Numbers Game

Trinitarian Musings

In a remote forest miles from the nearest Guatemalan village, on a windy and downright cold morning in August five years ago, I stood in a group of indigenous people, descendants of the ancient Mayans, curious about the religious rite I was about to witness. They had a great idea on that cold morning during the rainy season, also known as “invierno” or winter there, and that was to build a bonfire. Shivering in my summer clothes, I could hardly wait. Women clad in colorful native cottons, began laying the fire, placing incense discs in a cruciform pattern. They scattered ample grain around the circle that was to be the base of the fire. On top of that they placed the pastel petals of bunches of chrysanthemums. After the wood was gathered and laid on the fire, shamans, including at least one woman, oversaw the burning of various objects—including cigars, beans, coffee, grain, and various liquid drinks, all poured on the sacred fire. Facing in turn the four directions, the assembly invoked the winds and the gods, summoned the spirits of the ancestors, and ultimately had what looked to me like a Christian healing service, the shamans taking persons one at a time and laying on hands over their whole bodies, praying for healing, prosperity, success, wholeness.

It didn’t feel so strange to me, this ceremony with roots more ancient than Christianity. Partly, no doubt, that was because it included any number of elements contributed by Roman Catholicism and various other Christian expressions from the past several centuries. I came away with the distinct feeling that I had worshiped that morning, though the language was one I did not know and various ritual practices were outside my experience. I would not want to do those modern Mayans a disservice by calling their ceremony “Christian,” because it clearly wasn’t. And yet I recognized elements of my own community’s practice, including the building of the New Fire at the Great Vigil of Easter, that bore out the fact that so many religious symbols and practices are the dances that human beings do around One God.

And that brings me to the occasion we are here to celebrate today: Trinity Sunday. Anglican Christians have been rather reserved in celebrating doctrines and dogmas. The Book of Common Prayer makes some provision for celebrating Corpus Christi, for example, but ten to one, half of you don’t miss it or even know what it is about. No reflection on you; that is just par for the Anglican course. Not so with the Trinity. Every year, joining with most liturgical Christians, we celebrate the Blessed Trinity a week after Pentecost Day. Most of the time, in my experience, preachers on Trinity Sunday either try to explain the doctrine of the Trinity or complain that it is so hopelessly complex that there is no earthly use in trying to do so. Both approaches, frankly, irritate me to the point that I usually arrange to take Trinity Sunday off, or, if not, like today, preach on it myself.

I presume to understand what the doctrine of the Trinity is driving at, which is different from saying that I presume to understand the Trinity. But understanding is not my aim today, but rather what I would call encouragement—or perhaps exhortation—or maybe, with luck, even inspiration. I would like to convince you of the value in assuming that God is so great that we cannot possibly understand God in limited rational categories. And, if that is true, then the question I pose today is how come it is “Trinity” Sunday, rather than “Plurality” Sunday? I’m not joking. Why only three ways—primary ways—of thinking about God, as if somehow God can be squeezed into that particular formula? Hold off, all ye who are traditional theologians! Give me a little room here. Let me press my point before the wheels come off your wagon.

As far back as the Priestly document that we read today as Genesis 1, and much farther, the ancient Hebrews were using “Elohim” as one of several words to denote God. The word is plural, no doubt a vestige of an even more ancient past when before “God” our ancestors had a pantheon of gods. But even when Moses molded Hebrew monotheism, there were some aspects of God that couldn’t be quite neatly pressed into the container. They were not other gods, but certainly they were dimensions of the One God that were somehow more than characteristics or descriptors. Take, for example, the Hebrew word “Shekinah,” which in later Hebrew writing is a circumlocution for the holy nearness of God to God’s people. Although we don’t find the word itself in the Bible, we do find the idea. And it comes to have great importance in the New Testament, because it is akin to the belief that God peculiarly dwelt in the person of Jesus.

While the presence of God is connected with various places, and above all with the Ark of the Covenant that goes before Israel in battle symbolically representing the presence of Yahweh, God in the Old Testament frequently appears as “the Angel of the Lord.” In a number of stories, it is clear that “the Angel of the Lord” is a way of talking about God, as is the case, for example, when Jacob wrestles with the angel. It really is God that Jacobs wrestles with, as Jacob himself says, “I have seen the face of God and lived.” In fact, the “face of God,” while clearly a metaphor, is another way of talking about the divine presence, in perhaps a stronger, more intimate way. And a third way is to speak about the glory of God. Ultimately, that is what “shekinah” comes to mean perhaps most directly.

Now, to be sure, these don’t come close to being rival gods, or different beings. But there is still another term in Hebrew literature that becomes the focus for a whole body of literature in itself. That is wisdom. You have encountered that notion. In fact, it played a part in the Great Vigil of Easter. The books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and Wisdom depict Wisdom as a helpmate to God in fashioning the world. Wisdom is clearly God, even possibly an aspect of God, but at the same time she can be spoken of as a separate person. She is the one who fashions the works of God. One can see similarities between the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit and Wisdom, as well as similarities between Wisdom and the Word of God, which becomes incarnate in Jesus.

And this is just the beginning. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all have traditions of Names of God. And in each of the monotheistic religions there is a tradition of disclaiming that any one of them is absolutely definitive or descriptive. We are heavily agreed—certainly Judaism and Islam are—that there is but one God, no matter how many names that God can wear. Christianity is slightly different because we talk of God in three persons, while insisting that all the persons are expressions of a oneness that we call—guess what?—God.


Human beings are remarkably united in the belief that there is a “higher power” or some “higher powers” in the universe. When it comes right down to it, is there any difference between the Mayan ceremony out in the woods of Sacatepequez and us who are singing “Holy, holy, holy” today? Is there any difference between the 99 Names of God in the Quran and the various names we give Jesus and the Holy Spirit, not to mention God the Father, in Christian tradition? Have we simply taken the old pantheon of divinities (such as the Greek gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus) and rolled them all into one? Is our monotheism functionally different from, say, the Hindu understanding of Atman, Brahman, and Vishnu, and all the many avatars that Vishnu, for example, can assume?

