The moose at the window and the aurochs in the street

My friend Lucinda owns a lovely, historic wooden farmhouse on Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia. It stands alone on an isolated strip of land overlooking a beautiful bay. The first night that I stayed there, on my first visit several years ago, I awoke in the middle of the night to a loud rattling sound. Now, I was in the guest room way back by the garage, alone on the first floor of the house, and the room in those wee hours was pitch-black. The only light came from the moon outside, positioned so that it vaguely outlined a tall silhouette outside one of my partially-open windows. As I saw the silhouette move, I heard whoever was out there jiggle the mosquito half-screen that was propped in the window, as if they were trying to open it, and my teeth started clattering along with the screen. My heart thumped and my mind raced: Should I play dead and hope that the murdering rapist at my window would go away? Or should I try to scream for Lucinda upstairs, hoping that would scare him off? I decided not to move, praying that he just wanted to rob us and go away. After what seemed an eternity but was likely only a few minutes, I heard the gravel crunching as the intruder moved back away from the house. Needless to say, I spent the rest of the night listening in fear for him to return, the door of my room creaking open, as he made his way into the house for some evil intent.

          The next morning, I told Lucinda about the nighttime intruder, and obviously concerned, she called a knowledgeable friend to come look around outside. Lo and behold, he found only hoof prints in the gravel outside my window, either from a deer or even a young moose.  The terrible, bloodthirsty man at my window was nothing more than a curious or hungry animal, checking out the new arrivals in town. When I read the words from today’s reading in the Song of Solomon, I couldn’t help but chuckle, thinking of my love-sick Canadian moose: “Look, he comes … bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

          The Song of Solomon is love poetry, pure and simple. I invite you to read the whole book sometime … Believe me, you will wonder what on earth it is doing in the Bible. But in the Bible it is, and its descriptions of passionate, longing love have for centuries represented for Jews the love between humanity and God, and represented for Christians the love between Christ and the Church. I sometimes squirm when this erotic language is used for God, wondering cynically if many of our Christian mystics are perhaps suffering from too much celibacy. And yet, what better metaphor do we have for divine love, than human love? As embodied creatures, what better language do we have for spiritual longing, than powerful physical longing? Why can’t the lover at the window, impatiently rattling the screen, inviting us to come away, inviting us to be transformed from winter into spring, be our ever-loving God?

Up there in Cape Breton, I was afraid of the lover at my window because I could not see his face. If I had known that it was a moose or a deer, I would have perhaps quietly tiptoed to the window, offering him a bit of apple from the soft palm of my hand, rather than hiding under the covers. If my human beloved calls at my window, then I will recognize his voice and throw open the shutters. But with God, it is so difficult. When God calls in Scripture, how do I know that I am understanding those ancient words correctly? When God calls to me through my religion, how do I know that it is not a man-made tradition imitating God’s voice? How do I know that I am not confusing God’s presence with a bunch of stuff that, to use Jesus’ earthy language, is destined for the sewer? Before I risk my life getting up out of my nice warm bed to open the window, I want to know that it is really God out there in the dark. And yet, if I don’t get up, what good is the invitation?

My favorite C.S. Lewis book is Till We Have Faces, a Christian retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, a myth as full of erotic imagery and human love as the Song of Solomon. The title comes from the end of the book, when the narrator, placed in a kind of trial before the gods, realizes that all of the self-justifying words with which she has covered herself during her lifetime, are meaningless. In a moment of revelation, she says, “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”[1]

How do we get a face? Just as we cannot love another human being without a face, without a self, we cannot love God until we know who we are. We cannot see God until we have a face to see with. We cannot speak to God until we have a voice to speak with. It is not God who must become visible, but ourselves.

Theologians often accuse James, today’s epistle, with preaching works righteousness, with forgetting that we are saved by God’s grace and not by what we do on our own. But I believe that, in today’s reading at least, James is pointing out what the old woman in C.S. Lewis’ novel is making clear: Acting upon God’s invitation is not a matter of being a good, educated listener, accepting some teaching that is read aloud. It is not a matter of nodding one’s head solemnly at the truth of the Gospel or of speaking flowery words. Acting on God's invitation is to love as Jesus did, to love in the passionate, outpouring way that God loves each of us. It is, of course, Christ’s face that we are to adopt as our own. It is Christ’s voice with which we must learn to speak. What we are waiting for in our dark world is for some real honest-to-goodness loving and suffering and following of Christ to have marked us with Christ’s image.

In today’s epistle reading, James describes God’s inviting Word not as a lover at the window, but similarly, as a mirror, a mirror in which one sees oneself as the Beloved of God. Imagine a mirror that surprises you, not with your latest wrinkles and gray hairs, as my mirror does me, but a mirror that allows you to see yourself as the treasure that you are in God’s eyes. A mirror that reflects the light of God’s Son into your human soul. A mirror like the all-forgiving eyes of someone who is madly in love with you.

  If we merely peek into this extraordinary mirror from time to time, turning back into the darkness and living as if there had been no reflection, as if the gray hairs and frowns and wrinkles are all that there is, then Christ’s image will not take hold in our flesh. Imagine lovers who say, “I love you,” and then just sit there without touching or elaborating on what is in their hearts. Such a love would not last long. Religion can be all talk and no action. God calls longingly at our windows, and we religious people fight over liturgy or the wording of Creeds. We are the scribes and Pharisees, the good religious people cowering in our beds afraid of a new rattling at the window. “Religion” alone is no guarantee that we are acting on God’s invitation.

