I gave this sermon/forum thing about the promise and pitfalls of social media at Church of the Good Shepherd in Burke, VA on July 15. You can also read a reflection on the experience over at Key Resources, which is where I’m doing most of my blogging these days.
A sermon for Maundy Thursday
(Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 116:1, 10-17; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35)
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A dear friend of mine is the cantor at Congregation Beth El in Bethesda. Each year, my wife and I do our best to get ourselves invited to his Passover Seder. This is one of those years where the Gregorian and Hebrew calendars agree, so the Seder’s lovely introductory question has continued with me since Monday night: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
It’s a borrowed question for us in this place on this night, but I think it’s an appropriate one. What makes this night different from other nights for followers of Jesus? What does Maundy Thursday tell us about what will happen tomorrow, and the day after that, and the night after that?
**
Our reading from Exodus reminds us that the story that begins today and ends in the wee hours on Saturday is, like the Exodus, a story of liberation.
Our Jewish brothers and sisters keep the Passover meal with stylized embellishments intended to teach the next generation about this movement from slavery to freedom. It is the great redemption narrative of the Hebrew Bible. At Monday night’s seder, our group heard over and over again words like these: “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the L-rd, our G‑d, took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm.”
I’m always grateful to be one of the “little ones” receiving instruction. I always need the reminder that God longs to set us free, again and again.
**
Our reading from 1 Corinthians reminds us that, before the drama of Friday and of Sunday, Jesus instituted a tradition distinct from but not totally unlike the Passover meal. It’s at the center of our life together here at St. Paul’s.
What Paul leaves out but Matthew, Mark, and Luke recount is that our Lord desired to eat the Passover meal with his disciples, the twelve. It’s a beautiful reminder of Jesus’s humanity—that he longed to share his final meal with his friends.
After several days of very public words and deeds, overturned tables and apocalyptic teaching, our Lord chose, as some of his last free actions, to take, to bless, to break, to share. As painful as his words in the garden would be (“Could you not wait with me one hour?” “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me”), more powerful for us this night are what came first: “Eat. Drink. Remember me.”
**
Our reading from John reminds us how difficult and how beautiful such intimacy can be. Unlike Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John does not focus on the meal. Instead, he tells us about an accompanying action:
And during supper Jesus … got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.
Try to take that in as the disciples had to. This man is their teacher, their master. In the past few days alone he has raised a man from the dead, been welcomed as King of Israel by crowds in the street, had his own feet anointed with perfume worth a year’s wages. I dare say that every one of us would feel how Peter felt, “You will never wash my feet!”
Peter’s part in the story helps ensure that we take the full meaning. It’s true that Jesus says “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” It’s true that this story and this night are a meditation on serving others.
But Peter’s resistance and Jesus’s insistence show us the complete picture. Christian life in community requires a willingness not just to serve but to be served. We have to let go and let God save us. We have to let go and let our community support us. All around town right now, the meek and the mighty are baring their smelly, linty, calloused, embarrassing feet.
If we can’t do that, how could we hope to bare our souls? And if we can’t do that, what will we do when we need Jesus to bear them for us, unto salvation and redemption and what lies beyond?
**
Of the Maundy Thursdays I have experienced, one of them stands out in my memory, probably always will. I don’t know if it truly speaks to the core of what makes this strange and wonderful night distinct from all the others. But it has made all the difference for me.
It was my last year of graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin. I was attending both the student ministry on campus and a neighborhood parish not far from where I’d been living. We got word, a couple hours before the service, that the senior warden of the parish had died that morning. He was no older than my own father, a healthy and vital man. There had been no notice.
When the rector came out to the center aisle to preach, he looked … well, exactly like any of us would look after spending the day with the shocked and grieving family of a friend and partner in ministry gone too soon. I don’t remember anything about the sermon but its first line: “This is an impossible moment at the end of an impossible day.”
This church used foot-washing stations, and I can still remember the faces on the first wave of people being washed. One was the parish deacon, a perennially cheerful woman who had known the deceased for many, many years. One was my former chaplain at UW; she had guided me through a few crises of my own and was the first person ever to tell me I should be a priest. I’m sure these two stick out for me because, like the rector, they were people I was taken aback to see so vulnerable in church. Impossible moments will do that. And impossible moments are what the church is here for.
The last face I remember is less detailed. She wasn’t a friend or mentor, just a fellow parishioner about six years old. I don’t think she understood what was making that particular night so different and so painful. She washed my feet gently but diligently. And then, at her mother’s prompting, she looked into my bloodshot eyes and said, “Thank you for letting me wash your feet.”
**
Whatever makes this night different, it’s too damn subtle and complicated and magnificent for sermons. These readings are a holy traffic jam of cultural memory and religious meaning: blood of the Passover lamb mixed with dust of Judean hillsides mixed with water and wine and crumbs and tears and God knows what else. There’s no secret path through the mess that deposits us on the other side with talking points and a doggy bag.
All we have to do—all we can do—is show up and be present to God and each other. Impossible things will happen, some terrifying, some wondrous. At the center of it all is a Lord who is, on this very night before he died for us, an icon of human vulnerability. Take, thank, eat, wash, pray, drink, remember, love. Do this in remembrance of him.
Suffering, endurance, character, hope
(Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42)
Image source: “Hope” by Renato Giordanelli via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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I’m breathing slightly easier this weekend than I have for the last few months. We have reached the end, at least as far as the calendar is concerned, of a marathon faith experience even longer than today’s gospel passage. I call it the Third Quarter Blues.
