A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, The Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 2, 2010
Text: Acts 11:1-18
At first blush, we might think that hardly anything would be less important to discuss this morning than the matter of clean and unclean foods. Few of us are hung up on what kind of animals are kosher and which are not. A number of you, in fact, are vegetarians or vegans, and have thus presumably dismissed once and for all the question of meat-eating. You might even be viscerally repulsed at even this much talk of animals as food stuffs. (So let’s quickly move on to a comfortable abstraction.)
The story of Peter’s vision, recounted today in Acts, is not really about food, of course. Except that it is. The story is important because it marks the turning point for the acceptance of Gentiles as Christians on a par with Jews as Christians. (That seems odd, doesn’t it?) The problem for the early Church was an inherited division among people according to what they ate, among other things. The story overturns the notion that people are clean and unclean according to whether the foods they eat are clean or unclean. “What God has made clean you must not call profane.” Peter’s vision opens his heart to the possibility that the Holy Spirit can fall on Cornelius the centurion and his household the same way it had fallen upon him and other Jews.
Before jumping to the conclusion that this is a quaint story without much relevance for us, let’s pause to consider the persistent trait of human beings to divide the world into sacred and profane. It certainly is not a tendency solely among ancient Hebrews. People all over the world and from time immemorial have designated places, people, actions, and words “sacred,” and have sought to honor their sacredness by making taboo any careless or disrespectful transgression of the sacred. When I was a child, for example, the Bible in our home, the sacred book, was to have nothing placed on top of it. More seriously, there was a list, however much revised from my grandparents’ list, of things that could not be done on Sunday, the sacred day. The holy name of God and the holy name of Jesus were reserved for serious discourse and prayer. One did not swear with those names nor even use them as exclamations of surprise. Now, lest you think that I am bidding for a return to those ways of respecting the sacred, let me state clearly that my purpose here is only to illustrate how it is that we persist in having a category that we call “sacred”—and along with it comes the notion that to dishonor or obliterate the sacred is to “profane” it, or make it common.
Sacred and profane are a pair of opposites—a polarity—like light and dark, good and evil, comic and tragic, truth and falsehood that, if not inborn in us, are so deeply implanted structures that we seem unable to think in any other way. If, for example, we decide to define everything and everybody as sacred, then nothing is sacred. “Sacred” depends for its existence upon a relationship to the profane, its opposite. Same thing is true for night and day. We can only understand “day” in relation to its opposite, “night.” So if we were to abolish the category of “sacred” and say that everything is “profane,” it would not be profane; it would simply be. For “profane,” like “sacred” depends upon its opposite to have any existence.
The notion of clean and unclean (not just animals!) comes out of this polarity. And my point is that the polarity is not going away. If it does not pop up in one place, it will surface in another. Look, for example, at what happened to the Church of Peter, Paul, Luke, and the rest of the other early Christians. The categories of “clean” and “unclean” within a few short years had been replaced by the categories of “orthodox” and “heretical,” which functioned in much the same way. Some ideas and some people were admissible and good. Other ideas and other people were inadmissible and bad. Even the notion of common table fellowship in the Early Church, which had been the instrument of union among Jews and Gentiles, became the instrument of disunion when Christians started sorting themselves out into “orthodox” and “heretical,” sending each other away from the Table through excommunication.
Now you get the picture. The “clean and unclean” polarity is something that continually dogs the Church. The hot-button issue in our time is not food but sexual orientation. And it is interesting that when our own Kathy Grieb and others sat down to write the Episcopal Church’s response to what the Anglican Communion knows as “the Windsor Report” several years ago, she and they produced a document called “To Set Our Hope on Christ,” grounding much of it in this very story of Peter’s vision. Their point was that in every age God the Holy Spirit reveals that what we have called “profane” or “unclean” is off the mark. We continue to get it wrong by excluding this group or that group. When we listen carefully to discern the leading of the Spirit, we find that frequently we have messed up by failing to imagine that Christ’s saving power is deeper than our poor power to conceive it. And we likewise continue to learn that the Holy Spirit can, in fact, hold us together despite our proclivity for dividing each other into pitched camps of mutual disagreement.
You might get the idea—it would not be the first time someone did—that the upshot of all this is a notion that any distinctions between people are wrong, or that somehow there is no reason to see a difference between “clean” and “unclean,” for example. That is not what we learn from the Jesus of the gospels. It is commonly thought that Jesus treated everybody the same. No, he did not. What he did was to refuse to make distinctions based on age, gender, ethnic origin, or religious pedegree—things like that. But Jesus very clearly expressed in strong terms condemnation of those people who were self-righteous and hypocritical. What Jesus did was to shift the notion of “clean and unclean” from external matters to matters of the heart—attitudes, judgments, and intentions:
He said to them, “Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” (Mark 7:18-23)
What do we do with all this? What difference does it make? To become evermore conformed to the pattern of Christ—the process that we call Christian formation—we need to practice careful and thoughtful reflection on what in fact is sacred—clean, and profane—unclean. It is not that these categories have no meaning. It is that we often misapply them and as a result exclude or even demonize persons or whole groups of people. Two or three practices, even more basic than such reflection, are prayer, repentance, and the intelligent study of the Bible. The virtue that we seek to train by doing all this is the virtue of charity, the kind of generosity characterized by a soul open enough to see where we could be wrong and thus how someone different from us might be right, or at least deserving of respect.
Jostein Gaarder’s brilliant novel called Sophie’s World tells the history of Western philosophy in the guise of a mystery tale. I won’t spoil it for you by giving away the plot, but I will tell you that the 15-year-old girl at the center of the story learns how difficult it is to grasp how the human mind works and how easy it is to be prisoners of our own little worlds. As her understanding grows, so does her ability to see how rich and complex the mind is, how intricate the basic questions are. At the same time she begins to understand that the entirety of philosophy is a conversation around one or two basic questions: who am I? what is real? how should we live? It is not so different from the project that St. Stephen and the Incarnation is about, or for that matter, that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about: getting us to stretch open our little worlds (they can be little even when loaded up with much intellectual and political baggage) and become something new. To do that is often confusing and always a little scary. But it is a piece of the great transformation that God is about in bringing us to new life. And it is a big part of what we celebrate and call Resurrection.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010
Saturday, May 01, 2010
Sunday, April 04, 2010
Living Resurrection
A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Easter Day, April 4, 2010
Text: Luke 24:1-12
If you were going to start a religion and wanted to make it attractive enough to win some adherents reasonably fast, about the last thing you would do (at least in 2010) would be to make its centerpiece the story of a person being raised from the dead. And even if you were to try that, you probably wouldn’t choose to have your chief religious hero have a criminal record.
It is no secret that the ancient world, and not just the part around the Middle East, was full of stories about dying and rising gods. It could be argued, and often has been, that there is nothing much unique about the Jesus story. You can find in Rome, Egypt, Persia, Babylonia, and a dozen other places stories about empty tombs, graveclothes, angels, post-resurrection appearances, even crucifixions whose subjects survived. It is more than likely that one or more of the disciples, maybe all of them, had heard such stories—and certainly quite likely that not a few Early Christians had heard and maybe even believed the factuality of such stories.
Maybe that is why the apostles in Luke’s narrative, on hearing the rather incredible report of the women who had gone to Jesus’ tomb and found it empty, dismissed it as “an idle tale” which “they did not believe.” Nothing in the story lends itself to easy belief, not now and not then.
You and I are here today celebrating Easter not because once upon a time there was an empty tomb or a couple of angels or a missing body, but because something about this particular story and this particular Jesus touches us deeply. A few of you might be here because, like Justin Martyr in the second century, you have undertaken a philosophical quest that led you to an intellectual conversion to Christianity. But many more of us are here because, whether we were born Christians or not, we have been moved, changed, altered by something far more real to us than an empty first-century Palestinian tomb. We might not be able to put it into words. We might not be able to give a coherent account of the whole ball of Christian wax. We might not even be too sure about some of the elements of the story—virgin birth, walking on water, angels, heavenly voices—but we find some chord within us vibrating with excitement, resonating with hope, maybe even aching to believe the glorious impossibility of it all because it is too good not to be true.
Resurrection is not a proposition to be argued, but a life to be lived. And the best kept secret in the Christian Church—if not the world—is that resurrection does not begin when we die. It begins now. It is not a future possibility; it is an eternal reality. The whole point of Jesus’ ministry, of his life and of his death, was the same as his rising. It was never about him, it was about God and us. Imagine that God is busily at work, continually creating, tinkering with, molding, perfecting the essence of who we are—let’s call it human nature. The pieces are there: intelligence, creativity, passion, instinct, giftedness. But there are some rough edges and dark corners thrown in. We are not so different in most respects from our primate cousins. In fact, we are remarkably similar to an even broader company of mammals, whose main instincts are for survival, and who arrange their lives largely on the basis of who fears whom and who needs what simply to stay alive. And there are days when we act much more like reptiles than we do dolphins. Even the best of our capacities turn dangerous when we get scared of losing power or when we are shamed or humiliated. Imagine that God sees that, yet sees possibilities in us for things far beyond ordinary reaction: the ability to give power away rather than hoard it; the capacity to forgive even those who mortally wound us; a willingness to see beyond the safety of sameness within our own tribes and families in order to embrace those different from us. And let’s say that God sees how we can practice almost unimaginable charity to the point where we even lay down our lives for not just our friends but our enemies. Imagine that God shapes a human being—Jesus—to model, to embody those things—indeed to embody God’s own nature. Imagine that God challenges him to trust totally in the power of love to the point of willingly enduring the worst kind of disgraceful suffering and death, including a complete collapse of trust itself, for the sake of breaking the hold that the fear of and fascination with death has on people.
But one thing is still missing. There needs to be a door through which we can go to enter into and practice the kind of life that Jesus lived, a God-soaked life. There needs to be a portal which opens onto a space in which God can continue to work out the kinks in human nature. And there needs to be a community defined not by blood relationships or race or nationality but by soul, by spirit, in which people are free to be real without the trappings of pretense or power.
That is what Holy Baptism is. It is the meeting place of resurrection and now. Baptism is the door into the death and resurrection of Jesus. Look at it. In a few minutes we are going to gather around the font where three persons, Marcus, Parke, and Lulu, are going to walk through that door, just as surely as Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Joanna went into the tomb twenty-one hundred years ago. As Jesus was buried and lay dead in that tomb, so will our brothers and sister symbolically be buried with Christ in his death. And as surely as Jesus was raised by God from the tomb, just as surely will they come up out of the water, dry off, and set about living and practicing the resurrection life which is nothing short of God’s life. It will be as if each one of them breaks out of a shell on this Day of Resurrection, ready to skip and play all over God’s creation. Each of them will be united to the great Lion of Judah as if they wore his very crown, burying their faces in his mane, resting on his great paws. By God’s grace we will help them. We will tell them the tales of how something bigger than all of life once lay in a manger and how once on a big rock outside a city wall there happened a death so powerful it put an end to the power of death. We’ll teach them how to be priests in this priesthood of ours where serving is more important that prestige, and where children and the poor and the maimed and the hungry are accorded the highest respect in the community.
They will get hungry. Their souls will growl for the milk and honey of a Promised Land. Their mouths will water for food and drink to sustain them on their journey. And that is what Holy Eucharist is. Around the table, week by week and day by day they will feed on the One who is so much the source of life that we call him our Bread, whose love he feels as blood and we taste as wine. And the more they take his life into themselves, the more they will see themselves becoming what he is, living as he lives, forgiving and caring and feeding others just as he. What he is by nature they will become by grace.
Why seek the living among the dead? Jesus is not there. He is risen, and in him so are you, so are we. We have clothed ourselves with Christ and are become his body. And as unfinished a project of God’s restoring as we may be, that is enough to have us laughing and dancing and saying Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!
© Frank G. Dunn, 2010
Text: Luke 24:1-12
If you were going to start a religion and wanted to make it attractive enough to win some adherents reasonably fast, about the last thing you would do (at least in 2010) would be to make its centerpiece the story of a person being raised from the dead. And even if you were to try that, you probably wouldn’t choose to have your chief religious hero have a criminal record.
It is no secret that the ancient world, and not just the part around the Middle East, was full of stories about dying and rising gods. It could be argued, and often has been, that there is nothing much unique about the Jesus story. You can find in Rome, Egypt, Persia, Babylonia, and a dozen other places stories about empty tombs, graveclothes, angels, post-resurrection appearances, even crucifixions whose subjects survived. It is more than likely that one or more of the disciples, maybe all of them, had heard such stories—and certainly quite likely that not a few Early Christians had heard and maybe even believed the factuality of such stories.
Maybe that is why the apostles in Luke’s narrative, on hearing the rather incredible report of the women who had gone to Jesus’ tomb and found it empty, dismissed it as “an idle tale” which “they did not believe.” Nothing in the story lends itself to easy belief, not now and not then.
You and I are here today celebrating Easter not because once upon a time there was an empty tomb or a couple of angels or a missing body, but because something about this particular story and this particular Jesus touches us deeply. A few of you might be here because, like Justin Martyr in the second century, you have undertaken a philosophical quest that led you to an intellectual conversion to Christianity. But many more of us are here because, whether we were born Christians or not, we have been moved, changed, altered by something far more real to us than an empty first-century Palestinian tomb. We might not be able to put it into words. We might not be able to give a coherent account of the whole ball of Christian wax. We might not even be too sure about some of the elements of the story—virgin birth, walking on water, angels, heavenly voices—but we find some chord within us vibrating with excitement, resonating with hope, maybe even aching to believe the glorious impossibility of it all because it is too good not to be true.
Resurrection is not a proposition to be argued, but a life to be lived. And the best kept secret in the Christian Church—if not the world—is that resurrection does not begin when we die. It begins now. It is not a future possibility; it is an eternal reality. The whole point of Jesus’ ministry, of his life and of his death, was the same as his rising. It was never about him, it was about God and us. Imagine that God is busily at work, continually creating, tinkering with, molding, perfecting the essence of who we are—let’s call it human nature. The pieces are there: intelligence, creativity, passion, instinct, giftedness. But there are some rough edges and dark corners thrown in. We are not so different in most respects from our primate cousins. In fact, we are remarkably similar to an even broader company of mammals, whose main instincts are for survival, and who arrange their lives largely on the basis of who fears whom and who needs what simply to stay alive. And there are days when we act much more like reptiles than we do dolphins. Even the best of our capacities turn dangerous when we get scared of losing power or when we are shamed or humiliated. Imagine that God sees that, yet sees possibilities in us for things far beyond ordinary reaction: the ability to give power away rather than hoard it; the capacity to forgive even those who mortally wound us; a willingness to see beyond the safety of sameness within our own tribes and families in order to embrace those different from us. And let’s say that God sees how we can practice almost unimaginable charity to the point where we even lay down our lives for not just our friends but our enemies. Imagine that God shapes a human being—Jesus—to model, to embody those things—indeed to embody God’s own nature. Imagine that God challenges him to trust totally in the power of love to the point of willingly enduring the worst kind of disgraceful suffering and death, including a complete collapse of trust itself, for the sake of breaking the hold that the fear of and fascination with death has on people.
But one thing is still missing. There needs to be a door through which we can go to enter into and practice the kind of life that Jesus lived, a God-soaked life. There needs to be a portal which opens onto a space in which God can continue to work out the kinks in human nature. And there needs to be a community defined not by blood relationships or race or nationality but by soul, by spirit, in which people are free to be real without the trappings of pretense or power.
That is what Holy Baptism is. It is the meeting place of resurrection and now. Baptism is the door into the death and resurrection of Jesus. Look at it. In a few minutes we are going to gather around the font where three persons, Marcus, Parke, and Lulu, are going to walk through that door, just as surely as Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Joanna went into the tomb twenty-one hundred years ago. As Jesus was buried and lay dead in that tomb, so will our brothers and sister symbolically be buried with Christ in his death. And as surely as Jesus was raised by God from the tomb, just as surely will they come up out of the water, dry off, and set about living and practicing the resurrection life which is nothing short of God’s life. It will be as if each one of them breaks out of a shell on this Day of Resurrection, ready to skip and play all over God’s creation. Each of them will be united to the great Lion of Judah as if they wore his very crown, burying their faces in his mane, resting on his great paws. By God’s grace we will help them. We will tell them the tales of how something bigger than all of life once lay in a manger and how once on a big rock outside a city wall there happened a death so powerful it put an end to the power of death. We’ll teach them how to be priests in this priesthood of ours where serving is more important that prestige, and where children and the poor and the maimed and the hungry are accorded the highest respect in the community.
They will get hungry. Their souls will growl for the milk and honey of a Promised Land. Their mouths will water for food and drink to sustain them on their journey. And that is what Holy Eucharist is. Around the table, week by week and day by day they will feed on the One who is so much the source of life that we call him our Bread, whose love he feels as blood and we taste as wine. And the more they take his life into themselves, the more they will see themselves becoming what he is, living as he lives, forgiving and caring and feeding others just as he. What he is by nature they will become by grace.
Why seek the living among the dead? Jesus is not there. He is risen, and in him so are you, so are we. We have clothed ourselves with Christ and are become his body. And as unfinished a project of God’s restoring as we may be, that is enough to have us laughing and dancing and saying Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!