On the other hand, says James, if we turn away from the mirror determined to recreate the love that we have seen there, to reproduce it in the world around us, then we are blessed and transformed. It is by caring for the poor and outcast in their distress, says James ever so plainly, by avoiding the corruption of the world, that we make what we see in the mirror real.

With Hurricane Isaac wreaking destruction again on the Gulf Coast, I was reminded this week of a movie that is perhaps the antithesis of the imagery of the gazelle at the window. The Beasts of the Southern Wild is a movie full of the darkness of our world. A little girl lives in abject poverty on the Gulf Coast, forgotten by the society that lives on the other side of the levy that condemns her home to flood waters. Her mother is a prostitute who has abandoned her. At age 6, she fixes cat food for her own supper. Her alcoholic father drinks and hits her. A hurricane is on its way to wipe away the only community that she knows. The evils confronting her from within and without are represented by beasts in this movie: big, boar-like prehistoric animals called aurochs. Frozen in the ice-age, the aurochs have been freed by the melting of the polar ice caps, and they are slowly closing in on her Louisiana home. These beasts are not like gazelles leaping joyously over the hills. They lumber slowly and relentlessly toward the girl throughout the movie, like the hurricane itself, menacing her with death and destruction, instead of offering love. At the end of the movie, as the six-year-old is going to the bedside of her dying father, the enormous beasts arrive, huffing and puffing as she turns to face them on the road. What will she do? Surely they will devour her. I was surprised at her response.  “Go away,” she says simply. “I have to take care of my own.” And they turn back. For all that was lacking in this little girl’s family, her father had indeed impressed upon her that she belonged to him, that together, they were strong. Her father and her community were engrained in her soul. “One day,” she kept saying, “future scientists will find evidence that a girl named Hushpuppy lived with her father in the Bathtub,” their small, endangered community. In spite of everything, she had some kind of face with which to face the evil in her world.

Can we say as much? Will future scientists look at the evidence that we Christians leave behind and see the face of Jesus Christ? It’s interesting, isn’t it, how welcoming the divine gazelle at the window and resisting the evil aurochs on the road are both accomplished by one and the same action—by caring for the least of God’s beloved creatures, by performing the healing, loving action that gives us the face of the Beloved, the face that can turn even winter into spring.

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[1] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (New York: Harvest Books, 1980), 294.

It's Time to Build our Nest

       When I was in the sixth grade, I got a little autograph book for my birthday. Back in the early ‘70’s, these books were not necessarily intended for celebrity autographs, but you would get your classmates and teachers and family to write something cute and funny in there—the kind of things that people write these days in school yearbooks. Well, when I gave the book to my parents to sign, my father jotted down something sweet and comforting like, “I will always be proud of you. Love, Daddy.” But my mother, O my mother …. She pulled out a little poem from her well-worn devotional notebook, full of pasted prayers and inspirational quotes, and she wrote: “’To every man there openeth, a way and a ways and a way. The high soul treads the high way and the low soul gropes the low, and in between on the misty flats, the rest drift to and fro. But to every man there openeth, a way, and a ways, and a way. And every man decideth the way his soul shall go,’ Love, Mama.”

         I remember rolling my eyes and grinding my teeth in my best pre-adolescent girl way when I read it, thinking, “O come on, Mother, it’s just an autograph book—Lighten up on me, please!” And yet, that little poem in that silly little autograph book had a profound effect on my life. Against my will, it somehow stuck fast in my memory. After 40 years, I didn’t even have to look it up today to write it in my sermon. It made me painfully aware of the importance of my choices. When I would stand at a fork in the road, I would picture those words in my mother’s tilting and familiar handwriting, and I would remember what I had been taught at church and at home, and I would know that, even though I had a choice, the high road was the way to go. Sure, I was not always able to take that road in my life, but I knew which one it was and that I belonged on it.

          In John’s Gospel, the disciples, too, are presented with a life-changing choice. Do they remain good, faithful Jews, following the Law, remaining true to their understanding of God, or do they continue to follow the difficult, different, and dangerous Word that Jesus presents to them—a Word that is growing more confusing and more threatening to their old lives every day. It is a difficult choice that they must make, and according to our Gospel lesson, “many of [Jesus’] disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” Peter, however, standing at the fork in the road, finds that he has no choice but to throw up his hands like I did in front of my mother’s poem: “Lord, to whom can we go?” he complains. “You have the words of Everlasting Life.” Realizing that he has seen the Holy One in the heretical rabbi from Nazareth, Peter knows that he must follow him.

Deep down, most of us here today have seen the Holy One in Jesus Christ. We have seen at least glimpses of the Truth, or we probably wouldn’t be in church today. Going to church is no longer the “socially acceptable” thing to do. In the 21^st century, we no longer need to have our names in the roll books of a church for business reasons or to be accepted by society or our families. So unless your parents have dragged you here today out of your nice, warm beds to sing in the youth choir, you have probably come of your own free will, somehow hungry for Life or Truth or God. You have perhaps tasted Life in the mystery of the Eucharist, or you have heard whispers of Truth in the strange Words of Scripture, or you have met Jesus in the loving deeds of another Christian. We are not yet the disciples who have turned away. We, like Peter, are here because the Truth has hold of us by the scruff of our necks. Once we have opened ourselves to just a sliver of the Truth, it will continue to gnaw away at even the easiest and most attractive lies within us.

