Ice In Summer

F

or reasons I honestly cannot fathom, on this hot summer day my mind is wandering around the farm I grew up on. It is the middle of winter. Even in South Carolina in the days before drastic climate change, a severe winter storm has set in bringing ice and freezing rain. The thirty-seven acres on the farm seem huge to this boy. Woods border the fields on three sides. I stay out of the woods in hot weather for one reason only: snakes. But in the wintertime it is safe to wander through the woods. I do. I put on some boots. I walk across a frozen field and enter the wonderland. Trees bow down under the weight of ice. Sunbeams dance on bare branches caked in crystal. Hiking through Low Country woods the morning after an ice storm is not necessarily easy. It certainly isn’t fast. Trees have fallen. Ice across little streams turns out to be too thin to support my weight. I zig and zag my way forward. The adventure of moving through a tangle of vines and saplings and brush combines with the awe-inducing freeze to transport me so deep into the heart of Nature that I feel unnaturally connected to an unearthly Something. I’m seventeen. Suddenly I’m venturing into a world of rare beauty that inspires and puzzles me. 

Ice Storm in the South

Long lost to me is what I wrote when I returned to the house and warmed myself to the point that I could pick up a pen and put down some thoughts in the form of a theme for English class. What I do remember is wanting to preserve the experience, to dissect it just a bit, to get into what it was I felt when moving over a landscape at once so familiar and so mysterious. I don’t know that I grasped the paradox of great loveliness and peace a fierce storm had made possible. 

            I

Fifty-seven years have passed since that winter morning. What I believe I experienced then was perhaps not the first, but certainly one of the most memorable instances of finding my own place in creation. I was never a boy much at home in the outdoors. I liked staying inside much more than venturing outside. Reading, playing the piano, studying, and writing were much happier pursuits for me than practically anything I could name like football or baseball, hunting or fishing. I did not at first feel as if the natural world was home to me. I had a lot to learn.

On that morning walk through the ice-laden woods, I had already discovered the great Romantic poets of English literature. I learned from people like Wordsworth and Blake, Byron, Keats, and Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emerson that Nature was a Bible that communicated wisdom and truth to me. And I learned all that from a wonderful high school teacher who opened my eyes to see Truth in the world around me. 

The gravest problem the human species is facing today is the destruction of the natural world. The problem did not begin a few years ago, but has been steadily increasing in scope and severity over the last half century. A great source of the problem is that our religions in this part of the world have taught us that our individual souls are of far greater importance than our environment. They have gone so far as to school us in believing that the native and ultimate habitat of the human soul is in fact not in this world but in another world. They have been rife with images of God as having a home in a heaven that is distinctly not a part of this world. Our hymns and our preachers have told a fairly consistent story that the heaven where God lives is a land beyond the river that we call “the sweet forever,” and to that land we are bound if we are good and pass the grade. And while our religions have insisted that God is the creator of the world, their attitude has been by and large that God really doesn’t care very much about anything in this world except human beings and what we happen to prize. We have had the blessing of our religious establishments to dominate, exploit, use, and exhaust natural resources, with scarcely a murmur about the consequences. 

What you and I are trapped in, namely this wholesale cheapening of the natural world, is nothing less than a broad example of what St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians calls “slavery.” I’ll be the first to admit that when we hear words like “flesh” and “self-indulgence,” our minds go first to our appetites—especially to sex. But I invite you not to go there, just in case you like thousands of others think that Christianity in particular harps all the time in a sex-negative key. As a matter of fact, behind what we hear in Galatians, Romans, and elsewhere in the New Testament are echoes of a great struggle that goes on both within the human person and in society. Paul sometimes refers to it as two aeons or two ages. One is the Age of Adam and the other is the Age of Christ. Paul writes in First Corinthians, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” Clearly what differentiates the two is not mortality—because all humans, including Jesus, face death. But Christ represents passage, and not just at death, into a new quality of life, a new way of living, a distinctive redirection of life’s purpose. We struggle because we live in both ages at once. The question is whom do we follow. Adam represents our own human willfulness. Christ embodies free submission to the desire of God to dwell within us. 

Another way Paul frames this struggle is with the terms flesh and spirit. Think of flesh as not simply the human body, but as life that never quite gets beyond the basic struggle that all flesh engages in: the struggle  to survive. Following the Spirit is not negating the body, but reorienting our purposes for living in a radically new direction. Among other things that direction involves a change in the way we approach the natural world. 