© Frank G. Dunn, 2010
Friday, April 02, 2010
Cross Ways
A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Good Friday, April 2, 2010
In a few minutes we will gather around the font and venerate the cross. In one of the anthems at the veneration, the people say, “We will glory in the cross of Christ.” That makes no sense whatsoever—if you believe that God is all-powerful or if you believe that God is all-wise. For the cross suggests that God comes to us not in power but in weakness. And the cross suggests as well that God does not stun us with wisdom like the best of human wisdom, but rather arrests us with an image and a story that to the world is foolishness. So said St. Paul: “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are being called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Try as you may, you will never make “sense” of the cross of Christ. All you can do is stumble over it, dismiss it, or glory in it. It is better to stumble over it or to dismiss it than to glory in it for the wrong reasons. And chief among those reasons would be to imagine that the cross was the way a blood-thirsty god needed to be avenged with a death as payment for human sin. (Not to say that many Christians have not or do not believe that.) But the cross we glorify and venerate is the cross on which God joins in our suffering, becomes one with us at our weakest, experiences the distance that we experience when we are as far away from the Good as we can possibly be, identifies with us when we are most helpless, and literally sets aside thorough innocence in order to take the part of whoever among us deserves the worst.
Not surprisingly, a story says it best, one of the many that we have created to reflect on this stupendous act of enormous cruelty and suffering asking what it can possibly mean. Listen to the story in Helen Waddell’s historical novel, Peter Abelard.
So that is what the cross says. God suffers with us. Such is the love and such is the story of the one who hung there. In our deepest pain, greatest loneliness, worst bondage, or gravest evil, whether we know it or not, we are never far from our Maker and Redeemer, whose pain is greater than human pain, whose weakness is greater than human strength, and whose folly is greater than all the wisdom in the world.
Acostumbramos a recitar durante la Veneración de la Cruz: “Glorificamos la Santa Cruz.” No tiene nada de sentido si creemos que Dios es omnipotente o si creemos que Dios es omnisciente. San Pablo dice, “Los judíos piden milagros y los griegos buscan el saber, mientras nosotros proclamamos a un Mesías crucificado: para los judíos ¡que esándalo! y para los griegos ¡qué locura! Pero para los que Dios ha llamado, judíos o griegos, este Mesías es fuerza de Dios y sabiduría de Dios.”
Luego, ¿que significa la cruz? No es el instrumento por lo cual Dios obtiene satisfacción por nuestros pecados. Al contrario, es el lugar donde Dios viene para participar con nosostros en nuestros sufrimientos. Es el lugar donde Dios nos junta cuando estámos más debiles. En la cruz, Dios asume la parte de malhechor a pesar de que es inocente.
Una historia da cuenta bien. En su novello Abelard, Helen Waddell escribe que un día Pedro Abelard y su amigo Thiebault estaban circa del bosque cuano oyen una grita. Abelard pensaba que era un niño, pero discubrieron un conejo cautivado en una trampa. Abelard abre la trampa y cobra el conejo. El animal pequeño muere en sus manos. El corazón de Abelard está completamente roto, y temblando, pregunta a Thibault, “¿Pienses que hay un Dios en absoluto? Es justo que yo sufra por todos mis errores, pero este conejo pequeño, ¿qué hizo?
Thibault dice, “Creo que Dios está en esta situación.”
Abelard pregunta, “¿Qué? ¿Dices que Dios sufre también como nosotros? Luego, ¿porqué no pone un fin a esta situación?”
Thibault le dice, “No se. Pero yo creo que Dios sufre todo el tiempo, más que nosotros.”
“¿Estás pensando en Calvario?” pregunta Abelard. Thibault está de acuerdo. Le dice que Jesucristo es como una cepa que revela la interior de un arból cortado. La vida de Cristo nos muestra Dios, la parte que podemos ver. Luego, Dios es como Cristo, perdonandonos y salvandonos.
Mirando el conejo muerto en sus brazos, Abelard pregunta, “¿Todo la pena del mundo es la cruz de Cristo?¨
Thibault le dice, “La cruz de Dios. Y la cruz continua por siempre.”
Entonces, la cruz significa que Dios sufre con nosotros. En nuestro dolor más profundo, la mayor soledad, la peor esclavitud, o mal más grave, lo sepamos o no, nunca estamos lejos de nuestro Creador y Redentor, cuyo dolor es mayor que el dolor humano, cuya debilidad es mayor que la fuerza humana, y cuya la locura es mayor que toda la sabiduría en el mundo.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010. For the quotation from Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard, see http://whathorizon.blogspot.com/2009/04/and-it-goes-on.html, accessed March 30, 2010.
In a few minutes we will gather around the font and venerate the cross. In one of the anthems at the veneration, the people say, “We will glory in the cross of Christ.” That makes no sense whatsoever—if you believe that God is all-powerful or if you believe that God is all-wise. For the cross suggests that God comes to us not in power but in weakness. And the cross suggests as well that God does not stun us with wisdom like the best of human wisdom, but rather arrests us with an image and a story that to the world is foolishness. So said St. Paul: “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are being called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Try as you may, you will never make “sense” of the cross of Christ. All you can do is stumble over it, dismiss it, or glory in it. It is better to stumble over it or to dismiss it than to glory in it for the wrong reasons. And chief among those reasons would be to imagine that the cross was the way a blood-thirsty god needed to be avenged with a death as payment for human sin. (Not to say that many Christians have not or do not believe that.) But the cross we glorify and venerate is the cross on which God joins in our suffering, becomes one with us at our weakest, experiences the distance that we experience when we are as far away from the Good as we can possibly be, identifies with us when we are most helpless, and literally sets aside thorough innocence in order to take the part of whoever among us deserves the worst.
Not surprisingly, a story says it best, one of the many that we have created to reflect on this stupendous act of enormous cruelty and suffering asking what it can possibly mean. Listen to the story in Helen Waddell’s historical novel, Peter Abelard.
From somewhere near them in the woods a cry rose, a thin cry, of such intolerable anguish that Abelard turned dizzy on his feet, and caught at the wall of the hut. 'It's a child's voice,' he said.
Thibault had gone outside. The cry came again. 'A rabbit,' said Thibault. He listened. 'It'll be a rabbit in a trap. Hugh told me he was putting them down.'
'O God,' Abelard muttered. 'Let it die quickly'.
But the cry came yet again. He plunged through a thicket of hornbeam. 'Watch out', said Thibault, thrusting past him. 'The trap might take the hand off you.'
The rabbit stopped shrieking when they stood over it, either from exhaustion, or in some last extremity of fear. Thibault held the teeth of the trap apart, and Abelard gathered up the little creature in his hands. It lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died.
It was that last confiding thrust that broke Abelard's heart. He looked down at the little bedraggled body, his mouth shaking. 'Thibault,' he said, 'do you think there is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?
Thibault nodded.
'I know,' he said. 'Only I think God is in it too.'
Abelard looked up sharply.
'In it? Do you mean that it makes him suffer, the way it does us?'
Again Thibault nodded.
'Then why doesn't he stop it?'
'I don't know,' said Thibault. 'Unless it's like the prodigal son, I suppose the father could have kept him at home against his will. But what would have been the use? All this,' he stroked the limp body, 'is because of us. But all the time God suffers. More than we do.'
Abelard looked at him, perplexed. 'Thibault, do you mean Calvary?'
Thibault shook his head. 'That was only a piece of it - the piece we saw - in time. Like that.' He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle. 'That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree, but you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ's life was like; the bit of God we saw. And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind, and forgiving sins and healing people. We think God is like that for ever, because it happened once, with Christ. But not the pain. Not the agony at the last. We think that stopped.'
Abelard looked at him, the blunt nose and the wide mouth the honest troubled eyes. He could have knelt before him.
'Then Thibault,' he said slowly, 'you think that all this,' he looked down at the little quiet body in his arms, 'all the pain of the world, was Christ's cross?'
'God's cross,' said Thibault. 'And it goes on.'
So that is what the cross says. God suffers with us. Such is the love and such is the story of the one who hung there. In our deepest pain, greatest loneliness, worst bondage, or gravest evil, whether we know it or not, we are never far from our Maker and Redeemer, whose pain is greater than human pain, whose weakness is greater than human strength, and whose folly is greater than all the wisdom in the world.
Acostumbramos a recitar durante la Veneración de la Cruz: “Glorificamos la Santa Cruz.” No tiene nada de sentido si creemos que Dios es omnipotente o si creemos que Dios es omnisciente. San Pablo dice, “Los judíos piden milagros y los griegos buscan el saber, mientras nosotros proclamamos a un Mesías crucificado: para los judíos ¡que esándalo! y para los griegos ¡qué locura! Pero para los que Dios ha llamado, judíos o griegos, este Mesías es fuerza de Dios y sabiduría de Dios.”
Luego, ¿que significa la cruz? No es el instrumento por lo cual Dios obtiene satisfacción por nuestros pecados. Al contrario, es el lugar donde Dios viene para participar con nosostros en nuestros sufrimientos. Es el lugar donde Dios nos junta cuando estámos más debiles. En la cruz, Dios asume la parte de malhechor a pesar de que es inocente.
Una historia da cuenta bien. En su novello Abelard, Helen Waddell escribe que un día Pedro Abelard y su amigo Thiebault estaban circa del bosque cuano oyen una grita. Abelard pensaba que era un niño, pero discubrieron un conejo cautivado en una trampa. Abelard abre la trampa y cobra el conejo. El animal pequeño muere en sus manos. El corazón de Abelard está completamente roto, y temblando, pregunta a Thibault, “¿Pienses que hay un Dios en absoluto? Es justo que yo sufra por todos mis errores, pero este conejo pequeño, ¿qué hizo?
Thibault dice, “Creo que Dios está en esta situación.”
Abelard pregunta, “¿Qué? ¿Dices que Dios sufre también como nosotros? Luego, ¿porqué no pone un fin a esta situación?”
Thibault le dice, “No se. Pero yo creo que Dios sufre todo el tiempo, más que nosotros.”
“¿Estás pensando en Calvario?” pregunta Abelard. Thibault está de acuerdo. Le dice que Jesucristo es como una cepa que revela la interior de un arból cortado. La vida de Cristo nos muestra Dios, la parte que podemos ver. Luego, Dios es como Cristo, perdonandonos y salvandonos.
Mirando el conejo muerto en sus brazos, Abelard pregunta, “¿Todo la pena del mundo es la cruz de Cristo?¨
Thibault le dice, “La cruz de Dios. Y la cruz continua por siempre.”
Entonces, la cruz significa que Dios sufre con nosotros. En nuestro dolor más profundo, la mayor soledad, la peor esclavitud, o mal más grave, lo sepamos o no, nunca estamos lejos de nuestro Creador y Redentor, cuyo dolor es mayor que el dolor humano, cuya debilidad es mayor que la fuerza humana, y cuya la locura es mayor que toda la sabiduría en el mundo.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010. For the quotation from Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard, see http://whathorizon.blogspot.com/2009/04/and-it-goes-on.html, accessed March 30, 2010.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Innocence Slaughtered
A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Palm Sunday, March 28, 2010
Text: Luke 22:14-23:49
We want the world to be perfect. Why not, if that is a live option? We want the world to be perfect. But it simply isn’t.
What would perfect be? I don’t know. Maybe it would be a world that had no evil, and thus no good. Maybe it would be a world that knew no shadows or sunsets, only eternal noon. Maybe it would be a world free of snowstorms or thunderstorms, safe from earthquake and flood, full of mild spring days showered by cherry blossoms.
Instead, the world we inhabit is a world where the innocent are crucified.
Palm Sunday begins as if the world were perfect, on tiptoe awaiting the arrival of its Savior, singing, “Blessed is the King who comes in the Name of the Lord.” Glory, laud, honor, palms, parades, victory are all in place; but the whole thing quickly sours and darkens as we see the king of glory shamed, taunted, abused, and finally killed. And that is the way life in the world is. However wonderful that life could be, it carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Palm Sunday only puzzles us if we have not yet learned the truth of that.
There are, of course, multiple ways in which we can look at the passion of Jesus. A conventional way is to see him going about all this as if he knows the script perfectly well, moving from Bethany to the Temple Mount without a moment’s hesitation, heading towards the Passover in which he himself will be the slain lamb with not so much as an emotional hiccup. Luke will not allow such a view. He draws us close to Jesus at his last supper, clearly knowing that death awaits him, aware of imminent betrayal, fully expecting the most stalwart disciple to deny him, and overwhelmed with anguish as he prays to be spared the time of trial. There is nothing phony or superhuman about this Jesus. Yet Luke makes it clear that Jesus is not thrown off center by any of this. He has his wits about him, and he is no less here than throughout Luke’s gospel, full of Holy Spirit.
But this story is more than Jesus’ story. Or rather, in Jesus’ story we see caught up a host of other stories. The righteous suffer all the time, not just on Calvary. Evil hunts down Good every day of the week, not just on Friday. And innocence is slaughtered throughout the world, not just in Jerusalem. We tell this story over and over not only because it happened once and not only because we believe that it is about God’s Son, but because it rings true to what we know about our own lives. And lest we rush to conclude that we are the victims in this cosmic drama of the slaughter of innocence, we might remind ourselves that, like the players in a Passion play, we can switch parts with ease. Out of our mouths sometimes comes, “Hosannah!” and sometimes, “Crucify!” Sometimes we are rubbing our eyes trying to stay awake and watch with Christ, and sometimes we are busy negotiating the best way we can shut him up. At times we are walking behind him, carrying the cross, and sometimes we are running away from the scene lest we become involved. We can work ourselves up into paroxysms of pity for the innocent and in the next breath poke fun at the little prophet and dress him in purple drag as cheap entertainment. We usually do not one or the other but both.
And you know it. You may have been fired without just cause, discriminated against, hated without reason, brutally raped, robbed, or ridiculed. Or you might have been the one to inflict harm, or maybe just stand by looking and shaking your head–or less–when somebody else has been busy executing innocence. The tale goes on. Truer words were never spoken than his admonition to the women who followed and bewailed him: “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but for yourselves and for your children.” The story is about them and us, not just about him. And so when he prays, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he is talking past his own age and down the centuries. Yes, we keep killing innocence because in part we don’t know how to stop. We keep killing innocence because we refuse to become conscious about what we are doing. And we continue to be victims because as long as somebody is out to kill innocence and we happen to be in the way, we will get it between the eyes. The tale goes on, in my life and in yours, which is precisely why we need to pause and see that in this archetypal story of Jesus’ passion our own passions find healing and resolution.
Herman Melville gave us the character Billy Budd, the handsome sailor, naïve and beautiful, charming and well loved, who loses his temper when falsely accused of fomenting mutiny, strikes and kills his accuser, the jealous, evil Claggart. Captain Vere who passes sentence on him has Billy hanged not in the usual place but in the main yard of the ship, the center crossbeam unmistakably reminiscent of the one on which hung the Savior. Standing there with his neck in the noose, Billy says in clear accents, “God bless Captain Vere!” and all who stand watching with one voice echo him. It is the Christ story told again. “Bless them that persecute you; bless and curse not.”
There is a time to bless and a time to take up the fight against the slaughter of innocence; a time to say “No more!” to the shameful abuse of children and the exploitation of the helpless; a time to wage battle to protect the vulnerable. But there is never a time to give way to hating, nor a time to lie like those who lie about you.
We have no guarantee, only a promise that behind the shadows is the all-seeing Eye to whom not even a sparrow falls unnoticed. One can imagine that as the noble Joseph took the body of Jesus and wrapped it for burial in his own new tomb hewn of the rock, that no one spoke a word, if indeed anyone was around to see it all, grief locked in their throats. We can imagine that perhaps only the birds sang his dirge, as did the gulls when Billy Budd’s body dropped into the sea, as they flew “screaming to the spot,” and the silent ship under light airs passed on.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010
Text: Luke 22:14-23:49
We want the world to be perfect. Why not, if that is a live option? We want the world to be perfect. But it simply isn’t.
What would perfect be? I don’t know. Maybe it would be a world that had no evil, and thus no good. Maybe it would be a world that knew no shadows or sunsets, only eternal noon. Maybe it would be a world free of snowstorms or thunderstorms, safe from earthquake and flood, full of mild spring days showered by cherry blossoms.
Instead, the world we inhabit is a world where the innocent are crucified.
Palm Sunday begins as if the world were perfect, on tiptoe awaiting the arrival of its Savior, singing, “Blessed is the King who comes in the Name of the Lord.” Glory, laud, honor, palms, parades, victory are all in place; but the whole thing quickly sours and darkens as we see the king of glory shamed, taunted, abused, and finally killed. And that is the way life in the world is. However wonderful that life could be, it carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Palm Sunday only puzzles us if we have not yet learned the truth of that.
There are, of course, multiple ways in which we can look at the passion of Jesus. A conventional way is to see him going about all this as if he knows the script perfectly well, moving from Bethany to the Temple Mount without a moment’s hesitation, heading towards the Passover in which he himself will be the slain lamb with not so much as an emotional hiccup. Luke will not allow such a view. He draws us close to Jesus at his last supper, clearly knowing that death awaits him, aware of imminent betrayal, fully expecting the most stalwart disciple to deny him, and overwhelmed with anguish as he prays to be spared the time of trial. There is nothing phony or superhuman about this Jesus. Yet Luke makes it clear that Jesus is not thrown off center by any of this. He has his wits about him, and he is no less here than throughout Luke’s gospel, full of Holy Spirit.