Maybe it really does not make much difference at all what we take God to be. But I have a slightly different take on it. And here is where my exhortation comes in. It is possible that the worst disservice we can do to God, or at least to the idea of God, is to assume that God is small enough for the human mind to contain God. That may be far worse than our getting mixed up and thinking the wrong things about the Trinity or getting confused about what is an aspect or what is an avatar or what is a persona of God. God is not much on being domesticated, trained like a pet or controlled like a not-too-bright friend, always doing our bidding. To live in God, far more than merely believing that there is a God, involves opening oneself to mystery, to the power of story, to the presence of paradox in life. In other words, there is no way we can get it all down to the very simple so that we can move on to the next thing. God is far more than we can sketch out with textbook definitions.

And here is what inspires me and what I hope inspires you. There is no part of life, no experience, no feeling or thought, no problem or challenge that somehow doesn’t involve God. This marvelous and messy life we are living is a process where everything and everybody is caught up in things like light and shadow, good and evil, struggle and peace, giving and taking, failing and succeeding, dying and living. God is involved in all of it in one way or another. God’s business, so to say, is not just with the nice, polite and tame parts of life, the kinds of things your grandmother thought you ought to be preoccupied with when you come to church. God is also down and dirty, in the grit and grime, in the tick bite and poison ivy, in the untamed sexual expression and the hideous birth defect. There is no place that God is not, and no part of life where God is somehow above showing up. But the Good News is that in all these things, the nature of God is community. The crucible for discovering community is relatedness. And the goal of human relationships is to express love.

And before you know it, we are back from a list of a thousand things and from a list of 99 Names to a very short list of basics. Three, in fact. There is the undifferentiated creation and the God who is present in it all. There is the marvel of community, made possible when Love emerges in human flesh. And there is energy that keeps forming human community mirroring that Love we keep striving for and which, though it eludes us, still drives us onward.

And when you give a name to those three things, they are not a proposition to be debated but a way of life in a community of utter belovedness. You can call them Creator, Savior, and Life-giver. Or you can call them by the ancient names of Abba, Son, and Holy Spirit. Put aside words and labels, and draw closer to the Fire. It is the Truth that warms and changes you until you become aflame with love itself.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

In-Flow

Experiencing Pentecost

John 20:19-23

We still have a few hours of Easter left. The alleluias still ring. The Paschal Candle still burns. Pentecost is a part of Easter. Indeed, John’s gospel folds the heart of Pentecost—the giving of the Holy Spirit—into the story of the Day of Resurrection itself. Luke and later tradition break them apart, and there is a good deal of value in that. But John and much of the Early Church saw Easter as encompassing all the mighty acts of the Risen Lord, including the coming of the Holy Spirit.

A part of the Resurrection story is that the Jesus empowers his disciples to carry on his work in the world. To take that out of the Easter story is to leave Jesus risen, but high and dry. The whole point of the Jesus story from conception to ascension is that it is as much about us as it is about him. We are united to him. We are infused with his spirit, Holy Spirit. We are alive with him, sharing his Divine Life.

But wait a minute. You have heard all that before, certainly if you have been hanging around St. Stephen’s for very long. What difference is it making? What does it mean in your life and in the life of this community?

I think you have had the experience of Pentecost, and I don’t mean coming to church on Pentecost Day. I believe that, perhaps more than you realize, you have experienced the infusion of power. On some occasion you have been faced with something quite beyond your known capacity. You might have been fearful, overwhelmed at the thought of doing something so strange and daunting. You have had a speech to make, an athletic feat to perform, a role to play, a song to sing, a particularly challenging interview, or possibly the problem of coping with an illness—yours or someone else’s—that totally knocks the props from under you. Somewhere there comes to you an uncanny power, perhaps an unexpected calm, a surge of confidence, or perhaps a kind of “zoning out” that curiously positions you to drive the ball or sway the crowd or do the task you simply would never have imagined you could.

What does it feel like? Does it feel as if something came and settled on you, some power from an external source? Or does it seem that you have been able to reach deep inside yourself and grasp a hidden strength you may never have known you had? I want to suggest that it hardly matters whether the sensation is that help comes from outside or inside. Either is an experience of “Holy Spirit.” And that is to say that both are experiences of God. God is not external to us, nor internal to us. God cannot be nailed down to such categories, but transcends them.

A few years ago Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published his popular study called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It is a fascinating attempt to articulate what happens when we get “in the zone” or “in the groove.” Going with the flow, in that sense, is more than likely what Tiger Woods feels when he hits the sweetest of shots, or what Joshua Bell must feel like when he makes the violin practically weep for his audience. I think a good argument can be made that “flow,” while an optimal experience, is indeed a relatively common one. On the one hand, we cannot be coached into getting into the flow—it is a gift. But we can be taught how to do things, how to perform or play golf or preach or write, so that eventually something extraordinary begins to happen. Skill and temperament, passion and delight align in such a way that an enormous joy abounds. The human being is peculiarly alive and able to do quite astonishing things.

That is a good percentage of what the event of Pentecost is about. It is about stepping outside one’s fears and giving oneself over to the flow of the Spirit. When that happens, power is unleashed and we are able to do astonishing things. That is in fact what Jesus promises in John’s gospel when he repeatedly teaches the disciples that he lives in them and they in him. They will do, he says, the works he does—and in fact greater works than he does—because he goes to the Father. The Father will send the Advocate who will teach them all things, bringing to mind all that he has taught them. Jesus gives his life for us; we give our hearts and minds to Jesus. Jesus comes from Abba and goes to Abba. Abba sends the Spirit to us enabling us to be the community of love that lives out the commandment that Jesus gives us to love one another and so prove to be his disciples. You can see that all of this is about our being connected—to Jesus, to Abba, to the ever-present Spirit, to each other.

But this is not quite all of Pentecost. Jesus comes into the midst of the scared disciples and greets them with Peace. Then he breathes on them, imparting his breath, his pneuma, his Spirit to them. They are overjoyed on seeing him, and they are empowered by him. Being in the flow of the Spirit means authentic peace, incredible joy and amazing power. And that is what I think is a well kept secret. It is about time we blew the lid off and let each other and the world know that this thing of living in community with Christ is not essentially about onerous chores associated with organizational life. It is rather a wild ride of sheer gladness. Sometimes it is being deeply centered in a way we can only speak of as being peaceful. At other times it is hilarity and great fun. At still other times it is incredibly stunning, this life, in its capacity to speak Truth to worldly power, to fight for justice instead of giving up, to insist on equity instead of capitulating to prestige, to resist making pacts with oppression. Being in the flow of the Spirit is not just about an optimal experience for the sake of the experience (though there is nothing wrong with that!). It is being centered, charged, and empowered to do the right thing. It is about being in the forces aligned with the Truth of the Universe, which is nothing less than God.

