Look, a rainbow!

          In Preschool Chapel this week, I leapt right into a lesson on Lent, preoccupied with the challenge of explaining self-examination and repentance to two, three, and four-year-olds. Involved in what I was saying, I was not attuned to the seemingly random comments that kept popping up from the pews. “My,” I thought, “the children sure are having a hard time settling down today. They are usually such good listeners.” I tried to tune out their soft, amazed voices, more determined than ever to capture their attention with the messy, black ashes that I was using to draw a picture. It wasn’t until I’d finished my story that I heard what they had been saying the whole time, “Look, Miss Rev. Anne, there’s a rainbow on you! A rainbow!” I had never noticed before that, when the sun shines just the right way through our stained-glass windows, a rainbow appears on the right front side of the church—indeed, right where I was standing. Preoccupied with ashes and sin, I had a rainbow dancing across my face and arm, and only the children could see it.

 The story of the flood in Genesis is not a happy tale. I don’t care how violent and wicked the earth was, I don’t like the idea of a Creator God who wads up his creation and destroys it, like a petulant child dissatisfied with his drawing. I don’t like to imagine whole cities of flawed human beings gasping for breath underneath the muddy floodwaters while only Noah’s family bobs safely away on the ark. I roll my eyes at a God who shoots out painful lightning arrows with a mighty bow to zap us, even if that God has decided to hang up the bow on a celestial hook. The flood story usually makes me uncomfortable with God, despairing of human nature, and focused on sin and punishment. When I think about the flood story, I enter into a gray world of pouring rain, a real “Ash Wednesday world” of human depravity and divine judgment. It might be a good idea for us, though, on this first Sunday of Lent, to put aside our discomfort and indignation to join the Preschool children in concentrating on the rainbow for a change.

When I think of rainbows, I think of laughing children standing outside in the backyard on a lazy summer afternoon and squirting the garden hose at just the right angle to make a rainbow appear over the grass, like a magic trick. Like love itself, rainbows are happy, if ephemeral things. If we try to catch them, they turn to damp mist in our hands, and if we try to point them out to others, they slide away behind a sunbeam. Rainbows are a fitting sign of a covenant with a Creator who is inextricably intertwined and immanently present in the world, yet always just beyond our grasp and our vision. In today’s reading, God promises Noah to love and to sustain the world for all eternity, tenderly reaching out in life-giving mercy—not just to Noah’s righteous family, to the ancient Israelite nation, or even to sentient human beings—but softly enveloping all the creatures of the earth, seas, and sky. So involved is God within the world that the rainbow will appear in every cloud and before every storm, not merely for our benefit, but as a constant thought, a whispered “remember” to an ever-present and observant God. In the rainbow, the covenant of the Holy One shimmers, almost invisible, within every drop of water, for those searching with open eyes. It can shine on us, even when we are holding ashes in our hands.

The amazing thing about the covenant with Noah, marked by the rainbow, is indeed that it is a covenant that is binding only on God. The other Biblical covenants, given to Abraham and to the children of Israel, demand obedient responses from the human side of the bargain. But in this covenant with Noah, God accepts that “the human heart is evil from youth,” and God promises never to react again with violence against the creation. It doesn’t matter what terrible things we do, or what good things we fail to do, God voluntarily restrains God’s own power and freedom to destroy. It is as if we have a God who, out of love for Creation, emptied himself to become a slave, suffering and even dying for the world that he has made …as if we have a God who could become flesh and walk into the wilderness of our world to feel hunger and thirst and fear and to be tempted by Evil … as if we have a God willing go so far as to die as a condemned criminal on a Cross. We Christians like to point fingers at the “angry Old Testament God,” but the God who spoke in the rainbow is the same loving, merciful God that we Christians see in Jesus Christ. The shining rainbows that magically appear before our eyes are like the nail marks and spear marks in the flesh of the risen Christ—painful wounds and gashes of love and mercy bleeding light into the sky from the heart of a faithful and self-limiting God.

