Advent Meditations

Sunday, November 27: The First Sunday of Advent

Today begins a season of daily meditations based on the little book recommended by Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, Always We Begin Again, by John McQuiston II. In his introduction, the author briefly relates his discovery of the Rule of St. Benedict, and how he came to take a sixth century rule for monastic life and put it in contemporary language for ordinary people in the twenty-first century world.

As we begin Advent, ponder how it is that when we are sometimes unconnected from the world of religious language and ceremony, something will fall onto our path that blows our minds, totally altering the way we see our lives and the world we live them in.

What happened to McQuiston is not terribly different from what happened to a friend of mine, nor what happened to me. In the mid 1980’s I was searching for a way to spend a sabbatical. I talked with a person who put me in touch with a woman who lived in a neighboring State. When I contacted the woman, she told me the story of how one day, hunting for antique china, she happened upon a bookstore. After it fell from its shelf onto the floor three times in a row, she picked it up and opened it. It was The Rule of St. Benedict. It led her to discover Benedictine spirituality. I later joined her and about two dozen others for several weeks at Canterbury Cathedral participating in one of the first Benedictine Experiences sponsored by the Canterbury Cathedral Trust.

Sometimes the moment must be right. Ironically, I kept Always We Begin Again by my bedside for upwards of ten years. Only now that our new bishop has encouraged us to do so am I taking it and reading it, more than simply looking at it. The time is ripe. That is not a bad image of Advent. Open and read. Open and ponder. The Reign of God is at hand.

Monday, November 28: Feast of Kamehameha and Emma, King and Queen of Hawaii, 1864, 1885

The First Rule

The meaning of life cannot be learned, says Benedict. To think otherwise is a delusion. The meaning of life can only be discovered by living faithfully a life which transcends understanding.

Wow! That calls into question some of my most cherished assumptions.

“The first rule is simply this:

“Live this life
And do whatever is done,
In a spirit of Thanksgiving.

“Abandon attempts to achieve security,
They are futile,

“Give up the search for wealth,
It is demeaning.

“Quit the search for salvation,
It is selfish,

“And come to comfortable rest
In the certainty that those who
Participate in this life
With an attitude of Thanksgiving
Will receive its full promise.”

Tuesday, November 29

Each Day

Resolve on waking each day to treat each hour “as the rarest of gifts.” I am not what some call “a morning person.” I am becoming more of one as I get older; but for years I have done well to drag myself from bed and begin the day with mindless teeth brushing. To begin again living consciously, mindful that every day is a gift to be enjoyed, not a to-do list to be completed, is a radical change.

Every day is shot through with eternity, if only I can stop to hear it. Every day is a portal of the divine, if only I peer through it. Every day is a coming of the Reign of God into the present. Can I, shall I, be present to the One who comes?






Wednesday, November 30: Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle

Paramount Goals

To live fully is to embrace life thoroughly. There is nothing to fear in life, nothing to fear in death. Whatever comes we can greet gently and firmly.

Andrew was the first one that Jesus called. The first thing he did was to find his brother Peter to introduced him to Jesus. Practically every picture of Andrew in the gospels shows him bringing others to Christ. I need an Andrew, a messenger or a message, to turn me towards the Truth and walk me to it.

The Truth is that I need training. I need to practice turning my heart to Grace. I need to cut loose from the fears and desires that often drive me, centering instead on the deepest Truth of the universe, which is God, and on the deepest Truth of my Self, which is non-self, which is God. Here I am, old as I am, and I am like a kid. I have to begin again each day. I have to be born all over again.

What sustains me is the knowledge that if I simply let myself be brought to Christ, he who is Truth itself will make me free to be the person I am created to be.


Thursday, December 1: Feast of Charles de Foucauld, Hermit and Martyr in the Sahara, 1916

Good Works

Do good. For whatever good you do, you do not just for those for whom you do it, but for the life you thereby give yourself.

There are many things in my life I could regret, were I one to make regret a habit. But of one thing I am confident: never have I regretted, nor shall I regret, a good deed. Even when I have discovered that the one who sought my helped actually ripped me off, I would rather have erred on the side of generosity than on the side of meanness.

Good works are good even if the motive behind them is less than pure. For no motive we can conceive is ever totally altruistic. When we are conscious as best we can be, we can decide to do good without seeking a reward for doing so—not recognition, not thanks, not some pat on the back by a God made in our image waiting to congratulate us for making it into heaven. Goodness is its own reward.




Friday, December 2: Feast of Channing Moore Williams, Missionary Bishop in China and Japan, 1910

Teaching and Learning

We spend millions and billions of dollars in this country improving education, or so we think. So we hope. But ask nearly anyone to tell about a favorite teacher and chances are you will hear a tale about a man or woman who demanded excellence, who was fair, who cared about the student, and whose example inspired others to learn. We learn because of the relationship we have with whoever teaches us. We learn because someone asks more of us than we are aware we have. All the techniques and tests and standards in the world are no substitute for a relationship of trust and respect.

The things I have learned best are the things I have had to struggle with. The greatest learning experiences I have had thrust me into that awful place of confusion and frustration. And the very best learning experiences I have had are those in which I was tempted to give up somewhere about mid-way.

Teach by example. Learn by emulation. That is the way the disciple grows.

Saturday, December 3: Feast of Francis Xavier, Missionary to the Far East, 1552

Leadership

In his book Building the Bridge as You Walk On It: A Guide For Leading Change, Robert E. Quinn contrasts “the normal state” with “the fundamental state of leadership.” In my normal state, I am ego-driven, putting my interests ahead of the collective interests of my community. I tend to stay in my comfort zone, running no risks. I tend to define myself by how I think others see me. I usually seek comfort, which means that I stay in a reactive state, solving problems as they come along.

But I can move to the fundamental state of leadership, which comes not by my being elected or appointed a leader, but by my decision to accept my own creativity. Instead of fighting change, I begin asking what change I can create. I begin putting others’ welfare above my own, as I nurture trust in my networks of relationships. I move outside my comfort zone, seeking honest feedback, growth, and competence. I continually confront myself with my own hypocrisy, the gap between what I say I believe and what I actually do. And I pursue my life with confidence and a sense of purpose.

Is it possible for anyone to live in the fundamental state of leadership? Let’s hope so! Because another name which we could give it would be “living in the Spirit.” We could call it “walking by the Spirit,” a term St. Paul uses.

The irony in following Christ is that we become “leaders.” We move into that state of leadership which he embodies and exemplifies.

Lead without fear.

Monday, December 5: Feast of Clement of Alexandria, Priest, c. 210

Right Relationship

My whole practice of Christian living changed when I learned that the “righteousness” of which the Bible frequently speaks is not a kind of moral goodness, let alone purity, still less an unquestionable ethical rectitude. By “righteousness,” Scripture means right relationships. It is when those relationships are out of whack that the purposes of God are at risk. When, for example, I take on the role of God, I arrogate to myself responsibilities and privileges that do not belong to me. The same is true if I exploit others weaker or more vulnerable than I.

Our understanding of right relationships changes over time, and that is appropriate. There was a day when parents were assumed to be all-powerful over their children. We have come to understand that there are appropriate limits to parental power. Likewise in former ages people believed that the rich and the powerful had prima facie the blessing of God, and that those socially subordinate to them properly bent to their control. No longer do we believe that.

Preserving or restoring proper balance in relationships is what the work of the reign of God actually involves. We continue to goof it up, by such things as having too exalted a notion of our own importance, or too debased an idea of our own worth. The work of the spirit enables us always to begin again the task of bringing our relationships into balance.

Tuesday, December 6: Feast of Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, c. 342

Self-forgetfulness

Obedience comes from the Latin audire, meaning “to hear.” To obey is truly to hear, and to respond accordingly. It is no accident that Christian thought produced a powerful metaphor when thinking began to imagine Christ as “the Word.” It was not a new concept, but the notion took on new life when applied to Jesus. Word of the Father, in flesh appearing, announces that the Reign of God is at hand. It was then, and is now, at hand: the infinite wooing the finite, the divine penetrating the human, the eternal breaking into time. And the Word must be heard that his Way may be followed.
On one of Christianity’s most popular feast days, it is worth remembering that we know practically nothing about Nicholas, except that he was persecuted. If legends count for anything, he had a reputation for being particularly giving and especially good with children and seafarers. We can be reasonably sure that behind the reputation for saintliness lies the life of one who in his own way heard, obeyed, and followed his Lord. That he is remembered at all is not the point, nor would it be for you or me. All any disciple can do is to hear the call, obey the summons, and join him on his Way. Like Nicholas or those other disciples in the gospels, we drop our nets—our agendas, our plans—and follow.

He never takes our lives from us that he does not give them back again, whole and free.


Wednesday, December 7: Feast of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, 397

Silence

I once lived by myself for a month. During that time I wrote, I prayed the daily office, I had a minimum of human contact, I called and talked on the phone with my family regularly. But as I recall it, I never experienced silence. I don’t know that I ever have been silent. My “monkey mind” continually chatters inside my head, thinking this and that and the other, jumping from subject to subject, rehearsing speeches it will make when given the chance, re-running conversations that I have had or wish I had had.

Right now I feel the pull of the Silence of the night, the quiet of the inner processes of my cells and tissues, the white of the page beneath these words, the spaces that support the weight of the things in the room around me. I need to listen.

No more words now.


Thursday, December 8: Feast of Richard Baxter, Pastor and Writer, 1691

Humility

“The way to affiliation with the sublime is not to add, but is to take away more each day until we have been freed, even for desire for perfection.”

I hear that and it evokes from me a sigh of relief. I do not have to add things, activities, resolutions, prayers, projects, in order to be right with God.

I hear that again and I get a little nervous. What about the people, the things I care about? What about the fight for justice and equality? Does that count for nothing?
I hear it a third time and smile. Humility is not being different from me. Humility is simply being myself. Not being myself defined by my ego, nor presented by my various personas, nor given over to my indulgences, nor eager and zealous about my spiritual state, nor fretful about politics or economy, nor second-guessing myself because I am too happy about this or not happy enough about that.

Stop.

Shed, one attitude at a time, till having left old skin behind, I am simply the person of earth that I began by being and will end in being. A person of the earth, of humus, humble.

Real.

Friday, December 9

The Twelve Stages of Humility: 1

Keep consciousness alive. It is sacred. So is the time in which it exists and the space in which it lives.