Yes, there is scut work to do. No, it is not all attractive. Yes, if we don’t watch it we can get burned out and become relatively useless. No, we don’t have a guarantee that we won’t become self-righteous and have to be taken down a peg or two. Yes, there are days when we tire of stomping grapes in the vineyard of the Lord. But every time one of you speaks up for justice, the Spirit of the Lord has found a voice. Each time you opt for kindness instead of arrogance in public spaces, the Spirit of Jesus walks again on the earth. Every occasion when St. Stephen’s opens its doors to the homeless and musicians and artists and truth-seekers and the hungry and the jobless literally welcoming the world to come find a home in this place, the Spirit has inched closer to changing the face of the world into the face of Christ. Every time we proclaim the gospel in words that may be strange to some but which communicate with a new population, including those who have not yet met Jesus, a new outbreak of Pentecost occurs. When we look for ways to put it all together, so that Peace and Joy and Power all find a nesting place here, then Wind of the Spirit blows through anew, shaking the foundations, drawing us tighter into its mighty flow, sweeping us forward to the future of the One who still stands among his disciples, nail-scarred but dazzling, saying, “Peace.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Them Sheep

Acts 2:42


I have confessed to you before that I am not a fan of sheep, though I must say that it is only roast leg of lamb that ultimately will stand between me and being vegetarian. Lambs are one thing; sheep are significantly different. There is all the difference between lambs and sheep as there is between teddy bears and great big black bears. Every year I have to go through a kind of uncomfortable adjustment on the Fourth Sunday of Easter trying to figure out a way to deal with the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd and my implicit role as a sheep.

You have no doubt heard, or perhaps have personally experienced the fact that to be called a sheep is not a high compliment. Sheep are not bright, are easily led, quite nearsighted, subject to all sorts of dangers, and rather defenseless against predators. While they have been for ages a highly valued commodity, they do have some notable drawbacks, one of which is, at least to my mind, a rather unpleasant odor, though in so saying I do not wish to offend any shepherds, certainly.

Nonetheless, the image of Jesus as a shepherd is one that stuck in the mind of the Church, and lots of Churches of the Good Shepherd are quite happy today on what is their equivalent of a patronal festival. The church in which I was ordained priest has a stained glass window depicting Jesus as the Good Shepherd. I used to look up at it as I was celebrating the Eucharist as a young priest and see something that reminded me of the pastoral vocation to which I had been ordained. Pastor, of course, is the Latin word for shepherd, so all those traits of sheep that give me pause are ironically the things which define my vocation in a way.

Today, which happens to be our Annual Meeting Day at St. Stephen’s, I want to shift the image from the Good Shepherd to the sheep in the pen. I want to climb right down and get with the sheep, hearing their bleating and smelling them, seeing them jammed into their small space. I want to look into their gray-blue watery eyes and feel the cockle burrs stuck in their fleece. I want to imagine for just a brief moment that the feelings I get at being with such animals—the curiosity and fascination, interest and some pity, concern and a slight revulsion—are not unlike the feelings that any good shepherd, or even a not-so-good shepherd might experience. I imagine that the Good Pastor himself might register such a range of feelings with his flock of human beings on any given day.

For purposes of comparison, let’s take the line from Acts 2:42 that we hear fairly frequently because it occurs in the Baptismal Covenant which we renew with some regularity. “They continued in the apostles’ teaching, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers.” Human flocks, of course, do that; sheep don’t. But let’s say that human flocks, specifically Christian ones, need to do those things in order to be good flocks as much as the sheep in a sheep pen need to bleat and grow wool and rub up against one another and compete for food and water and set about grazing when the shepherd opens the door of the pen and leads them out to pasture.

In this human sheepfold called the Church are packed a fair number of Christians, some of whom are prize-winners, but most of whom are just ordinary. Several weeks after Easter, when Jesus had finished his work, had risen from the dead, and appeared in glory, all the angels are said to have gathered around, asking him how things went on earth, and what the high points and low points were. Jesus recounted his ministry, putting it in terms that the angels understood, describing his community as a flock and himself as their shepherd. “Oh,” asked an angel, “so what are the flock up to now, seeing that the shepherd has come home?”

“Come see my flock,” said Jesus. “These are the ones that are going to do greater works than I did!” The angels peered down from on high and saw a little band of people that Jesus referred to as his “sheep.” A look of horror spread across the faces of angels, who exclaimed in unison, “Them?”

“Them,” said Jesus.

Centuries went by. Jesus is said to have been walking about one day when an angel stopped him and asked for an update. “So, Jesus, how is that flock of sheep coming on?”

“Oh, they have their good days and their bad days,” said Jesus. “On the whole, they do some pretty stunning things. They continue in my teaching. They break bread together. They pray for one another. And they constantly talk about how they can widen their little sheep pen to include more and more people in it. You should see them.”

“Well, let’s,” said the angel, summoning some of his fellow angels to the moment.

Jesus led them to a precipice. They looked over and saw a scrawny bunch of somewhat sheepish people in a pen called “St. Stephen and the Incarnation.” A look of horror spread across the faces of the angels.

“Them?” one of the angels cried.

Jesus, gazing at his sheep, said, “Them.”


© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Gone to Hell

Grief and Easter

Luke 24:36b-48

It is easy to forget, when we are two weeks past Easter Day, that despite all our trumpeting of the resurrection of Jesus, Easter begins in an experience of profound grief. Not only is the crucifixion the background and necessary prelude to resurrection, but between Good Friday and Easter Day there is a descent into hell. I am not talking about a mythological notion of Jesus going to hell on Holy Saturday and preaching to the dead—whether he did that or not is neither mine to argue nor the point I wish to make. Rather I am talking about the hell that is thorough loss of the divine companion, hell that is total loss of knowing what to do, hell that is the gut-wrenching grief that rises up with a metallic taste in the mouth about a day after the funeral when the fact that he or she is no longer living begins to sink in. Say “alleluia” all you want, and it won’t make hell go away, not if death is real and not if grief breaks your heart.