          Why does it matter to us, you might ask, what kind of emotions we ascribe to God, to a God who is obviously more than any of our human labels? In the 21^st century, do we really still need this story of a God who gets angry and feels remorse and makes loving promises like a human parent? I believe that we do. For what we believe about God has a direct relationship to what we believe about ourselves and our world. Just as we project human emotions onto God, we pull down divine judgments onto ourselves and our neighbors. If God destroys and punishes, we are encouraged to do the same. The Christians who claimed that the flooding from Hurricane Katrina was divine judgment on the citizens of New Orleans for their iniquity were like me in preschool chapel—so caught up in sin and guilt that they forgot about the rainbows. On the other hand, if our God takes risks in loving creation, so must we. As David Lose writes, “If God, who alone has the right to despair, judge, or destroy, surrenders [that right], might not we who have tasted this mercy look upon all persons and all things as inherently worthwhile, that is, as those things that God has called worthy?”[1]

          I recently heard author Diana Butler Bass talking online about her most recent book, Christianity After Religion, and she was naming some of the things in the last decade that have turned Americans off of Church: the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, the nasty in-fighting of Episcopalians over Bishop Gene Robinson’s election, the violence of the Muslim terrorists on September 11 …. Unlike God, in our actions and reactions, we have both given up on ourselves because of our sinfulness and we have been unwilling to see and respond in love to the worth and dignity of every human being. We Christians have earned the reputation described in a new Lenten hymn: “we often sing that you are our delight, then we go shouting words that sting, we bicker and we fight. Oppressing others for our gain, we put our interests first. We overlook our neighbor’s pain while praying here in church.”[2] In other words, we hold up ashes, while rainbows dance across our foreheads.

          This first week in Lent, I invite all of us to remember the rainbows: not as cheery signs pointing to a pot of gold at the end, but as self-inflicted wounds in the heart of God, inviting us to live lives of forgiveness, mercy, and self-giving love.

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[1] David Lose, “Genesis 9:8-17” in Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 2, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds., 31.

[2] “O God of Love, the Fast You Choose,” by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, 2012.

Dust

       This Ash Wednesday, I have been thinking a lot about dust, the “dust” that we are and the “dust” to which we return. A year ago today, we shared our first Eucharist together. The first symbolic act that I performed with you, though, was to take powdery black ashes from a little container and make a cross with them on your foreheads, with the familiar words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” I didn’t realize on that day that I would, over the next six or seven months, stand before you again so many times with very similar ashes in my hands and proclaim, “All we go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song. Alleluia.” I could not imagine that so many of the expressive, living faces examining me with serious eyes for the first time at that Ash Wednesday service would, with closed eyes, be returned to the dust of our Meditation Garden, mixing beloved ash with dark, humid soil. Yes, remembering the somber weight of the ashes of beloved parishioners in my hands and the clinging of their ashes to my fingers, I have been thinking a lot this Ash Wednesday about dust.

          “Remember that you are dust.” This phrase from Genesis, spoken to Adam and Eve after their sin had forced them from the Garden, indeed recalls our sinfulness and our mortality, tied inseparably together, yet it also carries within it hidden blessing and responsibility. The dust into which God breathed life was not, as I have often carelessly imagined it, the useless stuff collecting on the top of my refrigerator or under my bed. A study of the Hebrew words shows us that God created Adam, the “groundling,” from the “dust,” from the loose dirt, of the good, arable soil.[1] God did not create us from heavy, sticky clay to be fired in an oven and shattered. God did not chisel us from hard, unbendable, self-sufficient rock. God did not form us from rotting peat or from shifting desert sand. God created us from loose, rich garden soil, from the soil that grows things, the soil that brings forth life when planted with seed and watered. As people of the dirt, we are one with the same soil that we work, the same soil that nourishes us with food. And it is to that same fine garden soil that we will all return. Our life as “dust” is not only impermanent and hard to hold onto. Our common life as dust ties us to the earth, to our job as caretakers of the earth, and of one another. When Cain killed his brother Abel, it was the soil that cried out in pain and indignation to God.