There is a tremendous reluctance on the part of human beings to become a conscious species. We prefer to amble through life, repeating mindlessly the myths that others have spun, substituting things for relationships, developing armor to shield ourselves from our feelings. Those are not bad things necessarily; they are just the signs of massive unconsciousness.

Pay attention. Notice what is going on around you. Listen to your own heart. Do not judge. Just listen.

When are listening to things close at hand, including our own souls, we are practicing the humility that allows us to pay attention to others.


Saturday, December 10: Feast of Karl Barth, Pastor and Theologian; Feast of Thomas Merton, Contemplative and Writer, 1968

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 2

Distrust your own will.

Karl Barth and Thomas Merton, one a great Reformed theologian and the other a Roman Catholic monk, died on the same day in 1968. From Barth, who shaped much of the debate that dominated twentieth century theology, I have a story. Towards the end of his life someone is said to have asked him if he could sum us his rather vast theology in one sentence. He replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” From Merton, I have a prayer, a part of which is this: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so…”

It is clear to me that my desires keep me whipped into a state of excitement all the time. I do not mean just the desire for food or drink or sex. I mean the desire to be accepted, the desire to be effective, the desire to make some difference in other’s lives. Even this writing comes out of a desire to do something useful, a not insignificant part of my being.

And the fact that I think that I am following God’s will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

Notice what you crave. Do not judge; simply notice. Be aware that the second stage of humility is not to have no will, but to be very skeptical of your will. For chances are it arises from a clot of desire that might have nothing to do with the person you were created to be and are aching down deep to become.

Sunday, December 11: The Third Sunday of Advent

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 3

Accept our limitations.

The oldest characteristic of human beings, once we became a conscious species—if you can call us that—is the desire to be immortal. Most of our mythologies include a dimension, if indeed they do not center, on the obsession of human beings with immortality. Indeed many people today, Christian and non-Christian alike, assume that the whole thrust of Christian religion is to get the individual believer into heaven at death.

Still we die. And not just in the end, but all along the way. We die a thousand deaths, from the loss of innocence to the loss of memory, from the death of embarrassment when some family secret is exposed to the loss of a home or a driver’s license in our tenth decade. Much that happens to us is nothing that we can control.

Why fight it? There are fights worth having, but the fight against mortality is not one of them.

Embrace the fact that you will not live forever. It has nothing to do with what comes after this life. It has everything to do with coming to terms with who you are in this life.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a creature.

Monday, December 12, 2011

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 4

Be patient. Be thankful even for your injuries.

There is a fine line between embracing one’s hardships and being a masochist who seeks hardship for its own sake. A great many Christians take persecution in particular to be a sign of their own vindication, and thus are quick to don the robes of the victim, the persecuted, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

But there is something here not to be dismissed as neurotic or unreal. There are hard things that inevitably come our way, testing our mettle, causing us to question our motives, our abilities, our identities. Such things may teach us what we absolutely need to learn. While we are kicking and screaming at the fire whose flames lick and tear at our flesh, we might remember that absolutely nothing need be wasted. Everything, no matter how difficult, can be a means to bring us closer to God, and thus closer to the destiny that is ours to claim.

Richard Baxter, whom we commemorated last week, wrote a memorable line: “Take what he gives and praise him still through good or ill who ever lives.”



Tuesday, December 13: Feast of St. Lucy, Martyr, 304

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 5 and 6

Do not lie to yourself nor conceal your faults, but be ruthlessly honest.

Sounds good. The truth of the matter is that each of us lives by a story, one we tell ourselves about ourselves. Only rarely do we examine those stories, and more rarely still do we change them. One of my mantras is, “If you do not choose a story, a story will choose you.” Better make sure that the story we are telling is true.

My early childhood I lived in an alcoholic home where secrets were kept and bottles hidden. It took me years, on becoming an adult, to learn not to cover up mistakes or faults. Now and again I still encounter myself edging towards the needless lie (“I tried to call you;” “I was tied up in traffic”) which is nothing more than rearranging my façade to present a prettier persona to somebody else, who, if smart, will likely see through the lie immediately.

Confession is not bad news but good news. It is the practice of looking squarely at ourselves, neither exaggerating our faults nor minimizing them, taking stock of our lives, letting the light of Truth shine in all the dark corners, ready to own our defects, ready to make amends when possible and necessary, prepared to take a step towards becoming free and whole.


Wednesday, December 14: Feast of San Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross), Mystic, 1591

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 7 and 8

Our most profound idea is the merest fantasy.

Well that’s disappointing. I don’t know that I have ever had profound ideas, but I have certainly loved some of the ideas that I have had. I remember when I was about 27, I spent a week in an inter-personal relationships lab. At that point in my life, ordained less than two years, I cared deeply about making an impact on the world. To be honest, I wanted to make a name for myself. The little boy who used to read the encyclopedia voraciously in the fourth and fifth grades wanted to be in it. The idea I loved was affirmation, recognition. Fame.

Our culture teaches us that certain things matter, and that a few things matter a whole lot. One is success. We spend much of our youth gearing up to be successful: building résumés, making connections, getting into the right schools, knowing the right people, getting the right job, networking the right nets to get the right career move or change. And all of it turns out to be empty, a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Ask nearly anyone who has made it to the top. They will tell you that it is not the top, but the very things you have right now, that make life rich and full: friends, relationships, opportunities to give, moments of quiet, maybe even time with God.

I have lived long enough now to see that a great many mediocre people made it into encyclopedias, as did a great many wicked people, and a great many unhappy people. Finding one’s true path generally involves tuning out the siren-songs wooing us with things like success, fame, security, and listening to the true guides who can help us hear the Word.

Who are your guides, and where are they leading you?

Thursday, December 15: Feast of Robert McDonald, Priest, 1913

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 9

Refrain from judgment.

Most of us understand “judge not that ye be not judged.” I am not so sure that we understand what it is not to judge in a more general, global sense. We are deeply trained to judge. This is hotter than that. That is softer than this. This is good, that is better, the other is better still. And so on. Some would argue that not only language, but the structures of the mind that produce language, are intrinsically tied to judging.

To move beyond judging is at the very least counter-intuitive, which is why so few people are able to do so. We find it very difficult to look at ourselves, let alone other people, and not think such things as, “I could do better. I could do more.” Nor is it inappropriate or unhelpful to be able to do that. Still the challenge for us is to be able to be present to something or someone, whether a part of ourselves or some other person or situation, not evaluating but simply being. It begins by practicing such actions as replacing “I caught myself thinking such and such,” with, “I noticed myself thinking such and such.” I thus can begin to observe, to ask questions, to pay attention, to let the organism that I am absorb data, take in information, without having to label everything with a value judgment.

Thus we begin to develop the strength necessary to be humble.

Do not fear that you will never be able to make a value judgment again! Judging is a faculty that we will hardly lose, so much a part of us it is. But training in humility requires exercising something besides judging.

One word for that something is openness.

Friday, December 16, 2011: Feast of Ralph Adams Cram, Richard Upjohn and John LaFarge, Architects, 1942, 1878; Artist, 1910

The Twelve Stages of Humility, 10-12

Never take pleasure in the shortcomings or misfortunes of another.

I would not think of laughing at someone else’s misfortune. Would I?

I cannot imagine or recall a time when I smiled with glee when someone I knew slipped and fell from grace, nor a moment when I licked my chops when a competitor or an enemy stumbled or took a loss. Well, not since childhood. Or maybe college.

But what I wouldn’t think of doing in the face of one of my friends, I find myself doing all the time when I see political figures whom I dislike suffering setbacks. I rejoice to see hypocrites exposed. I chortle when I hear demagogues make fools of themselves. And none of these things adds anything to humility.

What would happen if I practiced seeing my “enemies” as human beings with flaws? Could I do that and still oppose what seem to me to be clearly wrong-headed and anti-gospel positions? How would I go about that?

I am beginning to see how far from humility I am.

By daily pursuing the habit of humility I might be able to become more humble, more open, kinder.

I think am beginning to understand why grace is something without which I can’t do it.


Saturday, December 17, 2011: O Sapientia

Routine

Routine is good. Not all routines are good.

Most of us have routines, because generally we are creatures of habit. The question is whether your routines are good ones that serve you well.

St. Benedict saw the wisdom in having some structure in which to live daily life. His rule, which of course is the basis of McQuiston’s book Always We Begin Again, divided the waking hours into times for worship, times for study, and times for work. This threefold division has tremendously influenced Anglican spiritual life. We are at our best when we balance worship with study and work or Christian action. We are not so strong when one or more of these is given short shrift. The same is true for individual Christians.

I go through seasons. Some years ago when living through “The Benedictine Experience” at Canterbury Cathedral, I identified the fact that there are times when my rhythms seem naturally to resonate with discipline and other times when they don’t. Almost always in the fall, for example, I find myself getting organized. Frequently in the warmer months, I slack off. I have also learned that I cannot sustain but so many disciplines at once. I used to pile on the disciplines like so many layers of clothing until I would find myself bowed down by their weight and suffocating from too many resolutions bearing down upon me. I have learned to go lightly with the disciplines, and to strike a happy medium between routine and flexibility.

As we begin the last week of Advent (the days of which are called by the name of the “Great O” Antiphons sung on the Magnificat at Evening Prayer) it may be helpful to remember that the Wisdom (Sapientia) from on high that orders all things is the power that enables us to sort out soul-refreshing disciplines from soul-withering habits.


Sunday, December 18: The Fourth Sunday of Advent, O Adonai

Stewardship

The real issue of stewardship is nothing more and nothing less than the issue of how to be a (successful) living organism on this planet. It is the matter of how we relate to the world around us.

We have a choice between two options. Either we can possess, or we can share. If we choose to possess, we have at our disposal an entire physical and psychic system that has evolved to do exactly that: to get what it needs, but not to stop with that; to go beyond need to control. It can be argued that control itself is a need that we have developed. Perhaps. The point is, it comes naturally. We have only to observe other animals to see how natural it is.

The gospel introduces a second possibility—and by “gospel” I mean the Presence and work of the Spirit of God. That possibility to live in a way that recognizes our contingency, that sees everything in our lives as a gift. We own nothing, not even ourselves. That is the basis of a life of sharing. Not only might we share what we have with others, we can accept what they share with us. Sharing is more than largesse, either yours or someone else’s. It can also be a sort of common ownership wherein we take responsibility for the things we use (including public spaces, for example) as if they belonged to us with the proviso that we never be stingy or possessive.

