Exiles Come Home

One of the themes of Advent is woven into that great hymn from the fifteenth century, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

…And ransom captive Israel,

that mourns in lonely exile…

Why would we sing something like that? Or for that matter, why would anyone sing it in the fifteenth century? It certainly is not a historically literal idea. Israel was not in exile waiting for the Son of God to appear—not if you define exile as living away from one’s homeland. When John Mason Neale penned those English words in the 19^th century, he was picking up on something greater than a piece of history. He was giving voice to a human condition that people know about the world over.

Exile has never gone out of fashion nor lost its power. Numbers and estimates vary, but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees figures that about 16 million people were exiles from their countries last year. Add to that another 24 million who are exiled from their homes but who remain within their native countries. And that, of course, does not account for the people who are living in self-imposed exile, or who are driven from their homes for personal or family reasons.

But exile is not just a physical condition. And though we tend to think about it as a political situation, the roots of the idea of exile we can view most clearly in a religious or mythical context. Think of Moses. Think of Oedpius.[1] Such heroes as these experience exile and suffer the sense of alienation that exile brings. Running through the consciousness of humanity is the sense that we are in a real sense cut off from our spiritual home. That is the primary meaning of one of our primary stories, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It is not about history. It is about our condition. In a letter J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, “...but certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of exile.” This sense of alienation, of exile, is exactly what St. Augustine touched when he prayed his famous prayer, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” It is not just a Christian or Jewish preoccupation. Some native African religions have a story that once upon a time the gods dwelt at just about the level of the tree-tops. But something happened and they withdrew. People ever since have been in search of the vanished gods to reconnect with them.

I doubt very much that I have to sell you on the idea of exile, because I suspect you know as much as anyone does about it. We don’t go around every day thinking about Paradise Lost, to be sure. But you don’t have to live very long before you begin to sense that you are, in the words of spiritual writer Philip Zaleski, “living in the rift.” Whether you have moved to a new location, or changed jobs, or buried a parent, or lost a friend, or are battling illness, something has been lost. One of the purposes of Advent is to awaken this feeling, to bring it to consciousness, to invite us to embrace it and not run from it. That is the point of reading from the Book of Baruch today.

If you have ever heard of or paid attention to the Book of Baruch, you are a rare bird. It is not even in the Hebrew Bible. We have it in fact because someone translated a Hebrew text into Greek. It got combined it with other texts in that great ancient work called the Septuagint. Baruch dates most probably from the third or second century before Christ, at a time when Israel was experiencing not an altogether geographical but certainly a psychological and spiritual exile. Books like Baruch frequently look back to an earlier time for parallels, clues, and hope. So the author of Baruch takes the name of a prominent scribe in the time of the prophet Jeremiah, and retrojects some of his content into the period several centuries earlier when Israel was literally, geographically, and politically exiled. Jews—or Judahites—had been scattered all around the Mediterranean world and the cream of the nation had been deported to Babylon. Baruch in effect says to his hearers, “I know what you are feeling. You are feeling exiled. We have been there before.”

Now the problem with Baruch, if you read the whole book—short as it is—is that its theology is a kind of patchwork of the major religious thinking of its day. It is a kind of mild, none-too-original soup designed to work for as many people as possible across the entire spectrum of religious practice, liberals and conservatives alike. And maybe that itself is a sobering feature of this book about exiles. It seems to say that whether we are Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians, whether we are Anglicans or Baptists or Quakers or Unitarians, we are all exiles. None of us is exempt from the condition, and we are better off if we admit and embrace our fundamental unity. It is with a blaze of poetry that Baruch signs off, consoling the Jerusalem of Baruch’s day:

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,

And put on forever the beauty of the glory from God.

Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God;

Put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting;

For God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven…

Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them.

Is it possible? Can we come home? Is there anyone who will lead us? Or must we remain exiled forever? There is a sense in which the sense of exile is not going to disappear. On a purely practical level, if it is not one thing it is another. Aging, for instance, brings with it increasing challenges and losses, each one of which can exacerbate the condition of feeling exiled, as when quite literally we are marooned amidst crowds when we lose our hearing or when we are alone in our apartments no longer able to walk freely or drive. Nor can we get away from the fact that some of the sense of the loss of paradise is the inescapable loss of innocence that comes with experience.

But there is another sense in which the words of Baruch are just as pertinent, just as alive for you and me as they could possibly have been for Jews in the time of the Second Temple. “For God will lead Israel with joy in the light of glory” is a promise made to you this day. How can you have it, feel it, taste it, see it? How can it be more than a pious idea? The brilliant historian of religion Mircea Eliade described what happens when exiles have a sudden alertness to an inner call. Eliade called it “nostalgia for Paradise,” “the desire to recover the state of freedom and beatitude” before the exile.[2] When we begin longing to make contact with this God who seems so remote—when we begin entertaining the possibility that maybe there is something that can heal and restore us, something that we thirst for—long for—crave with all our being, then we can begin singing the song of Baruch even as own our exile and search for the way out of it. “God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven.”

There is the possibility that we can get stuck blaming our exile on various captors: the culture, politicians, the media, the collapse of religious consensus. There is the possibility that we can try to get out of exile by means of a new narrative furnished by science or art or some other religious tradition. We can always go down the exile aisle with sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, or some variation of them. But there is also the possibility that none but Emmanuel himself will come and ransom the captives that mourn in lonely exile. Take one step and God will take a thousand.[3] Once we realize that Emmanuel—Jesus--is right here, right now, the exile is not nearly so painful or so lonely. God is with us after all. Lost Paradise is regained. Exile ends. Rejoice!

---

[1] Vine Deloria, Jr., “Out of Chaos,” in Parabola, x:2 (May 1985), 14.

[2] Philip Zaleski, “Living in the Rift,” Parabola, vol. x, number 2 (May 1985), 6.

[3] Ibid., p. 13.

It All Comes Down To This

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Sunday, November 29, 2009, The Feast of Christ the King

John 18:33-37

So this is what it has all come to.

A year has passed since last Advent when we began telling the story of Christ’s life, Sunday by Sunday, season by season, living it, walking it, reflecting on it, imitating it. Shortly before Advent last year, I reflected with the congregation on the place of priesthood in a community committed to shared ministry. Out of that discussion came a suggestion that we reflect together on ministry on a regular basis. So I set myself a goal of going through an entire year with you examining ministry. If you have been with us during any of this year, I hope you have concluded that ministry is inseparable from the life each of us leads. I hope you will never again think of it as being limited to those who are ordained as bishops, priests, and deacons. I hope you will always remember that your baptism, if you are baptized, immersed you in a ministry that is all about how your life is woven together with the life of Jesus Christ, and that your purpose, is about bringing the world and God together in a way that is dazzlingly transforming.