When I arrived back on campus after Christmas break during my first year of seminary, a particularly blunt senior told me how things were about to go: “Third quarter is a straight-up miserable experience,” he said. “It’s cold, it’s gray, it’s long, it’s Lent. Everybody just goes crazy.” It turns out that seminary staff members are not immune to this malady, and I hope in the days ahead that some of my own crazy will dissipate.
I suspect all of us here are feeling the effects of something like the Third Quarter Blues—in our homes, schools, workplaces, and here at St. Paul’s. The time has changed but not the weather, at least not reliably. Perhaps we’re missing that object of our Lenten fast. We long for summer time off but can’t yet see that light at the end of the tunnel. And of course, the long and exhausting work of a parish transition continues.
Call it March Malaise. Call it the Lenten Lull. Call it early “spring” in the mid-Atlantic, with spring firmly fixed, for now, in impatient quotation marks.
Maybe that’s why today’s epistle reading caught my eye despite the sheer volume of the gospel lesson. When it comes to endurance of any sort of affliction, our patron saint is quite the optimistic observer of human experience. Listen again to this progression he proposes: “[W]e also boast in our sufferings,” he says, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us” (Romans 5:3b-5a).
Let’s be clear that Paul is writing about sufferings that go well beyond the doldrums I’ve been describing. The word he uses (θλῖψις) has at its root a sort of claustrophobia; it’s the pressing in of forces upon us, maybe even the cliffs rising up to surround our dire straits. I don’t have to tell most of you how difficult life can be.
Still, big or small, Paul says suffering is a valuable and even indispensable part of the Christian life. How can that be? Well, notice the way he frames his little formula for our spiritual formation. Here’s the passage one more time, but with the introductory and concluding verses restored to it:
Therefore, 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; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)
We stand on God’s grace. We share in God’s glory. Our hearts are filled with God’s love.
In this light, in the light of Christ and the power of the Spirit, suffering is redeemed by God’s presence with us in the midst of it. If we boast in our sufferings, it should be because they are God’s special time for being particularly present with us. Conversely, they are our special time to grow in trust, because we know we can’t persevere on our own.
The verses that follow emphasize the lengths our God is willing to go for our redemption: “while we were still weak,” Paul writes, “while we still were sinners,” “while we were enemies,” we were reconciled to God through Jesus’s death and life.
Death and life, held together in the heart of God’s Son amid the darkness of our tribulations. Let’s call that redemptive suffering and not confuse it with its hopeless counterpart. Unredeemed suffering is suffering with blinders on. It’s like reading those middle verses about suffering and character without their wider framing in God’s bountiful grace.
In our reading from Exodus, the people of Israel are suffering with no eye on redemption: we read, “[they] thirsted there for water and the people complained against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’” (17:3).
They’ve already forgotten that they are there for glorious purpose, [1] that God has delivered them from bondage and is leading them to a land of promise. Yes, they have trials to endure in the desert, but they seem blind to the many ways in which God is already caring for them there.
Unredeemed suffering can also come from mistaking random circumstance or cruel injustice for the will of God.
Consider the Samaritan woman Jesus speaks with at the well. I heard Bible scholars this week plead with preachers not to portray her as some serial adulterer or other notorious sinner. That conclusion simply isn’t supported by what John tells us about her or by what Jesus says. It’s more likely that she’s a serial victim: five times divorced due to infertility, perhaps, or simply the whim of husbands who held near total power over her in that society.
Whatever her history, Jesus shows her it doesn’t have to define her. Her redemption begins in the caring conversation he has with her—a woman, yes, and also a Samaritan. And it continues as he invites her to that sacred Gospel vocation: sharing with others the Good News of the Savior of the world.
Unredeemed suffering is living with no hope for better, living as if we were alone. It’s trudging to the well each day without thought for the living water that will truly sustain and satisfy us. Unredeemed suffering is never God’s will for us. And its fruit is not character but despair. Heaven make us free of it. Only heaven can.
Redemptive suffering, on the other hand, is how the Spirit works through the inevitable trials of our lives and uses them to shape us in God’s image and draw us into renewed life in Christ. That’s character.
We heard a story of redemptive suffering this week in our staff meeting. As many of you know, our parishioner Bob Cuniff is in his final days of a long and painful battle with cancer. Bob has been in the Pilgrims class this year and desired to be received into the Episcopal Church. On Tuesday, Sarah Stoycos accompanied Bishop Jim to the hospital to serve as Bob’s sponsor in a bedside liturgy of reception. It’s nice having a bishop around.
Before they began, Jim and Sarah met Bob’s sisters, both of whom are Roman Catholic and one of whom is a nun. Bishop Jim asked them if they understood why Bob wanted to become an Episcopalian. While still loving the Catholic Church, Bob believed he had found his true home here. He believed he was on a deeply meaningful journey.
They said, yes, they understood, they were supportive. And so Jim asked them if they too would like to serve as presenters. Again they said yes. What a powerful sign of their love for their brother.
The service for confirmation and reception can be quite short if you strip it to the essentials. When they were finished, Bob said a few words.
He said first that these past few weeks had been among the most difficult times in his life but that he could feel the presence of God there in the room. And he said this: that that experience had been wonderful.
Imagine that: I can feel God here with me in this hospital room, and that has been wonderful.
Hope did not disappoint our brother Bob. And Paul’s Good News for us today is that, by the grace of God, it will not disappoint us either.
**
[1] I realized somewhere along the way that this phrase is from Loki in the Avengers movie. Go figure.
