The Blind Begin to See Again

Vision for Ministry

Mark 10:46-52

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Surprising Point of Halloween

Affirming Death, Celebrating Life

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

John 11:32-44

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Getting at the Source of the Problem

Ministry and Justice

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

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank G. Dunn

Ministry, Plans, and Changes of Plans

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

Mark 7:24-37

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ministry in the Time of Folly

Wisdom as Source and Center of Ministry

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

Proverbs 9:1-6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009

Straight, Not Narrow: So How DOES It Feel to Be Gay?

Straight, Not Narrow: So How DOES It Feel to Be Gay?

Touching the Holy and Holy Touch

The Importance of Human Touch in Ministry

A sermon preached in St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8), June 28, 2009.

Mark 5:21-43

Madeleine L’Engle, author and theologian, once said that evil is great good gone awry. Good things have a way of getting twisted. Many times human beings start out with a good idea that we turn into a good reality and proceed to make the reality into a system. First news you know, the good idea has become infected with systemic blight. Education systems, health care systems, welfare systems, economic systems, legal systems, and religious systems are just a few of those we can readily point to as having started out as good ideas and have ended up corrupted to one degree or another.

Holiness is such an idea. It has its roots in a primal human experience which we could call awe. Human beings encounter aspects of nature or dimensions of interpersonal relationships and sometimes, without any warning, we strike a vein of profound mystery. It shakes us to the core. Sometimes we are wounded, sometimes we are healed. Sometimes we are crazy with fear, sometimes we sink into unsurpassed peace. Out of such primal experiences we encounter a Reality far above and beyond us, too big for our imaginations, and certainly too great for us to control. Although it might look a little primitive to us on some days, on other days we can see clearly that ancient human beings responded appropriately to these experiences of transcendence with respect, reverence, awe, and even fear. Such experiences led our ancestors to mark off certain things as too live to touch—like so many high voltage wires or third rails that simply were too powerful to play with. Sometimes those perilous things they observed as connected to disease or relationship-destroying behavior. So they began to compile lists of things that were taboo. Every culture has its taboos. Almost no taboo is universal, but no society is without its own.

The good idea of holiness and its corollary taboos developed into the holiness code in the Book of Leviticus. Jesus inherited that, as did his whole society. It would be highly incorrect to say that Jesus dismissed all ideas of holiness. Clearly he did not, as the Lord’s Prayer attests: “Hallowed [holy] be your Name.” Moral and spiritual holiness are distinct from ritual holiness, however. Two of the many taboos in place to protect ritual holiness were the taboo against having contact with a woman who was bleeding and the taboo against contact with a corpse. If you don’t understand the strength of those two taboos, there is little way that you can understand today’s gospel, in which both taboos figure.

You can imagine what is going on in the mind of this woman in Mark’s story. Not only is she sick; she has a condition that alienates her from the rest of society and taints her as ritually impure. Even menstruating women had to undergo purification. For her, however, there was no let-up, nor had there been for twelve years. By this time, no longer is she merely sick, she is bankrupt, having spent all her money on doctors who have not helped her. Sick and poor (did you ever here of that combination?), she has heard about Jesus. She comes, anonymously, untouchable as she is, desperate for healing. She reasons that if she only touches his clothes, she will be made well. It is easy to do, so many are crowding around him. She reaches out, touches him, feels in her body the hemorrhage stop, and quickly slinks into the throng. He stops. “Who touched me?” he asks. He has felt power leave him. He looks around. Perhaps he spots her, catches her eye. She knows she is caught. Trembling in fear, she comes, falls down before him, confesses the whole thing. Usually it is his touch that heals. This time it is her touch that has brought forth the healing power. It was an act of hope, trust, faith. And it worked. Her faith had made her well. Touching him, she was healed of her disease. He says so.

It has all been an interruption. Jesus is off to the house of Jairus, synagogue leader and father. His twelve-year-old daughter is sick and at the point of death. Jairus has come up, pleading, “Please, please, please, Master, please come and lay your hand on her. I know that if you do she can make it.” By the time the nameless woman has intruded herself into his journey, what takes only a minute or two in the story is long enough in reality for Jairus’ little girl to die and for messengers to come announcing the sad news to him.

“Why trouble the rabbi any further?” There is a world of difference between a sick body and a corpse. Not only from the point of view of Jairus and any others who loved her, but from the point of view of the holiness code. Don’t you dare touch a dead body, else you will be contaminated. And until you are ritually cleansed you will be as a corpse yourself, an alien to your community, untouchable. Jesus tells Jairus not to fear, only to believe. When he arrives at the house, the mourners have started the funeral rites. Perhaps defensive and embarrassed at what seems like his silly remark—she is not dead, only sleeping—they laugh. Nuts! He puts them all outside, takes his in circle with him along with Jairus and his wife. He touches the untouchable corpse and says, “Talitha, cum.” “Little girl, get up.” She breathes again! She gets up, walks. He tells them to give her some food.