Monday, December 19: O Radix Jesse; Feast of Lillian Thrasher, Missionary, 1961

Service

Living life as if the pursuit of goods and recognition is its purpose destroys it.

Perhaps the clearest call of the gospel beckons us to give ourselves in humble service to those in need, sickness, or some other adversity. The woman whom we remember today is an example of what that means. Lillian Thrasher grew up in Georgia, heard the call of God as a young woman summoning her to a life of mission, and went to Egypt after she had read in her Bible, “I have seen, I have seen the affliction of my people which is in Egypt, and I have heard their groaning and am come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send thee to Egypt.” Would that it were always so simple to discern the call! Lillian probably thought it was anything but simple. She began an orphanage without any steady aid until the Assemblies of God gave her some. Despite hardships, political turmoil, and war, she kept her orphanage running, caring for nearly 25,000 Egyptian children during the course of her life.

In our struggles for justice, it is worth remembering that, while systemic change is difficult and necessary, along the way there are many times that the best, and perhaps the only, thing that we can do is to give a cup of cold water to the thirsty in the Name of Christ.

Tuesday, December 20: O Clavis David

Meals

What might happen if every meal we ate consciously as if it were a eucharist?

A trait that runs in my family is grazing. My mother grazed, frequently stopping by the refrigerator or a cabinet to get a handful of something that she could eat. My older brother seemed to have insatiable cravings. I am no stranger to the habit of grazing. The only way I seem to be able to avoid it is to make a conscious decision—and a periodic re-decision—to be absolutely ruthless in not eating mindlessly.

It is possible to eat mindfully. There are some simple practices that can transform mealtime. Choose one meal a day to eat intentionally and consciously, focusing on the act of eating. Refuse to do anything else—no texting, no emailing, nothing that will interfere with eating mindfully. Eat at a table. Appreciate the appearance of the food (it helps to eat healthy food that actually looks good!). Focus on each mouthful, its flavor, texture, and the feel of chewing. Don’t rush. Chew well. Use cutlery, and put it down between mouthfuls. Talk and share with someone, concentrating on the experience of eating as opposed to things that distract from mindful eating. Go for small amounts eaten thoroughly.

Eating is one of the most important activities that any living being can do. Let it nurture the life we seek to be living.


Wednesday, December 21: Feast of St. Thomas, Apostle; O Oriens

Worship

The heart of worship is thanksgiving. It is not an accident that eucharist means thanksgiving. There are other things that worship typically includes: confession, adoration, supplication. But giving thanks is central.

We can go nowhere where God is not. We can do nothing that is outside God’s awareness. God is nearer to us than the air we breathe, more accessible than our very bodies. But these are mere words unless we are open to the Presence that permeates everything we are and do.

Worship is not a matter of forms or words so much as it is being tuned in to the sacredness of life.

The Great O antiphon for today is, “O Dayspring, Brightness of the Light Eternal, and Sun of Righteousness: Come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.” Worship perennially invites the Dayspring from on high to come into our awareness (it is already around us and within us!) to enlighten our hearts and minds. There is no better way to invite the Light than to practice simply being thankful.



Thursday, December 22: O Rex Gentium

Guests

We are all guests in the world, and all equally present in time.

The most artificial distinction of all is the distinction between oneself and others. For practical purposes we make that distinction all the time. I am I; you are you; they are they. However practical that might be, it is indeed artificial, if not downright false. For we are all in this life together, part of one species, part of one history and part of one future. In perhaps his most frequently quoted lines, John Donne said, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Thus there is a sense in which every guest that comes into my house or my church is no more a guest than I. We are all involved in the human experience, and thus bound to one another in ways that defy easy categories and simple analyses.

Standing at the heart of profound and eminently practical truth is that we simply must do unto others as we would have them do unto us. I treat a guest as I would wish to be treated myself. I accord honor and defer to a guest realizing that I am giving away nothing—nothing at all—for the guest is as much a part of me as my arm or my face.

That is why humility, on which topic St. Benedict dwelt so much, is essential to living in accordance with deep truth. Humility is recognizing that the ego-drawn boundary between me and the next fellow is totally useless, not to mention false and demeaning. It is precisely when we give ourselves away that we discover our selves in the faces and hearts of those to whom we give them.



Friday, December 23: O Emmanuel

Community

Humans live in groups, and honesty and candor are essential both to the health of the community and the individuals in it.

What would happen if our public discourse took into account that we are all members of a single human community? Sometimes I walk by the Willard Hotel downtown and muse on the fact that in the Old Willard the term lobbyist was coined to name the persons who hung about the lobby waiting to buttonhole legislators for their own purposes. What took on a name (it certainly was not born then, in the Grant Administration) has now become an art form, or a science unto itself. Everyone has an interest—and the competing voices build to a cacophony that drowns out not only the weak but even the strong who refuse to use their strength to degrade others.

It is not a pretty image to paint these two days before the Church begins to sing of the Savior born unto us at Bethlehem, of him who is to come again in power and great glory to judge the world and to right all wrongs.

Something must change. And the change that must come is not one “out there,” but one that first must take root in your heart and mine. Indeed the phrase “Become the change you want to see” is wise. That change is a rebuilding of the human self. God, the Architect and Builder of the New Self and of the New Age, is also the Mother who gives to us New Birth. We must be born all over again, begotten from above, so to say. Instead of living to protect our interests, the New Birth brings us to live essentially for others. Instead of living to acquire things, security, status, we inch with birthpangs into a world of giving, risking, sacrificing.

And this New Birth is nothing less than Emmanuel’s being born in us. God with us, God for us, God in us: O come, O come, Emmanuel, and save us. Build out of our disparate desires your own beloved community. Be born in us today.

Thanksgiving Beyond Good Luck

Thanksgiving Day may be our least corrupt holiday in the United States. It is hard to make giving thanks into much of a spectacle, as one can do with Halloween, Christmas, or even Easter. There is somewhere in the cracks of civil religion and its twin culture religion an allowance for thanksgiving as a worthy thing to do.

I am not sure what they do with Thanksgiving who do not have a god to thank. Perhaps it is sufficient simply to take note of one's good fortunes and to rejoice that one is lucky. But for those who have any semblance of belief in God, thanksgiving poses no problem. For even if our lives are clogged and pent with an abundance of misfortune, without much trouble we can find something somewhere that has come our way through no particular merit of our own, through no heroism or talent or ability that we have exercised, some little or big something for which we can take no credit. Instinctively we want to say something like, "Wow!" or maybe even "Thank God."

Thanksgiving began in a world of agriculture, an industry that few people in modern America engage in--certainly not in the sense of the cultures in which it arose. Harvest festivals, like planting, engendered rituals consisting of prayers, chants, dances, and other acts. When life depends upon good weather, rodent control, a minimum of mildew and rot, managing various pests, not to mention having enough to plant and not having to eat seeds instead of planting them, then it stands to reason that one might want to curry favor with the gods in charge of the universe to get some help in a daunting task. And when there is anything to harvest at all, much less an abundance, thanksgiving seems somehow too appropriate to have to explain.

Thanksgiving is not a situational activity, however, so much as it is a way of life. It is a state of mind and soul. One does not have to live on the margins of planet earth in order to be thankful--nor does one have to break records of good fortune in order to find a reason for Thanksgiving. Rather, the thankful heart is not preoccupied with counting blessings, but in noticing the benefit in all things. The thankful heart embraces not only good fortune but misfortune as well, knowing that even those things which cause us inconvenience or even grief can be the very agents of growth. The truly thankful heart accepts whatever comes as exactly what it needs.

Can one be thankful amidst suffering? Can we be thankful even when our souls are grieving or in pain? Can we be thankful even if, God forbid, we should be slowly starving to death or slipping out of this world sped along by deprivation or cruelty? You will never know the answer to that unless and until you get to the edge and find out there in the direst of straights you might ever imagine that you have it in you to give thanks even in those things and for those things. You do not want to go there and neither do I. But it is certain that in the most abject of circumstances one can find it possible to be thankful only if one has practiced being thankful over and over again. In hard times and in good, in depression as well as in joy, we can open our minds and hearts to the possibility that in the leanest of years there is something to sustain us; in the darkest night, there is some angel bearing us up until the dawn; in the strangest of countries, a companion who knows and charts our way; on the bleakest day, the gift of becoming.

To live like that is to live eucharistically, thankfully. It is to lift up our hearts to the Lord of Life, not measuring our blessings, but rejoicing in all things. Only the loss of such a God could ring the curtain down on thanksgiving. And the God whose hand is open wide to fill all creatures with plenteousness, is so lasting, so true, so sure, so dependable that you can actually believe God's promise: I will be their God and they will be my children and I myself will be with them.

Could we ask for more?

Right Here Beside Us

Calling up the Ancestors on All Saints

On a cool August morning with about eighty other people, I stood in front of a Buddhist shrine in a Colorado valley as a Native American drummed and chanted, calling up the ancestors to accompany us on a pilgrimage that would last for a week. We had gathered to explore the stories that bind us together for good or ill in the present world. I do not know much about my ancestors—specifically mine—who lived before the 19th century. I remember only two of my grandparents and none who came before them. My parents’ stories ran as far back as their grandparents, aunts and uncles, with an occasional anecdote preserved about Great-aunt Julia, because a piece or two of her jewelry came my family’s way when she died. But I knew a handful of names that I could call out loud and strong in the swelling tide of sound raised by that four-score people. We sounded like a chorus of great birds, a swarm of giant insects as we voiced our names that rolled out into the mist for a few seconds that seemed magnified and lengthened by the sheer power of the sound.

That was a very human moment. We were humans, not crows or bees or some other species. We were doing something that human beings alone among the creatures of earth do. With our memories we preserve stories from our past, and with our voices we tell them, passing on the information we need to survive. Along the way we have learned to sing, dance, paint, mime, act, carve, and write. Sometimes we look into the future and imagine what a new world might look like. But nearly always we tell stories and create scenes from our past. You can go the world over and find that what we were doing on that morning in Colorado is of a piece with what peoples everywhere do. We remember the dead. We honor them, sometimes even when we would think in sober moments that they did nothing to deserve honor. We set aside days and seasons to remember simple deeds that become more heroic as passing time gives them height and weight. They are important to us, because we generally have a sense that somehow they do not abandon us when they die. They hang around, unseen and usually silent. We imagine that what they learned they can teach us.

