practice resurrection

Communion of Saints: Fr Thomas Bray, 1730

At some point, prejudice and racism must have been intrinsically felt and seen as evil. Right?

http://liturgyandmusic.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/february-15-thomas-bray-priest-and-missionary-1730/

The more I learn, the less I know.

Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska died yesterday aged 88. "For the last few years my favourite phrase has been 'I don't know'. I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world."

Don't Sass Me

Second Sunday in Epiphany, from I Samuel 3.1-20.

Don't Sass Me

Okay, in my estimation it’s really only possible for children to talk-back.  The same dynamic exists for us (adults) but we treat it differently.  I mean, you would rarely, if ever, hear a boss tell an employee, ‘Don’t sass me.”  No, we use other language that is more properly passive aggressive and obtuse.  You might hear an adult say to their boss, “let me push-back on what you just said.”  It shares some of the language (push-back, talk-back), but it’s deferential, its really asking permission of the person in authority.

One of the challenges of being a parent or working with children, is trying to distinguish between when a child is talking back in a disrespectful, derisive manner (with the sass-tank full) and when they are giving respectful push-back. 

In fact, I hate to blow my cover with some of you teenagers here today, but I admit to you that I truly am sympathetic to your plight.  You live in a world of in-betweens.  You alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, have permission from all of us (and your culture), to act like a child and to act like an adult.  In most cases, we praise when you act with maturity, and in most cases, we celebrate when you act like a little kid.  But here’s the dance that you have to learn, right?  Trying to figure out which behavior and in which circumstance the two things are required by us, the adults in your lives?  Good luck with that.

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Samuel was likely around the age of thirteen when he was placed in the custody of Eli, a high priest and judge in Israel.  Thirteen.  He was put there by his mother who, as a young Jewish woman struggling to conceive, promised God that she would give any child she bore over to God, which in that culture meant she would see to it that such a child would be prepared for the priesthood. 

Many of us are at least somewhat familiar with this story.  Three times in the middle of the night, Samuel hears a voice and easily mistakes it for the voice of his mentor.  Finally, Eli, the old priest, realizes what is happening and tells Samuel to go back to his bed and if he hears the voice again, to sit up and say, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”  Samuel did, and it did, and he did.

And we usually end the story.  Right.  There.

It’s a good story.  We tend to use it when we are romanticizing the idea of attuning ourselves to God’s voice, discerning God’s direction for our life.  Symbolically, it’s useful for high school and college students who are trying to pinpoint a vocation, a calling.  But that isn’t where the story ends.  In fact, our Church’s lectionary today gives us the choice of ending our reading here with the quaint story, or continuing on to a darker part.

Here’s what the voice said.

“I’m getting ready to do something that will make your ears tingle, that will make your ears hot.  I am going to punish your teacher Eli because his sons, who are priests under his care, are corrupt and Eli hasn’t done anything to restrain them.  So for him and his family, all the sacrifices made will not cover their sins.”  That’s pretty heavy for a thirteen-year-old boy.

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About a year ago, an 11 year old from China named Zhang Hao challenged the Chinese Edible Fungi Association.  Seems his mother had stopped preparing his favorite dish, Roasted Mushrooms, because she read a report that the whitening agents, the bleaches, used to make the mushrooms look more presentable at market made them toxic.  

But eleven-year-old Zangh, loved Roasted Mushroom casserole, and so as a part of his “Scientific Inquiry Class” at school, he asked his teacher if he could do an experiment to try and quell his mother’s anxieties and get the roasted mushrooms back into the dinner rotation.  So he and his mother proceeded to buy 16 different species of edible fungi at the Beijing supermarket, farmer’s market and wholesale produce market.

Here’s what he found.   That ninety percent of the mushrooms purchased indeed had traces of bleach.   Now, you’ve got to really like Mom’s Roasted Mushrooms to keep making that dish.  It’s one thing trying to prove your mother wrong, right?  (Don’t sass me)  But it’s quite entirely something else telling Chinese officials they are allowing their citizens to eat toxic mushrooms. 

But that’s what Zhang did, and found himself in a very public squabble with the Chinese government.

Samuel lay there until morning; staring up at the ceiling because he could not sleep.  Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli.

It’s almost can go without saying that it requires extraordinary amounts of courage to speak truth to power. But it also takes courage to be the person in power to be willing to hear that truth; to be the person, like Eli, who says, “Tell me what the Lord said, don’t hide it from me.”  It takes a different kind of strength. 