But this story is more than Jesus’ story. Or rather, in Jesus’ story we see caught up a host of other stories. The righteous suffer all the time, not just on Calvary. Evil hunts down Good every day of the week, not just on Friday. And innocence is slaughtered throughout the world, not just in Jerusalem. We tell this story over and over not only because it happened once and not only because we believe that it is about God’s Son, but because it rings true to what we know about our own lives. And lest we rush to conclude that we are the victims in this cosmic drama of the slaughter of innocence, we might remind ourselves that, like the players in a Passion play, we can switch parts with ease. Out of our mouths sometimes comes, “Hosannah!” and sometimes, “Crucify!” Sometimes we are rubbing our eyes trying to stay awake and watch with Christ, and sometimes we are busy negotiating the best way we can shut him up. At times we are walking behind him, carrying the cross, and sometimes we are running away from the scene lest we become involved. We can work ourselves up into paroxysms of pity for the innocent and in the next breath poke fun at the little prophet and dress him in purple drag as cheap entertainment. We usually do not one or the other but both.
And you know it. You may have been fired without just cause, discriminated against, hated without reason, brutally raped, robbed, or ridiculed. Or you might have been the one to inflict harm, or maybe just stand by looking and shaking your head–or less–when somebody else has been busy executing innocence. The tale goes on. Truer words were never spoken than his admonition to the women who followed and bewailed him: “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but for yourselves and for your children.” The story is about them and us, not just about him. And so when he prays, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he is talking past his own age and down the centuries. Yes, we keep killing innocence because in part we don’t know how to stop. We keep killing innocence because we refuse to become conscious about what we are doing. And we continue to be victims because as long as somebody is out to kill innocence and we happen to be in the way, we will get it between the eyes. The tale goes on, in my life and in yours, which is precisely why we need to pause and see that in this archetypal story of Jesus’ passion our own passions find healing and resolution.
Herman Melville gave us the character Billy Budd, the handsome sailor, naïve and beautiful, charming and well loved, who loses his temper when falsely accused of fomenting mutiny, strikes and kills his accuser, the jealous, evil Claggart. Captain Vere who passes sentence on him has Billy hanged not in the usual place but in the main yard of the ship, the center crossbeam unmistakably reminiscent of the one on which hung the Savior. Standing there with his neck in the noose, Billy says in clear accents, “God bless Captain Vere!” and all who stand watching with one voice echo him. It is the Christ story told again. “Bless them that persecute you; bless and curse not.”
There is a time to bless and a time to take up the fight against the slaughter of innocence; a time to say “No more!” to the shameful abuse of children and the exploitation of the helpless; a time to wage battle to protect the vulnerable. But there is never a time to give way to hating, nor a time to lie like those who lie about you.
We have no guarantee, only a promise that behind the shadows is the all-seeing Eye to whom not even a sparrow falls unnoticed. One can imagine that as the noble Joseph took the body of Jesus and wrapped it for burial in his own new tomb hewn of the rock, that no one spoke a word, if indeed anyone was around to see it all, grief locked in their throats. We can imagine that perhaps only the birds sang his dirge, as did the gulls when Billy Budd’s body dropped into the sea, as they flew “screaming to the spot,” and the silent ship under light airs passed on.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010
Monday, March 15, 2010
Oh, Brother!
Bull!
I heard his bellowing a full mile away. Someone had taken the knife to Bull. But that was supposed to wait until frost. Why would he get one of the fellows to do it today, I wondered. Well, the Old Man was getting a little dotty and who knows why he had decided that today was the day he’d kill Bull?
I let it go. Too late to do anything about it, and I wasn’t sure it mattered. What did matter to me was how much the Old Man seemed to be losing it. His depression had only gotten worse in the last few years. We—my wife and I—had taken him three times in the last two years, once to Florence, twice to Charleston, to see the doctors. They keep putting him on different medications. Last week she caught him pouring a whole bottle of the stuff down the toilet. What a waste. But what can you do? No wonder he’s off his rocker today, I thought.
Late summer in Marion County is always hot. The tobacco market has come and gone. The fields are parched, the stubble of stalks sticking up like half-dead soldiers dragging home from battle. Straw crunched under my feet as I walked our land. I’d marked off the two hundred and thirty-two acres so many times I knew every inch of it, and what it looked like when the gum trees and pine around the edges bowed down with ice in February and what it smelt like when wildflowers turned fields purple before spring plowing. I loved the place.
I didn’t think I’d ever say that. I had just finished my third year at Clemson when Buddy announced on Christmas Day that he’d be leaving. The scumbag. Buddy never amounted to anything, but he sure knew the way to rip a family apart. The Old Man didn’t say a word. Went over to the safe behind the portrait over the buffet, pulled out a wad of cash, sat down and wrote a note, left Buddy and me sitting at the table, with Aunt Jewel wiping her eyes. Ten minutes later he was back. “Wait till Monday morning,” he said to Buddy. "Monk Clarke says he’ll meet us at the bank with papers ready to sign.”
I never asked, “What about me?” I already knew somehow that this would mean the end of the med school dream. Somebody would have to look after the farm, and it might as well be me. Buddy never would have done it anyway. He knew nothing, cared for nothing, wanted everything.
You don’t know what it’s like to see a heart break. Buddy had been the Old Man’s favorite and everybody knew it. Buddy favored him, complexion, eyes, shape of mouth. Buddy could never do any wrong, or nothing anyway that was wrong enough to rile the Old Man sufficiently to put him in his place. Buddy went out for football, got into a fight after too many beers, got kicked off the team for cussing the coach out. The Old Man tried to reason with him. Flunked three courses his junior year. The Old Man got him tutored. Got Penny Andrews pregnant. The Old Man shook his head, paid for Penny’s baby, got the preacher to pray with Buddy. Buddy was going to straighten up, fly right. Then he wrecked the Old Man’s car.
I got nearer the house and heard sounds I’d never heard coming from our place. Neighbors were there, pick-ups parked all over everywhere, people piling into the house like it was Homecoming at the Baptist Church, carrying their cakes, pies, fried chicken and pimento cheese sandwiches. The Dream Ranch Boys Band was striking up a tune, and Carl Edwards had turned up to be the caller at a square dance. The pack house had been turned into a dance hall and nobody had so much as asked my opinion.
Well, it is the Old Man’s birthday, I thought, and figured that Donna had arranged a surprise party. “But why wouldn’t she have told me?” I wondered. Didn’t make sense. Celia, the cook, was opening the back door carrying a big pot of something. I called her over to ask what was going on. She beamed, “Buddy home!” My heart grew sick. I looked up and saw the eyes I knew so well, my father’s eyes in a drawn and alcoholic skull, staring across the yard at me from the dining room window. He smiled, the cur.
To Celia I said, “Well you just tell the Old Man that he can have his party. Was that Bull I heard bellowing and screeching? You tell him he can just do without me.” I don’t think she heard me over all the racket people were making. Aunt Jewel came flying out, screen door banging behind her. “Buddy’s back!” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. Her hands went slack when she reached out to hug me. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Didn’t you hear me? Buddy’s…”
“Back,” I said. “Buddy can go to hell, which is where he’s likely been for twenty years."
Aunt Jewel gave me one of her oh-how-could-you-worry-your-father-so looks, reached into her apron pocket and said, “Read this.” I unfolded the note. “I don’t amount to anything,” it read, “so just hire me to work on the farm. I don’t even want my old room back or anything.” I shoved it back into her pocket. Bull. Buddy’s bull. I never liked it and I still didn’t.
The air thickened with the smoke of barbeque. I looked towards the Sutton field. I started walking. Blue the dog trotted past me. I felt a hand on my shoulder. The Old Man said, “Son, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t believe you.”
“What can’t you believe?”
“I gave up my whole life for you. Not one day in twenty-two years have you ever had to ask where I was, what I was doing. Donna and I have taken care of you. I have run the place, paid the bills, worked the land, harvested the crops, raised the cattle and hogs. And Donna. She’s tended to you like her own father. And the kids. You think—"
He pulled my arm. I told him to let go. “Son,” he said, “all that is mine is
yours–”
“I don’t need to hear that. What I need to hear is how you figure what fair is. Fair-haired Buddy totals your car, ruins a girl’s life, demands—demands—that you give him his inheritance as if you were to him as good as dead two decades ago—and then runs off to God-knows-where spilling his seed and sowing his oats all over the country and then comes home and isn’t here a half hour before you’ve called the whole damn county to come in and wine and dine him, the sorry son-of-a–
He just looked down at the ground, idly kicking at a clump of crabgrass. “Son,…”
“Don’t ‘Son’ me,” I said. “Bull. You killed Bull. What on earth are you thinking? For me you never killed—"
He wanted to know if I knew what it was like, if I’d ever thought what it would be like if Jack or Nan ran away, left home, no word, no trace, no phone calls or letters—what it would be like to lie awake at nights wondering what continent they were on, if they were still alive, jumping to answer the phone when it rang, hoping that it would be him, scared that it might be bad news, combing the papers to see if any sign of him turned up, foot-dragging to the barber shop, hating to go and listen to guys talk about their sons’ streaks of luck at this and that, casting an eye towards the pool hall when you pass, on the off chance he might turn up there where the dissipated play. He wanted to know if I knew what it was like to pray for a child not knowing if he was dead or alive.
“Bull.”
He asked me if I would come in and welcome Buddy home, or at least be civil. I’ve never felt so much like a child.
“Your brother,” he began again.
“No brother of mine, son-of-a––son of yours.”
“He was as good as dead. You ought to see his eyes. The light has gone from his eyes. But he is alive. And so are you. And so am I.”
Old fool.
“He was lost and is found.”
“Yes,” I said. “Lost.”
I don’t know how long he stood there before he turned to go back to the house. I glanced and others were looking our way, coming outside the pack house to see what was going on, I reckon. Could no one understand what it feels like to be embarrassed by a no-good brother and a senile Old Man?
I honestly didn’t know what to do or where to go, or whether to keep walking into the fields, or swallow hard and make an appearance at the party. I just didn’t know. I just didn’t know. I had never felt so lost in my life.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010
I heard his bellowing a full mile away. Someone had taken the knife to Bull. But that was supposed to wait until frost. Why would he get one of the fellows to do it today, I wondered. Well, the Old Man was getting a little dotty and who knows why he had decided that today was the day he’d kill Bull?
I let it go. Too late to do anything about it, and I wasn’t sure it mattered. What did matter to me was how much the Old Man seemed to be losing it. His depression had only gotten worse in the last few years. We—my wife and I—had taken him three times in the last two years, once to Florence, twice to Charleston, to see the doctors. They keep putting him on different medications. Last week she caught him pouring a whole bottle of the stuff down the toilet. What a waste. But what can you do? No wonder he’s off his rocker today, I thought.
Late summer in Marion County is always hot. The tobacco market has come and gone. The fields are parched, the stubble of stalks sticking up like half-dead soldiers dragging home from battle. Straw crunched under my feet as I walked our land. I’d marked off the two hundred and thirty-two acres so many times I knew every inch of it, and what it looked like when the gum trees and pine around the edges bowed down with ice in February and what it smelt like when wildflowers turned fields purple before spring plowing. I loved the place.
I didn’t think I’d ever say that. I had just finished my third year at Clemson when Buddy announced on Christmas Day that he’d be leaving. The scumbag. Buddy never amounted to anything, but he sure knew the way to rip a family apart. The Old Man didn’t say a word. Went over to the safe behind the portrait over the buffet, pulled out a wad of cash, sat down and wrote a note, left Buddy and me sitting at the table, with Aunt Jewel wiping her eyes. Ten minutes later he was back. “Wait till Monday morning,” he said to Buddy. "Monk Clarke says he’ll meet us at the bank with papers ready to sign.”
I never asked, “What about me?” I already knew somehow that this would mean the end of the med school dream. Somebody would have to look after the farm, and it might as well be me. Buddy never would have done it anyway. He knew nothing, cared for nothing, wanted everything.
You don’t know what it’s like to see a heart break. Buddy had been the Old Man’s favorite and everybody knew it. Buddy favored him, complexion, eyes, shape of mouth. Buddy could never do any wrong, or nothing anyway that was wrong enough to rile the Old Man sufficiently to put him in his place. Buddy went out for football, got into a fight after too many beers, got kicked off the team for cussing the coach out. The Old Man tried to reason with him. Flunked three courses his junior year. The Old Man got him tutored. Got Penny Andrews pregnant. The Old Man shook his head, paid for Penny’s baby, got the preacher to pray with Buddy. Buddy was going to straighten up, fly right. Then he wrecked the Old Man’s car.
I got nearer the house and heard sounds I’d never heard coming from our place. Neighbors were there, pick-ups parked all over everywhere, people piling into the house like it was Homecoming at the Baptist Church, carrying their cakes, pies, fried chicken and pimento cheese sandwiches. The Dream Ranch Boys Band was striking up a tune, and Carl Edwards had turned up to be the caller at a square dance. The pack house had been turned into a dance hall and nobody had so much as asked my opinion.
Well, it is the Old Man’s birthday, I thought, and figured that Donna had arranged a surprise party. “But why wouldn’t she have told me?” I wondered. Didn’t make sense. Celia, the cook, was opening the back door carrying a big pot of something. I called her over to ask what was going on. She beamed, “Buddy home!” My heart grew sick. I looked up and saw the eyes I knew so well, my father’s eyes in a drawn and alcoholic skull, staring across the yard at me from the dining room window. He smiled, the cur.
To Celia I said, “Well you just tell the Old Man that he can have his party. Was that Bull I heard bellowing and screeching? You tell him he can just do without me.” I don’t think she heard me over all the racket people were making. Aunt Jewel came flying out, screen door banging behind her. “Buddy’s back!” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. Her hands went slack when she reached out to hug me. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Didn’t you hear me? Buddy’s…”
“Back,” I said. “Buddy can go to hell, which is where he’s likely been for twenty years."
Aunt Jewel gave me one of her oh-how-could-you-worry-your-father-so looks, reached into her apron pocket and said, “Read this.” I unfolded the note. “I don’t amount to anything,” it read, “so just hire me to work on the farm. I don’t even want my old room back or anything.” I shoved it back into her pocket. Bull. Buddy’s bull. I never liked it and I still didn’t.
The air thickened with the smoke of barbeque. I looked towards the Sutton field. I started walking. Blue the dog trotted past me. I felt a hand on my shoulder. The Old Man said, “Son, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t believe you.”
“What can’t you believe?”
“I gave up my whole life for you. Not one day in twenty-two years have you ever had to ask where I was, what I was doing. Donna and I have taken care of you. I have run the place, paid the bills, worked the land, harvested the crops, raised the cattle and hogs. And Donna. She’s tended to you like her own father. And the kids. You think—"
He pulled my arm. I told him to let go. “Son,” he said, “all that is mine is
yours–”
“I don’t need to hear that. What I need to hear is how you figure what fair is. Fair-haired Buddy totals your car, ruins a girl’s life, demands—demands—that you give him his inheritance as if you were to him as good as dead two decades ago—and then runs off to God-knows-where spilling his seed and sowing his oats all over the country and then comes home and isn’t here a half hour before you’ve called the whole damn county to come in and wine and dine him, the sorry son-of-a–
He just looked down at the ground, idly kicking at a clump of crabgrass. “Son,…”
“Don’t ‘Son’ me,” I said. “Bull. You killed Bull. What on earth are you thinking? For me you never killed—"
He wanted to know if I knew what it was like, if I’d ever thought what it would be like if Jack or Nan ran away, left home, no word, no trace, no phone calls or letters—what it would be like to lie awake at nights wondering what continent they were on, if they were still alive, jumping to answer the phone when it rang, hoping that it would be him, scared that it might be bad news, combing the papers to see if any sign of him turned up, foot-dragging to the barber shop, hating to go and listen to guys talk about their sons’ streaks of luck at this and that, casting an eye towards the pool hall when you pass, on the off chance he might turn up there where the dissipated play. He wanted to know if I knew what it was like to pray for a child not knowing if he was dead or alive.
“Bull.”
He asked me if I would come in and welcome Buddy home, or at least be civil. I’ve never felt so much like a child.
“Your brother,” he began again.
“No brother of mine, son-of-a––son of yours.”
“He was as good as dead. You ought to see his eyes. The light has gone from his eyes. But he is alive. And so are you. And so am I.”
Old fool.
“He was lost and is found.”
“Yes,” I said. “Lost.”
I don’t know how long he stood there before he turned to go back to the house. I glanced and others were looking our way, coming outside the pack house to see what was going on, I reckon. Could no one understand what it feels like to be embarrassed by a no-good brother and a senile Old Man?
I honestly didn’t know what to do or where to go, or whether to keep walking into the fields, or swallow hard and make an appearance at the party. I just didn’t know. I just didn’t know. I had never felt so lost in my life.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Welcome, Stranger
"I'll be confound. It's Malloy."
Daddy's tone wore no hint of pleasure.
We had just gotten home from church on a hot Sunday morning. Perry and I had changed into our shorts, itching to get Daddy to take us to the beach. Mama was frying chicken. Grandmother was setting the table. Andy, the dog, was barking at a long, sleek, light green Chrysler Imperial inching down the lane to our house. Nobody ever showed up unexpected right in time for Sunday dinner. Even Andy knew that much.