What we are doing on the Feast of All Saints is very like what that crowd of people was doing in Colorado. We have invoked the names of ancestors, some heroes and heroines in the faith, some even known for their opposition and challenge to the faith as they inherited it. We have called out names and placed on the ofrenda signs and tokens of people known mostly or only to ourselves. Not only have we thanked God for them; we have cried out for them to stand here beside us as we walk our journey.

As universal as is this habit of relating to the dead, not everyone does it nor does everyone approve of it. There are lots of reasons not to, if you are looking for one. First, aside from occasional ghosts and poltergeists, there is little evidence that the dead are anything other than dead and gone. Second, in a large swath of our rationalistic Western society, anything that doesn’t serve immediate materialistic goals is suspect if not disdained. Moreover, a host of abuses and not a little silliness has grown up over the years in lots of places when people have turned things like prayers for the dead into elaborate schemes for money making, encouraging a culture of superstition and ignorance. One could go on, but I don’t want to give you gratuitous reasons for spurning All Saints!

The deeper question, far more important than the issue of how human beings can take a good idea and make a mess of it, is why we have this need. What moves us to keep an annual feast for calling up the ancestors?

On the most basic level, we humans are conscious that we are who we are because of so much that so many have done before us. It is no accident that nearly all of our major stories and sagas and epics crystallize around the idea of a journey. We know we are going some place. And we realize on a very obvious level that we did not begin the journey. Others have brought us thus far. It does not take much for us to see, too, that each of us is a product of our parents who are products of their parents. If you are lucky enough to live to see two or three or four generations in your family, you can see before your very eyes how it is that not only physical characteristics are passed down from one generation to another, but how behavior has an uncanny way of replicating itself, too. I look into the mirror and am increasingly startled to see my father’s face looking back at me. I see a photograph of myself and can tell that my mother’s smile is the one I wear. Over my bed hangs a photograph of my great-grandparents and their large Victorian family, taken in 1902. In the center is my great-grandmother Burroughs, who died 19 years before I was born, yet whose expression I see when I catch a glimpse of my face in a shop window as I pass by, and whose eyebrow arch I frequently see my younger daughter bearing. I doubt that dolphins and dogs are aware of such things, but you and I are aware of them all the time.

But the Christian community knows a truth that is stronger, deeper still. We know that the whole story of the human race is a struggle of life against death. We know that the things that often masquerade as life-giving—like power and status and prestige and money—are often the very things that wring the life out of us. And we know that some things like crucifixions and martyrdoms and persecutions and bloodshed that look like things to be avoided at all costs are sometimes the very things that mock cruelty, that in a peculiar way advance the journey of the human race in giant leaps, and even sometimes set us free. We know that ultimately the dying we must undergo is nothing to fear because nothing in this world can take us out of the hand of the Living God, and thus we cannot fall out of the reach of Providence. We know that we live in a world thinly veiled from a powerful reality made of non-material stuff, a spiritual reality that underlies and overarches and supports all that goes on in this workaday life of ours. Not only do we know, but we celebrate the openings to that world when the veil is torn by things like baptism, letting us glimpse and feel the Presence of God in the form of acceptance, incorporation, renewal, affirmation.

We know, too, that though our eyes cannot see them, there are hundreds and thousands of people known by their witness to the Truth and still felt by the love they left behind, now marching in glory. We ponder their examples, believing them to be no more “dead” in the true sense of the word than our latest breath. We know that they are aiding us by their prayers because prayer is nothing less than conversing with the living God to whom they are united. We picture them now, a great multitude which no one can number, from every nation, from all tribes and people and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, singing, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Like most of the things in which we believe that encourage and strengthen us, like love, hope, grace, the image of our ancestors in the faith cannot be weighed and measured. But we capture enough of it that it drives us forward, confident that we, too, will get to the place where we will hunger no more, neither thirst any more, nor be struck by scorching heat. We have already taken our places beside the Lamb in the center of the throne, who is our Shepherd. You have a place there too, and he will guide you to springs of the water of life and wipe away every tear from your eyes, save perhaps those of sheer joy that has run through your marrow when you have called out the names of the blessèd dead, saying with all your might, “Stand here, stand here, beside us!”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Holy God!

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18

Leviticus is not a name that engenders much applause among forward-thinking Christians. The third book in the Bible, in some ways the crown jewel of the Torah, with its elaborations of the Ten Commandments, is one that a number of us find nauseating because it has been hurled so frequently as a weapon against sexual minorities. But there are some things that are not so rough in the Book of Leviticus—not so rough, that is, unless you are really ethically challenged. Leviticus sees a deep connection between the nature of God and profoundly ethical behavior. The headline of the whole work is, “BE HOLY, FOR I THE LORD YOUR GOD AM HOLY.”

More than any other word we could think of, “holiness” expresses what we mean by “the sacred.” It is not something that is owned by one religious tradition. In his book The Idea of the Holy, written many years ago, German theologian Rudolf Otto noted that holiness is peculiar to the sphere of all religion, and is only secondarily transferred to the sphere of ethics as well. It is the experience of the holy that blasts the neat categories of the rational and puts us in the terrain of the inexpressible. We have come to use the word “holy” to mean completely good. Well, that’s not quite accurate. The holy is the real innermost core of any religion. Only in relation to that core can actions and behavior be said to be “holy.”

It is important to get our minds straight on what the holy is, because frankly it is not on the list of the top things that most Americans want to be. Or think they are. But the truth of the matter is we are created to be holy. Or, to be more precise, we are created with the capacity of being Godlike, else it would make no sense for God to issue the command, “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” Sometimes I muse about where we human beings get that idea. Of course, the tradition is that God actually spoke in revealing terms laying the notion out plainly. And that may well be. But you have to allow for the possibility that God could speak on and on about holiness—or this, that, and the other—and it would all be for naught unless human beings had the capacity to hear it. And that is to say that we carry around with us the idea that it is possible to be different from what we would be if we were just left to our own devices and desires. Left in the wild, so to say, we would revert to basic mammal behavior, looking after ourselves, our young, and our own kind, with loyalties only to our den, our pride, our herd, our flock, our warren. Left to ourselves, we could quite easily behave more as reptilians than gods. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is perhaps still the classic narrative of what happens to a community of humans that, with all constraints of civilization removed, goes down into the sinkhole of savagery. Boys will not only be boys, but savage boys if left completely to themselves.

But let us not make the mistake of thinking that there is anything necessarily godly about civilization itself. We continue to make that mistake by thinking and believing that anything that controls human behavior, that produces ostensible progress, that shapes human community is necessarily a good thing. We ought to know better. Crowns and thrones perish, kingdoms rise and wane, civilizations come and go. And while all that is happening there is in the center of human experience an impulse to live differently. And while that impulse may not in every instance equate with the current of holiness that comes out of the nature of God, still that impulse keeps surfacing. We humans keep grasping every now and then the idea that we are being called from outside ourselves to live differently, to lay aside some of our most intuitive and automatic behaviors. And the Book of Leviticus testifies that that call is from nowhere other than Yahweh, God, Lord. Yahweh frees and also commands, “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

The slice of Leviticus that we heard read today is not particularly hard to get a handle on. Indeed its ideas are very popular with many people, religious and non-religious. Don’t render an unjust judgment. Treat the poor and the rich alike. Do not go around slandering people. Do not hate your own kin. Reprove your neighbor, because you both are a part of the same community and what each of you does affects the other. Don’t be vengeful; don’t bear grudges. Love your neighbor as yourself. Who could take issue with those things? If this were all that is involved in being holy as the Lord God is holy, most of us would sign on without hesitation. We have Jesus to thank for teaching us that it is not so simple as that. Being right with God involves more than being ritually pure and legally flawless. And we have Paul to thank for hammering home the point that the essence of wholeness or salvation is not the keeping of a set of rules, no matter how sensible. We become holy by participating in the divine nature that Jesus embodies, and which through baptism and life in Christian community he shares with us.

And what is that divine nature, that holiness of God that God invites us into practicing and living? You won’t be surprised if I tell you that it cannot be neatly summed up, will you? No, it cannot be, precisely because the holiness of God stretches through all space and time and oozes as well into every cell of your body. We cannot cram it into the category of moral perfection, or even boil it down to right relationships, for holiness is like the source of all the energy in the universe, driving the entire cosmos. We cannot pick out a theme here or an idea there and say that we have laid hands firmly on what it means to be holy, because by its very nature, the holy eludes us. Nor can we reduce holiness to rational ideas or concepts, because what Otto called “the numinous” is trans-rational, mysterious, beyond our ability to describe and prescribe. If we had to choose some basic element by which to depict holiness, it would doubtless be the metaphor in which holiness most often appears in the Bible: fire. Like the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who saw the world itself as an everlasting ball of fire, the tradition sees the holiness of God as a consuming, purging flame, licking up everything opposed to the nature, truth, and faithfulness of God. So we may well scratch our heads and wonder what on earth or what for God’s sake does God mean by “Be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy.”

And yet, among all the ritual regulations and liturgical directions and sexual proscriptions in Leviticus, there is something that arises out of the Holiness Code that beckons us forward and upward in the progression from primal protoplasm to the God-nature shot through with glory. It is generosity. There is something about God that, when all is said and done, is exceedingly kind and generous. The fact that we would even be conscious of such a thing is itself a remarkable gift, for on our best days we realize that this life we are living can be so much better if we are not concerned only with our own safety and livelihood, but with the welfare of others, and that is a godly thing to think. “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien, for I the Lord am your God. You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; I am the Lord.” That is not all there is to holiness, but that is a key aspect of it. God’s hand is generously open with every gift humanity could possibly want, let alone deserve. And our hands are to be no less open. For we are to be holy, as the Lord God is holy.