 The temptation for us today, though, given the difficulty of the journey, is to want to hold out at the entrance to the path of discipleship for as long as we can, without really entering it. Peter acknowledges here in chapter 6 of John’s Gospel that he is compelled to follow Jesus, but it is not until much later, after he has denied Jesus 3 times to save his own skin, that he becomes a true leader in the early Church … a leader who is eventually martyred for following Jesus’ dangerous, difficult Words. It takes him awhile finally to enter the path that he reluctantly chooses in today’s Gospel. Like Peter, it is hard for us to take the plunge, as well. Wouldn’t it be appealing to imagine the Christian life to be like a bird soaring through the skies? Swooping through the heavens, close to God, as free as a bird, going where I please, looking from afar at the troubles and traps of the world down below? Zipping into a community of faith and back out again, unattached, grabbing a bit of God, shaking Jesus’ hand, sipping a bit of Truth as reinforcement for my continued solo flight—Doesn’t that sound wonderful? 

The trouble is that we can only fly around for so long. We can try to put off the moment of decision, but choose we must, for we cannot spend our lives in flight. Even birds have to land, and where they chose to make their nest is where they and their young will live and die.  Our Psalmist cries, “The sparrow has found her a house and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young; by the side of your altars, O Lord of hosts … Happy are they who dwell in your house… whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.” Jesus says over and over in John’s Gospel that we are to abide him, and that he abides in us. Abiding is not like flitting through the heavens. Abiding is like building a nest, settling down for the long haul, making a place into our home. To choose Christ is to make our nests in him, to curl up and live—and die—in him.

At Stewardship time, when the Vestry and Stewardship Team and I start talking about giving a sizable percentage of your income back to God, I know that it sounds an awful lot like a tricky way of saying that St. Thomas needs a new air-conditioner. I know that when I call you and ask you to be an acolyte or to be on the Vestry, that it sounds an awful lot like I am desperate to get some job done in the parish. Yes, we do need money to run St. Thomas, and we do have lots of jobs that need doing, but truly—and I am being upfront with you, I promise—that is not why you should give your valuable time, treasure, and talent to any parish. You give these things to God, because the way to find life in Christ, is to build your nest in him. It is to drag all of the scraps and pieces of your world into Christ and to form them, painstakingly, into your spiritual home. To enter the path that you have chosen is to dwell in God in a concrete way—to make the rhythms of your life, God’s rhythms: to rebel against our fast-paced world and to take real Sabbath rest; to worship regularly enough so that you live consciously into the circle of the Christian year, from Advent to Incarnation, to Lent, to Easter, to Pentecost; to pray throughout the day so that your prayer structures your life.[1] To enter the path that you have chosen is to dwell in Christian community: to serve together with others, to serve together with God, to offer yourselves to Christ and to one another.

          Several years ago, I found that some birds had done an awfully speedy and careless job of building a nest in the running shoes that were sitting on a shelf in my garage. I obviously didn't wear the shoes very often, but when I found a compact little nest balancing in the empty shoe, with stray grass and straw scattered messily around it for good measure, I decided that I didn’t like sharing my shoes. Since the nest was completely empty, I deduced that the birds agreed with me, and I carefully moved the nest from my shoe and tossed it outside. Much to my dismay, a few days later I found several little blue eggs sitting forlornly on the shelf next to the spot where the nest used to be. The birds, apparently confused because their nest was no longer there, didn’t know where else to lay their eggs. The eggs never hatched.

          We are blessed. We know where we can lay our eggs so that they will come alive. We know the difference between running shoes and the tallest cedar branches, between the low road and the high road, between life in the world and life in God, between the flower that fades and the God that abides forever. It would be sad for us to fly around afraid or undecided until we drop with exhaustion onto a shelf in the garage. It is time for us to start building our nests where our hearts are already set.

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[1] You can tell that I just read Dorothy Bass’ book, Receiving the Day, which will be the subject of our fall parish retreat in October ….

Vampires, Cannibals, or Cardboard?

At one of my first children’s chapel services at St. Mark’s, after I had lifted and blessed the paten full of thin communion wafers, a very alert and confident four-year-old interrupted me and proclaimed knowingly to her peers, “That’s not bread—it’s cardboard!” After it “snapped” in my hands at the fraction, she raised an eyebrow and murmured with satisfaction, “See? Cardboard!” When I told the rector about the embarrassing incident, he spoke from experience: “Sure--the difficult part is not to convince imaginative children that bread can become Jesus’ body; the difficult part is to convince them that those little wafers are bread!”

If our clean, crisp wafers don’t resemble bread, they resemble even less the food that Jesus describes in John’s Gospel: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you feed on the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” he challenges us in today’s lesson. Being an orderly person, I love the orderly choreography of the Eucharist. I like that it follows a clear pattern, and that there is a place for everything, and everything has its place. I like the gleaming silver, the beautiful, flowing gestures, the flickering candle flames, the deep purple of the wine, and the neat way that the wafer snaps in two. But despite the words that I say about body and blood, it is easy for us to forget that flesh and blood and death have anything to do with our beautiful ritual meal. However, if I had read John’s version of the Words of Institution that day in children’s chapel, I doubt that my four-year-old friends would have been thinking about cardboard. I imagine that I would have heard a resounding chorus of “Ewww, gross!” from my honest young parishioners, instead.

With his talk of eating flesh and drinking blood, Jesus is purposefully being disgusting. For devout Jews like Jesus and his disciples, any kind of blood was a most sacred thing. According to the clear proscriptions of the Law, blood is not to be consumed, and meat should not even contain animal blood when it is eaten. Human flesh being devoured is a metaphor for hostile attack in the Old Testament, and the devil himself is called an “eater of flesh.”[1] Yet, here we have Jesus talking about us eating human flesh and drinking human blood! With this vocabulary, it is no wonder that early Christians were accused of cannibalism by outsiders. Such language even sounds shocking to our modern ears. After all, even the handsome vampire in the popular Twilight series only drinks animal blood, for goodness’ sake! There is more to worry about, in taking communion, than drinking your neighbors’ backwash in the chalice.