The big, swept-wing Chrysler eased to a stop in the shade of the oak. Out stepped a man dressed in unseasonably dark, wool trousers. His shirt somewhat matched the Chrysler, its pale green punctuated by something like blood-red suns baking some place like Florida. His brown, silk tie (I had never seen one worn with a sport shirt) bore the grease of many meals. His frayed collar was disgustingly gray.
I had never heard of Malloy Grant, though in days to come I was to hear much. It didn't take me long to ascertain, probably from a quick covert conversation with Grandma, that Malloy was in fact a relative. I could not imagine being related to someone so foul. I supposed that he must be at best a very distant relation.
I watched to see how Daddy would get rid of him, there being no doubt in my mind from the initial sentence of recognition that shedding Malloy would be his certain aim. To my surprise and deep chagrin, I heard him ask, "Well, won't you stay for dinner? We're just about to sit down."
It would be a long time before I could ever eat fried chicken again without thinking of Malloy and his dirty hands.
Malloy, a first cousin of my grandmother's, was one of three siblings. By all accounts they were odd beyond words. Family rumor had it that Daisy and Abbie, Malloy's sisters, had gone to Washington to work for the Treasury Department. Malloy had gone some place too. But so mysterious and guarded was he that no one ever figured out exactly what Malloy did. We all supposed him to be some sort of spy for the CIA. Relatives resented "the tar out of him," as they put it, because he had a way of getting loads of information from everyone while revealing nothing about himself.
In years to come, I encountered Malloy several times, always camped out at some relative's house for an indeterminate, and unexpected, visit. From bitter experience long before I ever met Malloy, my dad had said, "No more" to Malloy's sojourns that could easily turn into months.
But I learned something that hot summer Sunday about hospitality. One shares one's fried chicken with whoever happens along. Whether or not they need a bath.
The church has only one ministry, and that is hospitality. Hospitality is even more basic than reconciliation. Hospitality is sitting down to a meal with any and everybody. Even unsavory characters. Even undesirable relatives.
St. Benedict memorably said in his Rule, “Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ,….” Everyone is a guest in this place, a guest of God. We are the doorkeepers. This Lent we will be unpacking the words of the prophet Isaiah,
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Let all guests be welcomed as Christ, stranger and friend, old and young, rich and poor, male and female, gay and straight, all races, all nations, all colors, all languages.
Nothing characterized the ministry of Jesus more than that.
© Frank G. Dunn, 2010
Daddy's tone wore no hint of pleasure.
We had just gotten home from church on a hot Sunday morning. Perry and I had changed into our shorts, itching to get Daddy to take us to the beach. Mama was frying chicken. Grandmother was setting the table. Andy, the dog, was barking at a long, sleek, light green Chrysler Imperial inching down the lane to our house. Nobody ever showed up unexpected right in time for Sunday dinner. Even Andy knew that much.
The big, swept-wing Chrysler eased to a stop in the shade of the oak. Out stepped a man dressed in unseasonably dark, wool trousers. His shirt somewhat matched the Chrysler, its pale green punctuated by something like blood-red suns baking some place like Florida. His brown, silk tie (I had never seen one worn with a sport shirt) bore the grease of many meals. His frayed collar was disgustingly gray.
I had never heard of Malloy Grant, though in days to come I was to hear much. It didn't take me long to ascertain, probably from a quick covert conversation with Grandma, that Malloy was in fact a relative. I could not imagine being related to someone so foul. I supposed that he must be at best a very distant relation.
I watched to see how Daddy would get rid of him, there being no doubt in my mind from the initial sentence of recognition that shedding Malloy would be his certain aim. To my surprise and deep chagrin, I heard him ask, "Well, won't you stay for dinner? We're just about to sit down."
It would be a long time before I could ever eat fried chicken again without thinking of Malloy and his dirty hands.
Malloy, a first cousin of my grandmother's, was one of three siblings. By all accounts they were odd beyond words. Family rumor had it that Daisy and Abbie, Malloy's sisters, had gone to Washington to work for the Treasury Department. Malloy had gone some place too. But so mysterious and guarded was he that no one ever figured out exactly what Malloy did. We all supposed him to be some sort of spy for the CIA. Relatives resented "the tar out of him," as they put it, because he had a way of getting loads of information from everyone while revealing nothing about himself.
In years to come, I encountered Malloy several times, always camped out at some relative's house for an indeterminate, and unexpected, visit. From bitter experience long before I ever met Malloy, my dad had said, "No more" to Malloy's sojourns that could easily turn into months.
But I learned something that hot summer Sunday about hospitality. One shares one's fried chicken with whoever happens along. Whether or not they need a bath.
The church has only one ministry, and that is hospitality. Hospitality is even more basic than reconciliation. Hospitality is sitting down to a meal with any and everybody. Even unsavory characters. Even undesirable relatives.
St. Benedict memorably said in his Rule, “Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ,….” Everyone is a guest in this place, a guest of God. We are the doorkeepers. This Lent we will be unpacking the words of the prophet Isaiah,
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Let all guests be welcomed as Christ, stranger and friend, old and young, rich and poor, male and female, gay and straight, all races, all nations, all colors, all languages.
Nothing characterized the ministry of Jesus more than that.
© Frank G. Dunn, 2010
Desert Survival
A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, the First Sunday in Lent, February 21, 2010
Text: Luke 4:1-13
Re-living, or maybe just living, the life of Jesus is the basic framework of the everyday life of Christians. The way we do that is by observing what we know as The Church Year. We start it off with Advent, a season that roughly parallels gestation. Then there is birth. And then epiphanies—revelations—beginning with baptism and ending with the great transfiguration. Slightly out of order is the season of Lent. We remember that immediately after his baptism, Our Lord went to the desert where he was tempted for forty days. Sometime around the fourth century, Christians began observing a six-week period (or forty days, excluding Sundays, which are always feast days) roughly paralleling the forty days that Jesus spent in the desert, or wilderness.
Looked at that way, Lent is a journey in the desert. One of the things we are always doing in church is reaching into our imaginations and memories and dreams to find the spot of connection with Jesus’ life. Some times and some things are easier than others. Desert, or wilderness, is one of those places in the life of Christ that might be easier to relate to for some than for others of us. If you have lived in a desert, such as North Africa, Nevada, Arizona, or Saudi Arabia, it won’t take you long to know exactly where the desert is or was in your life. Metaphors like thirst and hunger and being lost and stripping away all but the essentials for living cease to be symbols and become actual descriptions of a familiar reality. If, like some of our members, you have made the long trek from Mexico or Central America on the top of boxcars, scaling walls and dodging bullets fired into the Rio Grande; if you have crouched behind sagebrush and felt the breath of coyotes and heard the whirring of rattlesnakes in the deserts of Southern Arizona and Texas, no one needs to tell you about demons in the desert or dangers or how starving for bread could lead you to do almost anything for a mouthful of something to eat.
But there are other deserts, just as real in the lives of those who have never seen a cactus or an endless stretch of sand or a camel. They are the spaces where a person goes to get away from the press and stress of crowds and busyness. They are the places where we are sometimes dragged kicking and screaming when the job folds or when we hear the doctor telling us that the test came back positive or when we pick up the phone and learn that the one on whom we had pinned all our hopes was just died minutes ago. The desert can be a place of inexpressible beauty or a frightening wasteland of unspeakable horror. Sometimes, indeed, it can be both at once. Both demons and angels live in the desert.
When Jesus went to the desert he fasted, so the story goes. Desert retreats and fasts were perfectly normal things to do to prepare for a major task, especially if one were a prophet. Nor was it uncommon for a person to go through a time of testing—sometimes called an ordeal—as a part of an initiation, a rite of passage into adulthood, or at the point when one is taking up a life work. But Luke is clear that Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit, and that it was the same Holy Spirit that drove him into the wilderness. You might remember that “wilderness” plays a heavy role in the experience of Israel as a whole. Our forefathers and foremothers of Israel, after their baptism, so to say, in the Red Sea, wandered around in the wilderness for what the Bible says was forty years. Interesting. Three particular events formed this time of testing, and, unfortunately, our ancestors did not do all that well on their tests. In fact, they failed. Test Number One had to do with bread. Israel’s challenge was to learn how to do without the “fleshpots an bread of Egypt—read “slavery”—and to rely on the providence of God. They could not live by bread alone, says the Deuteronomist. Test Number Two came when, wandering around the desert, Israel found quite attractive the Canannite cults. Moses warned that they should not run after alien gods or court alien power. The Deuteronomist says, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you adore.” Test Number Three came at Massah, when over the matter of water, Israelites dared God to give them water, saying, “Is the Lord God among us [is God for real?] or not.” The Deuteronomist says, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” Jesus undergoes the wilderness experience of Israel, summing up, as it were, those forty years in the forty days. Jesus passes the tests. For Luke, it is clear why. He is filled with Holy Spirit. His origin is divine. Not only is Jesus compared to Israel, but he is compared to the devil. For, even though the devil can quote scripture, Jesus does so more powerfully. So that is some of what the desert experience of Jesus is about. Jesus is on trial. He proves his mettle by being armed with the “sword of the Spirit,” the word of God.
One of the things I want to ask Luke today is why all this was necessary. I see well enough the point he is making—it is a declaration of the spiritual power, the uniqueness of Jesus—but I want to know why this struggle between Good and Evil, Light and Dark? Is there really a cosmic war going on, waged on both sides for the soul of Jesus? And, if so, does it have anything to do with you and me? There is a variety of ways to answer those questions. But one way is to see that the wilderness itself is a metaphor, a way of describing a necessary component in the rhythm of life. Think of it this way. There is a way to live life by the book. You can live it in a way that follows the prescribed patterns and observes the accepted practices. But every once in awhile you discover that not everything is covered in the owner’s manual. That is where the wilderness, or desert begins. We can go into the desert place to explore, to take serious risks. Or we can protest that the only thing we want is to get out of the desert and back home to Nazareth as quickly as possible. We have the option of understanding that the tests of the desert are something that we simply have to face and pass in order to get clear about our own direction and purpose.
Look at it another way. Right now, this very minute, you sit in a space that is draped in something like a cloud of purple. This space, this church, is like a desert, a wilderness. And you are here on a wilderness trek, having left the familiar world with its noisy sirens and too much snow. For a few minutes you can move out of the structured world you live in and into a deep world of meaning and reflection. Now, true, you don’t have to look at it that way. But what would happen if you did? What would it be like to imagine that right now you have moved, just like Jesus, into the space where all of God’s children go to learn and to practice what is important: living not on bread alone, serving the Lord God instead of the powers of this world, and accepting the we and not God are the ones properly put to the test?
Do not fear. Go to the desert. It is the Spirit who is leading you there. Not because the Spirit wants you harmed, but because the Spirit knows that you can’t just hunker down in your safe, rational space and learn much at all about the Truth of the universe or the strength of your own life. Whether you go to the desert on foot, by camel, by airplane, or in your mind and imagination, you don’t have to worry about temptations. They will come, usually in a form that you do not expect, and with a strength that you cannot imagine.
In the darkness of World War II, which was certainly a stretch of desert for the human race, full of demons frightening beyond description, the poet W. H. Auden wrote a masterpiece called “For the Time Being.” It ends with an invitation to move into that wilderness following the Hero who went there before, full of the Spirit and driven by the Spirit:
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
© Frank G. Dunn, 2010
Text: Luke 4:1-13
Re-living, or maybe just living, the life of Jesus is the basic framework of the everyday life of Christians. The way we do that is by observing what we know as The Church Year. We start it off with Advent, a season that roughly parallels gestation. Then there is birth. And then epiphanies—revelations—beginning with baptism and ending with the great transfiguration. Slightly out of order is the season of Lent. We remember that immediately after his baptism, Our Lord went to the desert where he was tempted for forty days. Sometime around the fourth century, Christians began observing a six-week period (or forty days, excluding Sundays, which are always feast days) roughly paralleling the forty days that Jesus spent in the desert, or wilderness.
Looked at that way, Lent is a journey in the desert. One of the things we are always doing in church is reaching into our imaginations and memories and dreams to find the spot of connection with Jesus’ life. Some times and some things are easier than others. Desert, or wilderness, is one of those places in the life of Christ that might be easier to relate to for some than for others of us. If you have lived in a desert, such as North Africa, Nevada, Arizona, or Saudi Arabia, it won’t take you long to know exactly where the desert is or was in your life. Metaphors like thirst and hunger and being lost and stripping away all but the essentials for living cease to be symbols and become actual descriptions of a familiar reality. If, like some of our members, you have made the long trek from Mexico or Central America on the top of boxcars, scaling walls and dodging bullets fired into the Rio Grande; if you have crouched behind sagebrush and felt the breath of coyotes and heard the whirring of rattlesnakes in the deserts of Southern Arizona and Texas, no one needs to tell you about demons in the desert or dangers or how starving for bread could lead you to do almost anything for a mouthful of something to eat.
But there are other deserts, just as real in the lives of those who have never seen a cactus or an endless stretch of sand or a camel. They are the spaces where a person goes to get away from the press and stress of crowds and busyness. They are the places where we are sometimes dragged kicking and screaming when the job folds or when we hear the doctor telling us that the test came back positive or when we pick up the phone and learn that the one on whom we had pinned all our hopes was just died minutes ago. The desert can be a place of inexpressible beauty or a frightening wasteland of unspeakable horror. Sometimes, indeed, it can be both at once. Both demons and angels live in the desert.
When Jesus went to the desert he fasted, so the story goes. Desert retreats and fasts were perfectly normal things to do to prepare for a major task, especially if one were a prophet. Nor was it uncommon for a person to go through a time of testing—sometimes called an ordeal—as a part of an initiation, a rite of passage into adulthood, or at the point when one is taking up a life work. But Luke is clear that Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit, and that it was the same Holy Spirit that drove him into the wilderness. You might remember that “wilderness” plays a heavy role in the experience of Israel as a whole. Our forefathers and foremothers of Israel, after their baptism, so to say, in the Red Sea, wandered around in the wilderness for what the Bible says was forty years. Interesting. Three particular events formed this time of testing, and, unfortunately, our ancestors did not do all that well on their tests. In fact, they failed. Test Number One had to do with bread. Israel’s challenge was to learn how to do without the “fleshpots an bread of Egypt—read “slavery”—and to rely on the providence of God. They could not live by bread alone, says the Deuteronomist. Test Number Two came when, wandering around the desert, Israel found quite attractive the Canannite cults. Moses warned that they should not run after alien gods or court alien power. The Deuteronomist says, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you adore.” Test Number Three came at Massah, when over the matter of water, Israelites dared God to give them water, saying, “Is the Lord God among us [is God for real?] or not.” The Deuteronomist says, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” Jesus undergoes the wilderness experience of Israel, summing up, as it were, those forty years in the forty days. Jesus passes the tests. For Luke, it is clear why. He is filled with Holy Spirit. His origin is divine. Not only is Jesus compared to Israel, but he is compared to the devil. For, even though the devil can quote scripture, Jesus does so more powerfully. So that is some of what the desert experience of Jesus is about. Jesus is on trial. He proves his mettle by being armed with the “sword of the Spirit,” the word of God.
One of the things I want to ask Luke today is why all this was necessary. I see well enough the point he is making—it is a declaration of the spiritual power, the uniqueness of Jesus—but I want to know why this struggle between Good and Evil, Light and Dark? Is there really a cosmic war going on, waged on both sides for the soul of Jesus? And, if so, does it have anything to do with you and me? There is a variety of ways to answer those questions. But one way is to see that the wilderness itself is a metaphor, a way of describing a necessary component in the rhythm of life. Think of it this way. There is a way to live life by the book. You can live it in a way that follows the prescribed patterns and observes the accepted practices. But every once in awhile you discover that not everything is covered in the owner’s manual. That is where the wilderness, or desert begins. We can go into the desert place to explore, to take serious risks. Or we can protest that the only thing we want is to get out of the desert and back home to Nazareth as quickly as possible. We have the option of understanding that the tests of the desert are something that we simply have to face and pass in order to get clear about our own direction and purpose.
Look at it another way. Right now, this very minute, you sit in a space that is draped in something like a cloud of purple. This space, this church, is like a desert, a wilderness. And you are here on a wilderness trek, having left the familiar world with its noisy sirens and too much snow. For a few minutes you can move out of the structured world you live in and into a deep world of meaning and reflection. Now, true, you don’t have to look at it that way. But what would happen if you did? What would it be like to imagine that right now you have moved, just like Jesus, into the space where all of God’s children go to learn and to practice what is important: living not on bread alone, serving the Lord God instead of the powers of this world, and accepting the we and not God are the ones properly put to the test?
Do not fear. Go to the desert. It is the Spirit who is leading you there. Not because the Spirit wants you harmed, but because the Spirit knows that you can’t just hunker down in your safe, rational space and learn much at all about the Truth of the universe or the strength of your own life. Whether you go to the desert on foot, by camel, by airplane, or in your mind and imagination, you don’t have to worry about temptations. They will come, usually in a form that you do not expect, and with a strength that you cannot imagine.