We have looked together at such things as being healers, pastors, prophets. We have focused on how we are apostles, evangelists, and theologians. We have peered into ourselves to see what our egos have to do with ministry and how the way we handle conflict shapes that ministry. Through all this we have seen two things again and again. One is that the whole of ministry belongs to the entire People of God—not to some but to all. The other is that ministry embraces everything we are and do. So what would the purpose of this year-long project be, if not to persuade folks to get excited about ministry, and to want to live a God-centered life?

Every year, taking Jesus as the model of choice for the God-centered life, we unpack his story episodically through the Church Year. Today we come to the culmination of all that, and is it ever a rude awakening! For this is the feast of Christ the King. The picture we see is not some triumphant, exalted Lord reigning over all the worlds that are and are to be, but Jesus under arrest. Even in John’s gospel, where Jesus always appears to have everything under serene control, this picture of Jesus is disturbing. Jesus directly confronts the imperial weight of the Roman Empire. Pilate himself says at one point, “Don’t you realize that I have the power to release you and the power to crucify you?”

If you think about this in the context of our ministry—and of our identification with Jesus—this is a heads-up that those who live like Jesus, and even those who live even remotely like Jesus, are headed for trouble. The reason really is quite simple. It is lodged in this conversation between Pilate and Jesus about Truth. “My kingdom is not of this world,” says Jesus. We continue to miss that point. I am not sure that we grasp at all what he is talking about. He is certainly not talking about pie in the sky by and by. No, he is talking about a basic orientation, an organizing principle, a way of living that is totally counter to what human society tends to prize and to promote, namely power, privilege, and prestige. Civilization has managed to do many things, but it has not yet successfully overcome our basic tendency as primates—indeed more generally as mammals—to define ourselves by where we are in the “pecking order” or the hierarchy.
So the higher up we are, the more power we have, the more control we can exercise over the food supply, the better we feel about ourselves. That is what an enormous amount of human behavior comes down to. The health care debate? It is essentially about money—who has it and who does not—and that in turn is about those in power protecting their control of the supply of food and other essentials—and that in turn is about how to make sure that abandonment and death remain remote threats instead of ever-present threats. That is the kind of world that places a Pontius Pilate in charge of operations.

Jesus, on the other hand, really is about cutting through all that and getting to the heart of—dare we say?—Truth. For the truth of the matter is that the organization of the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the American Empire completely misses the point—in fact several points. It is not by swords’ loud clashing, nor by roll of stirring drums, but by deeds of love and mercy that the heavenly kingdom comes. Jesus’ way is about giving instead of acquiring. It is about forgiveness instead of revenge. It sets kindness above self-preservation; inclusiveness before tribal, family, or racial identity; and community over personal aggrandizement. In short, the Truth that Jesus speaks of to Pilate is nothing less than life lived by a set of values completely different from those of the ordinary workaday world. He says something to Pilate that echoes something he says elsewhere in John’s gospel: “Everyone who belongs to the Truth listens to my voice” makes the same point as “my sheep know me; they hear my voice; they follow me.” Living for Jesus means being tuned in to a voice that says, “Whoever would save life in this world will surely lose it; but whoever would lose life in this world for my sake and the sake of the gospel will find it.” Pilate does not understand that and quite likely never will. “What is Truth?” may be a flip, dismissive quip, but it can just as easily be a profound, sincere question. In either case, Pilate does not know what it is, but Jesus assuredly does. Essentially he knows that life is a gift to be celebrated extravagantly and shared prodigally, not hoarded and controlled. He knows that the center of the Truth of the universe is the God who lives in him and in whom he lives.

So that is what it all comes down to, this story of ours. It is a story we tell not so much because we believe its every detail but in order to believe the one whom it is about. It is a story we tell because the more we trace and re-trace the steps of Jesus the more we find ourselves doing the things he did—praying, feeding, teaching, forgiving, eating, healing, and above all living more and more free of anxiety and its offshoots, power-grabbing, manipulation, and depression. We tell of the Advent of a reign of peace and justice that is strong and real enough to inspire us to work for the end of war and to believe that there can actually be an end to global poverty. We tell of a Christmas that is not just the birth of our Savior but our finding New Life in unexpected places and unimagined ways. We tell of Epiphanies at Jordan and Cana and Mount Tabor that we see reflected in our own small mysteries when our vocations turn out to be the way lives are saved, or embarrassing circumstances become moments of grace, or our times of prayer streaked with flashes of transcendence. We ponder the desert experience of Jesus precisely to get to know our own demons, which turn out not to be so different from those that assaulted him. We walk slowly and deliberately through Holy Week because we need not only to watch Jesus do it but also because we have our own passions to undergo and sufferings to face and death to embrace. We shout our alleluias on Easter not just cheering him but cheering the human community he has managed to amass that keeps composing poetry when it would be easier to sulk and that insists on singing when it is easier to whine and that dances in the face of death because we flatly deny that death is anything to be scared of. We revel in Pentecost because we believe that the God that appears so visibly in Jesus every once in awhile seems startlingly alive in one of us, so much so that we have to recalculate our own potential to make the world a sweeter, better place just by walking by the Spirit instead of always by the rules of the flesh.

It all comes down to this: that the ministry of each one of us is nothing more and nothing less than the ministry of Jesus. And that in turn is a perennial scattering of light and joy wherever there is darkness and grief. It is enough to make us all feel enormously buoyed to the point of outrageous pride, all this glory that we share. But telling the story has the strange effect of making us know how in the end we are just dust, a truth which is delightfully all right. For that is exactly the cosmic stuff in which we began our great journey with the One to whom we bow, who lives and reigns for ever.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

The Blind Begin to See Again

Vision for Ministry

Mark 10:46-52

Sometime in the last generation, no small thanks to Judy Collins and Joan Baez, “Amazing Grace” entered the list of top ten hymns. People who rarely ever go to church know at least the first verse. Some say it is the most popular hymn in the English language, and it has been translated into a score of others. “I once was lost but now and found, was blind but now I see.”