And that brings us to the stretch of weeks which we inaugurate today, a season you have become accustomed to if you have been in this or some other church for much time at all. For this is fall, and it is the time when we talk about money and the virtue of generosity and such things. I want to level with you. I do not mind talking about money (Jesus talked more about it than any other single subject). I do not mind asking you to give generously to St. Stephen’s, where we try our level best to do ministry that we perceive the Body of Christ cannot not do. But I mind very much wrapping an exhortation to give your dollars for ministry in some kind of religious sophistry that constantly edges away from the plain fact that ministry costs. The older I get the more I realize that the things that cost much are not necessarily the things that are worth much, but the things that are worth much frequently cost a great deal. The relationships in my life that make my heart sing require gentle tending and nurturing. The things that I do that make much difference in mine and others’ lives cost time and effort. And the causes and communities that actually help make the world a better place for all God’s creatures deserve as much money as I can possibly share. The practice of stewardship is about nothing else than practicing the virtue of generosity–not just in church and to church, but everywhere. It has to do with how you tip the wait staff and how you give your time and whether you listen to someone else’s story as well as to how you give to St. Stephen and the Incarnation. It has to do with the attitude we have—or don’t have—which cherishes our neighbors the way we cherish ourselves, or ought to cherish ourselves. Generosity is the spark of holiness that lights the way for us to live intentionally the life of the One who says, “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011










 

Just Imagine

Ignatian Prayer and Scripture

Isaiah 5:1-7
Matthew 21:33-46

Over the years I have heard about everything in the liturgy criticized for one reason or another. But this week I have wracked my brain trying to recall if I could remember someone’s suggesting that scripture not be read in church. Perhaps there has been such a time, but I cannot recall it. Some have wondered why we read three lessons, as opposed to one or two. Some devotees of The Great Vigil of Easter want to read as much scripture as possible. But virtually no one suggests that we ought to dispense with reading the Bible. The reason to read it seems obvious. It is the sacred story of the Covenant People. Nearly all Christians, although they may disagree on how to read scripture, assume that the Bible has something to say. And if you ask folks what they most want out of a sermon, they will nearly invariably say that they want the preacher to show how the Bible is relevant to ordinary daily life.

Along comes a pair of passages like the ones from Isaiah and Matthew today on the theme of God’s vineyard. The meaning of them is not particularly obscure. The Isaiah passage, sometimes called “The Song of the Vineyard,” describes the House of Israel as God’s vineyard. As the planter and owner, God sees a vineyard that has not lived up to expectations. Instead of bearing lots of fruit, the vines have grown wild grapes. Thus God will destroy the vineyard. The parable of the wicked tenants in Matthew is even less obscure, since Matthew has taken care to put it in allegorical form. The prophets all come to Israel and one by one are rejected. Finally the Son comes and is thrown out of the vineyard and killed. It certainly conforms to what Matthew knew was the story and fate of Jesus.

Although their meaning may be fairly plain, what are we to do with passages like these? What are we to make of them? In a larger sense, this is the perennial question facing the community of faith in every generation: what are we to make of any scripture? How do we use it? How does it inform our life? One sermon, of course, cannot get into all the nooks and crannies of interpreting scripture. What I’d like to do today is to look at the way this image of the vineyard is used and to see what that has to tell us about hearing the message of scripture in general.

I

Picture a singer standing at the entrance of the Columbia Heights Metro station, singing something that sounds like a ballad. She begins with what sounds like an ancient couplet, “I will sing a song for my friend, a song of love for his vineyard.” We don’t have to know much about vineyards in Washington, DC, for such a singer to get our attention. What we need is for the singer to be good—good enough to get a couple of people per hour to pause and listen. But she is better than good. She is amazing. She halts our rush to Target or to Starbucks just to pause and listen to the sweet strains blending words and melody. By the time she gets to the second verse, we begin to realize that this is a tragic poem that she is singing. She begins to sing of how her friend who owns the vineyard despairs of vines that only produce sour grapes, good for nothing but to be spat out. The intent listener begins to wonder what on earth has gone wrong. Is the story about some disease that has invaded the vineyard? Is the singer an environmentalist making a point about the dangers of pesticides? We listen on. The riddle is solved, but in a way that is alarming. We, say singer and and song, we the people of Washington are the vineyard. And the lover who so sweetly planted us is the Author and Giver of Life. We are the ones who are his darlings. Then, in a plaintive, haunting lament, the singer ends the song, and by now several dozen people have stopped to listen. The vineyard planter looks to us to have produced justice but instead found only injustice. Instead of right relationships, he hears only a cry, only a cry. Only a cry. The singer stops, slips through the crowd and is gone.

Who was that singer? Where did she come from? Is she just another religious nut stirring up guilt? Shouldn’t we know the name of someone who is that good a singer? Her song hangs in the air; and the ending: what can we do about the ending? We walk away, not knowing exactly what, and get it out of our heads by continuing up the street, avoiding a street vender, ducking into Tynan’s for a cup of coffee, eventually being absorbed in the wave of people oblivious to anything but their own lists.

Look at what has happened, just in the last two or three minutes. A text—or even the oblique reference to a text—has caught our attention and in some way begun to work on us. You know what that experience is like because you have had it. You have seen a movie that has done slightly less than change your life, but that has entered your mind like hot steel, cleaving your soul, leaving you wondering, wondering. Or you have read a book that you can’t quite let go. That is what Isaiah intends to do. As he proceeds to show, the Song of the Vineyard was simply to get the attention of Israel so that they could identify with the plight of the vineyard, take responsibility for their own devastation, and know that the One to whom they owed their life was none other than Yahweh Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts. Isaiah then proceeds to articulate a series of woes—seven in all—that implicitly indict those who have betrayed the covenant by undermining right relationships and by subverting justice. And why does he do all that? Ultimately his aim is to bring his hearers around to changing. It could be said that he is foretelling the future, and that might be true. But equally likely, he is describing a situation that is unmistakably true and present in the community’s life. His short-term goal is to proclaim the absolute trustworthiness and righteousness of God. His long-term goal is to bring the people into a renewed covenant relationship with God.


II

Jesus might or might not have told the parable of the wicked tenants the way we hear it in Matthew’s gospel. An older version appears in Mark. Unlike most of the parables it is an allegory, wherein everything and everybody represents a person or an idea or an event. Whatever else Jesus did, it is quite likely that he used the image of the vineyard straight from Isaiah to make his point. His hearers, the authorities of Israel, knew well enough the Song of the Vineyard. But Jesus introduces the figures of tenants, suggesting that the problem was not the vineyard at all, which unlike Isaiah’s vineyard, produced perhaps bumper crops of good grapes. The problem was rather that those who had tenancy of the vineyard were scoundrels. When slaves come from the owner to collect the produce, the tenants beat them up. Finally the owner sends his son, who he is sure the tenants will perforce respect. Wrong! The tenants, perhaps knowing that as tenants they have rights of possession, proceed to assassinate the one who stands in their way, the heir.

As a good storyteller, Jesus then sets up his hearers for the inevitable response. What will the owner do? The answer is obvious. He will avenge the death of his son! He will put the tenants to death, the hearers answer (Jesus does not comment on that!) and lease the vineyard to other tenants who would give him his produce in due season.
Then Jesus does something that later tradition was to make much of. He quotes from Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.” He does not spell out the allegory but tells plainly its meaning. The kingdom of God will be taken away from the religious leaders (the tenants) and given to a people producing the fruits of the kingdom. He then issues a not-so-oblique threat, saying that the “stone” that was “rejected” will cause anyone who falls on it (stumbles upon it) to be broken to pieces and anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.

So here is another way that scripture is used. A metaphor, the rejected stone, referred to in scripture, is mined out of its setting and used to drive home a point, in this case a prophetic warning. The chief priests and the Pharisees get the point all right. They know that he is talking about them. And they react with characteristic and predictable rage, determined to arrest Jesus. It is absolutely fair to say that this was indeed the result that Jesus intended. The entire passage in Matthew’s gospel suggests that Jesus intended to press the point with the chief priests and Pharisees—and by extension the ones whom they led—that their days in charge of God’s community were numbered.

The story does not stop there, of course. Either the Church found in the tradition this nugget of a parable traceable to Jesus that it could confirm as a keeper precisely because sooner or later it came true. Or it doctored up the parable to bring it in line with recent events. Either way, it is a story that demonstrates what happens when those in charge of God’s vineyard are faithless, and a story of what happens in history when the rejected one (Jesus) becomes the keystone or cornerstone.






III


But the most important question perhaps is always, “So what”? That is indeed the question that The New Testament is forever addressing. One typical response to those who read the Bible, and especially to these kinds of things in the Bible, is to jump to a moral meaning, a “moral of the story,” as it were. That is not always bad or inappropriate, especially if one gets from Isaiah the message that we need to reform our ways and get ourselves on the side of justice; or if one gets from Matthew the message that we need to produce the fruits of the Reign of God. An unfortunate response that some make is to use such passages as anti-Jewish propaganda, projecting onto present-day Jews the profiles of ancient Israel ironically drawn from texts out of the heart of Israel’s own sacred tradition. A counter-response that liberals typically make is to silence Matthew and others from saying what they have to say because we are embarrassed at what can be and has been construed to be words and images that put Jews in a bad light. Another reaction can easily be that we treat all this material as far too abstruse to be of much use, all the historical issues having been settled, and the symbols and language too incendiary to risk using.

St. Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises uses a method of pondering scripture that could help us here. He takes a passage, like the parable of the wicked tenants, for example, and encourages the listener to move into the content of the passage with one’s senses. What colors, odors, sounds do we hear in the vineyard? And whom do we relate to? The tenants? The slaves? The owner? The son? Typically one uses one’s imagination to move into an experience like that being described, always for the purpose of coming closer to Jesus, clearer in one’s relationship with God. In that way, reading scripture is definitely a form of prayer, a piece of communication with God that is continuous with external life as well as with internal psyche.


IV


If the central question is, “So what?” surely the second question is, “What difference does it make?” What happens when we read scripture imaginatively, opening ourselves up to have the scenes, the words, the ideas make a deep impact upon our consciousness? Little by little—or perhaps on occasion, in a leap—we change, and that is the heart of what the entire gospel is up to. That can probably happen only when we begin to see ourselves in the stories. Are we the poor slaves who are just trying to do the master’s bidding, beaten and abused by the powers we confront? Are we the tenants who have robbed the owner by arrogating to ourselves what does not belong to us? Or are we some of both, depending on which day of the week it is and where we find ourselves in a particular pecking order? What is the Word that God is speaking and that Jesus is embodying right now? And do we rejoice at the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone, or become angry and depressed because in so doing he overthrows our own power? It is marvelous in our eyes or noxious to us, quite honestly?