Ministry is about reaching across boundaries and chasms and touching. Sometimes it is literal. Sometimes it is metaphorical. But if we get nothing else from the stories of Jesus in the gospels, we are bound to see that he paid no attention to all the prohibitions that the holiness code set up, largely erecting barriers to keep people from polluting the religious cult. He cared enormously about ethical decisions, and profoundly about spiritual holiness. In Matthew’s gospel he enjoins his followers to participate in the very life of God by being all goodness, all righteousness. But if it is a matter of keeping the Sabbath instead of healing; if it is a decision between eating corn or going hungry; if it is a matter of observing the purity regulations or healing a leper; if it is a matter of steering clear of a corpse or raising an only daughter to life; if it is a matter of reprimanding a ritually isolated woman for “stealing” his power or confirming her healing, there is no issue for Jesus. Down come the barriers as he reaches across them. To him, nobody is untouchable. And no regulation takes priority over human need.
It is not the things which go into the body that defile a person, he says in one place. It is rather the things—the words, the behaviors, the acts—that come out of the heart of a person that defile.

For some time now I have been thinking with you about ministry, looking at the scripture through the lens of ministry. Jesus’ example teaches us something of singular importance about ministry: you can’t do much of it without touch. And you surely can’t do ministry if your notions about holiness are all mixed up. Because ministry, which in a real way is the expression of God’s holiness in the sphere of human activity and relationships, creates and restores community. We can never subordinate it to ritual purity. To do so is to take a great good and make it just the opposite. For nothing is further from the Reign of God than the depreciation of God’s children, or for that matter, anything that God has made.

Do we need even to point out that the very regulations that Jesus ignores in the holiness code are frequently those things that religious people pull out to cause or to extend alienation among people? You have eaten the wrong kind of food, taken the wrong kind of lover, had the wrong kind of sex, worn the wrong kind of clothes, gotten yourself tattooed or pierced, looked at the wrong things or read the wrong books, they shake fingers and warn. But you will never hear him saying any of that, as strong as some of his denunciations can be.

Ministry is about reaching out and touching. It is laying a hand on bread and blessing it to be the Body of Messiah. It is laying a hand on wine and touching the cup to be as his blood. And it is about taking the bread and wine into one’s own person and being transformed into the one whose body and blood it is. Ministry is laying hands on the sick and praying for the power of the Holy Spirit to possess them and heal them. It is about washing those who come to Christ in the laver of baptism and touching them with the cross of his death and resurrection. There is little place in Christian practice for stinginess with touch, though there is a large place in Christian practice for ensuring that that touch always be loving and respectful. We at least touch hands at the time of the Peace. Lovers take each other by the hand in holy matrimony, and give each other their bodies as the sacramental meeting place of human flesh and divine reality.

A young priest once went to his first parish, located somewhere near the Bowery in New York City. On his first night in the parish’s shelter for the homeless drunks, he found himself disgusted, sick with the filth of the guests. Nervously he fidgeted with the buttons taking off the shirt of a man who had thrown up all over himself. A presence beside him whispered. “Let me help you. Don’t be afraid to touch,” counseled his mentor. “That’s how they know we care.”

When Abraham took little Isaac to the foggy land of Moriah to be sacrificed, how did he take him? By the hand. And when he found that God wanted life, not sacrifice, and he brought his living son back down the mountain, how did he take him? By the other hand. Touch. In the realm of God, there are no untouchables. In Messiah’s ministry, nothing can separate us from the love of God. And whenever something threatens to, that is the very moment that an unseen but sure Presence takes us by the hand. Or, at the very least, we can reach out our hands believing that if we could only brush his garment, we would be as good as new.


© Frank G. Dunn, 2009.

Not So Fast in Dispensing With Doctrine!

Theology and Ministry

A sermon preached in St. Stephen and The Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Trinity Sunday, June 7, 2009

Anglican Christians, generally speaking, are not stirred by doctrine as much as we are by worship. Sometimes we are accused of not even having any doctrines. I hope that by the time we have finished with the liturgy today you will know better. Today is the one day in the whole year that we focus on a doctrine. We call this Sunday “Trinity Sunday,” falling always a week after Pentecost Day. But we have no other feasts—not officially, at any rate—that celebrate doctrines or teachings.

When we do focus on the Trinity, it is sometimes not in the most helpful way. I don’t even want to count the number of sermons I have heard on Trinity Sunday that either lamely try to explain the Trinity or that declare exasperation with the complexity of Trinity. Today, I want to draw back a step or two and look with you at the issue of why having a theology is important to ministry.