Blind, but now I see. Blindness is, of course, not only a physical condition but a psychological and spiritual one. We may not be physically blind, but we know we can be blind to reality, blind to truth, blind to conditions, blind to dangers, blind to what is obvious to everyone else. In Mark’s gospel there are two accounts of Jesus’ healing the blind. Interestingly, they are not the major examples of blindness for Mark. No, the real blind people in Mark’s gospel are the disciples! They put to rest once and for all the silly notion that if you could just be with Jesus and see for yourself what he did you would have a better crack at being faithful or at least understanding Jesus better than somef us living in the 21^st century. The disciples just don’t get it. They do not understand the nature of real hunger, and so miss the point of the feeding of the five thousand and later the four thousand. They do not understand the nature of messiahship, and so try to talk Jesus out of the notion that he is to suffer and die. They shoo away the children, when in fact it is to such that the kingdom of heaven belongs. They fail to stick around at the crucifixion and they don’t show up for the resurrection. They miss the point of Jesus’ ministry, which is not about performing miracles as much as it is about spreading the Good News that God has intervened in history. Mark does not call them “blind” in so many words; but clearly that is what they are. Once when Jesus is talking to them, he points out that his habit of talking in parables is to have them understand the secret of God’s reign, while others will look and not perceive. But the more we encounter the disciples the more we suspect that it is the disciples who look and do not perceive.

Along they come to Jericho, the last stop in the Jordan valley before Jesus begins the long, steep climb to Jerusalem and death. As they are leaving, a blind beggar, Bartimaeus, finds out that Jesus is passing by. He calls out, “Jesus! Son of David! Have mercy on me!” The crowds try to shut him up. He shouts out all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Son of David. Bartimaeus is blind, but somehow he has the insight to see that Jesus is more than an ordinary rabbi. This is a messianic title, and the use of it is quite possibly dangerous, and might explain why the crowds want him to quiet down. Jesus calls him. Throwing off his beggar’s cloak, he springs up and comes.

“What do you want me to do for you?” asks Jesus.

He replies, “My teacher, let me see again.” Let me see again. Bartimaeus had not always been blind apparently. He had lost his sight. He wants to be able to see again.

With words that he frequently uses when he heals, Jesus says, “Go. Your faith has made you well.”

Mark places the story at a climactic and transitional moment. Bartimaeus not only recognizes and confesses Jesus as Messiah, in effect, but, once healed, he follows him on the way. And that way is tough. The road is not easy to walk, especially if one has been sitting for long hours and days begging, and especially not easy if one is old—as Bartimaeus might have been. But none of those things is exactly what Mark has in mind. Disciples who make bold to call Jesus “Teacher” follow him. They follow his example, his leadership, his life. They make it their own.

In Mark’s story, Bartimaeus stands in contrast to the rich young man who shortly before had come to Jesus asking what he needed to do. When he heard the answer—the call—to come follow, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. Bartimaeus has nothing but his old cloak, and he even leaves that behind when he comes to Jesus. He does what the rich young man does not do. He leaves it all in Jericho and follows Jesus.

So Bartimaeus becomes in some ways the model of discipleship in this gospel. In order to do the ministry of Jesus, we need vision. Or more precisely, we need to regain our vision. We once could see but now are blind, Mark might be saying to us. It is the story of the Church. There is another story of a blind man in another gospel. The religious authorities, scandalized because the healing takes place on the Sabbath, say to Jesus, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus answers them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” Which is to say that the worst blindness is the one that does not recognize itself. We can amble along in the darkness not seeing, not believing, not recognizing the opportunities for service, not noticing the hungry and thirsty of the world, unaware of our own potential and of our limitations, and we can perhaps do a bit of good here and there despite our blindness. But in order to do the ministry of Jesus we need vision.

“Without vision,” says a verse in Proverbs, “without vision the people perish.” But exactly what vision do we need and can we have? I have been doing some work, as some of you know, with your rector and vestry, assessing where St. Dunstan’s is and where you might be being led in the next year or two. Several Sundays ago, we had a conversation after church in the parish hall and I asked folks to name one or two dreams they had for this church and what it would look like for those dreams to come true. Many of you were there and answered the question. But even if you weren’t, you probably know what people said. Some dream of expanded outreach. Some dream of a larger, grander music ministry. Others dream of a parish that grows in numbers and spiritual depth. These are examples of visions that quite possibly can shape and tune ministry for the next decade.

But we have to be careful. For not just any vision will do. Sometimes our memories of a bygone era pass for vision. It never works. No one ever moved into the future by successfully replicating the past, because it simply is never possible. More likely in suburban American (I have spent most of my ministry right where you are in suburbia), what passes for vision is whatever is popular or trendy. When we begin asking, “What do people want?” it is almost a sure sign that our vision is beclouded by the notion that it we could just deliver consumers their goods we would we doing good ministry. It is not that there are not people with real needs. And it is not that we should not try to meet them. But that is not the vision that the gospel both calls us to and supplies us with.

The vision that the gospel makes possible is the vision of a world where healing is possible, where people actually work for peace, and where reconciliation, forgiveness, respect and kindness govern the way we behave towards those who are closest to us as well as towards those who are most unlike us. I have a Facebook acquaintance who recently wrote a note describing the dissonance he feels between his head and his heart.

“At this stage in my life, my mind (politics) and my heart (faith) are really coming into conflict with each other. As I wrote a few months back on this blog, my position on the death penalty changed when my belief that everyone should receive a New Testament forgiveness (heart) superceded - after much internal debate - my desire for harsh, Old Testament punishment (mind). Many of my friends and I have debated the current health care reform efforts in Congress, and I am torn between my belief that everyone should have health care coverage (heart) with the belief that the government shouldn't be the body responsible for running the program (mind). I am conflicted about the fact that something should be done to end world hunger, disease, and poverty (heart) versus the thought that we shouldn't leave it up to organizations like the United Nations (mind).” My friend is honestly struggling with vision. What he describes as a conflict between heart and mind is what I see as the struggle between two competing narratives, each with a distinctive vision of reality and of the future. One is the narrative that I would name “American Self-reliance” and the other is a narrative that I would call “Christian compassion and justice.” What my friend is discovering is that these are two very distinct visions. The two may be reconcilable, or they may not be. Sometimes we simply have to say, “You know, I really feel like the rich young man who went away from Jesus sad, but still committed to protecting his own self-interest; but instead I am going to spring for new vision. I am going to take my cue from Bartimaeus and go after a new vision. And I am going to let the new vision set me on a path of following Jesus wherever that road might lead.” Individuals can say that. So can parishes.