The gospel, indeed the whole Bible, can be good news or bad news for us, depending upon who we are and where we are in any particular story. But that is part of, maybe the biggest part of, the challenge to which we open ourselves by opening the book in the first place. It is the likelihood that when we read or hear the scriptures, we will come to a moment of recognition. A split second later, we may well find ourselves having to decide exactly what we are going to do with this Jesus who shakes our foundations, how we are going to respond to this God who hounds us demanding justice. Such a moment came to the chief priests and Pharisees when they realized that he was speaking about them.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Lows and Highs

Prayer and the Mind of Christ

Philippians 2:1-13

“Son, don’t act like you’re going to die just because you are feeling a little puny,” my mother said on more than one occasion. “You’re just like Uncle George. The minute he got to feeling bad, he was moaning and groaning and telling Aunt Nora that he wasn’t long for this world. Just like him.”

Although I am not one of these people who hasn’t been sick a day in his life, I have been remarkably healthy for the most part for over five decades. Yet when I feel the first scratchiness that presages a sore throat, and especially if I succumb to lying in bed with a virus, as happened twice several winters ago, I begin to hear Mama’s voice overriding my own moaning, “Son, straighten up. You’re just like Uncle George.”

Mine must not have been the only mother who says such things, nor mine the only family where people get pegged as copies of ancestors. We come to this earth not only trailing clouds of glory, but, like the little girl on the Morton salt box, pouring behind us indications of undeniable DNA. I hear myself talking sometimes and have to stop and think if the voice I hear is really mine or if it belongs to my father. Or my mother. Or Uncle George.

In a very real sense, the project of Christianity is the project of changing human beings. As a faith system, Christianity is about transformation, a remolding or remaking the human person to be different. Partly, of course, it has to do with our moral training, despite the fact that many Christians remain dreadfully confused about exactly what is moral. Simply put, the entire effort of the Christian Church is essentially about the creation of a community that so catches the Spirit of Jesus that we manifestly live in a way that is unmistakably like him. Not to put too fine a point on my mother’s dictum, it is as if someone might see or hear us, observe us as individuals or as communities and say, “You’re just like Jesus, no kidding.”

Now the second thing you may want to say to this is, “No way.” The first thing you may want to say is, “But how do we know what Jesus was like? How can we be sure?” Hold on a minute. There is something more fundamental at stake here than our rush to react to what might seem a dubious proposition.

That fundamental something is the fact that Jesus deliberately gathered a community. For the average Christian, this is so unremarkable as to be taken for granted or ignored entirely. But did you ever wonder why the disciples were even necessary? Forget the canned explanations. Ask yourself why Jesus would even have bothered with them. He selected what seems to have been a monumentally obtuse bunch, don’t you think? Yet the tradition is not the least bit in doubt about the fact that Jesus chose a community to share his ministry and in some sense taught them. He did not choose instead to be a lone ranger. Christianity is not about individual projects of personal salvation; it is about a community in where all the members work out their salvation together, even if it means doing so with some trepidation and nervousness. Why? Because we are all in this together. It is the nature of humans to form community because we are interdependent, no matter what some politicians or the financial establishment argue to the contrary.

So when Paul writes to the Philippians, in the warmest epistle he ever wrote to a community, he betrays a certain concern that perhaps they still have the a bit of the Old Adam in them, what Mark Twain called, “ordinary human cussedness.” It was likely coming out in the form of petty jealousies and rivalries, things that are the very best ways to undermine community. Why else admonish them to “be of one mind, being of one love, sharing accord” among themselves? Then he launches into one of the most sublime passages in all his letters, perhaps in the entire New Testament. Maybe he was quoting from a hymn that he knew churches like the one at Philippi frequently sang in their worship. Or maybe it was a creedal poem that he or someone else had written. “Have this mindset, or attitude, or frame of mind,” he writes, and then proceeds to describe the “mind” or “thought” that Jesus had. The community is to exhibit the character of its mentor and master. Or, to borrow from one of Paul’s metaphors elsewhere, the body was to follow where the head led. Since there is plenty of encouragement in Christ, since there is the incentive of love, since there is mutual participation in the life of the Spirit, since there is shared affection, there is plenty of reason and abundant strength on which the Philippians can build a more solid community.

This “mindset” or “orientation” that Jesus had is not so easy to get a grip on. The essence is this: Jesus had every opportunity to be or to remain exalted, since he pre-existed this life as God. But in fact he chose not to “grasp” or “cling” to equality with God, but did the opposite. He emptied himself. The rich for our sake became poor. The powerful divested himself of all power. He submitted himself so thoroughly that he became the willing slave of all, humbling himself to experience the totality of human life, including death itself. And not just any death, but death on a cross, the ultimate badge of rejection and dishonor. It is totally counter-intuitive for human beings even to imitate that, let alone to choose to do it because we want to. Quite the contrary. We are taught, especially in this culture, from day one that the goal of life is to succeed, to acquire, to compete. It is not too much to say that the very narrative of Jesus has been warped and twisted by knaves to seduce many a marginal population into servitude on the strength of the notion that to be relegated to scut work, to be underpaid, to be knocked around and ripped off is to be like Jesus, or at least to be like the poor who he said would be with us always. But the essence of Jesus’ community is not to be cringing dogs who slink away from abusive masters, but rather self-giving individuals whose identity is not what we can get for ourselves but what we can give for others.

The project does not extend only to the people who happen to sit in church on Sundays. It goes well beyond the borders of the community. The Church in fact exists not for itself alone but for the sake of the world that Christ died to save. If he emptied himself, so do we. If he gave his life for the sake of the world, so do we. This is what the Church has not learned terribly well. In many places we still cling to old behaviors and old mindsets, which, though not necessarily divisive and destructive, are desperate measures to hold on to what we have and to who we have been. The model of Christ is just the opposite. Let go, let God, let grace guide us into continually spending ourselves for the sake of the world.

Fine. We can say those things and even maybe believe them for a few moments during a sermon. But how can we actually live them? Can we actually live them? And, if so, how? Notice that Paul, who is no stranger to scolding people, does not wag a homiletical finger at the Philippians trying to shame them into behaving differently. The whole point he is making calls them to ground themselves right where he grounds his argument: in the foundational story of Jesus. Think as he thought. Do as he did. The community can hardly do that without being committed to serious prayer and assiduous practice.

The truth is that if transformation is to happen, we have to open ourselves to the process of change. Prayer pries us open. Praying opens us up, of course, to the suffering of the world when we notice and care enough to intercede for those who hurt and ache, indeed for the entire creation that is groaning in the pain of abuse and misuse. But praying is not just, or even primarily the opener of the soul in that sense. To have the mind that we see in Christ Jesus involves our constantly turning to and gazing upon Jesus himself. Obviously a place to begin is the gospels. But Jesus is not just found there. Jesus is also present when the community gathers to share bread and wine, his body and blood. Yet Jesus is not just there either. Jesus, if you believe what he says, is present when two or three are gathered together in his Name. But Jesus is more than that, too. Jesus is in the faces of the poor, the dispossessed, the oppressed, the marginalized, the condemned, the executed, the hosts of men and women who are dragged through the courts and sentenced to die just as he was. Prayer sharpens both our sense and our senses to behold the Body of Christ in every part and every cell of his creation, each of which bears the unmistakable stamp of the Word which calls all things and all creatures into being. And prayer can also be shutting off the lights, turning down the sensory data, stilling the tongue, putting down the pen, pulling the shades down so that we, retreating into our deepest selves, meet the One who is resplendently alive in the heart of darkness and silence. It is not one kind of prayer or the other, but both. Activists need contemplatives and contemplatives need activists, and no matter which we are, we probably need to practice some of what does not come so easily to us in our prayer, just so that we can learn something of the fullness of him who emptied himself and submitted to death.

It is interesting that the Philippians hymn goes on to say that God has highly exalted Jesus as a consequence of his self-emptying. God has given him a Name that is above every Name, that at the Name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father. You may think that that piece of it has nothing to do with you. And perhaps you are right, inasmuch as it really goes beyond what Paul is saying about unity in the Church. But maybe there is something embedded in this old hymn, this majestic poem that is so true that it goes beyond even the confines of the Jesus story. Maybe the Truth, as heavy as gravity itself, is caught up in the paradox that giving is oddly the way of receiving; that abasement is followed by exaltation; that emptying oneself of power and prestige is the true road to glory, not just for Jesus but for all. Don’t count on the world to document that terribly finely. But every once in awhile somebody bothers to believe it and it makes all the difference. You can almost count them on your fingers and toes, they are so rare. Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis, Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa, St. Margaret, St. Elizabeth,… No, you can’t count them. The numbers stack up. There are more than you would think, more than you can number. Some are sitting right here who have given up a day to be arrested in the cause of justice or who have given up an evening to intercede for Troy condemned to die, who have gone to Israel to wage peace, who slug it out for the spurned immigrant. Long grows the list of ways in which ordinary folk do not count themselves as the darlings of God, but empty themselves and become obedient to the most human of all things, the leveler Death. Wherefore their names, united to the Immortal Son of God, are written in heaven.

© Frank Gasque Dunn

Ten Years After 9/11/01

The following is a speech I made at the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, on September 16, 2001. I shared the program with at least a dozen other clergy, most of whom invoked the Bible as a warrant for retaliation against the enemy. It was assumed by nearly everyone there that we would certainly go to war, which turned out to be accurate. But that is not the only thing that was accurate, as it turned out.



I speak in the name of God, the Creator of all, the Redeemer of all, the Sanctifier of all.

When the nation was clamoring for revenge and retaliation for civilian American lives tragically slaughtered by the enemy, and every avenue to avert war had been exhausted, the President of the United States signed the Declaration of War. Then he put his head down on the cabinet table and wept.

The President was Woodrow Wilson. The year was 1917. And the day was Good Friday.

America entered a war that had begun with a terrorist act: an organized assassination. It was the cruelest and ghastliest of all wars this planet had ever known. You can read the Books of Remembrance in British churches and see page after page of names of young men who were slaughtered in the trenches of France. Literally a generation of the young was wiped out in the horror that ensued.

I don’t know why the President wept on that Good Friday afternoon. Did he weep for himself? Did he weep for America? Maybe it was because he knew, as he told a veteran news correspondent and editor, “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance….” Or was it because he sensed the deep irony that on that very day when the Christian world was remembering the death of Jesus, he was signing the death warrant for Christ to die all over again in young doughboys who would lie beneath crosses in places like Flanders Field?