          No wonder that Isaiah, in his vision of a restored Israel, calls us to be “a watered garden …. the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.” As dust, we are not meant to float away on a sigh over our own mortality, “to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes.” Even in acknowledging our frailty and failures, we are tied in responsibility to one another and to our world: “to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin” says Isaiah. Like the farmer who continues to work the soil, to fertilize, to weed, to bring forth growth by the sweat of his brow, we are expected to work the ground of our world, feeding, clothing, and caring for one another, as if our lives depended on it—for they do. I wonder if, during Lent and beyond, we can remember both to work the yearning ground of our world and the yearning ground of our own souls. St. Paul gives us the tools in our lesson from 2^nd Corinthians: purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God.

As you receive the dust of last year’s Palms on your foreheads today, think both of the Hosanna’s that turned to ash and the Hosanna’s that we will sing again in just 40 days. Remember the precious dust of loved ones who have returned to the life-giving soil. But when you think of the brevity of your own life, remember too that you are fertile soil filled with the breath of God and re-formed in Christ for a new creation. Remember that you are a “groundling” who, to borrow from St. Paul, “has nothing,” yet “possesses everything.” And go forth, blessed and strengthened by a cross of dust, for the life of the world.

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[1] See William P. Brown, The Ethos of the Cosmos: The Genesis of Moral Imagination in the Bible (Eerdmans, 1999), 137-140.

Sliding Down the Mountain with Open Eyes

        Most hikers dread the uphill climbs, but I dread the downhill slides. I don’t mind struggling up a mountain, testing the strength of my legs against the grade, even when the climb is difficult, and I have to stop every few steps to catch my breath. I might ache and pant, but I feel in control of my movements and in charge of my ascent. Going back down the slopes, though, especially steep ones, scares me to death. My children, whose Swiss blood seems to allow them to climb like mountain goats, can testify to my annoying hesitation. “Somebody’s going to have to hold my hand!” I call out in a panicky voice, as soon as the gravel or mud starts to slide around under my feet. I grasp for trees, even for thorn bushes, for anything to keep me upright, as soon as I feel like I might start slipping. I’ve even been known to sit down, bottom in the dirt, dignity abandoned, and scoot my way down a steep slope like a baby learning to crawl.

          So you can imagine my discomfort at the classic icon depicting Jesus’ Transfiguration. The icon shows Jesus standing glorious and powerful in his bright white robes, with Moses and Elijah on either side—but James, Peter, and John are not standing with them on the heights. Oh, no—they are instead lying sprawled out on the ground quite a way back down the mountain. They look as if they have been physically thrown down from the higher slopes. Peter is covering his face; John crouches on his knees, holding up a hand as if to shield himself; and James is sliding down the slope on his back, feet in the air.[1] The Glory of God, revealed in splendor on the mountaintop, has driven the dazed disciples from their perch and sent them sliding back down the slope, dignity and control clearly abandoned.

          What is it about the Transfiguration that robs us of our balance and destroys our sense of control? If it is just a sign that Jesus is the Son of God, shouldn’t we just nod and keep going?

          First of all, our Gospel lesson makes clear that the Transfiguration brings us close to nothing less than the Glory of Almighty God, that same Glory that Moses was not allowed to see, for fear that he could not see it and live. Just as we 21^st century Christians recognize God’s presence in the Cross or in the figure of an angel, Mark and the disciples knew, as good first-century Jews, that a figure clothed in dazzling white garments is the personification of God’s Glory, the bright, shining, powerful manifestation of God’s presence that goes before Him into the world. Since the disciples also knew that, according to tradition, Moses and Elijah did not die but were instead both taken straight up to heaven by God, they knew that the appearance of these two men with Jesus on the mountain confirmed that they were witnessing a vision of heaven itself, a vision as powerful and glorious and otherworldly as the flaming chariot and horsemen in today’s Old Testament lesson. In the Transfiguration, the rabbi Jesus became the Glory of God, and for a brief moment, heaven and earth were one. No wonder the disciples were bowled over.