Owning, Possessing, Hoarding:  Not Quite the Art of Living

Joe and I were watching a couple of nights ago a detective mystery in which a very wealthy man was thoroughly enamored of ancient Chinese artifacts. He was a collector who had amassed a museum-quality collection of various objects, many very precious and fragile. To him they were not to be shared, but to be prized and hoarded, only rarely to be seen by select visitors whom he could perhaps impress. What was important to him was owning the artifacts, to the point of engaging in whatever criminal activity he needed to in order to protect his ownership. That is a perfect example of the Age of Adam in full swing. That is a chilling example of walking after the flesh, living according to the gods of this world called self-indulgence, greed, avarice, malice, egotism. Our place is within the created order, not to exploit it to puff up ourselves with power, influence, fame, or privilege.

            II

Jesus is going forward, his face firmly set in the direction of Jerusalem. His agenda is constantly to confront the powers of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. His ministry of healing directly challenges diseases of body and spirit that infect people. He is constantly calling out the authorities both political and religious that oppress the poor and powerless. He consistently ranges himself on the side of the outcast. And along the way to Jerusalem, where he will pay the ultimate price for his witness, he calls people to follow him. One man says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus replies that he has no home, no bed, but is perpetually on the move, restless, tireless in his mission. Are you really willing to follow that example? To another who wants to delay responding to Jesus’ call, he says, “Let the dead bury the dead.” Who is dead? Those who live according to the flesh, those who are stuck worshiping the gods of the Age of Adam, those who hoard their art and possessions, their money and their food, instead of sharing. Someone agrees to follow but first has to say farewell to those at home. Sounds reasonable. But this is the third metaphor that emphasizes the urgent call of the Holy One asking for admittance to the human soul. 

Mary Cassatt, "The Child's Bath," 1893

And that is the simple truth at the bottom of all this. In everything, the great Soul Maker is sitting silently in the depth of our being, simply waiting to be noticed, waiting to be acknowledged. Waiting and waiting, the Great Mother can think of nothing better than to shower love and affection on her children. Nothing pleases her more than for her children simply to play lovingly with her and with each other.

            III

A life in the Spirit, life lived in the age of Christ, is not a drab and tedious thing that is ridden with guilt over imagined sins and weighed down with shame that cannot accept itself. No, it is like a trip to a fabulous farmers market at the height of the growing season where there are fruits and vegetables aplenty. Some of them are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. You won’t find laws that prohibit such things, because on both the deepest and most obvious levels those are the very things that human beings and societies most hunger for. We never quite have them until we have turned our faces in the direction our Leader is going. The fruits come with following the one through whom all things are made. 

            IV

I’ve grown a bit since that icy morning many years ago. All I could see then was the sheer beauty of a world so much larger than I. And that was enough. Now I understand that the enchanted frozen forest was not simply something that I was exploring, but a vast and profound territory that was as much inside my heart and mind as it was on the farm I called home. 

At the end of the day, when the sunlight has melted the last of the ice and has begun to sink into night, I can see the truth now. Walking by the Spirit, living in the Age of Christ, following Jesus, putting my hand to the plough and not looking back, is essentially acknowledging that I am a part of this marvelous world and all that is in it. The trees, the ice, the streams, the rocks, and even the snakes and spiders are a part of me and I of them. And so are you, my brothers and sisters. And there is absolutely nothing to do but love everything and everybody just as I love myself. We are all one, and it is all good.    

A sermon preached on Proper 8, Year C, of the Revised Common Lectionary, on the texts Galatians 5:1, 13-25, and Luke 9:51-62.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2019

William Potter Parrish: A Homily For His Funeral, June 5, 2019

W

e had gathered with no little nervousness. Much was at stake, not the least of which was our future. We were knocking on the door of the Church hoping that we’d be told at some point that we’d be welcome to become priests. It was on the whole a lot easier in those days to get the desired answer than it was later to be. But none of us knew that at the time. We were three postulants for ordination at our first meeting with the examining chaplains of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, a group of senior clergy to whom Bishop Marmion and the diocese had entrusted the task of vetting us young squirts who thought we just might do that impossible job.

One of the senior, trusted clergy picked up his big fat black leather briefcase sometime about 3 in the afternoon, stuffed some papers into it, and announced that he had a meeting to attend at Lynchburg College where he was on the faculty. He struck me as a man of serious purpose and few words, pleasant but somehow a little inscrutable. But that was less about the man, The Reverend Doctor William Potter Parrish, than it was about me, a newish convert to The Episcopal Church still wondering how to navigate in a system that was largely strange to me. Everyone was inscrutable and everything a bit daunting.