Does it cost? Of course it does! The pull of the familiar is incredibly strong. It won’t be long before Bartimaeus finds that following Jesus is not all it is cracked up to be, because, like other disciples who have known and followed Jesus, he will most likely want to run as fast and as far as he can from the suffering and death that ministry sometimes entails. Will he miss his old life of begging? Very likely. Will he even lament the loss of his blindness? Well, it is hard to imagine, but stranger things have happened. Our forefather and foremothers of Israel, once they were in the desert wandering around with scorpions and snakes and hunger and enemies and nothing but quail and manna to eat for days on end, began to think about how good the old slavery in Egypt had been. Vision is wonderful, but it does not necessarily make life a bed of roses. In 2006, the U-2 rock star Bono, addressing the National Prayer Breakfast, said,

“A number of years ago, I met a wise man who changed my life. In countless ways, large and small, I was always seeking the Lord's blessing. I was saying, you know, I have a new song, look after it… I have a family, please look after them… I have this crazy idea… And this wise man said: stop. He said, stop asking God to bless what you're doing. Get involved in what God is doing—because it's already blessed.”

What will happen when St. Dunstan’s begins to say, “We want to see again? We want a vision of the Kingdom of God that will transform us, beginning with the oldest and running through us till it has touched everybody to the youngest in this whole place. We want to go where God is acting in the world? We want a vision that will send us to the poor that are playing house in cardboard boxes under bridges or where elderly people are tired of living and scared of dying?”

It is interesting that Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants. Jesus could have easily guessed. But he gives Bartimaeus the chance to say for himself, “I want to see again.” And he gives today to you and your parish the chance to say, “I want vision of what it would be like to follow you, Lord. With my money, with my time, with my talent, with my body, with my energy, with my soul: I want to join what you are doing in the world. I want to follow you on the way.

The Surprising Point of Halloween

Affirming Death, Celebrating Life

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, on All Saints Day, November 1, 2009.

John 11:32-44

The story of the raising of Lazarus is perfect—for Halloween. Look at it. You have everything you need: a cemetery (of sorts), a grave, a corpse—looking something like a mummy—and a raising of the dead to life. I mean the gospel no harm by pointing this out. At first sight it is a stretch, however, to find something in this story that fits the theme of All Saints.

That is so because the Church has been busy telling itself for a generation or two that All Saints is about us. And, of course, to a large extent that is true. As we will sing later in the liturgy today, “They were all of them saints of God and I mean, God helping, to be one too,” the thrust of All Saints has been our being saints, or at least in becoming saints. It is a good thing that we be inspired to live virtuous lives. The great roll call of saints our litany powerfully trumpeted this morning not only stirs us to remember how many heroes stand beside us whispering words of encouragement, cheering us on, but also impels us to join that great caravan and become models, mentors, and guides ourselves.

But we would miss something enormously important if we simply took All Saints as a call to become satisfactorily, or even outstandingly, moral. We would miss the vein running through this entire celebration: the plain fact of death. There is no escaping death, and Christianity, beginning with Jesus, knows it. All those heroes, all those ancestors whom we invoked to stand beside us have one thing in common. Shot or tortured or burned or peacefully buried, all of them died. So that is why a story about death is particularly appropriate on All Saints Day. It reminds us that there is a deep connection between death and sainthood. But exactly what is that connection?

Things are not always what they seem. That is the underlying truth of the gospel. Sometimes something looks for all the world to be life-giving—wealth, status, prestige—and it turns out to be the very thing that saps Life itself. And sometimes something looks to be very clearly an example of death—letting go, giving oneself away, laying down one’s life for one’s friends, forgiving one’s enemies—and that very thing shows itself to be the opposite of death, an instance of true Life asserting itself. It is easy to get all mixed up about these things, because there is something counter-intuitive about the truth. What looks like life is really death and what looks like death is really life, so how in the world do you tell what’s what?

When we begin to get confused (as inevitably happens when we start to become conscious of complexities), our instinct is to simplify things. We categorize things easily as good and bad, helpful or dangerous, and we affix labels onto them that frequently don’t ever fall off. They stick. This tastes good, so it must be life-giving. That feels like loss and danger, so it must be the way of death. So we begin to divide the world into light and dark. The next step is that we begin to make stories out of our labels. Then we start believing our stories. Suddenly we have whole narratives of what we need to live—property, status, power, money, security, romance—and equally potent narratives of what we must avoid—giving in, compromising, letting go, giving our stuff and ourselves away, being shunned.

One of the best metaphors, to my mind, for seeing how this all plays out is the metaphor of mask. We wear masks, as it were, to conceal our vulnerable selves. Deep down we must have a suspicion that somehow we have it all backwards, for the simple reason that all those things that keep promising life turn out to be drearily disappointing more often than we’d like to admit. And every now and again we do in fact surprise ourselves by running some risk, taking some stand, acting out of some courage, showing some unnecessary love, giving away something precious to us, and we discover how thrilling and fulfilling it is to quit protecting and pretending and to live exuberantly and joyfully.

Leo Leonni, a writer of children’s books, composed a story called The Green Tail Mouse, in which he tells of a group of field mice. One day a city mouse happens by and tells them all about Mardi Gras. Enchanted with the idea, they decide to have a Mardi Gras celebration. They make themselves masks, with faces of monstrous bears and lions and tigers and cougars. They like their masks so much that they don’t stop playing. They become the ferocious animals of their masks. They frighten each other. This once peaceful community begins to be driven by fear. One day a mouse happens by. Someone cries out that a giant mouse has appeared, and they shudder for fear. “You silly mice,” says the newcomer, “I’m no giant. I’m a mouse like yourselves. And you could see that I am just like you and you are just like me if you would take off those idiotic masks you’re wearing.” So one by one they begin to take off their masks. They build a great fire and burn them, and have more fun becoming just plain real mice than they ever had wearing their masks.