Against the Ghost in the Machine: An appreciation of Keith Ward’s ‘More than Matter’
I was asked to review Keith Ward’s More Than Matter: Is There More to Life Than Molecules? as part of Ian Markham’s Dean’s Discussion Day at Virginia Theological Seminary. Here’s what I had to say (or here in PDF):
**
In his book More than Matter, Keith Ward offers a conversational but thorough defense of idealism, focusing particularly on philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s critique of Cartesian dualism from his book The Concept of Mind. To put it briefly, Ryle believed Descartes to have created a myth about a “ghost in the machine,” [1] a myth in which “the mind is a separate, hidden world connected arbitrarily to the body.” [2] Professor Ward thinks this an unfair reading of Descartes and sets out, in part, to correct it. It’s worth quoting at some length a late passage that summarizes Ward’s position and demonstrates the way he chooses to consistently frame it. He writes,
When the Aristotelian philosophy was replaced by the more mechanistic approach of classical science, it became difficult for philosophers to integrate personal values and purposes into the increasingly influential world view of natural science. Cartesian dualism was one symptom of this difficulty, separating mental substance from material substance in such a way that it was difficult to see how one could interact with the other. As I have emphasized, Descartes believed in such integration, but did not find a plausible way of formulating it. It was to take the discovery of evolution to do so, with the picture it opened up of a gradually more complex and emergent process leading to the development of mind as an increasingly autonomous inner aspect of matter. [3]
So for Ward, mind and matter are separate but integrated aspects of reality. Thus he calls his position “dual-aspect” idealism, because “it stresses the importance of the material aspect as a means of allowing the potentialities of mind[, the mental aspect,] to be expressed.” [4] I was reminded in this philosophical discussion of William Temple’s theological claim about the sacramental character of the universe. Temple writes, “the order … is spirit first and spirit last, with matter as the effectual expression or symbolic instrument of spirit.” [5] So it is for Ward with matter and minds. Material reality is essential because it provides a medium in which minds can find their fullest expression. That it took, we think, billions of years for finite minds to arrive on the scene does not necessarily undermine this primacy of mind. We must allow that the intention for the development of minds has been around since the beginning. But back to that in a moment.
Ward is clear about the stakes of this argument; he believes it is part of “a major intellectual battle” with materialists over the “distinctive reality and value of human minds.” [6] His motivation derives in large part from concerns about the person. For instance, if we believe a mind is different from a brain, we must carefully account for the continuity of “experiences” and “actions” that give minds “their unique identity.” [7] And if we believe a mind is more than a sophisticated computer program, then we must account for human consciousness and moral freedom to make clear why purpose and intention belong in our metaphysical speculation even as they have been excluded, and rightly so, from scientific discourse. Indeed Ward’s ambitious goal is to develop an account that is consonant with the picture of physical reality that twentieth-century science built up without discarding the concept of mind as illusory or superfluous.
I find Ward’s picture of the individual human mind to be quite compelling. His preferred language, drawn from Whitehead, [8] of mind as inner nature that gives meaning and purpose to our lives provides an evocative and, I think, reasonably satisfactory answer to the mind-body problem. I think Ward argues that the error with Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” is essentially false analogy. The brain doesn’t throw a series of discrete mental levers to animate the body’s arms and legs; rather the mind, as inner nature of the body, simply realizes its purposes through, among other things, physical movement. If the connection is mysterious for lack of a mechanism, then so be it. Action, no less than volition, is continuous, says Ward: “The mistake is not in positing mental acts. The mistake lies in thinking of mental acts as countable, discrete episodes.” [9] We find that we simply cannot expect the concepts and language of mechanics to give adequate account of mind and body at work together; we need an integrative, not a reductive, picture.
Where I find myself in the weeds with this book is those places where we move from minds as the unseen inner nature of persons to minds as “more real than matter” [10] and as “the basic character of reality.” [11] What I appreciated about Ward’s move from microcosm to macrocosm was the argument’s analogical consistency. Consider the following passage:
Whereas an older generation of scientists and philosophers thought the universe was rather like a watch, many now regard the universe as more like an organism. It grows and develops, and its first stages can only be properly understood when its completely developed state is perceived … [C]onscious personal life and the material structure of the universe fit together in a coherent way if we suppose that the physical universe has the purpose of producing personal consciousness as the natural realization of its inherent and original capacities. [12]
So just as human minds are the natural and ultimate movers and shakers of our bodies, so a personal Cosmic Mind or Hegel’s impersonal Absolute Spirit may be at work animating the material universe toward the ultimate purpose of conscious life. The “fine-tuned” nature of universal physical constants are just one example of how the results of physical science provide some support for this view, though of course in a speculative way.
What somehow rubbed me the wrong way in this discussion was to say that all this shows that mind is more real than matter. I can understand, as he says elsewhere “more basic, more causally efficacious,” [13] given the primacy of the mental aspect over the physical in their interplay as described above. But more real seems to me to undermine that essential mutuality. I am not convinced that because minds influence reality-in-itself we should therefore create a hierarchy of realness. That seems to me to needlessly antagonize the physical scientists Ward wants to be in conversation with.
Allow me now a short digression to introduce a final thought experiment that I hope might be helpful for some. I just returned from a long weekend in Philadelphia with my oldest friend. Carl was the one who introduced me to the work of British humorist Douglas Adams, who became a shared passion and who gave us much to laugh, cry, and think about for the roughly twenty years we’ve known each other. Apparently I couldn’t finish reading More than Matter in Carl’s home without putting Ward’s ideas in concrete conversation with Adams’s famously materialist perspective. In my imagination, Adams, and sometimes his friend Richard Dawkins, play the interlocutory roles for me that Ryle, and sometimes Wittgenstein, play in the book, for Ward.