To make the phrase even more jarring, the Greek verb translated in our text by “eat” is a word often used in other texts to describe the slurping, gnawing way that animals eat. English is actually the only language I know that doesn’t commonly make a distinction between human and animal eating. I learned my lesson about the difference one day as a new French-speaker in France, when I sweetly asked my husband’s colleagues at a dinner party if they would now like to “chomp on” on some dessert, not realizing that the slang word for “animal” eating that I had heard him use at home was not acceptable for educated humans in polite company. In our text, Jesus doesn’t mind at all using the Greek word for “chomping” in polite company--and on purpose: “Those who gnaw on my flesh … Those who devour my flesh will abide in me and I in them,” he says. Instead of picturing the nice clean loaf of bread and cup of wine offered at the Last Supper, instead of picturing the silver vessels and freshly-starched fair linens of our own churches, it seems as if we are supposed to picture ourselves at the Eucharist slurping up the blood from a raw arm bone, attacking muscle and fat in the voracious way that my dog Buck dives into leftovers from the grill.

Why must Jesus get so earthy and graphic and even disgusting in his language here? Why does he want to shock and upset us with these images? First of all, we must remember that Jesus always changes the way that we think by shocking us with his strange ways of acting and talking.  He is constantly breaking accepted conventions and purity laws: eating with tax collectors, refusing to make his disciples wash their hands before eating, healing on the Sabbath, hanging out with prostitutes. He gives us outrageous commands that seem impossible to follow, like loving our enemies and plucking out a lustful eye. And of course his strange parables are all meant to shock us and shake us to our foundations, so that we can be free of our boxed-in thoughts and rigid ways. Jesus does not teach by rules but by exception to the rule. Jesus’ outlandish language shatters all of our rules and activates our powerfully transforming imaginations, rather than our weak and rule-bound wills. It is in opening our eyes to see the world differently that he transforms us from the inside out.

In telling us to devour his flesh and to drink his blood, Jesus is using the language of sacrifice, turning it upside down and inside out in his typically shocking way. Jesus and his disciples were used to the sacrifices of animal flesh and blood in the Temple in Jerusalem. They knew how Moses had built an altar and made burnt-offerings, splashing and splattering blood on the altar and on all the people present, before receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, fixing God’s Law in the “blood of the Covenant” and thereby uniting the community. (Exodus 24) Ancient sacrifices were a way of drawing close to God by giving God the precious blood of life, but in so doing, they served to purify, to set apart, the community or the individual making the sacrifice.

According to Richard Beck, Jesus confounds our quest for purity by mixing it with our natural disgust for devouring flesh and drinking blood.[2] Instead of purifying ourselves and drawing close to God through the sacrificing of animal flesh and blood, Jesus “grosses us out” by telling us to find life in consuming his own flesh and blood. After eating his flesh and drinking his blood, the breaking-down of other culturally-constructed barriers can follow. Why not open ourselves up to people who normally disgust us? Why not let sinners and rule-breakers, the lost and the impure, into our fellowship? Amy Frykholm tells the story of a man who barges into her church service during the Eucharist, drunk and bleeding heavily from his hand. Leaving bloody handprints on his way up to the altar, he blurts out at the altar rail, “I have hepatitis C.”[3] Would you let him drink with you the cup of blood, the Cup of Life? Is Jesus’ blood really any safer than his?

Moreover, Jesus’ stomach-turning words will not let us forget that God became flesh--bloody, mortal flesh--flesh that allows itself to be eaten up, a “piece of meat” to be mishandled and consumed. Not only do Jesus’ strange words mess with our idea of purity, they mess with our idea of power and control, as well. Rowan Williams points out that, in presenting himself as flesh that is to be eaten, Jesus makes the new creation “an act of utter withdrawal.”[4] By renouncing power and control, Jesus breaks the world’s system of power and control, binding the betrayers and the betrayed into a community held together by God’s promises. Bread and water, flesh and blood, body and soul, life and death—all abide in Christ, as Christ abides in God. Jesus shows us that real power is in the divine abiding, an abiding that begins in Jesus’ renunciation, giving himself over to the power of death.

These days, wherever we turn, we hear, “If I am not on top, then I will be trampled.” We hear, “Make way for me and mine!” We hear, “I am afraid, give me security!” We hear, “I am afraid, let me be in control!” We hear, “I am afraid, others are out to get me!” We hear, “I am afraid, give me rules and certainties.” Jesus says, “Rules and certainties are only cardboard. What you think is power, is really nothing. What you think is secure, is empty. The ones whom you think are out to get you are really your brothers and sisters. What you think is valuable, is but dust. What you think is pure, winds up in the sewer. If you are afraid, let go. Open your hands for the food of vulnerability. Share the cup that overflows with the deep red promises of God. Abide in the bloody flesh that is the life of the world.

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[1] Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII (The Anchor Bible 2006), 284.

[2] Amy Frykholm, review of Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality by Richard Beck, Christian Century, June 27, 2012.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Rowan Williams, “Sacraments of the New Society,” in On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 216.

Funeral Homily for Daryl Busey

        If Daryl had been standing near the self-important disciples who were turning away the little children as they came curiously sidling up to Jesus, he would have been the one motioning to the children with a nod and a wink to stand behind him until he could get Jesus’ attention and smuggle them over to him. I can picture Daryl now in a comfortable shirt and with a giant mug of sweet tea, sitting on a stump and listening intently to Jesus’ words while quietly engaging the children around him, the children that nobody else was paying any attention to. It’s not just that Daryl loved children (though he did); it’s not just that Daryl didn’t care what others would think (though he didn’t); Daryl had learned the truth of God’s love for all people, including the marginalized, including those who “don’t count” in our society. He understood that God’s Kingdom belongs to them, for they are the only ones who are free enough to enter it.