Tomorrow our nation celebrates one our great truth-tellers, Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote this in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, and it’s important to note that one of the primary targets of his letter was the then Episcopal Bishop of Alabama, Charles Carpenter:  St Martin writes:

“The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's often-vocal sanction of things as they are.  But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”

It takes as much courage to hear and receive the truth, as it does to speak it.  Sometimes, it takes even more to receive it, to truly listen so that we can respond to God’s words.

Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the God was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.

Christ Tabernacled Among Us

Christmas Morning 2011, John 1.1-14

Tabernacled Among Us

 

Karen and I live near the crossing of Federal and Broadway in Shawnee. Not many people in our parish know this, but we bought our house from Rob Autrey.  BUT the house wasn't known as the Autrey house.  No.  When describing where it is we live, people still, to this day, say, "That's the Breedlove home."  

Apparently, I live in someone else’s house.  Dave and Mary Lee Breedlove raised their kids in that house.  OUR house.  They NOW live on Independence, but somehow, Karen, Noah and I still live in their house.  How longs a guy gotta live in a place you before it becomes the Youmans House.

Most of us know that Jesus was likely NOT born in the Wintertime, that our 4th Century Roman Church set the celebration of Christmas to compete with the Pagan Winter festivals that were already happening around the Solstice. So if he wasn’t born in December, when was he born?

There is a physicist from Hertfordshire England named Gary Turner who is among a small group of folks who study these sorts of things.  Dr. Turner makes a compelling case for why Jesus was born in the autumn--late September, early October, around the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. He makes a couple of salient points.  And the main point he makes is based on something John wrote in our Gospel lesson today, in verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us. 

So here’s what Dr. Turner says about this: 

A more literal translation, but less understandable to modern readers, of the word “lived” is the word “tabernacled,” a word that describes a simple, make-shift dwelling—a tent or a barrio.  These “tabernacles” serve as a kind of symbolic liturgical action in the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, also known as Sukkoth, when for seven days an observant Jew would construct and live in such a flimsy tent called a Succah, or tabernacle. The sukkah is intended as a remembrance of the fragile dwellings in which the Israelites lived during their 40 years they wandered in the wilderness after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt.

In the religious ceremony of Sukkoth, Jews welcome God’s Shekinah, or God’s glory and presence, AND in the ceremony, they welcome the seven faithful shepherds (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, David). 

So Dr. Turner asks, “Could this be the reason why the angels appeared to a group of shepherds?  God’s GLORY was shown to shepherds, who visited Jesus in a flimsy shelter, what the story calls a stable, but what could have been a Succah. In fact, Turner says that the Greek word for "manger" was probably the closest translation Luke could find for "Succah." Have I lost you yet?

And the WORD became flesh and tabernacled among us.

Maybe, right?  Oh, believe me, there’s more, but we don’t have time here.  I’ll post a link to his essay on my website if you are interested in his full treatment.  But suffice it to say that significant events in the life of Jesus OFTEN were interwoven with Jewish religious mythology, pulling from the symbolism of the Hebrew story.

A few years ago Karen and I received a call from the Breedloves.   You know those people whose house that we live in?  Their daughter was visiting for Christmas and she wanted to drop by and see the home where she had grown up.  Have you ever done that?  Or wanted to? 

She walked through our house and talked about the changes that we had made to it.  But when she got to the pantry, she stopped.   She opened the pantry door and closed it.  Opened it and closed.  She said,  “That sound, it brings back memories.”

I think the sound of the pantry doors stirs up all kinds of feelings for a lot of us, but that’s another sermon, am I right? 

But it’s so peculiar that something so subtle, so specific, the sound of a door, would be the thing that would stir her affections for that place.

As Anglican Christians, we hold the idea that God interacts with us through physical means, that the temporal and the spiritual are interwoven, even interdependent:  water, bread, wine, oil.  God shows up extraordinarily in these physical things.  It is the idea, the reality even, of sacrament.

We also have a theology of sacred space.  We act differently in the Parish Hall, than in the porch, than in the narthex, than in the Nave, than in the chancel, than in the sanctuary, than in the apse (did you know it was called an apse?). 

Last night we invited the children to gather around the Altar as Fr Gary consecrated the host, as he invited the Holy Ghost to inhabit bread, wine, something physical.  It was a kind of reward.  The children know they aren’t supposed to go back there.  It’s sacred.   And so last night the got to go.