Among many possible critical apparatus from Douglas Adams’s two major literary worlds, the one that occurred to me as most relevant to Ward’s discussion is the Total Perspective Vortex, a device that appears in Adams’s novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The Vortex forced its victims to see “in one instant the whole infinity of creation and [themselves] in relation to it.” [14] Adams playfully proposes that the experience would be fatal, given the utter insignificance of any individual being against so vast a cosmic backdrop.
I had to wonder what Ward’s idealist philosophy might make of the Vortex. “Space,” Adams famously writes, “is big, Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.” [15] And so of course the Vortex is a bit demoralizing, because the seven octillion atoms, roughly 10^28, in one human being [16] still make for a puny numerator when dividing by, say, 10^82, the high end of the estimate of the number of atoms in the known universe. [17] Any individual is a zero in such a framework, but idealism tells us that this materialist calculus is all wrong. A snapshot of the intergalactic night sky, however detailed, can never offer Total Perspective if we believe that all we see is not all there is.
If matter is not all of what there is, not all of who we are, then our relative size in the snapshot changes. Ward writes, “We should not think that it took the birth and death of millions of star-systems and the extermination of millions of extinct organisms just to produce one man drinking beer in a pub. However, in one sense that man is more valuable than all those galaxies, because there was no one to appreciate their beauty, whereas at least he enjoys his pint.” [18] So an idealist Total Perspective Vortex might well weight an individual’s significance by his or her ability to realize the universal purposes of consciousness, beauty, love, and maybe sacrifice, and to continue their development. Thus, the little “you are here” dot grows, becoming bigger than the sum of our body parts. Ward again: “We may think we exist on the last half-page of the many-volume book that is the history of the universe. But if there are even more volumes still to come, that changes the picture entirely.” [19]
As I worked through Ward’s final chapters and particularly his discussion of the arts, I came to believe that a true Total Perspective Vortex would of necessity be a multimedia experience to come anywhere close to capturing the cosmic significance of the lives of even the most boring among us. Our ability not just to appreciate but to create in the worlds of poetry and music, mathematics and ethics, would need to be reflected in some cinematic symphony. I was reminded then of another Douglas Adams scene, a fantastical encounter in which an electronic musician is suddenly surrounded by what he can only describe as “the music of life itself” (spoiler alert: it turns out to sound a lot like Bach). [20] The musician later says “I’m not religious, but if I were I would say it was like a glimpse into the mind of God. Perhaps it was and I ought to be religious.” [21] Perhaps it’s unfair for me to call my favorite writer a materialist after all. And perhaps it’s fair for Ward to call creative minds, and the Creator whose purposes they realize, the realest things we know of—at least for now.
- All footnotes from Ward give the approximate Amazon Kindle “location” of the excerpt (out of 3329 total locations). Keith Ward, More than Matter? [Kindle Edition] (Oxford: Lion Books, 2011): 80.
- Ward, 1638.
- Ward, 3015.
- Ward, 1335.
- William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan and Co, 1934): 492.
- Ward, 115.
- Ward, 913.
- Ward, 1182.
- Ward, 2177.
- Ward, 509.
- Ward, 810.
- Ward, 1196 & 1269.
- Ward, 1982.
- In Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Ballantine, 2002): 198.
- Hitchhiker’s, 53.
- Brian Clegg, “20 amazing facts about the human body,” The Guardian (26 January 2013): http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/27/20-human-body-facts-science
- John Carl Villanueva, “Atoms in the Universe,” Universe Today (30 July 2009): http://www.universetoday.com/36302/atoms-in-the-universe/
- Ward, 1302.
- Ward, 1316.
- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (New York: Pocket, 1987): 290.
- Dirk Gently, 298.
Something creative: A story about the Thrilling Adventure Hour
Because I now blog elsewhere(s), this space has apparently turned into a blog about sermons and my podcast obsessions. To continue in that latter vein, allow me to share a recent bit of silliness.
I just participated in a fantastic workshop by the Center for Digital Storytelling as part of a continuing education project through Virginia Seminary’s Second Three Years program. I was hoping to bone up on my video creation skills (this bit with Tricia was fun but needs some work on the production end). Boy did I. That’s not to say I’ve now become a master, but I’m always (foolishly) surprised with how much progress you can make with a good guide.
My fellow classmates told a lot of tremendously powerful stories of love and loss and love lost. I was wowed by these, but I knew I wanted to try my hand at something in a different mood.
So here’s my crack at a story about my trip to New York Comic Con to see the Thrilling Adventure Hour live. It was one of the highlights of my 2013, and I am glad for the chance to share the story.
His whole life for our whole lives
Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus
(Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:15-21)
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At first glance, today is a very literal sort of feast. We celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus because it is the eighth day of Christmas and, as our Gospel reading says, “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus.”
Aside from reminding us that Mary got the name from her Angel visitor, that’s pretty much all Luke gives us. Since we couldn’t very well have a one-sentence Gospel lesson, the lectionary leads into that verse with the details that come before it, of the shepherds’ visit to the Christ-child.
And so I found myself playfully revising the message of the Angel: “you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger—and wait ‘til you get a load of what they’re calling him.”
But our commemoration and our Gospel reading start to make sense when we consider what the name actually signifies. You may know that Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua, which means “God has saved” [translation by Marion Lloyd Soards in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, p. 97].