In the darkness of World War II, which was certainly a stretch of desert for the human race, full of demons frightening beyond description, the poet W. H. Auden wrote a masterpiece called “For the Time Being.” It ends with an invitation to move into that wilderness following the Hero who went there before, full of the Spirit and driven by the Spirit:
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
© Frank G. Dunn, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Spirit Filled
A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 24, 2010
Text: Luke 4:14-21 [Isaiah 61:1-3]
“I’m spiritual but not religious.” That is the way more and more people describe themselves in this culture. “I want a piece of the spirit world”–I guess they mean—“but I don’t want to bother with all the fol-de-rol that comes with religion. Buildings and bureaucracies and budgets are not worth my time." The sentiment is not far from that of the 19th century poet Robert Southey, who said, “I could believe in Christ if he did not drag behind him his leprous bride the Church.” There is nothing much new about preferring the “spiritual” over the “religious.” The latter seems all balled up with the material—money and property and organization—and there is a long, long tradition that pits spirit against matter with a clear preference for the former. Spirit is assumed to be good whenever it rivals matter.
To be spiritual but not religious would appear, at first glance, to be an attractive choice. (And, lest you think I’m going to come down on the side of being religious, let me warn you that I have nothing whatsoever against being “spiritual” per se.) But, whatever its advantages, “spiritual” is not necessarily easy. For one thing, I haven’t yet met a person who can successfully say what being “spiritual” is. Does it mean saying one’s prayers? Does it mean serving the sick and needy? Does it mean reading the Bible? Does it mean meditating on the Tao? Does it mean using beads and feathers and doing dances? Does it mean hitting the streets and demonstrating for universal health care? It can mean any or all or none of those things, depending on what anybody decides it will mean. And, incidentally, none of the things on that particular list is easy.
But one thing seems clear. To be spiritual has something to do with spirit. That is not much help, given the long list of things that “spirit” can mean—including such disparate things as “ghost” and “liquor” and “enthusiasm for one’s school.” Let’s cut to the chase. Spirit has to do with God. Perhaps the most memorable equation of the two comes from St. John’s gospel where Jesus says to a Samaritan woman, “God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and in truth.” Luke no doubt would agree with that, but makes the point in his own way. Twelve times before we reach Chapter 4, where we find today’s story of Jesus’ inaugural sermon in his hometown synagogue, Luke has referred directly or indirectly to him as a person uniquely shaped by the Holy Spirit and therefore uniquely “spiritual.” But Jesus is more than a practitioner of spiritual things. He is literally filled with Spirit.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he says in the words of Isaiah. His is going to be a ministry of bringing good news to the poor, bringing release to the captives, of opening the eyes of the blind, of freeing the oppressed, of proclaiming the Lord’s favor. In a real sense, Luke answers the question of what a spirit-filled life looks like by telling the story of Jesus’ ministry. All those things that Paul writes about to the Corinthians (which you heard in our second lesson today) are manifestations of Holy Spirit. But the fullest manifestation of Holy Spirit is Jesus. Praying and healing and feeding and teaching and forgiving and giving his very life when there was nothing else left to give: these are the things that a life full of spirit does.
Let’s drop back for a minute and view Jesus through a longer lens. How would we know he was “full of spirit”? A word of caution here. It is tempting to imagine (and that is all we can do, imagine) that being saturated with spirit has something to do with personality traits such as being animated versus being quiescent. There is no way of telling what Jesus was really like, and to suggest otherwise would only betray what we ourselves project onto him. But Luke, I think, would tell us that Jesus’ personality was not the point in the first place. The point is what holy spirit does, not how it appears. On the other hand, Luke has inherited some key ideas from the Jewish experience, and one of them is the close connection between spirit (ruah) and breath. Spirit is life. Another is the notion that the outpouring of spirit, on David or Elijah or Gideon, for example, enables one to do deeds of surpassing power. Life and power are thus what, for Luke, Jesus supremely manifests.
But, unlike the other gospel writers, Luke does not stop with telling the story of Jesus, as if the point were that Jesus was the beginning and the end of it all. He writes a whole other book that we call “The Acts of the Apostles.” That is, as much as Volume I, the Gospel According to Luke, a document about spirit. It did not stop with Jesus. Spirit-filled lives continue in the Church. It is not insignificant that the title we give to Volume II is Acts. The Spirit is not about having a degree in God and retiring into pious dreaming or something of the sort. The Spirit is life and power that gets expressed in re-interpreting scripture to those honestly searching, as did Philip; in healing the way that Jesus healed, as did John and Peter; in boldly confessing the Truth in the teeth of oppression and even going to jail because of one’s witness, as did Peter and Paul; of letting one’s heart and mind be changed to include the previously excluded, as did Peter; and of redefining the vision of the Church, as did Paul; of practicing generosity and hospitality, as did Lydia; of doing works of charity, like Dorcas; of turning around and making good after failure, as did John Mark. And all of those stories of the spirit have to do with you. They are told to make the connection between the Spirit that possessed Jesus and the Spirit that possesses the Body of Christ.
Yes, the Body of Christ, the Church. Have I pulled a fast one on you? Here we were only a minute ago talking about being spiritual, which sounds like such an individual thing, freed from association with that leprous bride of Christ who married so unfortunately beneath himself, and here we are talking about the Church. But the very reason that Southey and others, perhaps even you, complain about “religion” and find the Church to be so leprous is precisely because, stripped of spirit, it is at best dead and at worst deadly. What a pitiful caricature of Jesus’ body we are if we are lifeless, energy-less, dispirited, in a word. It is a sad and terrible day when one has to choose between being “spiritual” and being “religious,” if by spiritual we mean “filled with spirit” and if by “religious” we mean being lifeless. Bodies are meant to be vivified by spirit. Your body is that way. Jesus’ body was that way. And the Body of Christ, the Church, is that way. Quite simply, the Church, as the example of “religion,” is meant to be spiritual, and cannot be truly itself if it is not.
Yet in the popular mind a person does not need community in order to be fulfilled or whole. But we Christians have a different point of view. The New Testament understands that it is precisely by being united to Christ and to Christ’s new community that we in fact find and know and feel the Spirit. I do not mean to suggest that somehow a person’s worth is tied to how much they “go to church.” But I do mean to underscore that true Christian spirituality involves practicing the life of the Holy Spirit—which is another way of talking about the Life of Christ and thus the Life of God—in community. It is even possible for a person to lead a solitary life as a hermit and be Christian, so long as one is connected in some major ways to the community. Some of our forefathers and foremothers in the faith, like St. Seraphim of Sarov and Julian of Norwich, have been sterling examples of Spirit-filled lives while living as solitaries. But they lived solitary lives so that by their prayer and counsel they could contribute to the Body of Christ, not to get away from irritating people.
If you have noticed, I have drawn no sharp line between “spiritual” and “spirit-filled.” I concede that the two terms sometimes seem quite distinct. But at the end of the day to be authentically spiritual is to be thoroughly alive, and to be filled with the Spirit is likewise to be totally alive. And to be both is to be unmistakably full of life and power. That is why we are here today. If you are charged and ready, great! Lend your spirit to the whole body of the faithful, which in turn empowers you. If you are dispirited and doubtful, come to the table and be fed by and with the one whose life is full of Spirit. And if you are quaking in your boots with fear of what faces you tomorrow or the next day, sip the wine of wholeness which is a spirit that will quicken you. To a small and fear-struck army, Shakespeare’s King Henry V, grown from a playboy into a leader, says,
Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height…
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit,..!
Follow your spirit. Your spirit. The Spirit. The Lord and Giver of Life. Follow.
© Frank G. Dunn, 2010
Text: Luke 4:14-21 [Isaiah 61:1-3]
“I’m spiritual but not religious.” That is the way more and more people describe themselves in this culture. “I want a piece of the spirit world”–I guess they mean—“but I don’t want to bother with all the fol-de-rol that comes with religion. Buildings and bureaucracies and budgets are not worth my time." The sentiment is not far from that of the 19th century poet Robert Southey, who said, “I could believe in Christ if he did not drag behind him his leprous bride the Church.” There is nothing much new about preferring the “spiritual” over the “religious.” The latter seems all balled up with the material—money and property and organization—and there is a long, long tradition that pits spirit against matter with a clear preference for the former. Spirit is assumed to be good whenever it rivals matter.
To be spiritual but not religious would appear, at first glance, to be an attractive choice. (And, lest you think I’m going to come down on the side of being religious, let me warn you that I have nothing whatsoever against being “spiritual” per se.) But, whatever its advantages, “spiritual” is not necessarily easy. For one thing, I haven’t yet met a person who can successfully say what being “spiritual” is. Does it mean saying one’s prayers? Does it mean serving the sick and needy? Does it mean reading the Bible? Does it mean meditating on the Tao? Does it mean using beads and feathers and doing dances? Does it mean hitting the streets and demonstrating for universal health care? It can mean any or all or none of those things, depending on what anybody decides it will mean. And, incidentally, none of the things on that particular list is easy.
But one thing seems clear. To be spiritual has something to do with spirit. That is not much help, given the long list of things that “spirit” can mean—including such disparate things as “ghost” and “liquor” and “enthusiasm for one’s school.” Let’s cut to the chase. Spirit has to do with God. Perhaps the most memorable equation of the two comes from St. John’s gospel where Jesus says to a Samaritan woman, “God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and in truth.” Luke no doubt would agree with that, but makes the point in his own way. Twelve times before we reach Chapter 4, where we find today’s story of Jesus’ inaugural sermon in his hometown synagogue, Luke has referred directly or indirectly to him as a person uniquely shaped by the Holy Spirit and therefore uniquely “spiritual.” But Jesus is more than a practitioner of spiritual things. He is literally filled with Spirit.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he says in the words of Isaiah. His is going to be a ministry of bringing good news to the poor, bringing release to the captives, of opening the eyes of the blind, of freeing the oppressed, of proclaiming the Lord’s favor. In a real sense, Luke answers the question of what a spirit-filled life looks like by telling the story of Jesus’ ministry. All those things that Paul writes about to the Corinthians (which you heard in our second lesson today) are manifestations of Holy Spirit. But the fullest manifestation of Holy Spirit is Jesus. Praying and healing and feeding and teaching and forgiving and giving his very life when there was nothing else left to give: these are the things that a life full of spirit does.
Let’s drop back for a minute and view Jesus through a longer lens. How would we know he was “full of spirit”? A word of caution here. It is tempting to imagine (and that is all we can do, imagine) that being saturated with spirit has something to do with personality traits such as being animated versus being quiescent. There is no way of telling what Jesus was really like, and to suggest otherwise would only betray what we ourselves project onto him. But Luke, I think, would tell us that Jesus’ personality was not the point in the first place. The point is what holy spirit does, not how it appears. On the other hand, Luke has inherited some key ideas from the Jewish experience, and one of them is the close connection between spirit (ruah) and breath. Spirit is life. Another is the notion that the outpouring of spirit, on David or Elijah or Gideon, for example, enables one to do deeds of surpassing power. Life and power are thus what, for Luke, Jesus supremely manifests.
But, unlike the other gospel writers, Luke does not stop with telling the story of Jesus, as if the point were that Jesus was the beginning and the end of it all. He writes a whole other book that we call “The Acts of the Apostles.” That is, as much as Volume I, the Gospel According to Luke, a document about spirit. It did not stop with Jesus. Spirit-filled lives continue in the Church. It is not insignificant that the title we give to Volume II is Acts. The Spirit is not about having a degree in God and retiring into pious dreaming or something of the sort. The Spirit is life and power that gets expressed in re-interpreting scripture to those honestly searching, as did Philip; in healing the way that Jesus healed, as did John and Peter; in boldly confessing the Truth in the teeth of oppression and even going to jail because of one’s witness, as did Peter and Paul; of letting one’s heart and mind be changed to include the previously excluded, as did Peter; and of redefining the vision of the Church, as did Paul; of practicing generosity and hospitality, as did Lydia; of doing works of charity, like Dorcas; of turning around and making good after failure, as did John Mark. And all of those stories of the spirit have to do with you. They are told to make the connection between the Spirit that possessed Jesus and the Spirit that possesses the Body of Christ.
Yes, the Body of Christ, the Church. Have I pulled a fast one on you? Here we were only a minute ago talking about being spiritual, which sounds like such an individual thing, freed from association with that leprous bride of Christ who married so unfortunately beneath himself, and here we are talking about the Church. But the very reason that Southey and others, perhaps even you, complain about “religion” and find the Church to be so leprous is precisely because, stripped of spirit, it is at best dead and at worst deadly. What a pitiful caricature of Jesus’ body we are if we are lifeless, energy-less, dispirited, in a word. It is a sad and terrible day when one has to choose between being “spiritual” and being “religious,” if by spiritual we mean “filled with spirit” and if by “religious” we mean being lifeless. Bodies are meant to be vivified by spirit. Your body is that way. Jesus’ body was that way. And the Body of Christ, the Church, is that way. Quite simply, the Church, as the example of “religion,” is meant to be spiritual, and cannot be truly itself if it is not.
Yet in the popular mind a person does not need community in order to be fulfilled or whole. But we Christians have a different point of view. The New Testament understands that it is precisely by being united to Christ and to Christ’s new community that we in fact find and know and feel the Spirit. I do not mean to suggest that somehow a person’s worth is tied to how much they “go to church.” But I do mean to underscore that true Christian spirituality involves practicing the life of the Holy Spirit—which is another way of talking about the Life of Christ and thus the Life of God—in community. It is even possible for a person to lead a solitary life as a hermit and be Christian, so long as one is connected in some major ways to the community. Some of our forefathers and foremothers in the faith, like St. Seraphim of Sarov and Julian of Norwich, have been sterling examples of Spirit-filled lives while living as solitaries. But they lived solitary lives so that by their prayer and counsel they could contribute to the Body of Christ, not to get away from irritating people.
If you have noticed, I have drawn no sharp line between “spiritual” and “spirit-filled.” I concede that the two terms sometimes seem quite distinct. But at the end of the day to be authentically spiritual is to be thoroughly alive, and to be filled with the Spirit is likewise to be totally alive. And to be both is to be unmistakably full of life and power. That is why we are here today. If you are charged and ready, great! Lend your spirit to the whole body of the faithful, which in turn empowers you. If you are dispirited and doubtful, come to the table and be fed by and with the one whose life is full of Spirit. And if you are quaking in your boots with fear of what faces you tomorrow or the next day, sip the wine of wholeness which is a spirit that will quicken you. To a small and fear-struck army, Shakespeare’s King Henry V, grown from a playboy into a leader, says,
Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height…
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit,..!
Follow your spirit. Your spirit. The Spirit. The Lord and Giver of Life. Follow.
© Frank G. Dunn, 2010
Saturday, January 09, 2010
By Name
A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, The First Sunday after the Epiphany, the Baptism of Christ, January 10, 2010.
Text: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
When two creatures first awoke from the long journey from being just some other primates to being conscious humans, the first thing they must have done was to look at each other and speak a name. Even before verbs there were probably nouns, names. Man, woman, earth, sky, food, water: these must be the oldest nouns in the oldest tongue in the world.
In one of our foundational stories, God forms out of the ground every animal and bird and brings them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. Far from being the point of the story, this little detail reveals how ancient and how important is the notion of naming. We are not the only species with names, believe it or not. Research shows that dolphins have distinctive whistles to which they respond. But it is hard to imagine human beings without names. In fact it is hard to imagine a human being who can look at virtually anything without thinking of that thing as something with a name. When we encounter something previously unknown, our first impulse is to name it.
So when the prophet Isaiah, conveying words of God, writes, “I have called you by name, you are mine,” he is dealing with one of the oldest ideas in human experience and using it to describe the peculiarly intimate relationship between God and Israel. That is the sort of thing we either expect to hear in scripture and thus pass over without thinking, or the kind of thing that if we do think about it seems so strange that it hardly grabs us. I want to suggest three things today on this Feast of The Baptism of Christ. One is that naming is integral to understanding ourselves. A second is that naming is intricately related to baptism. A third is that naming is fundamental to understanding God.
First, naming is about understanding ourselves. When I was born, Daddy was away at war with several months to go before his return home. His mother named me Francis, after her oldest brother, and Gasque, her husband’s and my father’s middle name. Francis Gasque. I don’t know when I first heard, but I was fairly young when I learned that when Daddy came home he took a look at me and asked, “How come you named him Francis?” Daddy wasn’t the only one who had a problem. About the time I was of school age there was a series of movies featuring Francis the Talking Mule. I was not amused when people made a connection between one Francis and another. Not only that, but relatives frequently got confused because they knew of an older, more established Francis Dunn, one of Daddy’s first cousins. This was frighteningly confusing to me. But it was not quite as bad as the gender confusion that I already had in spades being exacerbated by the information that Francis could be a girl’s name as well as a boy’s, depending on whether one spelled it with an “e” or and “i.” Things were looking pretty bleak for young Francis when he went to first grade. And after a year of being the butt of jokes and the subject of confusion, I begged Mama to change my name before I went into second grade. And for fifty cents, paid to the South Carolina Bureau of Vital Statistics, I became legally and officially Frank.
I paid no attention whatsoever to the importance of any of that until years later when I was in seminary studying sacramental theology. Suddenly I came upon an important intersection of name-giving and baptism. I then realized how much of my personal history was either prefigured by or summed up in this narrative about my name. To a surprising extent the main themes of my very life are summed up in my name. Even the double-entendre of the name “Frank” is, I suspect, a key to my personality and even its shadow sides—as a signifier of frank as “free” and frank as “honest, to the point of being blunt.”