Tempting as it is to gloss over such painful stuff and certainly to keep it out of any sermon whose purpose is in part to convince you that faith pays dividends—just you wait and see—we need to stick with hell for awhile just to make sure we are being ruthlessly honest. So it is to Luke’s gospel that we turn today to get a glimpse of this profound grief that Jesus’ community is going through in the wake of his horrible execution. Cleopas and his companion are headed to Emmaus, presumably their home. Back to business as usual, just as in John’s gospel Peter says after it is all over, “I’m going fishing.” Back to the familiar, except that instead of filling the void, home is in this instance more like the place where we crash when there is nowhere else to go.

Two disciples they are, on the road and talking about all the things that had transpired. This is what humans do, particularly in the aftermath of tragedy, but then, really, all the time. I sometimes wish it were different, but I doubt that it ever is going to be. When Bin Laden is captured and killed, we have to have day after day after day of stories about what happened, how it happened, how it didn’t happen, how it happened differently from how it was first related to have happened, how it should have happened but didn’t, how it might have happened. And the story keeps changing. That is not only a function of news media, it is the way human beings consistently make sense of the world. We work something over and over again, trying to get it to fit a narrative framework wherein it can possibly make some sense. We tell ourselves things such as, “Everything happens for a reason,” and, “There is something to be learned from all this,” though we do not know what the reason might be nor what it is that we should learn from it all. That is what the two disciples are doing as they walk along.

A stranger appears so subtly that the two seem not to notice anything out of the ordinary. Sometimes strangers do such things—on the bus, for example. They seem to be reading their novel or diddling with their phone, oblivious to the world around them; yet sometimes one will interject a comment into what would seem to be an utterly private conversation. It might or might not fit, and it might or might not be welcome. “What things are you talking about?” the Stranger asks. When you are grieving, you imagine that the world must register what seems to you to be a seismic event. They stop, looking sad.

“Are you the only stranger…?” Cleopas finally asks. Stranger. Must be one of the people who has been in Jerusalem for Passover and is now, like them, returning home.

“What things?” asks the Stranger. Thus begins a conversation. It is a great story, because we know more than the two disciples. We know who the Stupendous Stranger is, and thus we anticipate a moment of revelation when the Stranger’s identity will be disclosed. Luke lets us overhear the conversation. The Stranger gives his fellow travelers the space to tell their tale, their version of the events.

“We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they say, giving a hint of their sorrow.

He upbraids them for being so foolish, so slow to believe. That might have tipped them off at once, since Jesus has at least in parts of the gospels a reputation for upbraiding disciples for their lack of faith and their slowness to believe. But, of course, the story is not quite ready for the climax. We have a way to go, and so do the disciples, who have not yet arrived home, and in any case, are kept from perceiving who the Stranger is because their eyes frankly can’t behold the mystery.

That, too, is one of the ways grief works. We simply don’t see clearly when the world has stopped turning and the birds have hushed singing. Of course it could be quite the opposite. Sometimes when grief is intense we imagine that the dead are right before our eyes—indeed there are stories galore of how they do appear as clear as day. It is hard then to know the difference between what is real and what is imaginary.

“Won’t you stay with us?” the disciples ask. This is not Washington, DC, where it would be fine to say thank you and goodbye and walk on one’s way. This is the Near East, and the Ancient Near East at that, where hospitality suggests, if does not dictate, asking a conversation partner to supper at nightfall. He makes as if to be going—in retrospect one wonders exactly why—but they insist. In a minute we will know why they are so insistent. But first, this strong urging on their part sets up the scene for the climax. Somehow—we are not told how—the guest becomes the host. Suddenly he is the one not being served, but in the role of taking, blessing, breaking and giving the bread. And that is the all-important moment. Immediately the disciples’ eyes are opened and they recognize who the Stranger is. This is what must happen for hell to be vanquished. And, frankly, it seems impossible that that something could ever come to pass. It is nothing less than a revelation of the Risen Jesus himself.

Why had they insisted so strongly that the Stranger come stay with them? Because their hearts had burned within them as they listened to him expound and interpret the Scriptures. His had been the words that had not only opened their grief but began to make some sense out of what seemed nonsense. Little wonder that they were not eager to let go of him! And of all the things that both make Christianity appealing and at the same time threatening, it is this peculiar mystique of Jesus. Not everyone experiences it, of course. There are some to whom Jesus is little more than a historical figure, a dead hero from ages past, or even as Algernon Charles Swinburne once called him, “A Pale Galilean,” with whose breath the world has grown grey. But for countless others, he is not dead but living, not pale but robust. And there is nothing theoretical about resurrection. It is a present reality, just as he is a present reality. How is it that we can go with the heaviest heart to the Table, hear again the story of what he did on the night in which he was betrayed, and do those four familiar things—take bread, bless bread, break bread, and give bread—and find ourselves healing on levels we cannot explain in ways we cannot quantify? How is it that a bite of bread and a sip of wine can be so much more than bite and sip—a feast, a wedding of soul and God, a passageway into a parallel universe, a healing of grief, a forgiveness of sin, a taste of something more real than our very flesh and the blood coursing through our veins? Partly, of course, it is that we choose to believe it, and thus it becomes a ballast that gives our lives a kind of steadiness. But partly it is that when we have gone the distance we can go with rational thought, we come to the great abyss of mystery. We either stare into it paralyzed and disbelieving, or we step forward into the fog, sure that we will either cross the chasm by grace, or fall into it and ironically find ourselves finally at home with the universe and the universe’s God. There is no explaining mystery, no justifying it, no rationalizing it. Like all the states we know well enough but cannot explain—such as love in a time of fear and courage in the face of annihilation—the simple Supper served by the Stunning Stranger persistently renews us, we know not why.

Yet that is the way that hell keeps being conquered, the way grief keeps being healed, the way we keep growing beyond the boundaries we erect to keep ourselves safe and sane and usually stunted, too. Just about the time we can say, “Ah! Jesus! It’s you after all!” he vanishes from sight, and we are left to ponder the mystery, usually second-guessing ourselves and wondering if we were taken in by some sleight-of-hand by the Trickster in our own mind.

Then is the hour we need to get up, go find some other disciples, share with them what we have experienced, and entertain the possibility that the Resurrection is for real, again and again and again. No one can convince you to do it. But once you invite the Stranger into conversation, you’ll find yourself exclaiming, “Did not our hearts burn within us?” And even when he eludes you, that burning will suffice.



© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Widening the Circle

John 20:1-18

Don’t miss the Resurrection!

It is possible to do that, you know. Like poking around in high grass for creatively hidden Easter eggs, hunting for what really happened on that Sunday morning long ago is bound not to turn up much. That is no way to find the Resurrection. In fact, it might even be the best way to miss it.