When Daryl agreed to submit his name for the Vestry, our governing board at St. Thomas, I asked him to write up a short biography for the parish newsletter—something that would tell people who he is and why he wanted to serve on the Vestry. When I arrived at his house to meet with him, he handed me a long, hand-written statement on a yellow legal pad. His handwriting was so bad that I had to ask him to read it aloud. My delight that someone had taken my request seriously enough to write such a long piece, soon turned to squirming as I listened to what turned out to be a brilliant parody of all such autobiographical statements. With dry wit and biting prose, Daryl turned each of his many accomplishments upside down, proudly claimed any failures, praised only his beloved wife, and made joke after joke at his own expense. He knew that we couldn’t publish his statement in the newsletter, but he had thoroughly enjoyed himself both writing the piece and watching the shocked look on my face while he read it. And with this bio that could have been written by Flannery O’Connor herself, Daryl had made a point that I will never forget: that pretense has no place in the church and that God loves us and calls us to serve as the imperfect human beings that we all are. I wish that I had kept it to share with you today.

 Daryl was one of those rare people who had learned what matters in this world (and what does not matter.) Like St. Paul, he understood that our own knowledge, our own prophecy, our own accomplishments, our own rules of decorum, are really only childish games played in the dark. It is only Love, God’s senseless, dangerously powerful, all-encompassing, ever-giving and eternal Love, that will bring us true Life.

Daryl still lives in that Love now, in that Love that never ends, and just as he was willing to suffer the risk and the pain that accompany a life filled with that Love on earth, I believe that he is now enjoying the beauty of that love in its fullness in God. Having entered God’s kingdom with the freedom and vulnerability of a child, having been taken in Jesus’ arms and blessed, Daryl now continues to grow in love and joy and peace, whatever that may look like on the other side of the mirror. I hope that Daryl’s spirit will remain with us here at St. Thomas, too, and that we will always be able to hear his chuckle when we are taking ourselves too seriously, that we will feel that poke in our ribs when we start feeling sorry for ourselves, and that we will hear his Southern Baptist preacher-style, Scripture-soaked voice (a voice of true authority that all of his humility and self-deprecating humor could not hide) urging us to hurry up and love, to get out there among God’s people and love.

Watching the Olympics with St. Paul

        While most of you were watching the London Olympic Games this week out of pleasure or patriotism, my determined eye was on the news of the Olympics in search of a sermon illustration. After all, with our lesson from Ephesians continuing to use the metaphor this week of the Christian community as Christ’s Body, I couldn’t help but think that the Olympics would be the place to look for illustrations of bodily perfection! So I watched and read about the swimmers and the gymnasts and the rowers and even the beach volleyball players as they competed in individual and team events, and I was indeed rewarded with two insights for us today at St. Thomas.

          My first insight came while watching the supple swimmers do their amazingly quick turns at the end of the pool. As the contestants in the backstroke race reached the pool wall, they would flip themselves around like a beach ball in a gust of wind and then shimmy forward underwater like dolphins until they were once again on their backs and racing forward. As I watched their bodies move through the water as if they were made of rubber rather than bone, I thought about the work of the tendons and ligaments that hold muscle to bone in their arms and legs. Bones move together because ligaments provide a framework between one bone and another, and tendons connect bones with the muscles, pulling on the joints so that they can bend and rotate. Watching the Olympic swimmers, I could picture the sinews of tendon and ligament within their bodies stretching and twisting like rubber bands, making possible those powerful kicks, that rapid-fire flip, and those fish-like shimmies. Watching those swimmers, I suddenly understood what the apostle Paul was getting at in that typically dense Pauline run-on sentence at the end of today’s Epistle: “But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way  … into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.”

We are used to imagining our participation in Christ’s Body in terms of individual body parts: Like legs or arms or eyes, we understand that we each fulfill specific functions in the community. The function of the teachers is to teach, just like the function of the legs is to kick. The function of the pastors is to shepherd, just as the function of the arms is to hold things. The function of the evangelists is to bring Good News, just as the function of the eyes is to tell us what is around us. Such an image of the body, however, while emphasizing the variety of roles that we play in community, does not shed any light on the ways in which we touch one another as we live and move together. This understanding of the body metaphor is missing the tendons and the ligaments that surround the bones; it is missing the supple parts that rub up against one another—the parts where friction occurs, yet the parts that hold the body together and allow it to move. If we are to move forward in love, if we are to grow and mature without deformation, if we are to twist and turn successfully in the currents, then we need to realize that we are more than just disjointed body parts, each doing its own thing. We need the tendons and ligaments that Paul commends to the Ephesians: humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and peace.

In a small parish like St. Thomas, we know each other well, and we are used to our roles in the Body. We think that we know what kind of movement it takes to pull forward in the water, and we think that we know the people around us with whom we coordinate those movements. We also each have multiple roles in this Body. Not only are many of us a leg, but we might serve as a finger and a nose, as well! It is hard to be joined by a tendon to a neck muscle when you are also joined by some ligament to the kneecap. What I have noticed, though, and notice even more lately, is that we lack the agile movements of the Olympic swimmers because we forget that the separate parts of our common Body need fasteners.