          But why should we be bowled over today? We don’t seem to be watching for God’s Glory much in the world these days. I’m not sure that we even feel strong enough to climb up the mountain in the first place. I recently read a very bleak version of the Lord’s Prayer, written by a pastor in war-torn Syria, that laments our sinful state and the instability of our lives, and ends with a self-accusing sigh: “Don’t abandon us, God. We will perhaps then be able to see the shadow of your kingdom, of your power and of your glory. Amen.”[2] The Shadow of God’s Glory?—that seems like a vague dimness compared to the shining figure or the flaming chariot that we read about today. It was not a shadow that surrounded Jesus on the mountain; it was light itself pouring through him, the light that chases away all shadows. Do our sins and our shortcomings really wall us off from that transforming Light?

        Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins doesn’t seem to think so: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./ It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;” he writes. Despite the brokenness of the world around us—despite greed and toil, pollution and corruption, he continues, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” because “the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” The world is irradiated with a divine Glory that seeps out in transfigured moments … In an ocean sunset or in the marvelous patterns of flower petals, but also in a sunrise through the smog or in patterns of blood on snow. It shines in the tiny fingers of a newborn baby but also in the peace of death.
        Indeed, according to Eastern Orthodox Christians, the light that poured through Jesus at the Transfiguration still pours into us, into all creation, now. They describe God’s Glory as a kind of Energy, a kind of Light that constantly streams forth from God’s hidden Essence, “as a limitless sea, flowing forth … from the unique Sun.”[3] This Light is a gift of the Spirit. It is found everywhere but can only be seen through matter, transforming even you and me into spiritual light. Orthodox Christians talk about this process as “deification,” the process of becoming God. Such language might make us uncomfortable. “Becoming God” is just for Jesus, we think. But for Orthodox theologians like Gregory Palamas, we too can “be illumined by the purest of lights, by becoming a son of that day which no darkness can dim… And once it has illumined us, [that sun] no longer hides itself in the West, but envelops all things with its powerful light … it transforms those who participate in this light into other suns.”[4] This deification, this transfiguration, is not something that we earn for ourselves by our good deeds, but it is merely something that we open ourselves up to, something that we allow to happen to us by opening up to God in prayer. Rowan Williams describes God’s Energy entering into us like the music that pours into a musician while they are performing. In making music, musicians are carried on the tide of an energy, by a great current of music that is becoming present and immediate in their actions.[5] When God’s energy fills us, it doesn’t change who we are, but it fills us with an energy that allows what we truly are to shine forth—beloved children of a loving God.

          The trouble with seeing the world lit up by the Energy of God is that it means that we are not the ones in control of the world. As Williams says, it means that “the boundaries are unsettled… they are always vulnerable to God’s action … In relation to God, there is no finally closed door in creation, and the environment becomes charged with possibilities we don’t know about.”[6] For Jesus and the disciples, those possibilities include crucifixion and death. They mean lives uprooted, beliefs overturned. They mean sliding backwards down the mountain, arms held up in surrender. Transfiguration does indeed rob us of our balance and destroy our sense of control.