So what about your home?  There is that old cliche, “anybody can build a house, but it takes love to build a home,” what we mean by that is that something of deep meaning and significance happens in that physical space, and in the doing of that, makes it holy.  Consecrates it. 

All that God was, all that God is, all that God ever will be, inhabited a physical space when Jesus was born.  Something intangible drew within our grasp.  God, who is love and who is Spirit, inhabited the temporal, by taking up residence in our human form.  God lived, in a sukkoth, a flimsy, make-shift shelter.  And in doing so, married the holy to the mundane.

In that same way, God can inhabit you.  You, a common, temporal, physical you, and in doing so, marry the holy to the mundane.  You can be consecrated.  Mary Oliver writes in her poem “Wild Geese:”

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.  And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.

Ghandi Tangling w/ the White Folk (and a few Indians)

No other kurfuffle in my career had me more twisted up than the time I found myself defending Ghandi a few years ago.  In fact, I wasn't even really defending him.  I weighed in on a debate between a group of Christian teenagers as to whether or not Ghandi was in heaven or not.  I took what I thought was the rather orthodox position that it wasn't up to us (or our theological systems) to decide such things, that it was rather arrogant and presumptuous of us, that it was Christ who made those decisions.  

Today's (trial) feast in the Episcopal Church remembers the first native Bishop of India, + Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah.  Among many things, he was known for his passion for promoting the Christian faith in predominantly Hindu India, for which he got himself in his own kerfuffle with Ghandi, who didn't care much for Azariah inviting Hindus to convert to the Christian life.  But it is important to note that chief among Azariah's reasons for promoting Christ's teaching was the barbaric caste systems that was intrinsic to Hindusim.  Ghandi knew that Hinduism needed reforming, but didn't see the introduction of Christianity as an Indian solution.

I think one of the primary challenges for any of us is to try and name the core values in our lives and systems that give health and foster redemtpion.  Ultimately, that is what God wants from any of the world-views we kick around in.  God wants glory, but glory that is intrinsic to the care and love of human beings.  And it is all the more reason why I work to ensure that the Christian framework I play a small part in cultivating maintains healthy ideas. 

Ghandi was a good human being, who was in a position to point out the unquestionable abuse and harm of English colonialism.  But like all of us, he had a culturally embedded blind spot.  If Ghandi had one, then how much more must I?  As I approach the Epiphany of our Lord, I only hope I will be able to see myself and my world views with greater clarity, for the glory of God and the welfare of all people.

Advent Journal: feast of Thomas Merton

"Businesses, are, in reality, quasi-religious sects. When you go to work in one, you embrace A NEW FAITH. And if they are really big businesses, you progress from faith to a kind of mystique. Belief in the product, preaching the product, in the end the product becomes the focus of a transcendental experience. Through 'the product' one communes with the vast forces of life, nature, and history that are expressed in business.""Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.""Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation."Thomas Merton, from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1966

Advent Journal: Until Christ's Forceful Return (Sermon)

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Advent I, the Gospel of St Mark 13.24-37

Sermon Audio

Rev. Harold Camping was that Radio preacher who last spring had predicted that Christ would return on May 21; Christ did not, in fact, return on that Saturday, and a lot of us had quite a bit of fun at Pastor Camping’s expense.  Fr Everret of Christ Church Tulsa advertised on the Facebook that they would be holding a “post-rapture Eucharist” on Sunday morning.  Fr Charles Blizzard suggested I set out full sets of empty clothing around our parish on that Sunday morning to suggest to some of you that you had not been raptured.  Church-nerd humor, I suppose.  A joke I fear that would have been lost on most Episcopalians. 

But Harold Camping said he had miscalculated and that Christ’s return would be October 21, five months down the road.  Well, that day also came and went, with much less fanfare.  Camping recently apologized to his church members and to his radio audience.  He said the whole thing was embarrassing, but that God was in charge of everything, and that we have to be very careful that we don’t dictate to God what he should do.”  You think?

Jesus told his disciples that he was leaving and he also told them he would return.  Both of those things were as hard for them to hear and understand then as they are for us now.  But we say it in our liturgy every Sunday:  He will return in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.  It is an extra-ordinary thing to say, Christ will return.  But I do wonder, what do all of you really think about it? 