Recently, it seems as if I often hear one group in the parish complaining bitterly (to me or to someone else) about another group or one individual complaining about another--either that they aren’t pulling their weight or that they aren’t doing things the way they have always been done or that they aren’t communicating thoughtfully (very often it is a matter of communication, or a lack thereof). I see each section of us so busy “doing our thing,” so entrenched in our role, that we don’t think who is positioned next to us or how we might need to work with them: bearing with them when they are annoying, persisting together in what is right, responding gently even under duress, walking in humility with one another.  We are each so focused on the jobs that have been given to us in this small Body of Christ, so focused on finally getting them done so that we can go home and do something else, that we are like a bag of separate bones trying to swim. And it is preventing us from moving forward.

I have also been feeling that it is sometimes assumed—either on your parts or on mine--that it is only the rector’s job to serve as the sinews between parts of the body. I feel as if I need to be the constant cushion between what are often quite sharp and pointy bones! I feel as if I am solely responsible for communication and coordination between the body parts, solely responsible for smoothing ruffled feathers and guarding the unity of the Spirit. That is not what Paul is saying, however, in our lesson from Ephesians. Paul makes it clear that God gives us each the grace, along with the gift, to build this body up in love. It is Christ, not the rector, who enters into our hearts to bind us to one another in love and peace. And that brings me to my second Olympic insight—one from the rowing competition.   

      The New York Times did an interview with the coxswain of our American gold-medal women’s rowing team, Mary Whipple.[1] The article describes Mary as “a sapling among the redwoods,” a short, petite woman with a soft-spoken voice and quiet demeanor. Coxswain means “boat servant,” and while she doesn’t row and doesn’t need the strong muscles of her teammates, it is her challenging job to face forward and see what is coming, to execute race strategy, and to keep the rowers motivated. “That’s it,” I thought as I read about Mary. I could identify with Mary Whipple, and not just because I’m short and have puny muscles! Instead of trying to insert myself between every bone, wearing myself down between the body parts, I need to be more like the coxswain in this race: Sitting where I can look forward to see what is coming down the river, calling out strategy in my quiet but firm voice, motivating, speaking the truth in love, keeping us rowing together that way, united in the “one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” I need to be the coxswain keeping and articulating the vision, the vision that is more important than anyone’s specific joint pain or rubbing of bone on bone.

         In a book on congregations, I recently read that it is easy for us to “stay mired in automatic behaviors.” It is easy to forget that we “have come together for something more than self-preservation … [to see] that [we] form a whole to respond to something larger than [our]selves.”[2] I think that this is what the apostle Paul was warning the Ephesians about, as well. We cannot speed ahead unless the bones become a Body, a common network, a united frame of tendon and ligament, a whole that is focused not only on serving as Christ’s Body in the world, but that is also taking responsibility for cultivating humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and peace within. As your coxswain, perched up here in the pulpit, I am calling us to row together, to work together with the precision of the Olympic athletes that we are in Jesus Christ, strengthening the ligaments of love that hold us together.

---

[1] Juliet Macur, “On Rowing Team, Smallest Body has the Most Authority,” New York Times, August 1, 2010, found at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/sports/olympics/voice-of-authority-directs-us-womens-rowing-team.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=general&src=me.

[2] Peter L. Steinke, How Your Church Family Works: Understanding Congregations as Emotional Systems ( Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 1993), 72.

In the Spring of the Year

         [Sermon written the day after a tragic death in my parish.]

          In the spring of the year, the time when baby lambs wobble across flower-studded fields and love caresses our hearts like a warm breeze, gallant King David and beautiful Bathsheba fell in love and lived happily ever after.

          Oh wait, that’s not how the story goes? The story starts off right for a happy romance, “in the spring of the year,” but that promising beginning shifts quickly into a minor key: “In the spring of the year …….the time when kings go out to battle” … David gets bored, grabs something that is not his, forces himself on someone else’s wife, takes, lies, kills, abuses his kingly power, his sins ticking past us as automatically as the seconds on a watch. Violence and manipulation quickly take over in a story that first seems to set up love and new beginnings. Stories are tricky that way. They can change in the tiny space between punctuation marks, leaving us to scramble after them, shaken and unprepared.

          “In the spring of the year,” full of confidence and hope after a long winter of rehab, the elderly man stood up, proud to walk with a cane, rather than the ungainly walker he had been using, and moved forward triumphantly across the living room … losing his balance and falling into the fireplace, shattering his newly healed bones.

          “In the spring of the year,” pregnant with a long-awaited daughter, the young woman waited contentedly on the ultrasound table, expectant eyes turned toward the screen where her baby’s face would soon appear …. and the nurse said, “there is no heartbeat.”

          “In the spring of the year,” in the cool breezes that finally chased away the oppressive heat, planning retirement adventures with his beloved wife, Daryl jumped on his motorcycle to run a quick errand…. and in the dark, they found his wrecked bike and body by the side of the road.

          “In the spring of the year,” before last night’s storm, I started out preparing a spiffy sermon that would decry the abuse of power in the David and Bathsheba story, but those preachy words have turned to dust and blown away in the storm, and now we are all sitting huddled in that boat yet again, the boat full of disciples, the boat of the Church that keeps being tossed around on stormy seas. We are shaken and unprepared. We can’t rely on happy endings. We can’t manipulate our way out of sin or plan our way out of death and disaster. We are at sea, at the mercy of wind and waves and sun and season and God and one another and ourselves … We are stuck together to toss and turn and perhaps even to capsize, caught up in a story so much bigger than we can even wrap our minds around, a story where the security of land is too far off to be seen.