Like many things that we puzzle over, stand in awe of, find ourselves totally overwhelmed by—things that defy easy belief and yet also persist beyond easy dismissal—Jesus’ resurrection is not so much complex as it is totally at odds with anything we would ordinarily expect. We can understand the physics of tsunamis and appreciate the behavior of sub-atomic particles. We can document the appearances of ghosts and the occasional resuscitation of a corpse. But the resurrection is one of a kind. Ghosts do not eat and drink. And resuscitated corpses do not pass in and out of rooms at will. So all of our stories about the resurrection of Jesus point to its uniqueness. Little wonder that we often don’t know quite what to do with it. And even less wonder that in trying to make sense of it we are likely to ask the wrong questions and look in the wrong places for answers.

To make matters more interesting, we have not one or two but four—count them—accounts, not to mention what you might call a very personal account that we owe to the Apostle Paul. Each account is different, though quite clearly they stem from traditions more ancient than the gospels themselves. The story we hear today is from the pen of the Fourth Evangelist. It is in some ways the most detailed. Its account of the encounter between the grieving Mary Magdalene and the Risen Jesus is among the loveliest stories of all, simply as story. We can almost feel the early morning darkness, imagine the sounds of Mary weeping, sense her shock and surprise when she hears him call her name, picture her reach for him and his drawing back saying, “Do not hold me.” The scene is, in fact, so clear and the story so artfully told that for a minute or two, we can put aside our hunt for the meaning of the resurrection and simply relish the scene.

But our scene comes from John the Evangelist, not John the novelist or John the producer. His aim is to evoke the response of faith—belief—not to garner a Pulitzer Prize or an Oscar. And for John, “belief” is not just intellectual agreement that a resurrection took place and all that goes with it, but a giving of heart and soul to Jesus. Belief for John is the key to connecting with the Risen Lord. John has in mind that other disciple, the Beloved Disciple, the one who, though not the first to go itno the tomb, is the first to see and believe: he is the model for you and me.

We are beginning to get close to what the Resurrection is all about. Notice that the people to whom Jesus appears (like Mary Magdalene) and the people who have not yet seen him (Peter, the Beloved Disciple, and the other nine) are Jesus’ community. That is key. The Risen Lord does not waste time, so to say, appearing to those who never believed in him in the first place. No episodes recount an appearance to Pontius Pilate, to the Sanhedrin, to the Roman soldiers who a chapter ago mocked him with purple robe and crown of thorns. The resurrection is not about proving anything, still less about validating Jesus’ life and miracles. It is about the creation of a community that—to borrow a phrase from St. Paul—will be his body in the world. “By this all shall know that you are my disciples,” Jesus says during his last supper, “that you love one another. As I have loved you, you are to love one another.” And the point of that, of course, is not that the community of disciples simply be a little fraternity enjoying their own special bonding rituals, but to become an ever-widening circle of believers that lay down their lives for the world, who follow Jesus to the cross, who risk all to live the paradox that letting go of their safety and security will assure their lives, while clinging to the familiar is a sure way to lose them.

The Resurrection that draws us here to celebrate today is less about what happened to Jesus than it is about what happens to us through Jesus. The surest way to miss the Resurrection is to confine it to stained glass and lock it up in tabernacles thinking that somehow we honor Jesus by according him a status so special that he could not possibly be emulated, so far from us that we could not possibly follow him let alone catch up with him. The Fourth Gospel is quite clear that Jesus’ entire ministry, the point of his death, the thrust of his glorification was to become the source of life to his community. Jesus prayed, “As you, Abba, are in me and I am in you, may they [the community of believers] also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one,…”

And why does the community exist? So that the world may believe. And if the world believes, truly believes, then the boundary between community and world gradually disappears. The goal of the community is to draw the whole world into itself, just as Jesus, when he was lifted high upon the cross, did exactly that: he drew the whole world to himself. So the circle gets wider and wider as more and more people are drawn into the community of Beloved Disciples. The community that mirrors Jesus’ self-giving love becomes nuanced enough that it is no more bound by definitions of “church” or “institution” than the Body of the Risen Lord is confined by locked doors. The community, empowered by the Spirit breathed into it by the Risen Lord, becomes as courageous as its Lord on his way to glory, carrying his own cross, confident to the last of what he was doing and where he was going. It is ready to get down on its knees and wash the smelly feet of adolescent boys and the lame feet of old diabetic women. It understands more and more that its purpose is not to get to heaven but to proclaim that heaven is here and now because the Eternal God is here and now, having broken into human life by blasting open the tomb of the buried Word and raising him to New Life.

Don’t miss the Resurrection, because it is going to happen twice more in this liturgy this morning. First it will happen when we encircle the font and bring into the New Community of Beloved Disciples two sisters and one brother who will share in the death of Christ by being buried in the depths of baptismal water. They will proclaim Christ’s resurrection by learning to live the life of love so well that somebody and maybe more than one or two will say, “I see in them Jesus Christ, and I believe.” The Resurrection will happen a second time when we encircle the altar to receive what to us tastes like bread and wine but which to our God and Lord feel like flesh and blood. It means the same thing as baptism. One is a bathing and the other is a feeding, but the meal is more than food just as the bath is more than water. They are outpourings of Spirit to make us—what? To make us one—one with each other and one in him. That is the Resurrection you don’t want to miss!

Every one of you, and dozens and hundreds more have a place in our circle at font and altar. We will not cease until every possible soul that we could embrace knows—knows—that he or she has come into a community where there is welcome for the sinner, and more graces for the good, and mercies for the hurting, and healing through the Blood that makes us new and makes us one. Our home, this building, will keep opening its doors the way we open our arms, bidding all to a great banquet where things as varied as square dancing and working for justice, hip-hop and tutoring, demonstrating against torture and chowing down on different ethnic foods, listening to Shakespeare and honoring the art of neighborhood children, singing Bach chorales and Negro spirituals and Latino love songs will be as natural here as picking up a hymnal or opening a prayer book.