And actually, that part is in the Angel’s words to the Shepherds: “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” God has saved. That’s what the shepherds went to the stable to see. That’s who they went to see.
So there’s a more substantial reason to celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus today, or at least during the season of Christmas, our great feast of the Incarnation of God in Christ. By speaking “God has saved” on, if you will, the liturgical anniversary of Jesus’s circumcision and naming, we remind ourselves that Jesus’s whole life was his saving act for those who would be baptized into it. His whole life was his saving act.
There will be other reminders of this insight along our path as we walk with Jesus from Creche to Cross and then beyond. When we sing the Great Litany during Lent, we will ask the Lord’s deliverance not just “By thine Agony and Bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension,” but also “By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity and submission to the Law; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation.”
Yes, when the shepherds brought their flocks, when the Magi brought their gifts, when Mary and Joseph loved and cared for him, Jesus was saving us. Each time he read Torah, each time he swung a hammer, each time he healed the sick, each time he welcomed a child, each time he taught the crowds, Jesus was saving us. His whole life was his saving act. His whole life he was saving us.
So perhaps there’s one last reason why it’s a good and holy thing for us to celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus on this particular day. For many of us, New Year’s Day means a renewed commitment to live lives more in touch with our deepest desires: health, wholeness, relationship, thanksgiving, generosity.
If, with God’s help, we are to succeed, we’ll do a little bit each day—with every decision, with every simple act. Thus, we’ll experience God’s gift of salvation and fullness of life in the same way Jesus offered it.
So remember that the next time you’re feeling bored or overwhelmed by what feels like a trivial task, or dozens of them. Remember it when you fall back into old habits despite your best efforts, or fall into new ones by a power you didn’t know you had.
Remember it when you meet someone who’s having a bad day, or someone who can’t remember the last time he or she had a good one. Remember the baby, the boy, the man whose mother named him “God has saved.”
And remember how he did it: with his whole life, for our whole lives. Thanks be to God.
Waking up, keeping watch
(Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44)
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A recent early-morning flight had me picking up fellow travelers on the Virginia Seminary campus at half past four. A few minutes later, as we crested the hill that opens up onto Arlington and the District, which were still beautifully lit against the darkness, one of my companions said, “I hate getting up this early, but I love being awake.”
If we’re to understand today’s readings properly―if we’re to understand this season of Advent―I think we need that 4 a.m. mindset.
Take a minute to get in touch with it: think back to that all-night study session in high school or college, to sitting vigil while awaiting a late-night childbirth, to watching the sky grow light on a chilly camping trip or an eternal third shift finally give way to the steady march of morning.
Yes, the dead of night can be a time of great frustration and loneliness, as all of us have experienced, some much more often than we’d like. But at its best, the chilly moonlight can illumine for us a dazzling facet of the human experience. When the Spirit is hovering in our midst, the dead of night comes alive with possibility.
Just ask Robert Frost, who wrote with longing, “These woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep.” Or consider Jandy Nelson, who wrote of two fearless sisters that
sometimes in the pitch of night
they’d lie on their backs
in the middle of the path
and look up until the stars came back
and when they did,
they’d reach their arms up to touch them
and did
Or if we want to get right down to it, we can ask the writer of Psalm 130: “My soul waits for the LORD, more than watchmen for the morning, * more than watchmen for the morning.”
The point is that the darkness of night and early morning can be a time of clarity, of focus, of yearning―a time when our waiting reconnects us with the courage of our convictions. What distinguishes Advent from Lent is that in the later season we are called to turn around and repent; in this one, we are called to wake up and keep watch.
Listen to what Paul tells the Romans: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.”
This is a call to alertness and action, to take up the practice of our faith with the focus and vigor of a promised new beginning. “[S]alvation is nearer to us now” because the God of our Salvation approaches. Jesus is coming, again. It is a matter of the greatest urgency.
And yet we don’t know exactly when it will happen. The morning has a way of sneaking up on us. That’s why we need to stay awake, as did the wise bridesmaids with their lamps. We sang about them in our opening hymn this morning, and we’ll visit their story in the closing hymn as well.
But for now Jesus tells us a different parable: “if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
The danger of our reflecting on the second coming of Christ, as we do every year on this Sunday, is to let this promised coming be a source of fear and dread. After all, the foolish bridesmaids do not enter the wedding banquet. And from today’s lesson, we hear: “two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”
But these are parables about being alert. The stories include consequences, surely. But the intention isn’t to scare us, it’s to shake us out of our sense of complacency.
“I hate getting up this early, but I love being awake.”
Here again, our Advent imagery of light in the darkness is useful. These opening days of our new liturgical year are for sober, but ultimately hopeful, contemplation—on our lives and the place of our coming Lord within them. It’s 4 a.m. reality check time. That means matters are urgent but our surroundings calm. There is time enough for focus, there is still and quiet enough for us to see and hear things we otherwise miss.
I think the line between urgency and anxiety is razor thin, and the Spirit in the beginning of Advent beckons us right up to that line. The guiding light that keeps us from stumbling over the edge is Jesus himself, with those familiar words “do not be afraid.”
As the season opens before us, he is still and already shining out in the darkness, guiding us on the righteous path, redeeming us in the brightness of his resurrection, protecting us as our impenetrable armor of light.
The question for us isn’t so much “how can we avoid being caught off guard?” but “how can we respond in faith, hope, and love as the Morningstar rises in our hearts once more?”
That is our question for the week, how do we respond to Jesus shining in our hearts? There is no place in our lives as individuals and as a community where we shouldn’t ask this question, because there is no darkness that can overcome his light.