On a glorious, sunny day in Nova Scotia, with cool breezes that felt to me just like springtime, my friends and I decided to go whale-watching. On such a beautiful day, even I could put aside my fear of riding in a little boat. From shore, the water was the deep blue of sapphires, the waves were tipped in bright white, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. My carefree, vacationing heart was as light as a feather, and I was relishing the adventure of going out to sea in the little Zodiac raft, excited about spotting a powerful whale, and proud of myself for my courage to live a bit on the wild side for once. “Won’t my kids be surprised at my exciting escapade,” I thought to myself. “I’ll have to tell my parishioners how brave I am, too, after all those sermons about being afraid of water!” I especially thought about bragging to Daryl, who loved to tease me about my fears and who got me to promise that I would ride his motorcycle if he ever consented to becoming senior warden.

They gave us ponchos to wear and said that we would probably get  a little wet, since the winds were so unusually strong that day, and I began to wonder if that meant that the ride might be bumpier than I had imagined. And then we were seated in the boat, and pulling out into the harbor, and the captain announced through the microphone that it was rough going out there, and that the whales were going to be extra hard to spot with all of those big waves, and that the last cruise had lasted an extra half-hour before they found the promised whales. And it was no longer springtime, and I was very afraid. Suddenly, the deep water, only a few feet from me now, looked more blackish-green than blue, and the little raft hit the oncoming 8 foot waves with splash after splash, rising high into the air and crashing back down with a spine-jarring, heart-stomping thud. The crazy captain sped straight into the wind, and I closed my eyes and held the seat and rail with all my might, while I pictured my death from either drowning or fear-induced heart-attack. Even my fellow passengers became ominously quiet as we got further and further from shore and the wind and waves continued entirely unabated. I wanted to stand up and shout that I wanted to go back to shore. I wanted a do-over. I didn’t like the way that this story had shifted. “This situation is out of control. I don’t care about the stupid whales, just get me out of this boat!” I thought, over and over, but all that came out of my mouth were low moans and a bit of very un-priest-like vocabulary. For an hour we fought against those high seas, the captain determined to find a whale so that he wouldn’t have to refund our money and me praying silently to God for all I was worth.

After awhile, I did have the presence of mind to think about my recent sermons about water, and I thought about the story that we read today, with the disciples in their boat, as Jesus approached them, walking on the water. I began to open my eyes and glance cautiously around, but I didn’t see Jesus coming toward us over those roiling hills of water. Yet suddenly, there they were! A whole pod of pilot whales, complete with mama and baby whale, slipping under and over those big waves with grace and slippery ease. They swam in amazing synchronicity with one other, diving and jumping as one body, unfazed by the stormy seas or by the boats full of seasick tourists or by the captains with their loudspeakers. They were Job's Leviathan, the magnificent beast that God made for the sport of it, sporting through a world that had terrified me, swimming with the power and joy of God striding across a stormy sea to reach out a hand to his fearful followers. “'I AM' is with you," cried the bobbing whales through their blowholes; "there is beauty out here on these waves." There is strength in the divine hands and feet that are reaching out to you. Awe can replace panic. The Creator is in control of the Story.

Suddenly, I noticed that the captain had turned the boat around and we were speeding almost smoothly toward shore. The sun was shining. The waves were sparkling. And I smiled. “You look like you are happy to be alive,” joked a friend. Indeed. Alive in my God, in the spring of the year.

          “In the spring of the year, at festive Passover time, God did miracles through his Son, and the people hailed him as their king …. Yet he ran away to a deserted place. and God was nailed to a cross and died,” goes our Story.

“In the spring of the year,” Jesus rose from the dead, and rough barley bread becomes his broken body, and we all sit down together on the green grass beside the still waters and are fed until we can eat no more. And there are leftovers. And nothing is lost. And the lost are found. And the boat reaches the land toward which they are going, even when life stories change in midsentence. For nothing can separate us from the Love of God, the God who will cross over to us as we huddle in our little boats...

In every season of the year.

Amen.

Where You Went to Highschool Doesn't Matter in Tragedy ... or in Christ

         “Where did you go to high school?”

When I first came to Louisville, I didn’t realize the importance of that seemingly innocuous question! “High school?” I would wonder. “If strangers are going to make conversation with me, why don’t they ask me where I went to college or where I work, for goodness’ sake?” The Question can begin with an appraising glance, a piercing look balanced upon an invisible measuring stick, a haughty hesitation that expects a certain answer. Or it can pop out in a spontaneous, friendly way. But however the question is asked, in this town, whether one spent four years at St. X or Trinity, Sacred Heart or Assumption, St. Francis or Collegiate, Male or Manual or PRP … that is the standard by which we categorize one another. So ingrained is this way of thinking that people don’t really know what to do with you if you say that you grew up in another town. I know that when I would tell people that I went to high school in Houston, they might look at me with wide, uncomprehending eyes, unsure how to proceed with me, until I learned to interject that my mother grew up here and graduated from Atherton. Only then could they relax, able to place me in a known category.

          In Louisville, already a city with clear geographical divides of race and class, we mentally line up our dividing walls around our high schools, creating a complex mix of subtle partitions that juggle differences in religion, class, race, academics, wealth, and even sports. So engrained is this way of thinking, that we often don’t even realize that we are judging when we ask the high school question, but we are. Perhaps St. Paul, if he were writing today to Christians in Louisville, would argue, “Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made all high schools into one and has broken down the dividing wall... He has abolished social cliques with their rules and etiquette, that he might create in himself one new humanity, thus making peace.”