Lest you think that this is far too much about me, take a look at your own name and see if reveals any less about you. If you like your name or if you don’t, it is important. If you are known by a nickname, it is likely that it, too, has had an uncanny impact on the way you view yourself.
In the biblical tradition, as in other ancient traditions, to know someone’s name is to have a kind of power over that person. That is why, until recently, a person who stood in a socially inferior relationship would not dare call a superior by the first name. It signaled an affront, an offense of a major sort. And that is why one of the worst things one can do to another is to call a person by an unflattering or pejorative name. It can be the worst sort of insult.
But what about the names we give ourselves, more like labels? We can call ourselves “idiots” when we do something thoughtlessly or clumsily, “dorks” when we behave strangely and uncomfortably, “eggheads” when we are embarrassed about being intelligent, “dumb jocks” if we think our athletic ability vastly outstrips our intellectual capacity. Every time we call ourselves such names, we depreciate a bit, or more than a bit, our sense of self-esteem. In effect, we curse ourselves—which is really no better than cursing someone else, and sometimes as much or more poisonous.
So names are powerful. So powerful that it brings us to the second point: why naming is integral to baptism. The present Prayer Book does not make as big a deal of name-giving as its predecessors did. In the 1928 Prayer Book, for example, the priest said to the parents and godparents just prior to the pouring of water, “Name this child.” And the reply was, as the presentation still is, to give the “Christian” name to the child, not including the family name. In the tradition of the Church, we have no family name except “Christian.” We belong to Christ. So, properly speaking, people are known in the congregation by their Christian name, which is why, when we pray for our bishop, for example, he is called by his Christian name. When we are naming the sick, we frequently call them by their Christian names only, a sign of familial intimacy. I wouldn’t put too fine a point on it, however. When we are praying for “Jane” in this congregation, for example, you may find yourself distractedly wondering just who is standing in the need of prayer: Jane Bishop or Jane Lincoln or Jane Colgrove? Is it Elizabeth Finley or Elizabeth Palmberg who is celebrating a birthday? Which Jessica is it who is pregnant, and which John is it who has a new job? And so forth.
But the point is that we are not isolated, nameless bubbles in the household of faith. We have names. “I have called you by name; you are mine,” says the Holy One of Israel. It is easy for us to see that in a congregation like this one, where there is a high degree of acceptance and mutual caring. But the family of God into which we are baptized includes not only St. Stephen and the Incarnation, but All Saints, Chevy Chase, and Christ Church, Akkokeek. It includes not only Anglicans but the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington and Bishop Harry Jackson of wherever it is in Maryland. It includes not only Desmund Tutu but George W. Bush. You get the picture. The issue is not that we have to agree with or like everybody in the household of God, but that we are committed by our baptism to respect the dignity of every human being.
And, I would argue, the naming of persons does not stop at the walls of the Church universal. It extends to the whole of the human family and even beyond that to the whole cosmos. Why? Because the Church does not exist so that only those who are in it can be accorded the dignity of personhood but in order to bring the world into union with its creator, whose will it is that everything in all creation be redeemed, saved, and whole. In other words, our baptism is not a badge of specialness for an in-group, but a vocation, a calling, to proclaim the truth, love, and justice of God to the whole world. Ultimately the message of Jesus goes beyond even the marvelous words of Isaiah: “you are mine” is intended to be heard by the whole world, not just Israel.
And that is the third thing: naming is fundamental to our understanding of God. In a sense, no one fully understands God, and we are fooling ourselves if we think we do. Fred Craddock, a noted preacher and homiletician, once quipped that sometimes you hear people talking about God as if they had walked all around God taking pictures. But that is not to say that we understand nothing about God. Through the long experience of homo sapiens, we have come to understand that there is something intensely responsive about the universe. Our scientific investigations show that even the smallest particles respond to each other. It is in the nature of things that something on one side of the universe has an effect on something quite remote. But all of that is tangential to the poetry, if you will, that we read in the face of Jesus. For, to quote St. Paul, “the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’” At the center of our faith is not an idea or an event or a book or a law but a person with a name. And it is through a person with a name that we come to encounter the maker and ruler and ground and heart of the universe. Outside of Jesus himself the great revelation of God to us is the revelation of the divine Name, so sacred that our forefathers and foremothers did not dare pronounce it, “I AM who I AM.” I am being itself. And I will be what I will be. Whatever else Jesus reveals about God, he makes plain again and again that God is not an impersonal, unfeeling, entity divorced from the experience of the world of human joys and tragedies. God is “Abba,” sweeping creation to find the lost, running with tears of joy to welcome home the wanderer, prowling the mountainside to rescue the perishing, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked as if they were the most important business in all creation. God does not have a name, God is a name. And that great “I AM” has a predicate nominative, love. Boundless, deep, passionate love.
In one of C. S. Lewis’s books the character Orual asks, “How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?” It is the same question that dogged the Swiss doctor and pastoral theologian Paul Tournier in the middle of the last century. Tournier was a Christian from childhood, but only until he had what he called a “face to face encounter with God” did his whole life and work and orientation change. In a letter to his patients he wrote, “I can speak endlessly of myself, to myself or to someone else, without ever succeeding in giving a complete and truthful picture of myself. The same thing happens with all these people who come to see me, and take so much trouble over their efforts to describe themselves to me with strict accuracy; inevitably I form an image of them which derives as much from myself as from them.” The whole question of the meaning of persons which had enchanted him for twenty years boiled down to one simple question, “who am I, really, myself?”
If you read St. Luke’s story carefully, you will see that Jesus’ whole life was in a sense a commentary on the name given to him before his birth: Yeshua, for he shall save…” What did it mean? Where would it take him? What secrets did it contain? It is the same mystery that lies at the bottom of your deepest longing and your highest hope. It is the gold that lines your despair when your work seems to amount to nothing and the ecstacy that dazzles you when your bump into a person who so thoroughly loves you that you are changed inside and out. “Who am I, really, myself?” And all those false names which we would give as answers are wide of the mark. “I have called you by your name. You are mine.” Your name. Your name. Your name.
And if there is one thing that ever happened to Jesus that most assuredly has happened or will happen to you, it is that at that very moment, heaven is open and the Creator cries back, “You are my child, my beloved. And I couldn’t be more pleased.”
© Frank G. Dunn, 2010
Text: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
When two creatures first awoke from the long journey from being just some other primates to being conscious humans, the first thing they must have done was to look at each other and speak a name. Even before verbs there were probably nouns, names. Man, woman, earth, sky, food, water: these must be the oldest nouns in the oldest tongue in the world.
In one of our foundational stories, God forms out of the ground every animal and bird and brings them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. Far from being the point of the story, this little detail reveals how ancient and how important is the notion of naming. We are not the only species with names, believe it or not. Research shows that dolphins have distinctive whistles to which they respond. But it is hard to imagine human beings without names. In fact it is hard to imagine a human being who can look at virtually anything without thinking of that thing as something with a name. When we encounter something previously unknown, our first impulse is to name it.
So when the prophet Isaiah, conveying words of God, writes, “I have called you by name, you are mine,” he is dealing with one of the oldest ideas in human experience and using it to describe the peculiarly intimate relationship between God and Israel. That is the sort of thing we either expect to hear in scripture and thus pass over without thinking, or the kind of thing that if we do think about it seems so strange that it hardly grabs us. I want to suggest three things today on this Feast of The Baptism of Christ. One is that naming is integral to understanding ourselves. A second is that naming is intricately related to baptism. A third is that naming is fundamental to understanding God.
First, naming is about understanding ourselves. When I was born, Daddy was away at war with several months to go before his return home. His mother named me Francis, after her oldest brother, and Gasque, her husband’s and my father’s middle name. Francis Gasque. I don’t know when I first heard, but I was fairly young when I learned that when Daddy came home he took a look at me and asked, “How come you named him Francis?” Daddy wasn’t the only one who had a problem. About the time I was of school age there was a series of movies featuring Francis the Talking Mule. I was not amused when people made a connection between one Francis and another. Not only that, but relatives frequently got confused because they knew of an older, more established Francis Dunn, one of Daddy’s first cousins. This was frighteningly confusing to me. But it was not quite as bad as the gender confusion that I already had in spades being exacerbated by the information that Francis could be a girl’s name as well as a boy’s, depending on whether one spelled it with an “e” or and “i.” Things were looking pretty bleak for young Francis when he went to first grade. And after a year of being the butt of jokes and the subject of confusion, I begged Mama to change my name before I went into second grade. And for fifty cents, paid to the South Carolina Bureau of Vital Statistics, I became legally and officially Frank.
I paid no attention whatsoever to the importance of any of that until years later when I was in seminary studying sacramental theology. Suddenly I came upon an important intersection of name-giving and baptism. I then realized how much of my personal history was either prefigured by or summed up in this narrative about my name. To a surprising extent the main themes of my very life are summed up in my name. Even the double-entendre of the name “Frank” is, I suspect, a key to my personality and even its shadow sides—as a signifier of frank as “free” and frank as “honest, to the point of being blunt.”
Lest you think that this is far too much about me, take a look at your own name and see if reveals any less about you. If you like your name or if you don’t, it is important. If you are known by a nickname, it is likely that it, too, has had an uncanny impact on the way you view yourself.
In the biblical tradition, as in other ancient traditions, to know someone’s name is to have a kind of power over that person. That is why, until recently, a person who stood in a socially inferior relationship would not dare call a superior by the first name. It signaled an affront, an offense of a major sort. And that is why one of the worst things one can do to another is to call a person by an unflattering or pejorative name. It can be the worst sort of insult.
But what about the names we give ourselves, more like labels? We can call ourselves “idiots” when we do something thoughtlessly or clumsily, “dorks” when we behave strangely and uncomfortably, “eggheads” when we are embarrassed about being intelligent, “dumb jocks” if we think our athletic ability vastly outstrips our intellectual capacity. Every time we call ourselves such names, we depreciate a bit, or more than a bit, our sense of self-esteem. In effect, we curse ourselves—which is really no better than cursing someone else, and sometimes as much or more poisonous.
So names are powerful. So powerful that it brings us to the second point: why naming is integral to baptism. The present Prayer Book does not make as big a deal of name-giving as its predecessors did. In the 1928 Prayer Book, for example, the priest said to the parents and godparents just prior to the pouring of water, “Name this child.” And the reply was, as the presentation still is, to give the “Christian” name to the child, not including the family name. In the tradition of the Church, we have no family name except “Christian.” We belong to Christ. So, properly speaking, people are known in the congregation by their Christian name, which is why, when we pray for our bishop, for example, he is called by his Christian name. When we are naming the sick, we frequently call them by their Christian names only, a sign of familial intimacy. I wouldn’t put too fine a point on it, however. When we are praying for “Jane” in this congregation, for example, you may find yourself distractedly wondering just who is standing in the need of prayer: Jane Bishop or Jane Lincoln or Jane Colgrove? Is it Elizabeth Finley or Elizabeth Palmberg who is celebrating a birthday? Which Jessica is it who is pregnant, and which John is it who has a new job? And so forth.
But the point is that we are not isolated, nameless bubbles in the household of faith. We have names. “I have called you by name; you are mine,” says the Holy One of Israel. It is easy for us to see that in a congregation like this one, where there is a high degree of acceptance and mutual caring. But the family of God into which we are baptized includes not only St. Stephen and the Incarnation, but All Saints, Chevy Chase, and Christ Church, Akkokeek. It includes not only Anglicans but the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington and Bishop Harry Jackson of wherever it is in Maryland. It includes not only Desmund Tutu but George W. Bush. You get the picture. The issue is not that we have to agree with or like everybody in the household of God, but that we are committed by our baptism to respect the dignity of every human being.
And, I would argue, the naming of persons does not stop at the walls of the Church universal. It extends to the whole of the human family and even beyond that to the whole cosmos. Why? Because the Church does not exist so that only those who are in it can be accorded the dignity of personhood but in order to bring the world into union with its creator, whose will it is that everything in all creation be redeemed, saved, and whole. In other words, our baptism is not a badge of specialness for an in-group, but a vocation, a calling, to proclaim the truth, love, and justice of God to the whole world. Ultimately the message of Jesus goes beyond even the marvelous words of Isaiah: “you are mine” is intended to be heard by the whole world, not just Israel.
And that is the third thing: naming is fundamental to our understanding of God. In a sense, no one fully understands God, and we are fooling ourselves if we think we do. Fred Craddock, a noted preacher and homiletician, once quipped that sometimes you hear people talking about God as if they had walked all around God taking pictures. But that is not to say that we understand nothing about God. Through the long experience of homo sapiens, we have come to understand that there is something intensely responsive about the universe. Our scientific investigations show that even the smallest particles respond to each other. It is in the nature of things that something on one side of the universe has an effect on something quite remote. But all of that is tangential to the poetry, if you will, that we read in the face of Jesus. For, to quote St. Paul, “the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’” At the center of our faith is not an idea or an event or a book or a law but a person with a name. And it is through a person with a name that we come to encounter the maker and ruler and ground and heart of the universe. Outside of Jesus himself the great revelation of God to us is the revelation of the divine Name, so sacred that our forefathers and foremothers did not dare pronounce it, “I AM who I AM.” I am being itself. And I will be what I will be. Whatever else Jesus reveals about God, he makes plain again and again that God is not an impersonal, unfeeling, entity divorced from the experience of the world of human joys and tragedies. God is “Abba,” sweeping creation to find the lost, running with tears of joy to welcome home the wanderer, prowling the mountainside to rescue the perishing, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked as if they were the most important business in all creation. God does not have a name, God is a name. And that great “I AM” has a predicate nominative, love. Boundless, deep, passionate love.
In one of C. S. Lewis’s books the character Orual asks, “How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?” It is the same question that dogged the Swiss doctor and pastoral theologian Paul Tournier in the middle of the last century. Tournier was a Christian from childhood, but only until he had what he called a “face to face encounter with God” did his whole life and work and orientation change. In a letter to his patients he wrote, “I can speak endlessly of myself, to myself or to someone else, without ever succeeding in giving a complete and truthful picture of myself. The same thing happens with all these people who come to see me, and take so much trouble over their efforts to describe themselves to me with strict accuracy; inevitably I form an image of them which derives as much from myself as from them.” The whole question of the meaning of persons which had enchanted him for twenty years boiled down to one simple question, “who am I, really, myself?”
If you read St. Luke’s story carefully, you will see that Jesus’ whole life was in a sense a commentary on the name given to him before his birth: Yeshua, for he shall save…” What did it mean? Where would it take him? What secrets did it contain? It is the same mystery that lies at the bottom of your deepest longing and your highest hope. It is the gold that lines your despair when your work seems to amount to nothing and the ecstacy that dazzles you when your bump into a person who so thoroughly loves you that you are changed inside and out. “Who am I, really, myself?” And all those false names which we would give as answers are wide of the mark. “I have called you by your name. You are mine.” Your name. Your name. Your name.
And if there is one thing that ever happened to Jesus that most assuredly has happened or will happen to you, it is that at that very moment, heaven is open and the Creator cries back, “You are my child, my beloved. And I couldn’t be more pleased.”
© Frank G. Dunn, 2010
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Saying Grace
A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, the First Sunday after Christmas, December 27, 2009.
John 1:16
“From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.”
Grace is not a peculiarly Christian word, nor an especially Christian concept. One can experience grace, see grace, recognize grace, act with grace, dance with grace, exercise grace, and say grace without being noticeably religious at all. But grace does occupy a very unique place in the Christian vocabulary. In fact, I would go so far as to say that one cannot tell the Christian story without talking about grace, or some other word (if there is one) that means the same thing.
“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us,” Anne Lamott writes. I would hardly say that her sentence, good as it is, in any way competes with the majestic prologue of St. John’s Gospel. Yet it has a certain affinity with the song that John is singing. John takes a page from Greek philosophy and identifies Jesus with the eternal Logos, or Word. The Word, or λογος, had long been thought to be the animating principle in the universe. John thinks of it as the tonally perfect expression, the complete utterance of God, the creating word which God had spoken, “Let there be light!” That Word, by which all things came into being, became flesh and dwelt among us as Jesus of Nazareth. John pictures this whole cosmic saga as a story of grace. Imagine that the λογος, or Word, contains the entire energy of the universe. Imagine that the Word is the power which we know as light. Imagine that the Word is the mysterious essence of life itself. And imagine that that is only the beginning! Packed, as it were, into the Word is every ounce of mercy in the cosmos, unfathomable love, the center and extent of justice, not to mention creativity, wholeness, freedom, peace, joy. And still we have not even begun to name all the things the Word-made-flesh embodies. We don’t have to go much further before we begin to get the picture: the Word is God. The Word was in the beginning with God. All things were made by the Word and without the Word absolutely nothing came into existence.
If you are used to thinking that Jesus is something of a super-human hero, a kind of oversized friend who, as the bumper sticker says, is your co-pilot keeping you on track and preventing you from getting lost, then this language will strike you as at least a bit strange, because it is so much bigger than your Jesus ever is. And if, on the other hand, you have your doubts as to whether Jesus was really all that special to begin with—hardly someone who could seriously be called “Son of God”—then this language will likely seem to you nothing short or preposterous. But what the Fourth Evangelist would say to both of you—well, to all of us really—is that there are two things we don’t want to miss. One of them is the astonishing glory of the great God of the universe and the other is that God has come to meet us in the person of Jesus. And, to use Anne Lamott’s phrase, God has come in Jesus to meet us as we are, but not to leave us there.