What I didn’t know as I watched him pack his briefcase was that I was looking at a man who would come to have a profound impact on my life in ways I could never have imagined then. I didn’t see Bill for the next several decades. In 1992, I answered a call from the vestry of St. John’s, Lynchburg, to become rector. One thing or another had taken the entire clergy and professional staff away from here, so I came on the alert to find somebody fast to help me lead the clergy end of things. I’d hardly unpacked when the then Senior Warden, Jim Peery and his wife Doris had a small gathering to welcome Barbara and me to our new community. Two folks came up to me and said, “You know, Frank, you might be aware that a great priest is available and might be willing to give you some assistance at St. John’s. His name is Bill Parrish. Ever heard of him?” I remembered the black briefcase being shut and the man who had packed and carried it from the meeting long years before. Sure enough, within a short time, I asked and Bill agreed to come here as pastoral assistant.

And what a great day that was, not only for me but for hosts of people in this community. Bill worked several days a week and usually Sundays as well for the next twelve years and then some. He was the mainstay of clergy presence by many a sickbed, in hospitals and retirement homes, up and down the halls and in living quarters at Westminster-Canterbury. He organized a group that we came to call “Daybreak Bible Study” but which the members of it called “Bill Parrish’s Bible Study” that lasted for years. But what few parishioners knew was that Bill kept the staff smiling and the rector supported with an unfailing sense of humor, good judgment, sound counsel, and unflagging faith.

We have a way of looking back over the years and can only be breathless at the patterns we see in retrospect that were barely discernible as events unfolded one after another. I think back to mornings with the staff on Manton Drive, to conversations in weekly meetings, to moments when we’d share pastoral information, to a sermon preached on an Easter morning, a hike along the Blue Ridge Parkway with a hurting knee eventually to be replaced, dear Jackie’s final illness and Jonathan and Minou’s wedding celebration, Herb’s untimely death and young Bill’s fortuitous return to Lynchburg. Those are just a handful of moments that are a part of a pastiche of grace in which his soul rose to its full height and brought the souls of others to stand at attention. You know much more than I do. You know how he touched your life. You know what he taught you. You know what witness he bore as he shared his understanding of the Truth with you. You are here today because of him whose life directly or indirectly brushed or more substantially shaped yours maybe thousands of times, may just a few, maybe only once.

That is the grand mystery pressing upon our consciousness that causes words to form such as these:

Lord you have searched me out and known me.

You know my sitting down and my rising up.

You discern my thoughts from afar.

You trace my journeys and my resting places

And are acquainted with all my ways.

The only way we ever discover such a wonder is in the details of our own lives. And the marvel of it is that such awesome love makes itself obvious not so much in the carefully scripted ways we imagine will bring us happiness and fulfillment, but in the jolts and tumbles that we’re least prepared for, twists and turns we never plan and wouldn’t in a thousand lifetimes choose. Deaths and losses and changes and revelations, challenges and dilemmas that leave us exhausted: these are the moments that alone can crack our false sense of self-sufficiency. Ultimately they form the school in which we learn whatever we learn of the power of God, the use of grace, the hope of glory.

Make no mistake. Bill Parrish didn’t get to be the priest or the teacher or the scientist or the friend or the father or grandfather that we honor him for by breezing through life going by someone else’s playbook. Like you and me, he found God showing up in the most unlikely moments, many times surprising with unexpected joy and just as many times bringing clarity through the sheer toughness of necessary change. How do I know? Not just because Bill and I spent a dozen years quite close to each other, but because it isn’t a secret that only through testing do we know what lasts, only through struggle that we experience anything worth calling victory, and only through dying to our ego-bound self that we are ever born into newness of life.

                        Where shall I go from your Spirit?

                        Where shall I flee from your presence?

                        If I climb up to heaven you are there.

                        If I make the grave my bed, you are there also.

All of that is theory and someone else’s experience until life overtakes you and you find it true because you’ve lived it or you are living it. You don’t have to worry about whether you can do it, or whether it is true for you. Nor do you have to take Bill Parrish’s or mine or anyone else’s word for it. All you have to do is look at your own life and you’ll see appearing before your face, indeed closer than your nostrils, that you haven’t really learned anything to compare with what you’ve learned when you’re pushed against the wall, undeniably out of your head’s inventoried resources. You can tell from your own experience that even in joyful times, delightful moments, you never experience pleasure while you’re busy holding back, you never know what it is to rise until see that your white-knuckled holding on is all that keeps you from rising even higher. And letting go of our ideas, preconceptions, judgments is what ultimately brings us to know what trust, the core of faith, is all about.