Leonni’s is a story that gets at the truth through a different route than the story of Lazarus, but it is the same truth. Someone appears who sees clearly and who speaks the Truth powerfully. Jesus appears at the tomb of Lazarus as the Resurrection and Life, strong enough to pull Lazarus out of death into life. “Unbind him,” Jesus orders, “and let him go.” Lazarus is set free. But the story is not just about a dead man coming to life again. It is about a Truth-telling, life-giving power that names the death-games which, like Leonni’s mice, humans play all the time. Someone appears who is who he is, not wearing a mask, not pretending. “Take off those silly masks,” he says. “Quit playing those death-games.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if you were beginning to see what all this has to do with Halloween and death, All Saints and life. Before Hallmark got ahold of Halloween and made a season out of it, and before the Christian right began to lose its mind and get all crazy about the demonic on Halloween, we had a festival, an occasion which poked fun at death. It also did something else, which one day we might recover. Halloween used to give us permission to become monsters and tricksters and ghouls and goblins for a night. Children didn’t know it, but grown-ups knew, if they were conscious at all, that there were parts of us that acted like monsters, and that we were capable of being every bit as fiendish as any fiend whose mask we wore. Halloween functioned as a rite of reversal. We embraced our mischief and our meanness, but only for a night. When All Saints dawned the next day, the King of Saints called us in a loud voice to lay aside our masks, to lay off the death-games, and to reclaim our baptism into freedom and truth. He called us to come out of our tombs and into the light of day. And he made us dance.

That is how saints are made. Christ does not call us to be two-dimensional plastic goodie-goodies, but to be real people who have dark sides and monsters in them but who have learned to take off their masks, embrace their humanity, and live in freedom and peace. One year in one of my parishes we gathered together for the youth group’s annual Halloween haunted house, all the kids and some of the adults in costumes and masks. But at a certain point in the evening we all formed a circle around the altar, read some lessons (including the raising of Lazarus) and then pulled off our masks to celebrate and receive Holy Communion, reminding ourselves that we are not only dust, we are also glory; not only hideous, but also beautiful; not only ghouls and goblins but also saints of God in the making.

Baptism reminds us that the only death we have to worry about is not the death that will end our earthly life, but the death-games we play with utter seriousness to puff up ourselves and frighten others. Baptism flows like a river through the universe, sweeping away all our masks, baggage, and armor, leaving us washed and ready to put on the garments of justice and holiness. And through the raging flood calls the voice of one who is what he is, with no pretense and no mask, saying, “You can be as real as I am, and as holy. Come forth. Live in the light. Be free.”


© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Getting at the Source of the Problem

Ministry and Justice

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, October 11, 2009

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15

Once upon a time a tribe lived along a swift and treacherous river. They were a peaceful tribe, gentle in their ways, temperate in their manners. One day, while fishing in the river, a member of the tribe heard a heart-splitting cry. A woman, terrified and helpless, was being savagely swept along in the whitewater. Running downstream, the tribesman called for help. Villagers came running. Soon two or three unmoored a barque, fought the current, and managed to rescue the woman. They brought her to shore, treated her wounds, fed her. She did not speak their language. They had no idea what had happened that nearly caused her death in the river. Some of the tribe, used to extending hospitality to strangers, gave her lodging. After about a week, the villagers missed her. She had disappeared.

Incidents mounted. Every few days another person, usually someone vulnerable, would be pulled from the river. Occasional drowned bodies the tribe would pull from the river and give its burial rites.

The tribe was pleased that they were able to provide help and shelter for the victims. Someone suggested building a structure out over the water to make rescue efforts easier. Others got to work constructing a first-aid station of sorts, stocked with medicines and bandages for the wounded. Some men and women organized rescue teams so that round-the-clock emergency aid could be extended. Lights were set up along the riverbank to make it safer. And, as the number of victims multiplied, various alarm systems were put in place. Pious members of the tribe erected a small chapel in memory of those whose lives were lost in which their priest offered daily prayers for successful rescue efforts.

One day a girl, a member of the tribe, announced at a village meeting called to discuss an expansion of the rescue efforts that she had discovered a very important secret. She had come to know one of the victims, who, less timid than the rest and able to communicate a few words, had confided a terrible tale of what was happening upstream. Villagers sat stunned as they heard a gruesome tale of a fierce and violent group that had taken numbers of people captive, and whose custom was to throw disabled, weak, or useless captives into the river. Some villagers were shocked. A few were outraged and immediately wanted to go upstream and put a stop to it. But most simply argued that the girl’s secret-telling was totally out of order, and urged that the village get on with its work of rescue. That is what had come to define them. They had a mission and nothing was going to distract them.

A few managed to organize a small band to head upstream to investigate. Some never returned. A few came back and tried in vain to interest tribe members in organizing efforts to intervene on behalf of vulnerable tribes being decimated by the marauders. But there was no interest. Instead, the tribe became better and better at rescue efforts. Until, of course, one day, there came a band of horrifyingly fierce warriors who sacked the village, took most people captive, and threw the old, sick, infirm and even some young braves into the river.

Hearing that story, we may take the longer view and criticize the tribe for its insularity and short-sightedness. But the truth is that they are not all that different from many a constellation of human beings who become attached to doing good so much that they unwittingly participate, or even enable, injustice. The Church is no exception. In fact, we are often a model of how this tale comes to life. Rescue efforts are good, even necessary. But somebody ought to be investigating why so many people are drowning. And somebody ought to be willing to stop the tragedy at its source, or die trying.

Amos is, I suspect, the Hebrew prophet most popular with progressives. Martin Luther King famously quoted Amos: “Let justice roll down like the waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos was, by all accounts, the first prophet whose words were written down in a book. After that, he slept for centuries before many people paid much attention to him. Both Jews and Christians paid a little homage to Amos every now and again, but nobody got terribly excited about Amos until in the last century a Progressive movement arose. Suddenly, the words of Amos came to life and inspired liberalism. They helped the cause that became known as “the Social Gospel.” But, in fairness to Amos, he was not about founding a reform movement. His message was essentially one of doom. A southerner who had gone north to preach, Amos, a Judean shepherd, a dresser of sycamore trees, appeared in the Northern Kingdom’s capital, Samaria, and began to preach a hard message against militarism, profligate immorality, economic inequity, and flimsy piety. These, he thundered, were the undoing of Israel, and the result would be the ruin of the nation. The priest, Amaziah, intervened and told King Jeroboam that the land was simply not able to bear the words of wild-tongued Amos, prophesying death to the king and exile for the people. “Go back south to Judah,” said Amaziah. “Work there, prophesy there; but don’t you come up to the royal sanctuary at Bethel ever again.” Israel had had quite enough of Amos and his prophecies of national ruin.