Grace upon grace. More grace than you ever dreamed of. Grace inexhaustible. But you must be saying, “Well, it all sounds good, but what is it, this grace?” Someone has said that grace is what God gives us that we don’t deserve and mercy is what God gives us instead of what we do deserve.” It is a little like Mark Twain’s saying that "heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” In the Christian vocabulary, grace means God’s favor, unearned and undeserved. Grace is a free gift, no strings attached. That is what is so odd, and ultimately so hard to swallow about grace. Grace comes when we least expect it. Grace surprises us—it has to, or else it wouldn’t be grace. We are accustomed to having to pay for anything that is worth anything, and there is a part of us that simply cannot believe that God would actually give us the world without charging us for it. But we have received from God the Word’s fullness grace upon grace upon grace and never paid a cent for it.
One day in about 1982, into my office in Newtown, Connecticut, walked Frank Johnson. Frank was in his 80’s, and had long since retired to his native Newtown from St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. “Can the church use a piano?” he asked me. My heart sank. I knew what was coming. He probably had some old Chickering upright, badly out of tune with yellowing ivory keys.
“Well, I rather doubt it, Frank,” I said. “We have a piano in the church, one in the choir room, and one in the children’s chapel. I don’t know where we would put another one.” His face fell. Wanting to extend the conversation a tad, I went on, “What kind of piano do you have?”
“Oh,” he said, “It’s a Steinway grand. It’s an antique that was in my wife’s family. It’s only problem is that its sounding board has a crack in it that needs to be repaired. It was reconditioned a few years back. About 1928, I think.”
My eyes widened. “Frank!” I exclaimed, holding on to my seat, “A Steinway grand, eh? I’ve never wanted anything so much as a Steinway grand. It’s about the only thing I’d consider going to hell for. Let’s talk. I might want to buy it from you.”
“Oh,” he said, “if you want it, it’s yours.”
“Oh, no. No. No way. I mean I couldn’t. No. Let’s talk. I’ll come take a look. We’ll talk. No, no way. I… no.”
“Oh, it’s yours if you want it. Come, take a look.”
So I went out to Frank’s house, sat down, played something in A-flat, a lush key that brought out the richness of the bass of the instrument,” and said that I would be delighted to own such an instrument. But,” I added, “you’ve got to let me think about it. Name your price.”
Frank looked at me from behind his round tortoise shell glasses. His gray eyes misted a bit. He swallowed. “It’s a gift,” he said. “My gift to you. We inherited it. I have had it all these years since Edith died. I want you to have it.” I looked down. I stroked the ebony.
That’s grace.
“A gift, eh?” I could hear the voice of my mother saying, “Son, if someone gives you something, including a compliment, the thing to do is to accept it. Just say thank you.”
“Thank you, Frank,” I said. “Thank you.”
And that is the other part of grace. In English we can’t hear or see it as well as we could in Spanish or Italian. “Gracias,” or “grazie,” would tip us off that grace and gratitude are inseparably linked. It is not that there is a charge for grace—not if it really grace. But there is an appropriate response. And that is to accept gratefully and graciously the gift. St. John’s calls it “believing.” “As many as believed him, to them he gave power to become the children of God.” But by believing he means something quite different from what you might think. To believe does not mean to give intellectual assent to an idea or a proposition. To believe means to give one’s love to (someone), and is related to the word meaning “dear.” Ancient forms of the word “believe” mean literally to give one’s heart.
Which helps to explain what grace has to do with Christmas. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. So many gifts, and not just on Christmas morning. They keep coming and coming and coming, like multiplying bread and fish miraculously feeding multitudes. The supply never dries up. And we are left wondering,
© Frank G. Dunn, 2009
John 1:16
“From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.”
Grace is not a peculiarly Christian word, nor an especially Christian concept. One can experience grace, see grace, recognize grace, act with grace, dance with grace, exercise grace, and say grace without being noticeably religious at all. But grace does occupy a very unique place in the Christian vocabulary. In fact, I would go so far as to say that one cannot tell the Christian story without talking about grace, or some other word (if there is one) that means the same thing.
“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us,” Anne Lamott writes. I would hardly say that her sentence, good as it is, in any way competes with the majestic prologue of St. John’s Gospel. Yet it has a certain affinity with the song that John is singing. John takes a page from Greek philosophy and identifies Jesus with the eternal Logos, or Word. The Word, or λογος, had long been thought to be the animating principle in the universe. John thinks of it as the tonally perfect expression, the complete utterance of God, the creating word which God had spoken, “Let there be light!” That Word, by which all things came into being, became flesh and dwelt among us as Jesus of Nazareth. John pictures this whole cosmic saga as a story of grace. Imagine that the λογος, or Word, contains the entire energy of the universe. Imagine that the Word is the power which we know as light. Imagine that the Word is the mysterious essence of life itself. And imagine that that is only the beginning! Packed, as it were, into the Word is every ounce of mercy in the cosmos, unfathomable love, the center and extent of justice, not to mention creativity, wholeness, freedom, peace, joy. And still we have not even begun to name all the things the Word-made-flesh embodies. We don’t have to go much further before we begin to get the picture: the Word is God. The Word was in the beginning with God. All things were made by the Word and without the Word absolutely nothing came into existence.
If you are used to thinking that Jesus is something of a super-human hero, a kind of oversized friend who, as the bumper sticker says, is your co-pilot keeping you on track and preventing you from getting lost, then this language will strike you as at least a bit strange, because it is so much bigger than your Jesus ever is. And if, on the other hand, you have your doubts as to whether Jesus was really all that special to begin with—hardly someone who could seriously be called “Son of God”—then this language will likely seem to you nothing short or preposterous. But what the Fourth Evangelist would say to both of you—well, to all of us really—is that there are two things we don’t want to miss. One of them is the astonishing glory of the great God of the universe and the other is that God has come to meet us in the person of Jesus. And, to use Anne Lamott’s phrase, God has come in Jesus to meet us as we are, but not to leave us there.
Grace upon grace. More grace than you ever dreamed of. Grace inexhaustible. But you must be saying, “Well, it all sounds good, but what is it, this grace?” Someone has said that grace is what God gives us that we don’t deserve and mercy is what God gives us instead of what we do deserve.” It is a little like Mark Twain’s saying that "heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” In the Christian vocabulary, grace means God’s favor, unearned and undeserved. Grace is a free gift, no strings attached. That is what is so odd, and ultimately so hard to swallow about grace. Grace comes when we least expect it. Grace surprises us—it has to, or else it wouldn’t be grace. We are accustomed to having to pay for anything that is worth anything, and there is a part of us that simply cannot believe that God would actually give us the world without charging us for it. But we have received from God the Word’s fullness grace upon grace upon grace and never paid a cent for it.
One day in about 1982, into my office in Newtown, Connecticut, walked Frank Johnson. Frank was in his 80’s, and had long since retired to his native Newtown from St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. “Can the church use a piano?” he asked me. My heart sank. I knew what was coming. He probably had some old Chickering upright, badly out of tune with yellowing ivory keys.
“Well, I rather doubt it, Frank,” I said. “We have a piano in the church, one in the choir room, and one in the children’s chapel. I don’t know where we would put another one.” His face fell. Wanting to extend the conversation a tad, I went on, “What kind of piano do you have?”
“Oh,” he said, “It’s a Steinway grand. It’s an antique that was in my wife’s family. It’s only problem is that its sounding board has a crack in it that needs to be repaired. It was reconditioned a few years back. About 1928, I think.”
My eyes widened. “Frank!” I exclaimed, holding on to my seat, “A Steinway grand, eh? I’ve never wanted anything so much as a Steinway grand. It’s about the only thing I’d consider going to hell for. Let’s talk. I might want to buy it from you.”
“Oh,” he said, “if you want it, it’s yours.”
“Oh, no. No. No way. I mean I couldn’t. No. Let’s talk. I’ll come take a look. We’ll talk. No, no way. I… no.”
“Oh, it’s yours if you want it. Come, take a look.”
So I went out to Frank’s house, sat down, played something in A-flat, a lush key that brought out the richness of the bass of the instrument,” and said that I would be delighted to own such an instrument. But,” I added, “you’ve got to let me think about it. Name your price.”
Frank looked at me from behind his round tortoise shell glasses. His gray eyes misted a bit. He swallowed. “It’s a gift,” he said. “My gift to you. We inherited it. I have had it all these years since Edith died. I want you to have it.” I looked down. I stroked the ebony.
That’s grace.
“A gift, eh?” I could hear the voice of my mother saying, “Son, if someone gives you something, including a compliment, the thing to do is to accept it. Just say thank you.”
“Thank you, Frank,” I said. “Thank you.”
And that is the other part of grace. In English we can’t hear or see it as well as we could in Spanish or Italian. “Gracias,” or “grazie,” would tip us off that grace and gratitude are inseparably linked. It is not that there is a charge for grace—not if it really grace. But there is an appropriate response. And that is to accept gratefully and graciously the gift. St. John’s calls it “believing.” “As many as believed him, to them he gave power to become the children of God.” But by believing he means something quite different from what you might think. To believe does not mean to give intellectual assent to an idea or a proposition. To believe means to give one’s love to (someone), and is related to the word meaning “dear.” Ancient forms of the word “believe” mean literally to give one’s heart.
Which helps to explain what grace has to do with Christmas. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. So many gifts, and not just on Christmas morning. They keep coming and coming and coming, like multiplying bread and fish miraculously feeding multitudes. The supply never dries up. And we are left wondering,
What can I give Him,(Christina Rosetti)
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.
© Frank G. Dunn, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
God's Body
A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Christmas Eve, 2009.
Luke 2:1-20
Of all the religions on the face of the earth—old, new, past, present—Christianity is the religion of incarnation. If you haven’t been hanging around churches lately, let me state that a little more forcefully. Christianity is definitely a religion about the body. Our central teachings and our practices center on embodiment. That is what that passage in Luke, so familiar to four hundred years of English speaking people, is about: a human body which was born to live, hunger, thirst, suffer, love, work, laugh, sleep, and die like any one of us. In a few minutes we shall gather around a table and share a meal in which we proclaim what he proclaimed—that a little chunk of bread is body, and a cup of wine is blood. And we go so far as to say that we who are gathered here doing all this are in fact a body. No not just “a” body, but the body of Christ.
It is good to remember that because it is the most readily forgotten thing in the Church. We got our start in the ancient world where a fair number of people distrusted the body. It was not all that uncommon to find around the time that Jesus was born a good number of people who believed sincerely that matter was evil or at least bad enough to be the enemy of spirit. If God was spirit, the last thing God would do would be to get mixed up with bodies. Some went so far as to suppose that the Most High God could not even have been the creator of the world, so they talked about a demi-urge, a being with responsibility for making the material world including human bodies. Some took the stories in the Hebrew Bible and interpreted the creation of man and woman—indeed the physical world as we know it—to be a result of a primal disobedience—sin, if you will—resulting in the awful fate that we have to live in a material world in material bodies.
But tonight we gather to celebrate the truth that all that is a gigantic lie. Matter is not bad because nothing that the Creator makes is bad. All of it is good. Bodies are not evil. Bodies are good, natural, even spectacular, however short-lived most of them are. And how do we know it? By the telling of a story that once upon a time a human body was born, fashioned in the depths of its mother to be the person who would completely reveal God to the rest of his fellow-creatures. We celebrate, we dance, we sing, we laugh because that body became the three-dimensional representation of a wedding of humanity and divinity, one person in which the fullness of God and the completeness of a human being dwelt in total harmony. We celebrate this feast decked out in green and red: the green reminding us that it is not just the human body but the great body of nature, the body of the whole universe that the Creator cherishes so; the red reminding us that the baby Mary bore came like all of us out of the birth canal all bloody, and would leave life in this world with the same body again all bloodied. We celebrate this feast because it is not just about that body, his body, but your body.
Four years ago this night, a body lay in a bed three states away from here, dying. It was a body I knew well, though strangely not as well as you might think. It belonged to my father. I came to church that Christmas Eve at 5:00. Some of you know that Linda Kaufman, one of our priests who has presided at that liturgy for years, tosses out a sheet in the middle of this space, proclaims it a stable. Children, some prepared with costumes and some unsuspecting, quickly volunteer to assume parts in the birth stories from Luke’s and Matthew’s gospels. Sometimes there can be up to three Marys. Frequently there are cows and sheep and a donkey. I sat in the pew that night, devoutly wishing not to be a part of anything. But no one volunteered to be Joseph. I felt it coming. Linda asked me, “Frank, would you be Joseph?” I wasn’t about to say no to her, not on Christmas Eve, though I really would have preferred to be a cow, if I had to be anything. So I got up in my collar and leather jacket and proceeded to act the part of Joseph. For a little while it took my mind off that bed in South Carolina and the trip I would be making the next day to see him one last time. I like Christmas pageants well enough, but I have never thought that they did a particularly good job in helping us get past romanticizing Christmas, if not trivializing it. I’ve seen one too many shepherds do shameless things to one another by hook or by crook, wondered too many times if the angels carrying candles would set themselves or the church on fire, wanted to brain some pubescent boys for chewing gum in the middle of the thing, seen one too many wise men trip over his oriental drag, heard my fill of snide comments about who is going to be the blue angel or the pink angel and how she only came to Sunday School beginning in late November so she could be in the pageant. So this time, thanks to Linda, I entered the story, there in my collar and leather jacket, espoused to one or two Marys, whom I could accompany for a few minutes. I was remarkably nervous about the whole thing, as I recall.
I think I got through all that fairly well, ultimately grateful that I could shelve for a few minutes my preoccupation with Daddy. Not until we were singing “Silent Night” did I feel something happen in my body. It started somewhere in my chest, a sensation that became a knot which lodged in my throat. I was singing the tenor line at about “holy infant so tender and mild” when tears sprang. My voice quavered and I fell silent on “sleep in heavenly peace.” That is what bodies do, you know. They register this stuff in ways that I can hardly imagine disembodied spirits being able to. They tense up, they choke, they cry, they get goosebumps. And they remember. I heard him singing, the way he used to sing when I was 8 or 10, his voice effortlessly sounding bell-clear. They say you can only think one thought at a time. But suddenly there was with my tears a multitude of memories. I saw my little girl of 10 years padding by me in her sock feet, an angel stately carrying her candle in the Christmas pageant for the first time. I was in the back seat of the1949 Chevrolet, looking at the giant electric Christmas card in lights on the International Paper Mill in Georgetown, with Daddy singing and whistling, “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas,” and Mama beside him purring approval. Christmases on the farm, staying up late wrapping presents for the children, walking into the rectory on Christmas Eve in Newtown inhaling the scent of cinnamon, seeing the mantle decked in fruit and evergreens, going with Aunt Myra to church and hearing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” for the first time: oh, the bodily life is exquisite!
Every memory that flashed through my mind was only possible because of this collection of bones and muscles and sinews and senses that I am. I can get myself into a good deal of trouble, sickness, and pain both with the body and with the mind that lives within it. But all these fleshly things like songs and scents and signs are part of the world that (Christmas says) God chose to inhabit. No doubt there are better worlds, where Peace is more than a slogan on a greeting card and where folks actually hush their noise and cease their strife to hear angels sing. But this is the world that we know. For better or worse, it’s home. And to live in it necessitates having a body, God knows. And it was such a body that the Holy Spirit chose in which to tabernacle, in which a baby was conceived and carried. And it was such a body, pierced at the first with straw and at the last with nails, in which was assumed the whole of human nature just so that what he is we might become.
Tonight we hear, of course, only a chapter in the story of God’s body. We shall hear others in due time. In just a little while on Ash Wednesday, we’ll remember that we bodies are but dust and to dust shall we return. We shall see shortly thereafter the Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, on the tree, suffering and dying reminding us that it was a very bodily death through which we find the door to life. We shall gaze on the body of the Risen Lord on Easter, marveling at the scars that betoken his pain and our healing. We shall look for the body we can no longer see on Ascension; and while we wonder where in heaven’s name he has gone, we’ll see as if in a mirror that that ascended and glorified body is right here on earth, with eyes and skin and breath and blood, in the form of a community that loves and serves and heals just the way Jesus did.
And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. A tiny body. A holy body. Just like yours.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2009.
Luke 2:1-20
Of all the religions on the face of the earth—old, new, past, present—Christianity is the religion of incarnation. If you haven’t been hanging around churches lately, let me state that a little more forcefully. Christianity is definitely a religion about the body. Our central teachings and our practices center on embodiment. That is what that passage in Luke, so familiar to four hundred years of English speaking people, is about: a human body which was born to live, hunger, thirst, suffer, love, work, laugh, sleep, and die like any one of us. In a few minutes we shall gather around a table and share a meal in which we proclaim what he proclaimed—that a little chunk of bread is body, and a cup of wine is blood. And we go so far as to say that we who are gathered here doing all this are in fact a body. No not just “a” body, but the body of Christ.