You might notice that all of those things are happening now. Yes, they are, because the circle has been widening for some time. Back in the 1950’s when St. Stephen’s was a lily-white congregation, the neighborhood began changing as white people fled to the suburbs after court-ordered desegregation of the schools. Into the neighborhood went Father Stuart Gast, inviting new African-American neighbors to come into the circle. Three years after 1954, St. Stephen’s had remained here, the church declared itself integrated, and the circle was wider. A dozen years later when the nation was torn by the Viet Nam War, protestors and peace advocates found a place to sleep in St. Stephen’s. The circle grew wider. It grew wider still when a woman ordained priest celebrated at our altar for the first time ever in The Episcopal Church. It grew yet wider when gay and lesbian couples and later transgender and other sexual minorities were embraced. It grew wider five years ago when Misa Alegría was born, our Spanish-speaking congregation which has grown to about 15 times the size of the original seed group.

Today, after months of conversation, thought, and prayer, we choose the Day of Resurrection as the time to share with you the direction of St. Stephen and the Incarnation. It is called “Widening the Circle,” because the circle must and will become wider still. We know where we believe God is leading us in the next few years—and what we together have decided we need to do together to widen the circle. But we have no clue as to where the Spirit may lead us beyond that or as a result of our attempts to widen it. But we know that God’s Life is real Resurrection, and we are ready to run to strange places where death is said to be, knowing that resurrection happens most frequently there. We know that any resurrection worth going to is an event that will test our patience and probably find us saying from time to time, “I miss my Lord. By God they have taken him away and I don’t know where they have laid him.” We know that there will be moments when, despite our best efforts, all will seem useless and we will know all over again just what the Magdalene felt like standing there in the chill, sorry and probably angry. And we know, as surely as anything, that when we least expect it, we will hear a familiar voice, calling our name, and we can wonder how we ever have thought he wouldn’t show up as we exclaim, “Rabbouni!” which means, “My Master.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

No Hay Amor Más Grande

La Santa Eucaristía y El Lavatorio de Pies

San Juan 13

Tal vez ustedes saben que Jueves Santo es el día que Jesús nos dio La Santa Eucaristía. Pero, es un poquito extraño que el evangelio que nosotros leemos y escuchamos esta noche no dice nada sobre la Santa Eucaristía. En la cuenta que San Juan nos da, la cena no es la Pascua. Pascua no llegará hasta mañana, viernes, a puesta del sol. Por supuesto, Jesús estará condenado a muerte a mediodía de viernes, exactamente a la hora cuando los corderos van al matadero para la Pascua.

San Juan es diferente de los otros escritores de evangelios. Nos da historias más o menos largas de conversaciones, a veces argumentos y disputas, entre Jesús y sus oponentes. En estas conversaciones, San Juan nos da su interpretación del bautismo o de la eucaristía.

Por ejemplo, una vez un miembro del grupo de fariseos, llamado Nicodemo, vino de noche a reunirse con Jesús. La conversación estaba una exploración de los temas de la enseñanza de Jesús. Jesús dijo a Nicodemo que es necesario ser nacido por agua y espíritu para entrar en el Reino de Dios. Nadie puede ver el Reino de Dios sino nacer de nuevo desde arriba. Inmediatamente, cuando escuchamos estas palabras, pensamos en bautismo, por qué el bautismo es nuestro nacimiento por agua y el Santo Espíritu.

De manera similar, San Juan da cuenta de cómo Jesús dio de comer a cinco mil personas por multiplicación de pan y pescados. Cuando un grupo venía buscando a Jesús, él les dijo, “Yo soy el pan de vida. El que viene a mí nunca tendrá hambre, y el que cree en mí nunca tendrá sed.” Además les dijo algo muy interesante: “El pan que yo daré es mi carne, y lo daré para la vida del mundo.” Entonces, hay una conexión entre Jesús, tu, la muerte de Jesús, y la eucaristía.

Si bautismo es nuestro nacimiento, la eucaristía es la manera en la que crecemos en Cristo por recibir regularmente el alimento de pan y vino que nos dan la vida nueva. Jesús ha hecho la posibilidad de compartir en él, y en su resurrección, por medio de su muerte en la cruz.

El secreto es este: para vivir totalmente en el espíritu de la eucaristía, debemos seguir el ejemplo de Jesús lavando los pies de los discípulos. Según San Juan, no hay otra opción si queremos comprender y practicar ni solo el signficado de la eucaristía, sino también la vida y el ministerio de Jesús. Él vino para servir, no para ser servido. Él lavó los pies como un servidor, también murió en la cruz, sirviendonos y sirviendo al mundo.

El misterio el más grande del evangelio no es un gran milagro, pero la verdad que escuchamos repetidas veces: “el que quiera ser el más importante entre ustedes, debe hacerse el servidor de todos, y el que quiera ser el primero, se haré esclavo de todos.” También hay la promesa, “El que ama su vida la destruye; y el que desprecia su vida en este mundo, la conserva para la vida eterna.”

Cuando lo oímos, ¿quién no quiere decir, “Aparta de mí esta copa”? Y contestamos a Jesús, “Tu, Señor, ¡jamás me lavarás los pies!” Pero el Señor nos responde, “Si no te lavo, no podrás tener parte conmigo.” Luego llega nuestra hora que ser glorificado, nuestro momento para rogar, “Señor, lávame no sólo los pies, sino también las manos y la cabeza.”

Laying Down

Eucharist and Washing Feet

John 13

Ask nearly any average informed Christian what Maundy Thursday is all about and chances are you will hear the response, “That’s the day of Jesus’ last supper, when he gave us the eucharist.” And so it is. But don’t you think it is rather strange that the gospel we read tonight does not once mention the eucharist?

Instead, we have Jesus at supper, which in John’s gospel is clearly not the Passover seder, because Passover does not begin until Friday at sundown, according to him. Indeed the Lamb of God will be sentenced to death at noon on Friday, the very hour when the bleating of lambs being slaughtered for Passover will split the ears of all Jerusalem. Thursday night in John’s story is the last supper, but there is no accent at all on the supper, its menu, the significance of bread and wine. Nothing. Complete silence. Instead we have a story about the washing of feet.

Many heads wiser than mine have puzzled over John’s omission of any account of something so central to Christian practice as the eucharist. Noticing that he does not explicitly tell us anything about baptism either, some have figured that John was not all that keen on sacraments. Others have suggested that all John has to say about the eucharist is packed into his account of the feeding of the five thousand, and the long discussions that follow. Actually, those things give us a clue as to what in fact John has in mind, and thus help us to hear the Word he is speaking to us tonight.