Not only does Christ tells his disciples that he is going to return, he says he will return within their generation.  Our theological tradition has a word for this event, it is called the Parousia.  And in many ways, the parousia is treated as a problem, primarily because it seems from both the words of Christ and those of the early Church leaders, they believed that his return was imminent.  For instance, the apostle Paul encouraged people not to get married or to start families because of this impending return.  Lord knows the things you can get done if you don’t have a family to hold you back, right? 

And yet generation after generation has passed, thousands of years, predictions have been made repeatedly, and like Harold Camping we have been left a bit befuddled, and for those who truly get emotionally invested in it, we fight off disillusionment.  The article quoting Camping, that I mentioned earlier, says that as he apologized his voice was unsteady, quivering. 

To truly believe in the physical, imminent return of Christ is a risky thing.  It leaves you vulnerable not just to the ridicule of others, but to a poignant kind of sadness generated from a place in us that hopes for a better world that stubbornly refuses to be fully realized.  We want to believe that God will show up and make the world right--to fulfill the deeper promises of Judaism, the deeper promises of Christianity.  When will our Messiah come and make things right?  He promised he would, but when?

The writer of 2 Peter says it this way:  The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some thing of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.  But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.  Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you be, leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire?  But in accordance with his promise, we wait for a new heaven and a new earth, where right-living is at home.

Beautiful, frightening.  And even though this hasn’t yet happened in the way described, the collective consciousness of humanity has always accepted this to be part of the fabric of existence.  We believe there was a beginning, we believe there will be an end.  We seem to not be able to make change come to our world, our best efforts at fairness and mercy seem always to be thwarted by the lesser angels of our nature, and so we long for the day when that from which we were created intervenes and sets things right.

The writer of 2^nd Peter has jumped on the only band-wagon we seem to have until that day comes, and I don’t say that flippantly.  Christ has yet to appear in the east, but the spirit of Christ, the mind of Christ, the imagination of Christ can manifest within you, can inhabit your Spirit.  The values and enterprise of Jesus can be woven into the values and enterprise of your life.  He shapes the way we relate to friends, to family, the way we spend our money, the speed and manner in which we forgive and show mercy.  These words from 2 Peter have it right, “Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be.”

Until that day when Christ comes with such forcefulness in the world, the real work that you must do, is hope that Christ comes with forcefulness into your life.

Advent Diary (Don't Act Natural)

I think I may have posted a link to this article before, but I came across it again as I was making a sweep of some papers needing to be filed.  It's a reflection from Rabbi Shais Taub:

"So if you would like to see a miracle, I would say that in very down-to-earth terms it means a person who has come to think, feel, of behave in a way that is uncharacteristic of themselves.  It is a re-setting of the default personality.  And that is literally supernatural."

I've been a little inwardly jaded lately on the ability of people, more accurately systems made up of people, to change.  It seems to me lately that even the smallest conflicts have folks hunkering down to fight.  So how is it going to be possible for us to take on the bigger, more serious problems we face?  Rabbi Taub says that getting human beings to act naturally isn't hard at all, what is seemingly impossible is getting us to act against our defalt position.  We do not easily seek out the incomfortable thing.

I think this may be a theme for me this Advent, acting against instinct, seeking the uncomfortable, not acting naturally.

Orchestral Music in Casual Wear is Much Hipper

 

A Letter from Bank of America

An Apology to Our Customers

(The Borowitz Report) – The following letter was sent today by Bank of America to all of its debit card customers:

Dear Valued Customer:

As most of you probably know by now, last month we instituted a $5 monthly fee for all of our debit card users.  To say that what followed this decision was a shitstorm would be a massive understatement.

Considering that just three years earlier taxpayers had bailed us out with billions of their hard-earned dollars, it’s understandable that Bank of America was compared to a person who, as he is pulled from a burning building, turns and kicks the fireman in the nuts.

That’s why we are writing to you today with a simple message: “Our bad.”  And to tell you that we are refunding the $5 to you, effective immediately.  All you have to do is pay a simple, one-time $10 refund fee.

You can receive your refund online, or pick it up at your nearest Bank of America branch, where a teller will hand the money directly to you for a simple, one-time $15 handling fee.

If you do visit your branch, feel free to use any of our services, including our state of the art ballpoint pens and deposit slips.  (Prices on request.)

Again, accept our apologies for instituting the debit card fee.  We have learned our lesson, and we make this solemn promise: next time we squeeze money from you, we'll do it in a way you won’t notice.

Sincerely,

Bank of America