Amos’s book, while never a best-seller, lasted because his prophecies came true. No doubt it was preserved in Judah, where someone saw that perhaps Amos had a good idea. Maybe justice was, after all, an idea worth doing, and perhaps by doing it, Judah, the southern kingdom, could avert the fate that their northern cousins had eventually suffered at the hands of Assyria.

And that, frankly, is why Amos has something to say to us today. We do not read him because we need to hear prophecies of doom, but in order to hear and ponder what he has to say about justice and righteousness. So we need to listen closely to exactly that. Let’s talk—or let Amos talk—a little about justice. “Woe to those who turn justice (mishpat) into [the indescribably bitter plant] of wormwood,” he says. Courts are being used to exploit the weak and poor. Something is systemically toxic, infecting the entire judicial system and thus poisoning the possibility of redressing any wrong. Those who are using the poor are not only turning justice to wormwood, they are trashing righteousness, the quintessential quality of God’s life and activity. Righteousness is the source of justice. One does righteousness (rather than “is” righteousness) by living up to the demands that any given relationship makes, and thus by “doing right by” those in relationship with you. One does righteousness in two ways: by doing right by God, and by doing right by one’s fellow human beings. If the very structures that aid righteousness on the human-to-human level are themselves corrupt, the entire social order is perverted. If laws and courts and political systems serve the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and weak, and if no one does anything to correct them, the whole system collapses. In Amos’ terms, the Justice of God simply won’t let it go on forever. History bears him out.

With that much in mind, we can revisit the story of the tribe by the river. They were not living unjustly: far from it. They were doing acts of mercy, and so much the better. But so totally committed to their good works were they that they did not see that grave injustice was taking place, causing in fact the very harm that they were busy addressing. The world needs rescue missions, but the world also needs people who will fearlessly contend against the forces that imperil people to begin with.

Just as there is no hard line between righteousness and justice, so there is no firewall between justice and mercy. But for the purpose of understanding the need for both, think of mercy as pulling drowning people from the raging river and justice as work of intervening to stop the tragedy in the first place. We need both. We need to serve food at Loaves and Fishes, but we need to fight the causes of hunger and malnutrition. We need to offer hospitality to the homeless, but we also need, through our work with Washington Interfaith Network, for example, to identify and to address the forces that make and sometimes keep people homeless. The reason most people gravitate towards works of mercy and away from the work of justice is that mercy is easier to understand, easier to see, and easier to get your hands on. To take on systems, to ask hard questions, or—in the terms of our parable of the river tribe—to take on the evil of the marauders who keep throwing people into the river—are difficult, scary, sometimes complex, time-consuming tasks. Doing justice is rarely a simple matter of rounding up some bullies and putting them in jail, but of changing economic or educational or juridical systems that are checkered with both good and bad qualities, hard to sort out. Not infrequently, in addressing the evil that has infected systems, we find that we ourselves are complicit with the evil. We often profit from corruption. So the health care system might be unjust, but tackling it is no easy matter.

Ministry is not about doing one thing or the other so much as it is about both. Nor does everyone necessarily have the same ministry. That is why we are a community, combining many gifts and many forces so that we can both rescue the perishing and combat the forces that cause so many to perish.

In the middle of his dark prophecies Amos did say a word or two of hope, hope that still inspires those who work for justice, who seek to do right by their neighbors:

Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you. Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

© Frank G. Dunn

Ministry, Plans, and Changes of Plans

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, September 6, 2009

Mark 7:24-37

A novel I began reading this week opens with a scene of a Swiss professor walking across a bridge. He sees a rather distraught looking woman who suddenly appears to be on the verge of jumping off the bridge. He is ready to intervene when suddenly she stops, turns, and writes on his forehead a telephone number that, lacking paper, she wants to remember. She follows him to class. He only has the briefest conversation with her, but it is enough to impel him to leave his teaching post and travel halfway across Europe to Portugal, where she had come from.

I can’t tell you more because I have barely read more. But I don’t need to. It is a weird beginning, in a way. And yet it is thoroughly believable. Not because it happens every day: it does not. Yet there occurs in nearly all our lives an occasional incident whose effect on us is out of all proportion to its content or circumstances. It contains the power completely to rewrite our scripts, to alter the ways we look at the universe, or at the very least thoroughly to shake up our plans.

Such an incident forms the gospel for today. If you are tracking Jesus in Mark’s gospel, you can tell an enormous amount about the meaning of the story simply from knowing the geography of Jesus’ travels. Jesus and the disciples have crossed the Sea of Galilee a second time. They have gone to a deserted place, presumably on the eastern bank. People have followed on foot the several miles around the northern shore of the sea. It is there that he feeds them by multiplying the loaves and fish. The group comes back across the sea, and lands at Genessaret, where immediately a throng besieges him, begging for his healing power. After going around the farms and villages and cities to the north and west of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus encounters a deputation of religious leaders who upbraid him for his and his disciples’ being careless about matters of ritual purity. Then he does something that, up till now in the story, he has not tried. He heads into Gentile territory. He moves away from his native stomping ground in Galilee, and heads towards the Mediterranean coast. Mark’s readers are aware that Tyre and Sidon are largely non-Jewish centers. The notion seems to be that Jesus is on retreat. He enters a house—we don’t know whose—and he specifically does not want anyone to know that he is there.

We cannot say what Jesus’ plans really were, even in the context of Mark’s narrative. But we do know that this is not the first time in this gospel that Jesus has encountered a Gentile. The first incident happened a few chapters back on the first trip he and his disciples took across the Sea. Now that is significant in itself, because the land to the east of the Sea of Galilee was also Gentile territory. We know that it was because it was near Gerasa that Jesus encountered the demon-possessed man out of whom he drove the demons into a herd of swine. Jews don’t raise hogs; Gentiles do. The pigs promptly ran down the bank and into the sea and drowned. It is a terrifying story, and does not do much to show deep sensitivity to a Gentile farm economy, this exorcism. Nonetheless, after only this one incident, in which the demoniac is healed and ordered to stay on his side of the lake, Jesus and his disciples cross back over to Jewish territory.

So, while he is visiting in this home somewhere near the coast, comes this woman who is identified as a Syrophoenician, a Gentile. Her little daughter has an unclean spirit. The woman bows down at Jesus’ feet, a gesture of obvious humility and supplication. She begs him to cast the demon out of her daughter. Then Jesus says something that to many ears sounds utterly incomprehensible, given the usual suppositions about Jesus’ universal inclusiveness. “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Choke! Might it not be that Jesus, good Jew that he was, actually saw the world in these terms? What we can say with some assurance is that at this point, Jesus’ ministry takes a decidedly different turn. He does not in fact, return to the familiar towns of Galilee, but instead heads through Sidon to that eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, the Region of the Decapolis, more Gentile territory.

