dealing with death if we are busy denying it. Forty years ago, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross taught many of us that dying was nothing of which to be ashamed and that it was possible to do it with dignity and peace. If our faith teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:39) That is a faith which, far from sugaring over the complexity of death, places it squarely in the hands of God, whom not only do we have to thank for creating our bodies that die, but whom we have to praise for redeeming death so that, even at its worst and most threatening, it only tosses us closer to the Love that will not let us go.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2010

Community Change

2010-05-23T18:53:00.000-07:00

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, The Day of Pentecost, May 23, 2010

Text: John 14:8-17; 25-27

Use your imagination. Think of Jesus, gathered with his disciples during his final hours, hearing Philip say, “Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied.” A silence falls over the room. Jesus looks down, then up. He runs his hands through his hair. He squints. He lifts one hand to his forehead and knocks a couple of times against his head. See his jaw grinding, his lips pucker. Silence thickens. Disciples see his chest rising with a deep internal sigh. He stares at Philip.

“Have I…have I been…” He stops, measuring his words. “Have I been so long a time with you, Philip, and yet you have not known me?” Though exasperated, he contains his frustration. “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Or don’t you believe it?—his expression seems to say. “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.”

His tone changes. Exasperation gives way to excitement. “I tell you the truth. The one that believes in me will do the works that I do, and, in fact, will do even greater works than these because I go to the Father.” He looks around the table at them all. Their eyes meet his. He lowers his voice to little more than a whisper, as if he is telling them the best secret in the world. “I will do whatever you ask in my name.”

Pentecost is one holy day that has been spared bastardization by Hallmark. Don’t expect to see Pentecost cards on sale tomorrow, nor little marshmallow doves stacked up in CVS. I’m glad to be spared such trivialization. But, to be honest, I’m not sure we in the church have done all that much better in our treatment of Pentecost. We’ve sometimes reduced it to a rather cute celebration of the birthday of the Church, a rather dubious idea since it was hardly on Pentecost Day that something recognizable as “church” actually sprang into being. Sometimes we have had fun—I have—with wind and water and fire and doves and the other symbols. In some places, folks assume that Pentecost is about God getting a little whacky and encouraging us to get whacky too with shouting and clapping and tongue-speaking and praise music—not that there is anything wrong with that. But all these things tend to miss something very central. They obscure the fact that Pentecost is about community. It is about the transformation of a community. It is about a transforming community.

There is a deep connection between the scene of Jesus and his disciples, in which he tells them that he and the Father are one, and the story of Pentecost Day when the promised Spirit comes to the disciples. And the connection is this: that the very nature of God is communal, just as the very nature of humanity is communal. John’s gospel is explicit in identifying “indwelling” as a characteristic of God. As far as the Fourth gospel is concerned, God does not nor ever did live alone. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God:” remember? Jesus is that Word become flesh. He makes it explicit that Abba (as he calls “God”) lives in him and he lives in Abba. Abba works through Jesus, speaks through Jesus, empowers Jesus. The gospel makes it equally clear that indwelling does not stop with Abba and Jesus, however. Abba sends the Spirit to live with and in the disciples. Over and over Jesus tells them that the Spirit will enable them to be one, as he and Abba are one. Through the Spirit, he and Abba will come and make their dwelling with the new community. The world will know that the community belongs to Jesus because the community will love like Jesus. “As Abba loves me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another as I have loved you.”

There is no such thing as a Christian alone. We are all communal, first by our very nature, and second by the transforming act of God through the power of God’s Spirit. Yesterday, our vestry—the governing body of the parish—gathered for a retreat day. Emily Barton took us out on St. Alban’s lawn and gave us a group task to do. She whipped together a bungee pole of the sort used for a tent frame. It weighs only a few ounces. Half of the dozen of us lined up facing the other half. Everyone extended index fingers underneath the rod. Our task was to lower it to the ground. Can you believe how hard that is? Our natural inclination was to lift, not lower. We struggled for a few minutes until Linda, our leader, began to coach us. Working together, we managed very, very slowly to lower the pole until we finally got it to the ground. We talked a bit about what made it so difficult. One insight was that it helped to think together, imagining together the downward motion. Another insight was that our natural instincts were to lift if we saw one end sagging. The point was clear: we could only do the job if we very intentionally and sensitively worked together. Being together in community was a start, but not enough. We needed a transformation.

A fellow I know, about 35 years old, tells the story that several years ago he developed a serious problem with arrhythmia—the condition when the heartbeat changes in frequency or in force. For some reason his medication did not work and he was unable to get medical help. He said that his mother commanded him to lie down on the bed next to her. She took him in her arms and held him against her as if he were a small child. After awhile his heart began to beat in sync with hers. His arrhythmia went away. A strange story, perhaps, but one which serves as an image of what it is like when God holds any one of us so close that our very life-beat begins to mimic God’s own. We begin to live first in sync with God, and then more and more in companionship with God, and finally in true union with God. Then we can become not only a transformed community, but a transforming community.

Today we are baptizing Rosa Falee, one of our youngest sisters. Baptism is not about doing something that will make God love Rosa anymore than God already does love her. Nor is it about some future that she will share with God when she leaves this body and this life. It is about Rosa being connected to a community alive with the life of God dancing around our heads like so many flames. It is about Rosa living among us, practicing things like prayer, repentance, proclamation, works of mercy, works of justice. It is, in short, about Rosa being in a community that knows its heartbeat will be irregular unless we stay very close to the God who births us and mothers us and heals and restores us. But Rosa will not have heard the whole message of God or of Jesus if she does not hear that her Christian life does not end with her own transformation, nor indeed her community’s transformation. The Spirit is to the community of Christ what breath is to the body: it empowers the community to do transforming works—believe it or not, even greater works than Jesus did (we have never ever believed that and still don’t). But that is the promise and the call. And do you know what? A people on fire with God’s spirit, staying close to God’s heart, can do wonders. Like bring the planet back from the edge of self-destruction. Like learn to get past racism. Like dismantle nuclear arsenals. Like lay down their lives for their friends, and to love their enemies for God’s sake. Like being kind when it is easier to be nasty, to tell the truth when it is easier to lie, and to believe against all odds that the great God who made us actually lives within us.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2010