          I sighed as I read today’s Scripture lessons that point out so clearly that Almighty God cannot be enclosed in a house built by human hands or human minds, and that Christianity is to be a religion without dividing walls. You don’t even need a sermon from me in order to recognize the truth of these things. And yet, where is that promised peace and unity in Christ? It is so easy to say that Christians are supposed to welcome everyone into one family in Christ, that we are all supposed to get along, that the dividing walls are to be no more. We don’t seem to be any closer to attaining it today, though, than the quarreling Jewish and Greco-Roman Christians were in Paul’s day. Even in a loving Christian community like St. Thomas, one can often see walls between age groups, between parishioners and staff, between present vestry and past vestry, between ministry groups, between church and preschool, between parishioners and “renters.” In our diocese, we maintain walls of rivalry between one parish and another, and our churches can’t seem to breach those walls that divide Louisville into separate enclaves. (I am ashamed to admit that I have never set foot in either St. George’s or in Messiah-Trinity, and I doubt that I am alone.) At the wider church level, as we work to break down a wall to include one group, we often alienate another group, who start piling up stones for a new wall on the other side. And of course, among clergy, the question is not, “Where did you go to high school?” but is instead a sneakily suspicious, “Where did you go to seminary?” as we roam between partitions made of theology and churchmanship.

          Strangely enough, it is not joyful worship but tragedy that seems to push us to tear down our dividing walls. That movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, was made up of people from different high schools, ages, classes, churches, political parties, and races. They were sitting peacefully next to one another, ready to lose themselves in a story, rather like we do in our church services. Yet, there too, the peace was only surface deep. A discussion or a common project or, Lord knows, a committee meeting, would have stirred up the judging wall-builder within each one of them. When the larger-than-life deranged gunman entered, however, and tore through their lives with evil and death and sprays of bullets, these strangers suddenly became brothers and sisters. According to the news reports, they shielded one another, pulled one another to safety, collapsed with relief on one another when it was over, and reached out to the families of strangers who had died. The survivors of that attack are now members of a community so strong that the dividing walls have all come tumbling down. I would even venture to say that our compassionate God now dwells in the midst of them. And if we were to meet one of them on the street, we would not ask him where he went to high school. We would not ask her if she were gay or if she believed in Evolution. We would not turn up our noses at the way he dressed or spoke. We would automatically reach out with love and offers of help.

          As good, obedient Christians, we try to make peace and unity happen in our communities like we try to get people not to chat noisily in their pews before the service. We think that it is something that we can moralize about and will upon ourselves as we sit in meetings and in the pews. According to Paul in our lesson from Ephesians, however, peace and unity are the result of Jesus Christ entering our lives and our communities in a powerful way—almost, dare I say it, with the force and overwhelming drama of a madman entering a movie theater. The shock of God upon the Cross is supposed to rip through our lives like a spray of bullets. The powerful promise of Life in Christ is supposed to unite us just as strongly as the threat of death from a killer with a gun.

          We read in our Gospel lesson of the transformative power that Jesus had over the crowds. All anyone had to do was to touch the fringe of his cloak, and they were healed. When he traveled throughout the Galilee, the crowds followed him everywhere. So hungry and desperate were people for the healing and new life that Jesus and his followers could give them that they pestered them without ceasing, not even letting them eat a meal in peace, racing ahead of their boat to meet them when they tried to get away for a rest.

          So … what is missing today? Where is Christ’s commanding presence among us, his followers? Where are the crowds? Why are our communities transformed by the aftermath of sin and death, yet not by the power of life? Paul writes, “Jesus himself is the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord … into a dwelling place for God.” Perhaps we, like Nathan and David, have been too busy planning our own dwellings for God, rather than letting ourselves be inhabited by Christ. We Christians are now the Body of Christ; we are the ones with the arms and legs to walk into the crowds and bring healing in Christ’s Name. We are the ones to turn things upside down by our proclamation of a crucified God. Is that what we are doing? We are only in unity insofar as we are in Christ, bringing Life and caring for his sheep.

          I can actually give you all a fresh, real-life example today of what I am talking about. When you get home, go to the St. Thomas Facebook page and take a look at the picture of the five children from this week’s first annual Reading Camp standing in front of our church. You will see five elementary school children who will probably attend five different high schools. This picture could be a poster for racial diversity. The children have their arms around each other in genuine affection, and they have huge smiles on their faces. These are children who have trouble in school and who spend most of the school year “like sheep without a shepherd,” not needy enough to receive special services in the classroom, yet struggling to keep up with their classmates. Yet, they had so much fun working on their reading skills all morning at St. Thomas and then receiving attention and affection from St. Thomas parishioners all afternoon, that they didn’t want the week to end. This Reading Camp was a lot of work for our volunteers. Our parish is so small that it was a risk for us to plan on inviting even 5 or 6 children to a complex camp like this one. We had to raise money with a silent auction at Bluegrass and Burgoo, and that was a lot of stress for many of you. We had to cook and serve two meals each day at our camp; we had to have transportation for field trips; we had to plan lessons almost from scratch; we had to figure out logistics; we had to displace two important groups in our parish to have room in the Fellowship Hall. And yet …. I saw nothing but peace and unity this week at Reading Camp. I saw older parishioners and teens and even some out-of-town family members who joined us, working together with huge smiles on their faces. I saw a public school working hand in hand with a Christian church for the good of the community. I saw compassion. I saw healing. I saw the Body of Christ. Will this Reading Camp change the East End? No. Will this Reading Camp “grow our church?” No, I doubt that we will get any new members from it. But, by allowing us to reach out in Christ’s Name, to proclaim the Life and Healing that Christ offers to us all, it brought us one step closer to becoming “citizens with the saints” and “members of the household of God,” a dwelling place in Christ. That is the kind of growth that every parish needs more of, even the big ones. Giving of ourselves as Christ’s Body is not easy, but it is the only way to peace and unity within. It is the only way to combat the insidious divisions among us and the only way to transform the world with light and life, not darkness and death.