Let’s think briefly about a timely example, the matter of our annual giving to St. Paul’s. In the coming weeks, we’ll be filling out pledge cards, making the commitment to give back to God. We do this out of our sense of gratitude, as Bishop Jim wrote so eloquently in the Epistle this month, and out of our sense of mission, as Fr. Shakespeare reminded us via email.
Thus, it is good for us to feel some urgency about our giving. It will affect how we are able to serve our neighbors near and far. It will affect our corporate life of worship and of welcome. It will affect our very souls, as God continues to teach us the painful but unavoidable lesson that to be truly free in this life is to learn to let go.
But my prayer is that all our deliberations about giving can take place against a spiritual backdrop of 4 a.m. stillness. We’ll be tempted to fret about trendlines and bottom lines, comparing this year to last year and yesteryear. But they are the past. We’ll be tempted to fear the worst about the year to come, about the changes and chances we cannot predict. But they are the future.
In our giving and in all our seeking and serving, may we remember St. Paul’s admonition: Now is the moment for us to wake from sleep. Now is where where God’s reality meets our response. Now is where we have our impact. The night is far gone; the day is near.
Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, help us to wait for your coming with urgency but without anxiety. Be for us our Light and our Salvation. Amen.
Pilgrim Virtues
(Amos 8:4-7; Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13)
Image source: Ahron de Leeuw via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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Let me start by saying that I’m as confused by our Gospel passage today as you might be. A manager “squanders” the resources he’s been entrusted with and receives notice to get the books in order, such as they are, and prepare for the pink slip. So he scrambles around cutting deals with his master’s debtors, hoping to ingratiate himself and receive eventual welcome “into their homes.”
As we get ready for Jesus to pounce on the manipulative manager, the punchline all but set up, we hear instead that the master “commended” the manager’s shrewd strategy. And just as we get our heads around this shocker and prepare for Jesus to write both men off as “children of this age” rather than “children of light,” he tells the crowd to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” [pause] What’s the deal?
Well, let’s first commend Jesus for his shrewdness too. A story with not one but two surprise endings certainly grabs his hearers’ attention—no mean feat in his time or ours. And a parable that leaves us asking “What’s the deal?” has achieved the overriding objective of any parable: to get us thinking hard.
A lot of very smart people have thought very hard about this peculiar parable, and I read quite a few of their attempts to make at least some sense of it. Several of them seemed to me to put too tidy a bow around a messy story dripping with ambiguity. Jesus, and Luke, were quite capable of being clearer if they wanted to be.
The interpretation I found compelling and relevant to our life together has modest ambitions. It starts by picking up on a little translation detail that would be easy to miss:
When the manager is contemplating possible landing zones for his self-made golden parachute, he speaks of being welcomed into his associates’ “homes” using a greek word that means home, house, or household. When Jesus talks about the friendships we are to forge, the promised “eternal homes” would be better translated with “tabernacle,” “habitation,” or simply “tent.”
The persuasive commentator then puts this small detail into a broad perspective on the Christian life:
“Jesus does not promise to provide what the unjust steward sought, the stable abode of those who have possessions and security. Rather, [he] promises the unstable abode of the wanderer, the refugee, and the pilgrim, whose mobility requires the dispossession of goods” [Scott Bader-Saye’s “Theological Perspective” from Feasting on the Word (Westminster John Knox): Year C, Volume 4, pages 95–96.]
So we might paraphrase Jesus like this: You might as well throw that dishonest wealth around with some abandon, because you can’t take it with you on the journey I’ve got in store for you.
This exposition doesn’t “solve the puzzle” of this parable, but I don’t think that should really be the goal. What if, instead, we just sat with the question our commentator suggested: What would it mean, what does it mean, for the people of God to be pilgrims rather than citizens, tenants rather than landlords, sojourners and wayfarers rather than the kings and queens of our own castle keeps? Here’s my stab at some … let’s call them “Pilgrim Virtues”:
First, pilgrims know that absolute security is an illusion. They do their best to bring provisions for the days ahead, and to steer clear of the most dangerous obstacles. But no one is immune to famine and disease, to cycles of violence and random tragedies.
(On that note, let me pause and bid your continued prayers for the victims of the mass shooting at the Navy Yard on Monday morning; for their families, friends, and colleagues; and for all those affected by violence throughout the world. If you know someone touched by this tragedy, or if you experienced resonances with some past trauma in your own life, please remember that the clergy and people of St. Paul’s are here for you. Just speak to someone after the service and we will do our best to connect you with the help you need.)
So pilgrims are not surprised by the worst that life can throw at them, but pilgrims are also thankful, as we know, for the gifts they have received. They don’t have the luxury of mistaking those gifts as signs of their own value or of a contingent blessing based on good behavior or worthy offerings. Pilgrims know what it’s like to be out of meal and oil, and they’ve learned the hard way to trust that God is present anyway. If they hadn’t learned to trust and to be thankful for what they have, they never would have made it this far.
Pilgrims can also be on the lookout for opportunity. They are blessed with an awareness that the story of their people is still being written. They are resistant (though not immune) to the temptation of glorifying “the good old days.” If they weren’t, they probably wouldn’t have ended up as pilgrims in the first place, because the memory of what was is seductive. It seems like a much easier dream to chase than the promise of what could be. But of course the pilgrims have it right, and the alternative is usually folly.