          I was watching the contractors work on our organ chamber this week. They first took every precaution necessary to shore up the floor, according to minute physics calculations. Then they carefully framed the walls out of long, unwieldy pieces of wood, nailed them at precise right angles. Then they put up the big boards that will enclose the organ pipes, keeping the powerful sound from blowing us away. I thought to myself, “Ha, we are building booths on the Mountain! We are carefully keeping the Energy contained! God forbid that a powerful sound would fill our little church so completely that we couldn’t think straight, that our hearts would beat strange new rhythms, that we would no longer feel in control.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe in organ chambers, and I love careful way that we have planned our new one, and this analogy only goes so far. But in thinking about our reactions to being blown over by a roaring, powerful music that we can’t control, perhaps we can identify with those disciples sliding down the mountain on their backsides. Perhaps we can welcome God’s painfully powerful Energy in us, in our world, and in our parish, even when it opens doors that we would prefer to close and breaks down walls that we would prefer to build. Perhaps we can put down our hammers and nails and open our eyes and even ourselves, not just to change, but to divine transfiguration.   

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[1] See Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light, 3

[2] Pastor Bchara Moussa Oghli, Alep, Syria, 14 December 2011, translated from the French by me.

[3] Gregory Palamas, The Triads, 88.

[4] Ibid., 89.

[5] Williams, 6.

[6] Ibid., 14.

Team in Training

          Now here’s an open invitation for me to talk about sports again in the pulpit, if ever there was one! Did you hear St. Paul today in his letter to the Corinthians? He is talking about the self-discipline and dedication of marathon runners and professional athletes, using imagery that seems as alive to us as it did in ancient Corinth, seat of the famous biennial Isthmian Games. We’ve all seen the discipline of body and spirit required by today’s Olympic athletes as they train for years in their special events. We’ve watched all of the heart-warming movies about the rag-tag sports team who pulls together and practices night and day in order to triumph over the big, mean team that has been lording it over them for so long. Perhaps you have even prepared yourself for a marathon or perfected your body in a dance studio? I don’t know much about sore muscles or athletic competition, but I have experienced the same all-consuming drive and self-control necessary for musical accomplishment: the solitary hours spent practicing, the discipline of giving all of oneself to one single pursuit, the family investment of time and money spent on lessons, the mind games involved in constantly measuring oneself against one’s competition. Such a pursuit of individual excellence demands utter commitment and purpose, and like the Corinthians, we understand the image of the struggle for salvation that Paul is conjuring up in our minds …. Or do we?

          Taken alone, these few verses from Paul’s letter sound as if they are inviting us Christians into some kind of individual competition with one another or with the rest of the world. Who can live the holiest life? Who can push through the mediocre crowd first to snatch salvation and approval from God’s almighty hands? Who has the self-discipline to perfect his soul like an athlete perfects his body? Thanks be to God, such self-perfection is not what Paul is arguing for here in his letter to the Corinthians. Taken in the context of the whole letter, these few verses are part of Paul’s over-arching argument that the squabbling Corinthian Christians need to take care of one another, that they need to love one another and work together in unity. As he writes in the beginning of his letter, “I exhort you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be of a same mind...” Paul is asking us, then, in today’s lesson, to apply all of the self-discipline of the athlete to our difficult relationships with one another in community, to work to perfect the divided body of Christ with all of the effort and dedication that it takes to win an Olympic gold medal.

Paul is indeed arguing for that struggle, self-control, and discipline that we all know so well in our individual accomplishments—but he is switching the goal of all the hard work from our own growth and healing to the growth and healing of our brothers and sisters. The crown of laurels that we are striving to win, says Paul, is not the personal “perishable crown” of first place in a sport, or of an Oscar, or of a Platinum album … or of my own Glory in any shape or form—but it is the “imperishable crown” that the Good News of God’s love places upon the heads of our brothers and sisters. The crown that we are working so hard to win is woven from the healing of the world around us. Paul names his victory crown when he calls the Philippians, “my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown.”