Recall that in John’s story one of the Pharisees, Nicodemus by name, had once gone to Jesus during the night to discuss with him the substance of his teaching. The conversation became a discussion of being “born from above,” or of being “begotten from above.” Jesus tells Nicodemus that neither he nor anyone can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. We immediately and instinctively know that John is telling us something about baptism, that central and major practice of the Christian community which is a symbolic way of being born anew—not just a bath is it, but an outpouring of Holy Spirit. In baptism we are remade thoroughly, a project that extends throughout our lives. It is so radical a remaking that it can only be described as a new birth, a second birth; or, as the other gospels put it, becoming a child all over again and starting life anew. Life in the Spirit is, for the baptized, life built day by day in the image and likeness of the Son of Man, to whom we increasingly and repeatedly give our hearts.

Something similar happens in John’s story after Jesus multiplies the loaves and fish to feed the multitude. Crowds come looking for Jesus. When they find him, he tells them that they have come looking not because they saw divine action in the feeding, but because they had eaten their fill of bread. They must work, he tells them, not for perishable food but for the food that endures to eternal life. That food is Jesus himself. “I am the bread of life,” he tells them. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Giving one’s love and life totally to Jesus (John calls that “believing”) is the way to eat the Bread of Life. When one eats it, one has eternal life. Then Jesus says something very astonishing: “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

So there is a deep connection, then, between Jesus, you, the Living Bread you eat in the eucharist, and Jesus’ death. If you make those connections, you catch on to what John is up to. If baptism means that we are born in the Spirit, eucharist means that we continually grow by feeding on the one who makes possible our union with God by his death.

Though this does not solve the puzzle as to why John tells us nothing about how Jesus instituted the eucharist, it does point to the relationship of washing feet, Jesus’ death, and what the eucharist means. More than once in the gospels we encounter Jesus’ teaching that he is among his followers as one who serves. He came not to be served, but to serve. That is exactly the picture John gives us of Jesus when he washes his disciples’ feet. The whole episode is set firmly within the story of the Passion. Jesus does more than give us the model for Christian love and service, though he does that. He relates that to his own laying down his life for his friends. As the evening goes on, he tells them that this new commandment he has given to them to love one another is what he himself does in laying down his life.

To live that way is to live eucharistically. To be willing to wash feet is to follow the pattern of the Master and Lord who stoops to wash the feet of his disciples. To be willing to have one’s feet be washed—to let yourself acknowledge your own dependency and vulnerability—is to have a share in Jesus’ person, in his life, in his ministry, in his death. To live in the eucharistic fellowship is to serve, not fundamentally to be served. The greatest mystery of the gospel, perhaps, is nothing miraculous and dazzling, but this truth that keeps turning up that the last shall be first and the first last; that the servant must follow the way of the master who follows the way of a servant; that the way of life is the death of self which is paradoxically the way of life.

It is a hard truth, to be sure. Something in us says no, let this cup pass me by. When this truth is offered to us, we instinctively say, “You will never wash my feet.” If you don’t recoil at the idea of giving up your life in order to gain your life, you are one of a rare breed of human beings. Have patience and hang on, for the one who is offering that truth says, “Otherwise you have no share in me.” Then comes your hour to be glorified, believe it or not. Then comes your hour, your moment to pray, “Not only my feet, Lord, but also my hands and my head as well!”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Working Wonders

Prayer and Miracles

John 11:1-45

Ironic––isn’t it?––that the very things that might have inspired faith in the first century or the second are some of the things that can create obstacles for twenty-first century people. For instance, the only story told essentially the same way in all four gospels is the story of how Jesus fed the multitudes with five loaves and two fish. I don’t know if people a generation or two after Jesus would have found that particularly easy to believe, but it is a cinch that none of the gospel writers considered it a stumbling-block to faith in Jesus as Christ, else they would no doubt have quietly edited it out. Yet no one who serves meals at our Loaves and Fishes kitchen thinks of saying grace over a couple of chicken breasts, multiplying them to feed the crowd downstairs of several hundred. And anyone who came off the street, even I dare say, some Senior Priest or other, offering to do so would be promptly reported to the police, likely banned from the building as a danger to others, and shipped off St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. We have a hard time taking the supernatural seriously.

If you have a hard time with the notion that someone literally fed 5,000 people or more with five loaves of bread and two fish, then I suspect you have a big-time issue with believing that Jesus actually raised the dead Lazarus—after the latter had been carefully buried for four days, long enough for rot to start. Some of you will tell me that you have no problem with that at all precisely because Jesus is God and can thus do anything. Yes; but what do you say to Pat, a young man who once said to me when his father dropped dead of a heart attack, “I know that if we believe strongly enough that Jesus can bring back my dad from the dead, isn’t that right?”? I think you will concede that, well, Jesus is alive and well and Resurrected but that does not exactly mean that we can get the same results from him that those people back then could and did. Others—I myself on many a Fifth Sunday in Lent—have dodged that whole issue, taking this story of the raising of Lazarus as a theological tour de force, highly symbolic, seeing it as a testimony to the truth that indeed Jesus—God—brings us out of various dead places and into new life. Still others will say that the raising of the dead to life actually happens in our world (people who are as good as dead are sometimes resuscitated with wise and timely use of CPR). So, they would point out, we really do the same thing that Jesus did (sort of). We just go about it a little differently.

Are these matters just “academic,” with little relevance to us? I think not. For both the believer and the unbeliever, the supernatural presents a challenge, and not only because it occurs with some frequency in the Bible. How many times have you heard or said, “We’re just praying for a miracle”? When pushed against the wall, and when someone’s life is at stake, like Mary and Martha we send for Jesus or for someone who can intervene and work a miracle. We get ourselves in the frame of mind that if we can call on the right Power, anything is possible. Granted, that shakes out to getting the right professional help, if we are able to afford it. Go to Mayo, Cleveland, Sloan-Kettering, Johns Hopkins, Duke, the Menninger Clinic, Hazelton, if you are financially blessed enough to do so. Still, we are sometimes willing, if one of those things works, to say that the Hand of God was in it. And that may well be true.

But what of the poor folk who don’t have the resources? Are they left just to bang on the door of heaven hoping to God that someone somewhere will hear their desperation and respond? Or don’t we want them to feed on the wonderful mysteries of their religion and ours, replete with stories like healing lepers and blind people and raising the dead to life? That is a roundabout way of saying that miracles are more attractive the fewer resources you have. If you can buy your way through intensive care, you might not find yourself quite so frequently in need of a miracle. But when you are out of resources (and that can happen to the rich, too, by the way), divine intervention can seem like a good idea.