So what do these pilgrim virtues have to do with us? We might start by asking what false security we’re hanging onto. To add some wayfaring imagery to Bishop Jim’s question from two weeks ago, what treasures are we dragging through the wilderness that should have been left in Egypt? Some things are worth carrying, as the Israelites knew. But only the essentials—pilgrims travel light. We can’t limit our soul-searching to physical things: some old ways of working and worshiping, of relating to each other and our neighborhood, will probably need to change. God is doing a new thing, but none of us knows entirely what. That’s why we’re on a pilgrimage.
How about thanksgivings? What do we have to celebrate, right here, right now, even among much uncertainty? My first idea is the incredible talent and dedication in our music program under Robert McCormick’s steady direction. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate our choirs than with more music, and I hope to see many of you here Friday night to support their ministry and join in the fun. Sharing and retweeting our social media posts about the event wouldn’t hurt either.
Another gift I’ve heard the parish buzzing about these past couple weeks is, and you can’t make up these coincidences, pilgrims: the Pilgrims in Christ class. As someone who makes his living as a Christian education consultant in training, I cannot understate to you what a tremendous blessing it is to have newcomers, long-time members, and a team of dedicated teachers so excited for a year-long faith formation experience that meets for two evening hours every single week. If I even suggested something like that to anyone who called our center at the seminary looking for ideas, they’d probably still be laughing at the absurdity. But Pilgrims is transforming lives in this parish, even in a year of transition. I’m thankful for everyone taking the plunge.
But what opportunities to use our many and distinctive gifts haven’t we thought of yet? What life-changing ministries lie just beyond the horizon? What unmet needs are we just starting to get an inkling about? What new ways to share the love of Christ are seeking root in the fertile soil of our hearts and minds?
We’ll miss these opportunities if we’re busy engineering a soft landing into business as usual or serving masters other than the Lord of All. We’ll miss them if we expect them to be unambiguous or tidy or painless.
But those who have taken a leap of faith in this life know the sure provision and surprising pleasures of a pilgrimage in Christ. It takes an ability to stay calm, to keep alert, to let go. It may even take some holy shrewdness.
The one thing we can be sure of is that God will be there in the thick of it, even if we don’t always understand how.
Healing and the Sabbath
(Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17)
Image source: Josh James via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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I am something of a monastery groupie. Maybe that’s not the right phrase. But I follow—with great passion, in person and online—a number of monks, nuns, friars, and the orders they belong to.
My adult faith was largely formed among members of the Order of Julian of Norwich. One of my favorite seminary classes was a Thomas Aquinas course taught, mostly, to first-year Dominicans. Every day, I read a meditation by Franciscan spiritual writer Richard Rohr, whom I was fortunate to hear recently in this his last year before retiring from speaking.
And as many of you heard back in Lent, I am a tireless cheerleader for the various online outreach efforts of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, MA (SSJE for short).
Because I work for a highly regarded Christian education professor, I recently had the opportunity to collaborate with some SSJE staff members on the first draft of a curriculum about writing a rule of life. As it turns out, the first order of business in this curriculum was unpacking some baggage around the word rule, baggage that has some bearing on our Gospel lesson today.
When many of us hear the word rule, we think of an encumbrance of some sort. A rule holds us back, tells us we can’t do something that in fact we’d rather like to do. I think, somewhat bizarrely, of the teacher screaming, “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding” to a classroom full of singing students in the Pink Floyd movie The Wall.
But from Paul Tillich to Paul of Tarsus, the Christian tradition has preached the paradox that rules actually help set us free, that some kind of accountability is necessary for us to become the people that God wants us to be and that we ourselves want to be. The rules may not be the fun part of a game, but games wouldn’t be fun at all without them. Life wouldn’t be possible or meaningful without them.
That’s the sense in which the monastic tradition uses the term “rule of life.” Our rule is that set of intentions and practices that gives shape to our Christian discipleship. Participants in our Pilgrims in Christ class write rules of life, selecting personal guidelines from what they’ve learned helps bring them closer to God and their neighbors:
“I will go on a silent retreat each year” or “I will keep a journal about my struggles with prayer” or “I will volunteer once a month at Grate Patrol or my local food pantry” or (here’s one my spiritual director suggested to me) “I will ask for help.”
A rule of life keeps us centered on the spectrum that lies between freedom and responsibility. Without a rule, most of us tend to go a little off the rails—down one extreme or the other. Sometimes our rule will tell us to get in gear. Sometimes it will tell us to take a break. Sometimes, it’s hard to know what it’s telling us.
I think we’re seeing something like this dynamic in the encounter between Jesus and the leader of the synagogue. Their dispute is about two important aspects of observing sabbath, which is part of any good rule of life. [I’m grateful here to Charles Raynal for his Pastoral Perspective in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3, page 382.]
One idea comes from Exodus 20: “in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it” (verse 11). That’s the important perspective the leader of the synagogue has in mind: God made this day holy, so you should honor that, Jesus. That means resting, not running around healing people!
The other idea comes from Deuteronomy 5: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day” (verse 15). That’s what Jesus was thinking of: God longs to set us free. So how could I let this woman be held captive by her affliction?
We will each need both these bits of witness throughout our lives, however we choose to observe a sabbath of some kind: the voice saying “honor this time that God has set aside” and the voice saying “be free to receive God’s gift of healing and rejuvenation.” Sometimes there will be no conflict, other times we will feel forced to choose one or the other.
In this particular case, Jesus lets one of his usual rules of thumb guide his discernment: I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly. I came to proclaim Good News to those in captivity, tidings of peace, of redemption, of release. “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” You are set free from your ailment.