It is good to remember that because it is the most readily forgotten thing in the Church. We got our start in the ancient world where a fair number of people distrusted the body. It was not all that uncommon to find around the time that Jesus was born a good number of people who believed sincerely that matter was evil or at least bad enough to be the enemy of spirit. If God was spirit, the last thing God would do would be to get mixed up with bodies. Some went so far as to suppose that the Most High God could not even have been the creator of the world, so they talked about a demi-urge, a being with responsibility for making the material world including human bodies. Some took the stories in the Hebrew Bible and interpreted the creation of man and woman—indeed the physical world as we know it—to be a result of a primal disobedience—sin, if you will—resulting in the awful fate that we have to live in a material world in material bodies.
But tonight we gather to celebrate the truth that all that is a gigantic lie. Matter is not bad because nothing that the Creator makes is bad. All of it is good. Bodies are not evil. Bodies are good, natural, even spectacular, however short-lived most of them are. And how do we know it? By the telling of a story that once upon a time a human body was born, fashioned in the depths of its mother to be the person who would completely reveal God to the rest of his fellow-creatures. We celebrate, we dance, we sing, we laugh because that body became the three-dimensional representation of a wedding of humanity and divinity, one person in which the fullness of God and the completeness of a human being dwelt in total harmony. We celebrate this feast decked out in green and red: the green reminding us that it is not just the human body but the great body of nature, the body of the whole universe that the Creator cherishes so; the red reminding us that the baby Mary bore came like all of us out of the birth canal all bloody, and would leave life in this world with the same body again all bloodied. We celebrate this feast because it is not just about that body, his body, but your body.
Four years ago this night, a body lay in a bed three states away from here, dying. It was a body I knew well, though strangely not as well as you might think. It belonged to my father. I came to church that Christmas Eve at 5:00. Some of you know that Linda Kaufman, one of our priests who has presided at that liturgy for years, tosses out a sheet in the middle of this space, proclaims it a stable. Children, some prepared with costumes and some unsuspecting, quickly volunteer to assume parts in the birth stories from Luke’s and Matthew’s gospels. Sometimes there can be up to three Marys. Frequently there are cows and sheep and a donkey. I sat in the pew that night, devoutly wishing not to be a part of anything. But no one volunteered to be Joseph. I felt it coming. Linda asked me, “Frank, would you be Joseph?” I wasn’t about to say no to her, not on Christmas Eve, though I really would have preferred to be a cow, if I had to be anything. So I got up in my collar and leather jacket and proceeded to act the part of Joseph. For a little while it took my mind off that bed in South Carolina and the trip I would be making the next day to see him one last time. I like Christmas pageants well enough, but I have never thought that they did a particularly good job in helping us get past romanticizing Christmas, if not trivializing it. I’ve seen one too many shepherds do shameless things to one another by hook or by crook, wondered too many times if the angels carrying candles would set themselves or the church on fire, wanted to brain some pubescent boys for chewing gum in the middle of the thing, seen one too many wise men trip over his oriental drag, heard my fill of snide comments about who is going to be the blue angel or the pink angel and how she only came to Sunday School beginning in late November so she could be in the pageant. So this time, thanks to Linda, I entered the story, there in my collar and leather jacket, espoused to one or two Marys, whom I could accompany for a few minutes. I was remarkably nervous about the whole thing, as I recall.
I think I got through all that fairly well, ultimately grateful that I could shelve for a few minutes my preoccupation with Daddy. Not until we were singing “Silent Night” did I feel something happen in my body. It started somewhere in my chest, a sensation that became a knot which lodged in my throat. I was singing the tenor line at about “holy infant so tender and mild” when tears sprang. My voice quavered and I fell silent on “sleep in heavenly peace.” That is what bodies do, you know. They register this stuff in ways that I can hardly imagine disembodied spirits being able to. They tense up, they choke, they cry, they get goosebumps. And they remember. I heard him singing, the way he used to sing when I was 8 or 10, his voice effortlessly sounding bell-clear. They say you can only think one thought at a time. But suddenly there was with my tears a multitude of memories. I saw my little girl of 10 years padding by me in her sock feet, an angel stately carrying her candle in the Christmas pageant for the first time. I was in the back seat of the1949 Chevrolet, looking at the giant electric Christmas card in lights on the International Paper Mill in Georgetown, with Daddy singing and whistling, “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas,” and Mama beside him purring approval. Christmases on the farm, staying up late wrapping presents for the children, walking into the rectory on Christmas Eve in Newtown inhaling the scent of cinnamon, seeing the mantle decked in fruit and evergreens, going with Aunt Myra to church and hearing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” for the first time: oh, the bodily life is exquisite!
Every memory that flashed through my mind was only possible because of this collection of bones and muscles and sinews and senses that I am. I can get myself into a good deal of trouble, sickness, and pain both with the body and with the mind that lives within it. But all these fleshly things like songs and scents and signs are part of the world that (Christmas says) God chose to inhabit. No doubt there are better worlds, where Peace is more than a slogan on a greeting card and where folks actually hush their noise and cease their strife to hear angels sing. But this is the world that we know. For better or worse, it’s home. And to live in it necessitates having a body, God knows. And it was such a body that the Holy Spirit chose in which to tabernacle, in which a baby was conceived and carried. And it was such a body, pierced at the first with straw and at the last with nails, in which was assumed the whole of human nature just so that what he is we might become.
Tonight we hear, of course, only a chapter in the story of God’s body. We shall hear others in due time. In just a little while on Ash Wednesday, we’ll remember that we bodies are but dust and to dust shall we return. We shall see shortly thereafter the Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, on the tree, suffering and dying reminding us that it was a very bodily death through which we find the door to life. We shall gaze on the body of the Risen Lord on Easter, marveling at the scars that betoken his pain and our healing. We shall look for the body we can no longer see on Ascension; and while we wonder where in heaven’s name he has gone, we’ll see as if in a mirror that that ascended and glorified body is right here on earth, with eyes and skin and breath and blood, in the form of a community that loves and serves and heals just the way Jesus did.
And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. A tiny body. A holy body. Just like yours.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2009.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
It's About Time
A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, on the Third Sunday of Advent, December 13, 2009.
Text: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Luke 3:7-18
Somebody asked a couple of weeks ago where to buy an Advent calendar. I pondered a minute on the fact that I don’t think I have ever actually bought an Advent calendar. When my kids were growing up, we used a red and green chain made of construction paper. Inside each link was something to do to get ready for Christmas. Each of the four of us, and even the dog, had a special day during Advent. Then there were some feasts like St. Nicholas Day which we always celebrated in lieu of a big Santa Claus to-do at Christmas time.
It’s fun keeping track of time when you think you’re waiting for something special—as special as Christmas is to a kid. I don’t know that it is so much fun counting the days until you go in the hospital for surgery, or the weeks left before your case comes to trial. But we are creatures who are peculiarly attuned to time. We are conscious of past and future, although we only know of them in the present.
If you are waiting for Christmas, you can quite literally count the days, the hours, the minutes before it arrives. You can know precisely when it will be here, how many more shopping days left between now and then, and when it will be over with. That is because Advent calendars and date books and Blackberries and Palm Pilots all measure clock time. Χρονος it is called in the New Testament. But there is another kind of time, just as real, maybe even more real, than the time measured by clocks and watches. It is what the New Testament calls καιρος, and it has more the sense of “season” or “the right time” or “the favorable time.” It can also mean a fixed point in time, and can mean a period of time, such as the span of time when Pontius Pilate was procurator or when Augustus was Caesar. One of the things that καιρος means is the time of crisis or the last times. There is a good deal of interest in the last times, or the Messianic times, in the New Testament. People in general start thinking about the last times when they become increasingly convinced that things are bad and getting worse (and that is a good deal of the people a good deal of the time). When John the Baptist appeared in the desert of Judea preaching repentance, he appealed to people who were already on the tiptoe of expectancy, ready to welcome the arrival of the last things. Of course, the “last things” did not necessarily mean the end of the world so much as it meant a thorough housecleaning by the Coming Messiah. Wheat and chaff would be separated, good and evil sorted out, and a great big bonfire set to take care of worthlessness. If you are waiting for that kind of event you are definitely waiting for a καιρος, not a χρονος, moment.
It is frequently said that when Jesus came people were particularly ready for him because they were expecting such a καιρος moment. That is partly true. We rarely experience καιρος time unless we are open to it, awaiting it, anticipating something different. That is one of the funny things about these καιρος events: they are frequently missed, dismissed, undervalued, and misunderstood if we are not attuned to them. But it is partly not true because there was a very old idea that God was going to show up in human history, and was going to look quite different from what Jesus turned out to look like. Our prophet in today’s first lesson, Zephaniah, was one of the clearer voices proclaiming the Day of the Lord. He did this six hundred years or so before Jesus actually appeared. (That is to say that Zephaniah was about as temporally close to Jesus as, say, Henry VIII of England is to us.) Most people don’t remember what was in the news three or four years ago, and couldn’t care less about what was happening a generation or two ago, let alone what somebody was announcing six hundred years ago. But this is exactly where our community of faith has a different sense of time and of reality from the sense that prevails in the world of ordinary human affairs. We think not so much in terms of χρονος as in terms of καιρος. What’s a year? What’s a century? What’s a millennium? These things don’t matter nearly as much as the coming to birth of a Truth, a Presence, a Reality that folks are open to, ready to embrace, eager to greet.
The Day of the Lord, Zephaniah said, was not pretty. It would be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry. He doesn’t sound too different from many a voice in the present period who are telling us about climate change and terrorism and global economic meltdown and endless war. And, generally speaking, Zephaniah was saying all these things with the hope of making a point: that Jerusalem—Judah—had to change, had to renew its Covenant with the Creator, had to change its ways. Think of Zephaniah as proposing a massive intervention in Jerusalem, much as we might confront an alcoholic or substance abuser. The point is not just to predict doom; it is to get a change in behavior. You can see the parallel between him and John the Baptist. John’s idea, like Zephaniah’s, was not to announce the great and terrible dies irae of God’s judgment; it was to confront and exhort people to repent. It was, after all, as Luke says, “good news.”
A piece of relatively good news is that this is not the only Advent season that we are likely to see. There will be others and others and still more, well past the lifetimes, I suspect, of everybody here. Of course, there are always predictions of Doomsday, and a great many people buy into them. The Mayan calendar runs out in 2012, and many see that chronological time as a kind of καιρος moment signaling the end of the world. Conservatives and reactionaries swear that as the old order crumbles, the world will simply go to hell. Some of them seem plenty pleased with that. But liberals, too, predict dire consequences of economic disasters and climate apocalypse. Nobody seems to be selling much hope.
Unless it is the faithful proclaimers of the gospel, like, I hope, you. With our eyes open and with clear heads, we are once more articulating an Advent message. “My spirit rejoices,” we say, “in God my Savior.” Sing aloud, O daughter Zion! The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst. Look at him: a victor dancing in the midst of you like a young, strong, vibrant warrior, far more intent on singing than on fighting, far more taken with his own dancing than with his enemies, for more enchanted with you his beloved than preoccupied with his enemies.
We keep talking this way because we believe it is the Truth. It may take six or seven hundred more years, or maybe not, for it all to come around. But we know. We have seen it before. When we thought there was absolutely nothing to be done and no hope for the morrow, a young woman conceived and brought forth a son. He showed us how life could be lived out of love and not fear. He came among us and washed our feet when we could only compete, forgave our sins when we thought we’d be stuck in therapy forever, taught us that in giving we would become rich, and that in learning to die we would strangely learn to live. In him, the old Day of the Lord stopped being something to dread and became something to celebrate. And we even believe that when we gather around a table today, hearing and seeing a new priest speak words he spoke, he is powerfully and surprising present, making out of many individuals one body capable of actually adding joy to the world.
© Frank G. Dunn, 2009
Text: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Luke 3:7-18
Somebody asked a couple of weeks ago where to buy an Advent calendar. I pondered a minute on the fact that I don’t think I have ever actually bought an Advent calendar. When my kids were growing up, we used a red and green chain made of construction paper. Inside each link was something to do to get ready for Christmas. Each of the four of us, and even the dog, had a special day during Advent. Then there were some feasts like St. Nicholas Day which we always celebrated in lieu of a big Santa Claus to-do at Christmas time.
It’s fun keeping track of time when you think you’re waiting for something special—as special as Christmas is to a kid. I don’t know that it is so much fun counting the days until you go in the hospital for surgery, or the weeks left before your case comes to trial. But we are creatures who are peculiarly attuned to time. We are conscious of past and future, although we only know of them in the present.
If you are waiting for Christmas, you can quite literally count the days, the hours, the minutes before it arrives. You can know precisely when it will be here, how many more shopping days left between now and then, and when it will be over with. That is because Advent calendars and date books and Blackberries and Palm Pilots all measure clock time. Χρονος it is called in the New Testament. But there is another kind of time, just as real, maybe even more real, than the time measured by clocks and watches. It is what the New Testament calls καιρος, and it has more the sense of “season” or “the right time” or “the favorable time.” It can also mean a fixed point in time, and can mean a period of time, such as the span of time when Pontius Pilate was procurator or when Augustus was Caesar. One of the things that καιρος means is the time of crisis or the last times. There is a good deal of interest in the last times, or the Messianic times, in the New Testament. People in general start thinking about the last times when they become increasingly convinced that things are bad and getting worse (and that is a good deal of the people a good deal of the time). When John the Baptist appeared in the desert of Judea preaching repentance, he appealed to people who were already on the tiptoe of expectancy, ready to welcome the arrival of the last things. Of course, the “last things” did not necessarily mean the end of the world so much as it meant a thorough housecleaning by the Coming Messiah. Wheat and chaff would be separated, good and evil sorted out, and a great big bonfire set to take care of worthlessness. If you are waiting for that kind of event you are definitely waiting for a καιρος, not a χρονος, moment.
It is frequently said that when Jesus came people were particularly ready for him because they were expecting such a καιρος moment. That is partly true. We rarely experience καιρος time unless we are open to it, awaiting it, anticipating something different. That is one of the funny things about these καιρος events: they are frequently missed, dismissed, undervalued, and misunderstood if we are not attuned to them. But it is partly not true because there was a very old idea that God was going to show up in human history, and was going to look quite different from what Jesus turned out to look like. Our prophet in today’s first lesson, Zephaniah, was one of the clearer voices proclaiming the Day of the Lord. He did this six hundred years or so before Jesus actually appeared. (That is to say that Zephaniah was about as temporally close to Jesus as, say, Henry VIII of England is to us.) Most people don’t remember what was in the news three or four years ago, and couldn’t care less about what was happening a generation or two ago, let alone what somebody was announcing six hundred years ago. But this is exactly where our community of faith has a different sense of time and of reality from the sense that prevails in the world of ordinary human affairs. We think not so much in terms of χρονος as in terms of καιρος. What’s a year? What’s a century? What’s a millennium? These things don’t matter nearly as much as the coming to birth of a Truth, a Presence, a Reality that folks are open to, ready to embrace, eager to greet.
The Day of the Lord, Zephaniah said, was not pretty. It would be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry. He doesn’t sound too different from many a voice in the present period who are telling us about climate change and terrorism and global economic meltdown and endless war. And, generally speaking, Zephaniah was saying all these things with the hope of making a point: that Jerusalem—Judah—had to change, had to renew its Covenant with the Creator, had to change its ways. Think of Zephaniah as proposing a massive intervention in Jerusalem, much as we might confront an alcoholic or substance abuser. The point is not just to predict doom; it is to get a change in behavior. You can see the parallel between him and John the Baptist. John’s idea, like Zephaniah’s, was not to announce the great and terrible dies irae of God’s judgment; it was to confront and exhort people to repent. It was, after all, as Luke says, “good news.”
A piece of relatively good news is that this is not the only Advent season that we are likely to see. There will be others and others and still more, well past the lifetimes, I suspect, of everybody here. Of course, there are always predictions of Doomsday, and a great many people buy into them. The Mayan calendar runs out in 2012, and many see that chronological time as a kind of καιρος moment signaling the end of the world. Conservatives and reactionaries swear that as the old order crumbles, the world will simply go to hell. Some of them seem plenty pleased with that. But liberals, too, predict dire consequences of economic disasters and climate apocalypse. Nobody seems to be selling much hope.
Unless it is the faithful proclaimers of the gospel, like, I hope, you. With our eyes open and with clear heads, we are once more articulating an Advent message. “My spirit rejoices,” we say, “in God my Savior.” Sing aloud, O daughter Zion! The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst. Look at him: a victor dancing in the midst of you like a young, strong, vibrant warrior, far more intent on singing than on fighting, far more taken with his own dancing than with his enemies, for more enchanted with you his beloved than preoccupied with his enemies.
We keep talking this way because we believe it is the Truth. It may take six or seven hundred more years, or maybe not, for it all to come around. But we know. We have seen it before. When we thought there was absolutely nothing to be done and no hope for the morrow, a young woman conceived and brought forth a son. He showed us how life could be lived out of love and not fear. He came among us and washed our feet when we could only compete, forgave our sins when we thought we’d be stuck in therapy forever, taught us that in giving we would become rich, and that in learning to die we would strangely learn to live. In him, the old Day of the Lord stopped being something to dread and became something to celebrate. And we even believe that when we gather around a table today, hearing and seeing a new priest speak words he spoke, he is powerfully and surprising present, making out of many individuals one body capable of actually adding joy to the world.
© Frank G. Dunn, 2009
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
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