We meet today at the monument of the turning point of another great war. We meet in a town where an incredible number of young lives were wiped out in an invasion that ultimately would mean liberation from a regime of unprecedented horror and evil. America entered that war only when, on a quiet sunny morning, enemy bombs had made mincemeat of The United States fleet. President Roosevelt was outraged. The country was shocked. December 7, 1941, is still a day that lives in infamy.

Today we are faced with another momentous occasion. This time, another sneak attack. This time, an act of obscene hatred and violence carried out again against unarmed citizens. But this time, a complicated enemy hard to detect, difficult to pin down, capable of cloning its own violence hundreds of times. And an enemy convinced in righteous indignation that it has God on its side; that its acts of terror and destruction are not only justified but also holy; that its program of retaliation is compelling enough for its warriors gladly to yield their lives to fiery deaths, so right they are.

I talk today about history because human history is exactly what the Judeo-Christian tradition understands to be the sphere of God’s activity. And if we are going to speak about God, we have to look at history, God’s lesson book.

What have we learned? One lesson that we have learned is that violence breeds more violence, and terror begets more terror. We cannot play into that! If, in the best judgment of our leaders, this nation must engage in military action, no doubt the country will support them—no doubt at all. But do not be deluded into believing that that violence will not come at great cost! Far more than the lives we will lose in any one military action, the cost will spiral into an ever-broadening wildfire of hatred and revenge. Through our cries for retaliation and revenge, in so many throats this week, we need to hear and heed the words of Ghandi. He said, “If we live by the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be both blind and toothless.” Pour out instead your prayers for peace and healing as you have never done before. Envision a world wrapped in its Mother’s arms. If this dreadful attack is a wake up call, let it rouse us to double our efforts for peace: peace in our hearts, peace in our homes, peace in our nation, peace for our planet.

What have we learned? We have learned that religious intolerance and hatred, no matter of what stripe, are tools of evil. Hear me carefully. I speak in the name of the Prince of Peace. If we, individually and as a nation, turn against one another in disrespect and outright hatred, we are replicating the same bigotry and self-righteousness of the terrorists themselves. There is no difference between Islamic fanaticism and Jewish fanaticism and Christian fanaticism except the labels. All are life denying and peace shattering. God calls all people of this world into unity with God and one another. Let there be no place in this society, under attack in part because of our openness and acceptance, for finger pointing and blame laying and scapegoating. Reach out in support to Arab Americans. Join with Muslims as with all others in the family of religions and assure them of your good will. Live with courage the words of the hymn, “Who loves the Father as his child is surely kin to me.”

What have we learned? We have learned that God shows up at the least likely of times and in the worst stenches imaginable. Julia Ward Howe wrote that we have seen God in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps. Well, this week we have seen the face of God: in exhausted firefighters, in strangers reaching out to hold the grieving, in physicians and nurses and technicians aiding the wounded, in hands digging down into the rubble to clear a path for life where there is life. “Where charity and love dwell, God is truly there.” In the Persian Gulf War, when some Iraqi soldiers finally came out of their bunkers expecting to be killed by Americans, they found themselves instead washed and fed and treated humanely. That is the spirit of Christ. That is the face of God.

What we have yet to learn is that Jesus was not joking when he said, “Love your enemies.” “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who persecute you, pray for those who abuse you.” That is the lesson that the world needs to hear, and that is the way to the healing that we so deeply seek.

Whatever the reason, President Wilson was right to weep, just as he was right to sign the Declaration of War. Sometimes we have to do what we most fear. But, in the end, if we are as open, as humble, as loving as we can be, then, in the long march of history the world will become as God created it to be: free, and whole.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Good Behavior

Praying and Living Forgiveness

Genesis 50:15-21
Matthew 18:21-35

When I was in elementary school, we got report cards every six weeks. Six weeks zooms by now, but in those days it was like a semester, a term of months on end. As the weeks dragged by, I was never ever worried about what grades I would get; but sometimes I sweat bullets about what comments the teacher would write on the back. The word “conduct” named the category that was my greatest challenge. Teachers would threaten to write bad reports to parents if we talked out of turn, broke into line at lunch or recess, took up unnecessary class time with silliness, or were generally impolite to other students. I am not sure what would have happened had we spoken disrespectfully to a teacher herself. Such was so far from anybody’s mind that it was never discussed.

One grading period, my second grade teacher, Eva Stone Long, otherwise known as “Sister Long,” wrote a comment on the back of my report card. Among a couple of compliments, she noted, and I quote verbatim, “…likes to talk too much.” I was horrified. Not because it was not true, of course, but because I knew I would catch it when my parents read it. And I was totally right. Interestingly, I cannot remember what Mama said, although I am sure it was plenty. But Daddy, I recall, virtually came uncorked. The message I got from his protracted lecture was that it was fine to make any grade I made, but what would never ever do was to get a “conduct” comment. The least I could do, he pronounced, was to go to school and behave.

Good behavior generally means conforming to somebody’s idea of deportment, like Mrs. Long’s. Those of you who have grown up in a more permissive society probably have no idea of the weight that people my age and older (and maybe some a few years younger) carry around in the form of ethical baggage. It really isn’t ethical, of course. It is internalized fear of being called down for misbehaving. Now, to be sure, some people have escaped that heavy burden by kicking over the traces and becoming utter nonconformists. Such people are not likely to show up in church, not at least until they have made a bit of peace with social expectations, even in a rather freewheeling place like St. Stephen’s. And the reason is rather obvious. They see the Church as being in the business of policing people’s behavior, and they don’t necessarily want theirs to be policed. It is all right, of course, for the Church, like other institutions—school and court, for example—to nurture good behavior in other people (including our children) inculcating in them good behaviors and sharpening their distaste for bad. At the same time, this idea that the Church is all about making people nice and culture gentler is exactly what draws some people to it.

Something is terribly, tragically wrong with all this. And it is wrong not because there is anything the matter with being nice and well behaved (I want to say nothing to discourage either), but because we have somehow managed to warp the notion of good behavior to mean conforming to prevailing social expectations and specifically to exclude several kinds of behaviors that Jesus seem to think were pretty important. One of those practices is forgiveness, a theme that fills our scriptures today. I do not mean to say that forgiveness is not integrated into the fabric of societal expectations, because to some extent it is. Polite society expects that folks will apologize for oversights and mistakes, and that generally those apologies will be accepted. But forgiveness in the radical sense described in today’s gospel or in the Genesis story about Joseph and his brothers is far past anything that can be described as accepting an apology. It comes out of a different way of looking at reality. It reflects values so qualitatively different from our cultural norms that this kind of forgiveness can be rightly called subversive.

As some of you are aware, my sermons this year all look at the practice of prayer from some angle, and today’s focus on forgiveness is no exception. In its simplest state, prayer is practicing the presence of God. It is practicing being Godlike. Right there emerges some boundaries of what we do and do not pray for. To the extent that we know anything about the nature of God—and we Christians claim to know a right good bit, inasmuch as we have identified Jesus as the embodiment of God—we can say with assurance that one does not pray for the destruction of one’s enemies for example. No, one may pray for protection, for the enemy to have a change of heart, for strength to withstand the assaults of the enemy; but the Christian stops short of praying for the destruction of enemies for the simple reason that Christ commanded us to love them. He did not, by the way, suggest that we do so because it would be immediately rewarding or because it would save us lots of time resolving conflicts or yet because it would be a popular practice or easy.

The parable of the unforgiving slave is crystal clear. The slave is enjoined to treat his fellows as the master has treated him. God shows mercy on us, therefore we show mercy on others. “Forgive us our sins” is a prayer that is predicated on the assurance that we will forgive those who sin against us. Now how it is that we can pray such a thing day after day, week after week, year in and year out, while harboring grudges, driving wedges between ourselves and others, collecting injustices, hating those who have wronged us is, well, not so big a mystery. Quite simply, we do not believe what we say. We do not believe what we pray. And when we come right down to it, we don’t believe Jesus.

Need I point out that ten years ago today the People of the United States of America—certainly not without exception, but on the whole—gave to their government permission to wreak vengeance on our enemies. You may argue that the teachings of Jesus are no way to conduct a foreign policy, and I suspect Jesus would indeed agree with you, disinterested as he was in the foreign policies of empires. But that does not get us off the hook, because the hook is consistency and honesty. If you are going to wage war, wage war; but don’t try to baptize it and call it “Christian.” It you are going to hate your enemy, whoever he or she is, go ahead and hate; but don’t turn around and expect that God will show you mercy when you show none yourself. Punish your enemy if you must; but be aware that it leaves you defenseless when you pray a hollow prayer, “…as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

That is strong stuff! You will no doubt point out to me that nobody can live this way; that the nation would be in tatters if we tried it and your own life would be untenable if you risked it. Moreover, I suspect that some sitting right here could point out that the preacher today has no earthly idea of what it is to suffer untold abuse at the hands of tormentors, that your own experience of victimhood qualifies you as an exception to the ethic of forgiveness. Fair enough. I could respond by saying, “You know, you’re right. This is too hard a teaching to take really seriously. It is after all an ideal, one of those many that the gospel—indeed the Bible—is packed with. God, being really sweet, has no intention of making us feel bad about our propensity to hate, but wants us rather to feel quite affirmed. Thus, the notion of being forgiving is a nice one but altogether unworkable, a fact of which our Omniscient God must surely be aware.” And so forth.

But something else is in play here. Look at it this way. Why do you suppose that God would actually care whether we are forgiving or not? What does it matter? Why would Jesus have put so much emphasis on forgiveness? For an answer to those questions, I turn to the last chapter of the Book of Genesis, in which Joseph and his brothers finally come to terms about the brothers’ dreadful misbehavior in selling him into slavery and then lying about it, and Joseph’s response to it all. Years have passed since the brothers conspired to get rid of their pesky little arrogant sibling. Still more years have passed since famine had driven them from Canaan to Egypt in search of grain, only to find there that the presumably lost Joseph has become vizier to Pharaoh. All this while the brothers have had an uneasy conscience about their guilt, and now with the buffer of their old father gone, they wonder if Joseph will cash in on the grudge he might rightly bear against them. So they first send him a message, restating what the old man had said about how Joseph ought forgive their trespass. Joseph responds by weeping. They get up the courage to go see him, and kneeling down, present themselves as his slaves. Then Joseph says something profound. “What you meant for evil against me, God meant for good.” With that statement the story utters a profound truth. God is bigger than our projects and prejudices. In the long sweep of human activity—indeed of the world itself—the very guilt behind the heinous crime, the evil intention, the awful deceit: God has pulled all this together into the great pageant of salvation in which nothing is lost. Through the whole tragedy, God has caused a remnant to be saved, bringing long-term good out of short-term evil. Joseph thus has no effective choice but to forgive his brothers, for to do otherwise would be to pose himself against the very Word that God had already spoken.