Assuming that Jesus was not playing games with the Syrophoenician woman (some commentators have suggested as much), she clearly had an impact on his ministry, and quite likely on his self-understanding. Certainly, her persistence that he heal her daughter caused him to change his mind and attitude towards her. And it was not just her persistence, but her willingness, as a foreigner and outsider, to state her claim on Jesus’ power and attention. Matthew tells the story a bit more elaborately. There the woman is like the importunate widow elsewhere in the gospels, clamoring for attention, bugging the disciples, annoying them beyond their patience. In that account it is clearer that the woman is outside her rights to insist on a healing when she is not even a member of the household of Israel. Mark simply says that Jesus tells her, “For saying this you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”

As the story continues, it seems clear that this encounter has changed the nature of Jesus’ mission. For when he goes to the Decapolis, the Gentiles bring one of their own, a deaf man with a speech impediment, to be healed. He does not respond by arguing that the man has no claim on healing or other blessings because he is not a Jew. No, this time Jesus has not entered Gentile territory fundamentally to get away from it all, but specifically for the purpose of ministering. Now the interesting thing about this deaf man is that he embodies exactly what Israel thought of Gentiles. One of Israel’s poets, contrasting his faith with that of the Gentiles, wrote,

Our God is in heaven; Whatever he wills to do he does. Their idols are silver and gold, The work of human hands. They have mouths, but they cannot speak; Eyes have they, but they cannot see; They have ears, but they cannot hear; Noses, but they cannot smell; They have hands, but they cannot feel; Feet, but they cannot walk; They make no sound with their throat. Those who make them are like them, And so are all who put their trust in them. [Psalm 115:3-8]

In almost no other healing account in the gospels do we get so graphic a description of Jesus’ healing as we do in this one. He takes the man privately, places his fingers in his ears, spits and touches his tongue. We have come a long way from Tyre when Gentiles were accorded the status of dogs.

There is no doubt that the most significant achievement of early Christianity is that, instead of remaining a sect within Judaism, it consciously, if at first hesitantly, embraced the Gentile mission. If we think that the Church is wrestling with explosive issues today in the realm of human sexuality, we should remember that these issues hardly compare with the gigantic breakthrough of the Early Church in smashng down the wall between Jew and Gentile. The way Mark tells the story, it is clear that Jesus himself is the origin of that movement. And how did that come to be? The key incident is that one day a Syrophoenician woman implored him to heal her little girl, resolved not to take “No” for an answer, and argued that, if she were a Gentile dog, she could still gather up the crumbs that fell from Israel’s table.

Ministry, yours as well as mine, is frequently about revising our plans and notions, even those we are completely committed to. That itself is something that a great many people have trouble seeing. Humans hold on to the past with a vengeance, whether it is a personal past or a social or religious or political past. Often the impulse to preserve what has worked well serves to protect and to extend important learnings. But all the great breakthroughs in any sphere of life are by their very nature events that blast open the confines of previously accepted wisdom. They are breakthroughs precisely because they break through barriers and ceilings and take us to new places. Yet those new places are always scary to a great many of us. We don’t know how to think or how to behave without familiar charts and conventions. Our pattern is usually to resist, and ultimately to fall back into the more familiar patterns, at least for awhile. Thus, the Early Church had its Judaizers, seeking to undo at least the thrust of the Gentile mission’s insight that the center of our freedom is in a Risen Christ and not in keeping kosher. The Reformation on both sides did not take long to devolve into a new orthodoxy, in some ways and places as rigid as the old. Vatican II, which many of us remember as shaking loose the ossified establishment of Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, has been followed by decades of retrenchment.

Nor is religion the only place we see the dynamic at work. Scientists are notoriously slow to revise their mindset when an Einstein or a Heisenberg comes along with an unorthodox notion that challenges established theory. Much of what we have been seeing this summer in the way of political overreaction in the health care debate is the clash of undeniably new thinking with people’s patterned responses which they employ and defend despite all reason.

Jesus could certainly have made a case—indeed we see him making one—in Tyre which would have left the Gentile woman with a mentally ill daughter indefinitely, a case based on his own plans and the received mindset of his people. Instead he allowed himself to be changed.

Yes. Even Jesus learned what it meant to take a deep breath and look into space and say to himself, “Ephphatha! Be opened!”

Ministry in the Time of Folly

Wisdom as Source and Center of Ministry

A Sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, August 16, 2009

Proverbs 9:1-6

Suddenly with the aid of Facebook I am in contact with people I have not thought about nor heard from in forty or fifty years. I have discovered three or four people from my past who turn out to be interesting, agreeable, thoughtful souls with surprising insights. I find myself suddenly liking these people who I only knew casually in high school or college because (who would have guessed?) they share my views and opinions at virtually every turn.

Not so sweet, though, is to reconnect with an old friend who turns out to be disgruntled, or hyper-sensitive, or simply idiotic. I exaggerate, of course. One such acquaintance sent me a note last week of a media event that promises to include all the features of something I would deliberately avoid. We exchanged a civil and polite series of messages, during which I told him that I totally disagree with his point of view, his party, his politics, even though I might see, here and there, flaws in some of the positions I myself hold. And, with a flourish of humility, I ended by saying, “But, hey, I could be wrong.” He wrote back: “You are.”

There is nothing new, of course, about divisions, arguments, and heated conflict between political or theological opponents. Church history is littered with the nastiness that Christians have exercised towards each other. We Americans frequently imagine that all of our sainted Founding Fathers were civil to each other, but try telling that to my friend Jim Elson who has studied how downright mean Thomas Jefferson was to Patrick Henry. And that is just one example of a number of estrangements and hostilities that lodged in their hearts. When we go through a period of tea-bagging and angry demonstrators at town hall meetings, it is easy to forget the horrors of even relatively recent things like civil rights demonstrations and anti-war protests in the Viet Nam era.