As I continue to look with you at ministry as fundamentally the way we live our lives in the light of God’s Truth, offering all that we are and do to God for the sake of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, I am struck by the way theology shapes action and behavior. You may think you don’t know what theology is, and you may be convinced that you not only don’t own one or even care to. But trust me: theology is the, or a, or your “word about God,” your understanding of God, whatever that is. Even if you aren’t too sure about God, your very uncertainty impacts (and not necessarily negatively) your actions and behavior. Even the atheist has a kind of a-theology—an understanding of the God not to be believed in.

Theology is essentially a story. Whether or not it is a good story depends partly on how well it is told, and partly on the storyteller. Limiting the focus just to Christian theology, we can survey the field and fairly readily see that there have been (and are) some pretty awful theologies floating around. For example, there are all the theologies that see God as essentially at war with creation. Matter is opposed to spirit. Therefore do not trust anything material. Very strange. Then there are theologies that emphasize the afterlife to the point that everything is judged by whether or not a belief or action will help or hurt your chances of getting into heaven. And there are other theologies that only take the positive aspects of existence into account, without dealing with negative, dark, shadow-side of reality. These are just three possibilities out of dozens of really bad theological possibilities.

What difference does any of this make? Let me illustrate with a couple of cases. Suppose, let us say, that you have a theology in which you view the human race as the central feature of the natural world. God, you might think, really created the world principally for the enjoyment of the human race. It has no intrinsic value. Such a theology acts not only to validate, but to encourage the destruction of the natural world. Climate change is of no importance, except as a matter of concern and convenience for the human species. Other species can live or die. God is uninvolved and unconcerned. God, rather, is concerned only about narrow choices of personal morality. Now, almost no one really believes that hook, line, and sinker. But you can readily see that, if a person or group tells such a story consistently, they come out at a very different place from the person or group that holds a theology which sees humans as being accountable to God for the way they tend to the natural world.

Take another example. If your conception of God is that of a being that metes out judgment according to strict standards, it is quite likely that you will develop a theology that creates not a little anxiety about how well a person measures up to God’s standards. If “heaven” is contingent on meeting those standards, the thrust of that theology is likely to inspire behavior in accordance with God’s perceived will. If, on the other hand, your understanding is that God’s judgment has already been issued and that humanity has already been saved, clearly what motivates you to behave ethically is not your struggle to achieve an afterlife in heaven, but rather thanksgiving for what God has already given you.

So, if theology is important, what kind of theology is actually helpful? In a word, a Trinitarian theology. And what is that? It is an understanding of God that holds three important dynamics in equilibrium. One is the notion of God as a supremely transcendent Being, at the core of the universe, the creator of all. The second is the experience that God has been revealed most thoroughly in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. The third is that God is present and active here and now in all people, but especially in the community of faith centered in Jesus. We traditionally speak of the Trinity as one God in three persons. Although the language is not necessarily orthodox, I would suggest that we can get at the central idea by speaking of God as the Truth manifesting itself in at least three distinct but interdependent ways. God is transcendent. God is also revealed in human life, especially in that of Jesus. And God is accessible and real in the present. To emphasize any one of these things over the other two is to create a story that inevitably leads to a lop-sided theology that is apt to produce or at least encourage lop-sided behavior.

What would it look like if we were to have a Trinitarian theology undergirding our ministries? First, we would likely live with the understanding that not all truth can be squeezed into rational categories. We would hold that God is greater than any of us. We would accept the fact that there is a “givenness” to the universe: limitations and laws and even the irrational are part and parcel of the reality we live in and live with. Life is not all about human beings. We are a part of creation, certainly not the only part, and dubiously the most important part, despite our powers and possibilities. We would see that there is an overarching Benevolence which spans all life.

We would begin to feel more comfortable with Jesus, realizing that, for Christians, Jesus is indeed what makes us unique. Rather than debating about whether Jesus is the only way to God (which is a poor way to spend time), we would see rather that, for us, Jesus is the connecting link between divinity and humanity, so much so that we say he fully embodies both. Divinity and humanity live together in him at peace and in harmony. We would see Jesus as our model, and that his life, death, resurrection and ascension form a story that is the pattern or our own stories. We would find ourselves living, breathing, eating, drinking Jesus, forming our minds and hearts in him, until we reflect his his life to the point that people would know him because they knew us.

And we would have a pneumatology, a doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which understands God as not only transcendent and other, not only as historically located in Jesus of Nazareth, but every bit as real and as present with us here and now. We would understand that God did not stop with Jesus, but continues to unfold Truth through us. We would reckon with the fact that Jesus said, “I have many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now. I will send to you the Spirit, who will guide you into all truth.” We would see ourselves caught up in an ongoing revelation in which our lives and our experiences became the vehicles through which God is discovered and known as Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2009