So it goes.

                        If I take the wings of the morning and dwell

                                    in the uttermost part of the sea

                        Even there your hand will hold me, and your right hand hold me fast.

It is true irony that when we come together, as we do today, to celebrate a human life that in many ways has been beautiful, a life that has made ours richer and fuller, the mass of us generally only knows the most superficial things that made such a person tick. The same will be true of you when your days are over and the love you’ve inspired and left behind brings together those who will honor you. We don’t know now and they won’t know then but a tiny fraction of what has really been your journey. At best they will, as we do today, intuit from the experiences they’ve had the richness of your life, its meaning, the import of your story.

And all of that is just as it should be. The soul loves mystery and rests best in silence. All words of laud and honor will be a faint tinkling in the breeze of memory. It won’t be important. What saves us is not what we’ve done nor really what we’re remembered for. What saves us is Love, the Power that brought us here and receives us back again, the Love that gave us birth and receives us again into its own deep and dazzling darkness.

It is thus with William Potter Parrish, child of God. That was and always will be quite enough.

A homily based on the text of the 139^th Psalm. All quotations are from that text.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2019.  Copies of this may be freely shared.  Quotations in print or online from this text should be credited to the author.  Thank you.

We’re Living It, Whether We Know It Or Not

The farther we get from Easter Day, the less likely we are to hear words from Scripture as being messages about resurrection. Why is that?

The main reason, I think, is that most of us think that the resurrection was something that happened once upon a time to Jesus. A fair number of folk take it to be the happy ending to an otherwise tragic story about the suffering and death of a righteous man, indeed a man who was not only human but divine.  As such, it doesn’t occur to us that resurrection of the body has anything to do with us, certainly not here and now. We have successfully swapped the notion of resurrection for the belief in immortality of the soul. The two are not necessarily incompatible, but immortality leaves some important issues aside.

I invite you to consider some of those issues [this morning]. They are raised in one, two, or all three of the scriptures. So let’s take them one at a time.

The river near Philippi, supposed place of
Lydia's baptism, the first in Europe    

The story from the Book of Acts is the lovely account of a Sabbath morning when a delightful woman by the name of Lydia became a Christian convert. Luke tells us in one of the passages in which he recounts his accompanying Paul that they headed outside of  Philippi to the river that they supposed was a gathering place for prayer. Sure enough some women were there including a businesswoman, Lydia. Incidentally, she was apparently very prosperous as she dealt in purple cloth, a precious commodity. Luke tells us that Lydia was a believer in God.  How she had come to be one we don’t know. After hearing Paul’s message about Jesus she and her household were baptized, the river no doubt being convenient for that. We don’t have to speculate much about what Paul said that morning. His was always the message of the transformation brought about through relationship with Christ Jesus. He couldn’t have proclaimed the gospel without mentioning the death and resurrection of Christ. And no doubt he unpacked his understanding of baptism that a few years later he would write in his elegant letter to the Romans:

           

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.[1]

St. Lydia of Philippi

In effect, Paul gave to Lydia and the others a framework for their lives if he discussed resurrection in this way.  He might have said as I often do, “When you forget everything else about baptism, remember that it is “down under and back up again.” Baptism, as graphically demonstrated by immersion in water, is a ritual enacting the death-and-resurrection principle.  Indeed it is a way of identifying with what we call “the Paschal (Easter) mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.” But it spills over into all of life. It was already present in Lydia’s experience as she went through the inevitable ups and downs in her business. Take apart any moment or extended moment in her life, such as dealing with one of the problems of a member of her household, and she could see in that slice of life the dynamic of death and resurrection. Something begins in the ideal state of perfect equilibrium, at least theoretically. Then something goes wrong and we descend into the quagmire of problems, perhaps confusion, even despair, or, on the simplest level, the ideal is exposed to be imperfect. It deteriorates, as does everything in life. We reach bottom. Metaphorically speaking, our notion of the ideal is dead. Then arrives the moment of truth and we see, if but dimly, how there is literally no way forward but up. Hope comes alive. And we take its wings and begin the ascent out of the depths. 

