Good Neighbors

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

Text: Luke 10:25-37

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Independent Church

A meditation for the Fourth of July

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank G. Dunn, 2010

Facing Death

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

Text: Luke 7:11-17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank G. Dunn, 2010

Community Change

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

© Frank G. Dunn, 2010

Benediction for a Commencement

COMMENCEMENT BENEDICTION
May 15, 2010

Now may the One whose Word preceded every beginning
And whose Word will abide after every ending
Be with us and bless us on this day
When so much is coming to a close
And so much more is just about to commence.
Then we shall
Accept the blessings of God who prompts us to great joy
As we celebrate the success that so many have achieved
And smile at the failures that have been so graciously forgiven.

Accept the blessings of God who prompts us to deep sorrow
For those who began the journey with us
and are concluding it elsewhere
For those who began the journey with us
and are still aimlessly without a conclusion
For those who began the journey with us
and whose time on earth ended before their education could.

Accept the blessings of God who prompts us to weep
In tears of gratitude for teachers who believed in us when we doubted ourselves
In tears of thanks for siblings and spouses and sons and daughters
who celebrate with us though they do not understand
what we study
or why
In tears of respect for parents
who sacrificed more than even love could require
who labored so we might learn
who kept vigil so we could rest
who maintained hope so that we would be free from our doubts.

Accept the blessings of God who prompts us to keep our minds and hearts open
So that we can learn about arrogance without being arrogant about learning
So that we can long for peace without feeling that war is the only way to win it
So that we can labor for success without needing others to fail for us to gain it

Therefore, on this day,
May the light of learning that informs our minds
Also infuse our souls
And transform our ways
Then those of us who have studied law
Will establish justice
And those of us who have studied business
Will practice equity
And those of us who have studied science
Will embrace mystery
And those of us who have studied art
Will create energy
And all of us who have been committed to study
Will make a commitment to serve

Until every one of the children in God’s world
Who feels forced to travel in any manner of darkness
Will journey safely and peacefully
Into great light AMEN

William B. Lawrence, Dean
Professor of American Church History
Perkins School of Theology
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas

Clean Start

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

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

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.

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.

Beauty Tips for Ministers » The Genius of the Rev. Julie Blake Fisher

Beauty Tips for Ministers » The Genius of the Rev. Julie Blake Fisher

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

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

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

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

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