I think it’s no coincidence that Jesus has to weigh in in the direction he does. I think it’s no coincidence that, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus takes still more opportunities to heal and otherwise lighten the load for the downtrodden on the day he was supposed to be resting.
I think between the loads life puts on our shoulders, and the ones we add of our own design, there’s not a one of us here who doesn’t long to hear these words from our Lord, desperately need to hear these words:
You are set free from your ailment—from your perfectionism, your self-hatred, your addictions, your stubbornness, your anxiety, your illness.
Jesus is always ready to say it if we’re able to hear. He doesn’t promise a life without trouble; he does promise a life in which our troubles are transformed by his abiding presence. If we’re ready to be honest with ourselves about it, then Jesus is ready to start redeeming it. In fact, he was already ready, has always been ready, has always been redeeming us.
This process can only happen fully in community, which means our healing and wholeness is tied to that of those around us. That’s why we pray and read the Bible and confess our sins and listen for the Spirit together.
That’s why Christians have been forming communities in house churches and monasteries and study groups and parishes like St. Paul’s K Street for as long as there have been Christians.
That’s why tens of thousands of people came the National Mall yesterday, to renew our country’s collective commitment to being honest about the prejudice and greed and fear that prevent us from living the generous and interconnected lives God calls us to. Lives that we know deep down will bring us greater joy and opportunity as we share these gifts with our neighbors.
It’s no mean feat to live the lives of grace and peace God desires for us, which is why it helps to have a roadmap, a rule. It takes a commitment to living together, the courage to name the burdens we’re carrying, and the humility to lay them down when Jesus offers to make us free of them.
Our Gospel lesson today warns us against presuming there’s ever a time when we don’t need that gift—and, more importantly, that there’s ever a time when he isn’t offering it.
A common life of uncommon devotion
The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin
(Isaiah 61:10–11; Psalm 34; Galatians 4:4–7; Luke 1:46–55)
Image source: Eric R. via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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Earlier this week, I was at a gathering in Colorado that brought together leaders in the Episcopal Church for a couple days of peer training and resource sharing. One of our preachers was Scott Gunn, who leads the Episcopal discipleship organization Forward Movement. As such, he’s also involved in Lent Madness, the yearly tournament that decides which saint will win the Golden Halo.
Tuesday was the Lesser Feast of Anglican spiritual writer Jeremy Taylor, and Scott led us through a different saint’s game, one I think he called Guess How We Got These Readings. It worked pretty well in the case of Taylor; the readings had an obvious connection to his work on Holy Living and Holy Dying, but not so obvious that there wasn’t something to talk about in the sermon.
It would be pretty boring to play “guess how we got this reading” for today’s Epistle, which summarizes rather tersely Mary’s unique part in our salvation story. Diddo for today’s rather obvious Gospel lesson, Mary’s magnificent song of praise. How could we not include that? But our reading from Isaiah makes Scott’s game interesting. Why do we hear this reading in this service? Let me play for a few minutes with one possible answer: more so than usual, I think this lesson invites us to engage our imaginations.
In its original context, this passage from the end of chapter 61 concludes a poem announcing the prophet’s good news to the LORD’s people in exile. Though they had received a double portion of shame and dishonor, their destiny is a double share in everlasting joy. These verses are their song of praise and thanksgiving at that promise. [Joseph Blankinsopp, Isaiah notes, New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3 edition, p. 1064.]
What our liturgy asks us to do this evening is to hear this lesson in a different key, to view it through a particular prism. Try to hear these words as Mary might have heard them, to say them as she might have said them. Does that help us pick up on some new detail? Does it touch our hearts in a new way? I’ll go first.
**
When I hear the collective people of Zion sing “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God”—when I hear that my mind’s eye imagines a civic celebration, a people gathered in joy, a city in bloom.
But when I hear these words from Mary’s perspective, the notion of exulting in God with “my whole being” takes on an added gravity, an essential physicality.
It helps that the Hebrew word in question, נֶפֶשׁ, has a particularly expansive set of possible translations: my soul, my self, my life, my person, my appetite, my mind, my living being, my desire, my emotion, my passion—my whole being shall exult in my God. The words from our marriage vows come to mind as I hear this list: “with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you” (BCP 427).
For Mary, to magnify the God who magnified her meant carrying and giving birth to a son, feeding him at her breast, protecting him as best she could, and being wounded in her own soul by the sword that pierced her son. It must indeed have taken all that she had to make it through. [pause]
With all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you, O God. I exult in you with my whole being. That is the life commitment to which Christ and his apostles call each of us, over and over again. Sell all your possessions and follow me. Hunger and thirst for righteousness. Let your body be a temple of the Holy Spirit. This is our divine vocation: Call it purity of heart. Call it way, truth, and life. Call it new creation.
We commemorate saints because we can never have enough role models for living lives of true devotion. The saints are God’s signs to us that by the grace of the Holy Spirit we too may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
In Mary’s case, that sign is a life both common and uncommon: Bear a child, God said to her. Raise him in the faith. Celebrate his victories and mourn his losses. Exult in me with your whole being. Exult in him.
**
So you’ve heard the line that jumped out to me, and a little bit about where it led my imagination. Now it’s your turn. Be sure to have another look at the reading. As you do, put yourself in Mary’s shoes. What do you notice? What does it show you about God, about Mary, about her son? Ponder these things. Tell a friend. Talk to God. And next time we commemorate a saint, have another imaginative encounter with scripture.
How did we get this reading from Isaiah? The same way as always: someone thought it might help us live our lives in a new way as we try our best to love and follow Mary’s son. For her sake, on her day, let’s try to do it with our whole being.