That is a bit dramatic a description of ordinary moments, but maybe you see the point. That is quite literally the way life is. All of life, not just human life, and certainly not just conscious life, and most definitely not just Christian life is a matter of what some have called “traveling the U: down, down, down until we reach the bottom, and then back up again.”[2] Death and resurrection are woven into the fabric of the universe. 

So what does baptism do to merit our calling it the means by which we experience true resurrection? Baptism brings us into a community whose very life is conscious, intentional fellowship with the Risen Lord. Living with him is not fundamentally anticipating a future in another world but living in eternity. All the scriptures point to the unity of creation with the Creator. The entire Bible can be summed up in the words, “They shall be my people and I shall be their God, and I myself will be with them.” And that is the core message of the gospel lesson from John 14. Dwelling in this community of the baptized is the explicit context in which the incarnation of God extends from Jesus to everyone through nothing else but love. “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.”[3]

All of this is quite simple and straightforward, or so it would seem until we get to the existential reality that we are faced with every day. That reality is our being situated in what John’s gospel calls “the world” and what Paul rather confusingly calls “the flesh.” They both mean the day-to-day cauldron of human activity largely driven by anything but love. It is the world where even the most well-intentioned systems get twisted from their best potential and turn into engines that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. It is the world where gratuitous violence destroys life and is even praised. It is the world where money rules and where greed is a breeding ground for corruption that now has extended to the point where the entire ecosystem is but a few years away from being thoroughly wrecked so that our own species and a number of others will not survive. Add to that the willful ignorance that denies the enormity, the evil of it all.  

At precisely that moment—the Now of this very day—comes the hope revealed in that beautiful but dreadfully misused Book of Revelation. Its message is nothing less than resurrection on a cosmic scale. If we surrender the temptation to read Revelation as a book essentially about the damnation of all but an in-group of like-minded conservative Christians, it is about the body of God, another name for which is the universe. You’ve heard from ours and many other traditions that the temple of God is the body. So it is. That body of yours is like every other material thing in the universe. The energy to which it is convertible is the Love that powers all things in the cosmos, and one of the thousand names of that Love is “the Lord God the Almighty.” And the one through whom we know that Love and its origin best is Jesus, who is called “the Lamb.” When we who share his life and live it in our own bodies catch on that what he is by nature we become by grace, then we begin to be what C. S. Lewis referred to as “Little Christs.” We usher in the age when “the nations will walk by the light [of God’s glory]. It is totally incompatible with such Love that we would ever settle for a life of lies and falsehoods, whether on a personal or corporate, national or global scale.  Why?  Because the deepest truth of the universe is indeed Truth. And it is made concrete and present when we attune ourselves to the Divine and live for no motive other than to be like God, not by how knowledgeable or sophisticated we can be, but by how loving we can be. That’s what it is to be “written in the Lamb’s book of life.”[4]

Revelation moves towards its end with an image of the last things that marvelously mirror the first things that ever were and presage the first things in a transformed world.  Far from being a corrupt and perverse world hell-bent on destroying itself by the hand of one species that’s out of control, the world empowered by resurrection and saturated with love is a world nourished by water from the river of life, bright as crystal, flowing right out of the heart of God and the Lamb down

through the middle of civilization. Instead of a population on the defensive, fearing even children fleeing from oppression, poverty, and violence, its cities will be abundantly fruitful and its people known as healers for people of all nations and tribes and languages. The dwelling of God and of the Lamb will be in pitched in the heart of everyone, and we will worship him.  We will see his face in the face of every creature. His identity will be visible on ours and their foreheads.  There will be no more night.  We will not need any light—of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be our light, and everyone who manifests the life of God will reign forever and ever.[5]

What a surpassingly powerful vision! And yet we will never get there by doubling down and working harder at it making come to pass. Paradoxically it is by letting go and letting God, as the old slogan has it, that the heavenly city is born and the heavenly community realized. Our old ways, including all the old stories we tell about ourselves including the story of how terribly sinful we are, must die. Only in traveling the way of death do we ever reach the point where there is no way to go but back up again, rising full of the power and peace of the resurrected and ascended Christ.

Edward Knippers, The Ascension of Christ, 2014

A sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year C in the Revised Common Lectionary, based on Acts 16:9-15; Revelation to John 21:10, 22-22:5; John 14:23-29

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2019

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[1] Romans 6:3-11.  This an all other biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford,  1991).

[2] Peter Senge et al, Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

[3] John 14:23.

[4] Revelation 21: 10, 22-27.

[5] Revelation 22:1-5.