So here we are, a week away from Holy Week and almost two away from Good Friday. It is as good a time as any to deal with how we pray in the face of death—or more generally, how we deal with suffering, tragedy, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. What might help us is to look carefully at a few aspects of this story about the raising of Lazarus.

If we are wondering about whether we ought to pray for miracles, the story suggests that we might be asking the wrong question. One of the major points that the Fourth Gospel makes is that the presence and power of Jesus (and thus of God) is quite different from what we might imagine. Mary and Martha send for Jesus, presumably hoping that he will come and heal Lazarus whom he loves. When Jesus comes, too late for a healing, both of them express their disappointment that Jesus was not there. “Had you been here, my brother would not have died.” No doubt. Martha goes further, saying, “Even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask.” It is not clear what she has in mind, but it is quite probable that it is not her brother’s resuscitation. She must assume that the time for miracles is over. Something more like the healing of grief, perhaps, or dealing with life after the male on whom the family depended had died: these might have been on her mind and in her prayer.

But look at it from another angle. Observe Jesus. He knows from the moment he gets the message, that Lazarus is dead or soon will be. (That is so characteristic of Jesus in John’s gospel. He is clairvoyant, omniscient.) Then he stays an additional two days east of the Jordan, which is a good day’s hike from Bethany. He says that the glory of God will be revealed through Lazarus’ illness, and specifically that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” I suspect you see immediately that that is exactly what John’s purpose is: to narrate how Jesus is glorified more than to spotlight Lazarus himself. Yet there is a larger truth here. Many times we approach life, quite naturally, from the point of view of what we want, what we need. “We need a miracle.” “I want to be healed.” “Do what you have to, Lord, to make this situation better.” I am not saying that there is anything necessarily wrong about that; but I do think we might acknowledge that we do not always—indeed frequently do not—see the larger picture, including where God’s Presence and Power are already at work. The effectiveness, the dependability, of God’s being in a situation does not preclude our praying for healing or rescue or spectacular intervention. But the point is that God is present whether we are praying for those things or not. One of the prayers of the Book of Common Prayer refers to God’s doing “better things than we can ask or pray for.” Exactly. Practicing prayer involves growing out of the idea that God is largely passive until we start pushing God’s buttons by praying. Prayer includes acknowledging that God is, that God is active at all times and in all situations, just as surely as air silently surrounds us, and just that close.

All the Bethany people in the story are grieving, and ultimately Jesus joins them in one of the most memorable scenes in the New Testament, which we nearly always remember at funerals: “You wept at the grave of Lazarus your friend.” In the King James Version of the Bible, that is the shortest verse of all: “Jesus wept.” He is human, he feels deeply. Perhaps there is a hint here that before this mighty act Jesus is on edge, emotionally raw. But there is a sentence in here that doesn’t make it into English very well. Instead of saying that “Jesus was deeply disturbed in spirit,” the text actually says something more like, “Jesus was inwardly angry” or “Jesus was royally irritated.”* At what? It is not clear, but a good guess is that all the cavorting and crying and carrying on did not set well with him. You might remember another story from the Synoptic gospels in which Jesus goes to Jairus’ house ultimately to raise his little girl from death, and he summarily puts the wailing mourners out of the room. Jesus apparently did not like that kind of drama. Perhaps that was just a personal preference, with no particular implication for us. I think, however, that it might be a commentary on how easy it is for people caught up in their own tragedies, to miss the larger point of God’s presence and power in a situation.

Then notice something else. Jesus himself prays. It has been said, “It is because he is one with God that he prays, and because he prays he is one with God.” Thomas Aquinas wrote, “When the Father does the Father’s will, the Father does the Son’s will.”** What strikes you about Jesus’ prayer? Does he ask for special power? Does he confess that he is nervous? What strikes me is that his is a prayer of thanksgiving. “I thank thee that thou hast heard me.” This, too, is a clue as to the relationship of prayer and miracle. The miraculous, if you want to call it that, is going on all the time, and most of it is wrapped in what we call the commonplace. The supernatural, so named because it does not fit our understanding of the natural, is just more from the same God who is constantly sustaining us and all creation. I myself have known of unexpected joy, surprising healings against all odds, startling rescues from tragedies and disasters. Many of these came on the wings of prayer, and a few occurred without pleading or warning or both. Miracles happen, but never because God has to be convinced to work one, as if somehow God sits on God’s hands until we get worked up enough to mention the possibility of a miracle. “I thank thee that thou hast heard me,” prayed Jesus. You can pray that prayer, too. Avery Brooke, who for years had an astonishing ministry of healing in the Church, taught me to end prayers for healing with, “Thank you God, for hearing our prayer, and for the healing that you have already begun in this person.”

John’s gospel is clear about the place of the raising of Lazarus. It was the tipping point in Jesus’ ministry. We shall be again at Bethany next week on Palm Sunday, because it is from there on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives that Jesus will take the fateful journey into Jerusalem. Raising Lazarus was for John what ultimately convinced the authorities that Jesus had to die. “Better that one man die on behalf of the people than to have the entire nation destroyed,” warned High Priest Caiphas. So Jesus ultimately went to his death. But yet another stone was to be rolled away and another body to be raised from death, this time not to be a resuscitated corpse, but to be the glorified body of the Risen Lord. Sometimes we pray for miracles, and sometimes they happen. But the thing not to miss is that sometimes it is the very cross we would most like to avoid that turns out to be the thing that saves us. The more we learn to trust in a surrounding and sustaining God, the less we might find ourselves praying for miraculous things, yet giving thanks in all our tragedies, doubts, terrors, and deaths for the Presence of the One who is himself our Resurrection and our Life.


*Rudolf Schnackenberg,The Gospel According to St. John, vol. 2, (New York: Crossroad, 1990), pp. 335-336.

** Ibid., p. 517, note 66.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Conversation Starter

Prayer as Dialogue


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Prayer is the place to wrestle

 with the Dazzling Stranger

 who calls all things into question.

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

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

Diego Rivera, Woman at a Well, 1913

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

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Ashes and Glory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

My Sermon on the Mount

Prayer and Worry

Matthew 6:19-34


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Frank G. Dunn, 2011

Shining Light

Ethics and Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

“We are!” they would shout out.

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

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

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

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

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

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


© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011