Nonetheless, I suggest that, although it is neither novel nor distinctive, we are in fact living during a time of folly. Our institutions, like Congress, creaky and cantankerous, are unable to chart a coherent course for the future and to implement it. News media have a few things in their arsenals that they overuse: mockery, sniping, lampooning, trivializing, and masquerading at being fair and balanced. We have now seen that the machinery of capitalism is vulnerable to excess and collapse, and if you are noticing carefully, you can see how, like a monster that is wounded but not dead, it is reviving to continue devouring whomever it can. The populace wants to believe that there are simple answers to complex questions. They continue, against compelling evidence, to argue that there is nothing wrong with our environment, nothing basically wrong with our health care system, nothing fundamentally flawed about our energy policy. People fling about old bromides such as the epithet “Socialist!” as if to do so immediately negates the thing thus labeled. And, equally foolish, people like me trick ourselves into thinking that having a rational discussion is an actual possibility in a climate of irrationality.

We actually have among our treasures in Judaeo-Christianity a tradition that addresses such situations as the one we are in. It is the wisdom tradition. You heard a snippet of it this morning in the Old Testament lesson from the Book of Proverbs. Unlike other traditions in the Hebrew scriptures, the wisdom tradition is at once more skeptical (the Torah and the Prophets never are) and more practical. In fact, the wisdom tradition is, to a great extent an ancient Hebrew philosophical theology. The books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom, and Sirach are intended as means of instructing people in how to live good lives. The Book of Job is a drama which questions the easy answers of prevailing theology. Job promotes serious inquiry into the nature of good and evil, and suggests that situations are far more complex than at first they seem.

Wisdom literature at first glance looks as if it is just another collection of folk sayings, full of competing proverbs and simplistic answers. Some of it may be. But when one actually reads it, particularly after reading, say, Deuteronomy, one finds a fresh perspective on things. God, for example, is not cast in the mold of an old man frequently getting upset over human events. In fact, the wisdom writers often use a word for “God” that connotes a being who creates and sustains the universe and brings all human acts to completion. Wisdom writers assume a divinely implanted order in the universe, encompassing both nature and human nature.

But what is Wisdom? It is hard to pin down, because it means a cluster of things. First, wisdom is practical counsel on how to live a good life, beginning with respect and awe for the Lord. And yet, human wisdom has its limits. Wisdom is both something you must work at, and is at the same time a gracious gift from a gracious God. And fourth, the wisdom writers reflect on wisdom itself, frequently speaking of wisdom as an attribute of God, or even as a kind of being that they think of as a female who shares with God in the governance of the universe.

But, as our lesson from Proverbs shows today, wisdom literature sometimes sets forth a teaching of two distinctly different and mutually exclusive ways. One is the way of wisdom, sometimes known as Lady Wisdom. The other is the way of foolishness, of stupidity, of wrong action or evil intention, sometimes called the way of Dame Folly. These are not invariably contrasted nor consistently thought of as competing. But they are two distinct ways of living. One sermon cannot tell you all about being wise. You will have to read and study the wisdom books for that. But what we can do is to see that wisdom offers a way of navigating stressful and conflict-heavy situations, and we can test whether we want to practice it.

The way of wisdom has enormous potential for helping us not to get stuck in lots of foolishness swirling around us. In fact, without putting too fine a point on it, I want to suggest that our ministry, mine and yours, especially in a time when foolishness or folly seems to be the situation du jour, is to drink deeply from the spring of wisdom, to be centered in wisdom, and to be guided by it. Notice that I don’t expect our ministry to dissuade all the fools going off on various tangents in all directions not to be foolish. It is perhaps true that, if we picture Wisdom as a woman, we can imagine her sending out servant girls to call out to the simple, “You that are simple, turn in here. Eat my bread, drink my wine. Lay aside immaturity and live, walking in the way of insight” (Proverbs 9:1-6). But I doubt that we would get very far if we just adopted the script of biblical Wisdom.

So what would happen if we “steeped ourselves” in wisdom? How would we likely behave in, for example, the health care debate? To begin with, a disclaimer. I am not advertising myself as an expert at this or believe that I have accomplished it. Not only that, but I publicly confess to practicing some of the folly that on the whole causes me to retch. But, I think, first thing to do is to get in touch with the sources of wisdom. Read and re-read the wisdom literature and reflections upon it. Read and listen to other sources as well. One of the wisest books in the world is the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese wisdom of Lao-Tzu. Much of it, not surprisingly, accords with Hebrew wisdom. Get acquainted with the poetry of Rumi, the Islamic poet of the Middle Ages. And these are only a beginning.

In addition, stay in what I would call “a state of wisdom,” a mind-set, an attitude. It is marked by careful inquiry, always doing your homework, reading and reflecting on things. In the words of Kipling, keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.

Out of that grows another behavior. Ask questions. For example, one of the things I have been trying to do of late is instead of shouting people down, simply ask questions with the aim of getting them to clarify their positions. “All right, so you don’t like a particular plan that is being proposed. Do you agree we should have health care? Who do you think should be left out? Really? You would leave illegal immigrants out? So what about the child of an illegal immigrant who has been taken to the ER with a ruptured appendix? How would you handle that? There is no need to do anything much more than ask questions. This is not necessarily for the purpose of converting anyone to your point of view, but sometimes it does encourage people to think and that is a good thing.

And that leads me to my next suggestion. Know what you believe and why. Our friend Jim Wallis of Sojourners, who has had enormous influence on getting people, especially evangelical Christians to re-think their positions on poverty, for example, did not exert influence simply by asking questions without having a very clear position himself. Know what you believe. Know why you believe it. Be able to state what it is. And, if you are Christian, do not be afraid to say that, “My faith—or my understanding of the gospel—leads me to believe that such and such is the right thing to do.” That is called bearing witness. It is not antithetical to being wise.

We are not called upon to make all the decisions or to know all the answers or to be able to solve all the problems of the day. We are, however, charged with working for the spread of God’s reign, and that means working and giving and praying and investing in those things and spaces where Justice can be clothed with might and where human needs can be met and where hurts can be healed. Our baptismal covenant sets the tone and pattern of our ministry with our commitment to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves. It leaves no question as to whether we are to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being. These things are not optional, and they require no apology. How can you very firmly and clearly let your family, friends, Facebook acquaintances, co-workers, neighbors know that the values we collectively call “the Kingdom of God” or “the Reign of God” are important to you?

And finally, a part of wisdom is never to be so sure you are right that you fear questioning your own assumptions. Someone once told me that the signature phrase of an educated thinker was the use of five words: “it seems to me that….” It is a way of acknowledging, “Hey, I could be wrong,” and you do it, even when somebody comes back at you saying, “You sure are.” You are wise to that, and you stay wise, for God’s sake.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009