Conversation Starter

Prayer as Dialogue


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Prayer is the place to wrestle

 with the Dazzling Stranger

 who calls all things into question.

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

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

Diego Rivera, Woman at a Well, 1913

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

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Ashes and Glory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

My Sermon on the Mount

Prayer and Worry

Matthew 6:19-34


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank G. Dunn, 2011

Shining Light

Ethics and Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

“We are!” they would shout out.

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

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

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

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

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

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


© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Spoken Word

Prayer as Transcendent Experience

John 1:1-18


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank G. Dunn, 2010

Heart Warming

Christmas as Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


©Frank G. Dunn, 2010

Pray Tell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we pray.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

¿El Fin del Mundo o el Fin de Temor?

San Lucas 21:5-19


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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Plain View

Luke 19:1-10


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

Sinking Feeling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010

All Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010