We do, I hope, get the message: that forgiveness is the very nature of God, because God’s purposes are always to bring about good. That is what the world cannot give through the machinations of empire and the assertion of one group or one person over another. For God’s good to happen on a human scale inevitably entails more than a few Josephs who can see beyond the moment to the overarching Providence that holds all souls in life and all the world in its healing embrace.

That is the real ethical agenda of the Church. It is to continue to be the community that God has created to express this urgent push towards life, to embody the fierce compulsion to save. One cannot join or long belong to the forces of good if one’s focus shifts from forgiveness to revenge, from community to tribalism, from merciful to unmerciful. God’s work is healing and wholeness, and so the vocation of Joseph and of you and me is that same healing and wholeness that conquers hate and evil, bit by bit, when we live the words we pray, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Desperate Housewife

Prayer and Desperation

Matthew 15:21-28

America’s Four Gods is the name of a book I am reading. It is an intriguing investigation into what we as a people say about God and what that says about us. The authors, sociologists, in their research discovered that there are five types of people in this country when you divvy them up according to what they think about God. There are those that perceive God as authoritative, those who believe in a God who is benevolent, a third group who thinks of God as critical, another bunch for whom God is distant, and the fifth group who are atheists and don’t believe in God at all.

I suspect that, like many typologies, this one breaks down at several points. I simply say so based on the fact that I am not so sure I have only one basic view of God, but rather an image of God that shifts and changes depending on the day of the week. I doubt that I am alone. Still, the authors make a persuasive case that these four notions or images of God are swimming around in the minds of people in our culture, and that they have a great deal to do with the arguments we have in this country generally called “culture wars.”

It is not so much on culture wars that I’d like for us to focus today as it is the question of what idea we have of God and how that affects the way we pray. I should pause to point out to a great many of you who have joined us in the last several months that my year-long project in preaching is to look at each Sunday’s scriptures with a view to what light they can shed on the practice of prayer, a quintessential religious activity that we sometimes don’t understand very well.

There probably is no story in the New Testament that better illustrates the crisis of prayer than the gospel lesson we have today. The Canaanite woman in Matthew’s gospel (15:21-28) has a serious problem. In fact she is desperate. Her little daughter is demon possessed. But on top of that, the woman is an outsider, not in her own territory—that was Gentile and so is she—but because she stands outside Israel, and thus separated from the source of healing that Jesus brings. He is, as her address indicates, “Son of David.” If the woman were American, and were studied by the sociologists Froese and Bader to find out where she landed on the God question, it is quite likely that she would fall in the group that sees God as benevolent, engaged in the affairs of humans, but not a punitive, judging God.

How could we make that guess? Well, if her notion of God were that God is authoritative and thus judgmental, she would more than likely believe that he daughter was demon possessed as repayment for something the daughter or mother or somebody had done to anger God. If she believed in a critical God, likewise she would see that God was judgmental, but she would hardly believe that God had time to intervene on her behalf. If her view of God were that God is distant, God would be neither interested in her plight nor judgmental, but utterly unconnected with what was happening in her life. As it is in Matthew’s version of the story, the woman cries after Jesus and pesters the disciples with her cries and pleas. The disciples want her gone. Jesus does not answer her. Yet the woman keeps it up. Finally she gets a word from Jesus. It is not clear in the story whether it is to the disciples or to her that he says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel,” but either way that does not stop her. She comes and kneels in front of him, in the posture of worship and implores him, “Lord, help me.”

There are only three prayers—“help,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” So the Canaanite woman’s is pretty direct. “Lord, help me.” We could make up all kinds of things about the woman that might or might not reflect who she was. We don’t in fact know if she was rich or poor or somewhere in between; whether she was a single parent or not; whether she had other problems and issues or not; whether she had done anything else or seen anybody else to secure help for her daughter. But the point of this story is not to report a historical incident, nor to inspire speculation about the woman. The point is that this outsider, this Gentile woman, this mother, in her desperation takes Jesus on and stands toe to toe with him. So when for reasons best known to himself Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” she is undeterred. She comes back at him giving him as good as she gets from him: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Much else can be said about this woman and her role in Jesus’ life and ministry. But skip all that and simply look at her tussle with Jesus, for that is what prayer is, isn’t it? Is the woman not you in some hour of your own desperation? Is she not one of us, determined not to give up fighting for one utterly dependent on her and whose cause is a matter of life or death? Although Jesus is for us a divinity unseen, our prayers to him—to God—the two are interchangeable for the purposes of our discussion—our problem is that the concealed God is hard to get ahold of, hard to get an answer from, hard to move into action. That is of no great importance perhaps until the situation gets desperate, and then we’ll take whatever crumb we can get. Our Canaanite friend reminds us to beat God’s door down, to pester the living daylights out of disciples and saints and onlookers that stand in the way, or who look at us askance, or who try to shoo us in another direction. She exhorts us to stop at nothing until we get satisfaction from this unresponsive God who seems to mistake human beings for dogs!

OK. That is putting it a bit harshly, I admit, and maybe taking it all a little too far. But I think there is some warrant for believing that the story actually addresses the issue of desperation in prayer. From Luke’s gospel we can take a lesson from the little parable sometimes called “the importunate widow,” who pestered the unjust judge until he granted her request just so she would shut up. How much more, asked Jesus, will God grant justice to the ones who cry to God day and night? That message seems consistent with the Canaanite woman’s experience: keep on and don’t lose heart.

When we are desperate, someone hardly has to convince us to pull all the stops out. And more and more people are getting desperate as they approach the drowning point amid the tumultuous waves of this economy. People are losing jobs right and left. They are short of cash. They are out of food. They have no money for essential medicine. They are maybe a paycheck or two away from being unable to pay their mortgages or their rent or their electric bills. What has all that to do with prayer? Those who believe that God is engaged in the world, who believe God actually takes note of what is going on, whose eye is on the sparrow, have no trouble understanding that this is not a theoretical problem. And those who believe in a benevolent God—whose love is enduring and whose mercy is endless—do not get snagged by the notion that problems accrue because we have somehow angered a wrathful deity, much as one might foolheartedly arouse the anger of a mother bear by threatening one of her cubs. But what if you believe in a distant, impersonal, detached God? Do we need to convince you that prayer works? Do you need me to demonstrate how in your own desperate circumstances God is available and engaged?

The deeper I get into this, the more I realize that the way we pray—especially when we are between a rock and a hard place—is directly related to who and what we believe we are praying to. If you believe that God is actively involved in the world and in our lives; if you can even allow for the possibility that God cares about what is happening to you and me; then it does not matter much which of the four God-camps you belong to, God invites you to grapple with God and pour your heart out doing so. No room for niceties here, the careful phrasing of a collect or the beauty of liturgy. Just go to it. Pray, “Help, Lord, help!” If your God is distant and you have trouble seeing what sense it makes to pray, well, pray in whatever way you can, not in whatever way you can’t.

Maggie Ross, who is an Anglican solitary, wrote a book some years ago that I cannot part with, called The Fire of Your Life. In it she says that when she was living in Manhattan she had trouble praying and asked a friend what she should do. “Oh,” he said, “pray for things like taxicabs when you need them. If it makes you feel safer, don’t ask God for them, but pray to something inanimate like a fire hydrant.” So Maggie says that she spent several weeks experimenting with that and, when she was late for an appointment, she would pray to the nearest fire hydrant for a cab. Taxis would appear from nowhere. If ten people were along the block signaling for a cab, the one taxi that appeared would pull right in front her. She could get taxis at rush hour, in the rain, on the Friday of a three-day weekend. Then there ensued the dark night of the taxicab, and the joke was over.

That may seem bizarre to you, but I think I understand it. The reality of God has little to do with what we think of God—and that is true no matter what one of the groups, including atheist, that you might fall into. Prayer is giving ourselves over, heart and soul, to the great Mystery of the universe, crying out our need, doing what the Canaanite woman did when she interceded for her daughter, clamoring in the darkness for the Bread of Life or for healing. That God would turn and listen, respond, get with us in our weakness, hear our panic and soothe our fears is as improbable as praying to a fire hydrant would produce a taxi. But time after time, person after person, reports that it is true. For those who doggedly stick to their notion of God—whether that God is a strict judge or a critical impersonal deity or a remote force not interested in us—it takes perhaps more of a leap than they are willing to take. In the end, it does not matter what you think or what I think. Reality is reality. And until we throw ourselves on the mercy of the universe tossing ourselves upon the breast of the universe’s God, we’ll never know what works or what does not.

But you and I both know that it is not so simple as all that. At the end of the day we cannot just pray in desperation expecting God to appear out of the sky to rescue us from all our ills. A friend of mine once said that it is easier for the Holy Spirit to get you somewhere if you are already in motion, not inert. If you are hungry, either for bread or for spiritual sustenance, do something about it. Probe, investigate, ask, seek. Keep moving, talking, looking. If you are looking for work, network, talk, do all that you can to keep moving. If the Canaanite woman had sat at home and said her prayers and done nothing else, chances are her daughter would never have been healed. When she got herself up and out and on the street, determined to find the healer who could help her, she found Jesus and eventually got the assistance she sought.

And perhaps that is what prayer mostly is anyway. It is not technique or formula or theology or philosophy. It is simply moving into the Presence with audacity and courage. It is wrestling and struggling with whatever is tormenting us and giving voice to the deepest desires and yearnings of our hearts. It is taking God to task without fear and without groveling. It is letting fly with gusto and doing everything we can with the energy we have. It is when she did that that our Canaanite friend heard his word, “O woman, great is your faith. Be it done to you as you desire.”

Who knows? Will you push on and out of desperation until you hear that too?

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011