We in the Church have a long way to go to measure up to Paul’s dreams for us. At our clergy retreat this week, we talked about a video that the Presiding Bishop made for the deputies who will be attending General Convention this summer. It is a wonderful video all about the mission of the Episcopal Church, about how the structures and resources of the Church should be focused on spreading the Good News of God’s Kingdom and on responding to the needs of the world, rather than on internal dynamics and a structure of command and control. Yet the speech itself has caused a tempest in a teapot, because the President of the House of Deputies is upset that the Presiding Bishop has addressed “her” House of Deputies directly and out of turn. What if the energy spent on internal squabbling between branches of our national church could indeed be turned toward spreading the Good News of God’s love for all people? And closer to home, what if the squabbling within our parishes and dioceses about everything from the color of the carpet in the parlor to the size of the organ to diocesan funding or same-sex blessings could, with great discipline and self-control, be treated as less important than the faith and salvation of the world within and around us? How would that effort change the dynamics and growth within this Body of Christ?

As a “liberal Christian,” I was convicted years ago by a comment in one of Rowan Williams’ sermons that the problem with “liberal indifference” is that it “seeks to draw the sting from bitterness and conflict by suggesting that both sides should stop believing things so hard … yet that is saying … that [our] struggles aren’t worthwhile, that [our] life is not at stake here [in what we believe.]”[1] Indeed, “not believing things so hard” is not the answer that Paul gives us to our conflicted life together. Rather, Paul wants for us to believe with all the strength and focus and energetic spirit that we can muster, and then some. He does not want us to be boxers who stand around “flailing at the air,” ineffectual and unconvinced. Yet, all of our labor needs to be turned to the race being run by our brother or sister. “It is by your holding fast to the word of life that I can boast on the day of Christ that I did not run in vain or labor in vain,” he writes to the Philippians.  Why do we have to get along? Why do we care about the Christians who don’t agree with us? Because without them, we lose the race.

Some of you may have seen or heard about a You-Tube video sensation a few weeks ago made by a young Christian rap artist named Jefferson Bethge. Called, “Why I hate religion but love Jesus,” Bethge’s message that skewers the Church and its hypocrisy, while contrasting it with the loving freedom shown to us in Jesus Christ, has been seen by over 18 million people on the Internet. His message picks up on our overwhelming feeling these days that all institutions, from the Church to the government, have failed us in their squabbling and hypocrisy. Last week, writer David Brooks wrote about the video sensation, pointing out that when Bethge was challenged in his statements by older theologians, he immediately recanted, changing his once-passionately-stated position. Why did Bethge agree, “not to believe too hard?” For Brooks, “Bethke’s passionate polemic and subsequent retreat are symptomatic of a lot of the protest cries we hear these days. This seems to be a moment when many people — in religion, economics and politics — are disgusted by current institutions, but then they are vague about what sorts of institutions should replace them.”[2] The answer that Brooks offers to this phenomenon is that we have forgotten the benefits of a tradition, a set of practices and beliefs that ground us in a way of life. “Effective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings,” he writes. “It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions. Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart …They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change.”

I think that St. Paul would agree with David Brooks on this point. As the one body of Christ, we Christians share in a common “end” or goal; we are part of one overarching story of hope and forgiveness and love. It is the common race that we are running for the sake of the world that gives us the focus and the means to turn passion into change. At the same time, we are a mess of squabbles, indecision, and “flailing at the air.” If we give up on ourselves and our story, though—if we strip off our team jerseys to sunbathe naked in our own individual brilliance or if we offer up only defensive strategies—then we will indeed “fail to qualify.”

We don’t need to back down in what we believe, as long as we are communicating with a shared vocabulary and striving for a common end in God’s Kingdom. We can still play the tough game, still run the difficult race. The question that we need to ask ourselves, individually and as a community, is whether we are willing to ache and sweat and give our all so that others (even our enemies) can receive the crown of life. For such is the paradoxical race for which our Lord is gathering us, the Church, for spring training as his Body in the world.

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[1] Rowan Williams, Ray of Darkness, 89.

[2] David Brooks, “How to Fight the Man,” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/brooks-how-to-fight-the-man.html?_r=1