I preached yesterday at Reconciler - my first time in the pulpit (ok, at the crossing) there. I did it without notes, but I think this text is pretty close to what I actually said yesterday.
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I’ve had a lot of weird dreams recently. I had a dream about a snout coming out of the ground. I had a dream that I got married, but my mother was wasn’t around to remind me what to do, so I ended up wearing a t-shirt and cut-offs to the reception. And I had one where I was fighting with a close friend, and the fight got bigger and bigger, worse than any fight I’ve ever had with any friend before, and we were screaming and yelling, and then I picked up a ceramic mug and I hurled it at my friend’s head, and it hit him, and the mug broke.
I woke up then, before I could tell how badly the mug had hurt him, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It scared me, a lot. I don’t like to think that there’s a part of me that’s capable of that, that would ever do such a thing - to anyone, let alone to a friend. But I also know that part of me is there, that part that almost craves violence, that threatens to erupt in an angry outburst. It’s always been there, and I’ve spent a fair amount of energy training it to stay back, and also trying to appear to the world as though that part doesn’t exist.
I’ve done a pretty good job at that. Most people think of me, maybe not as a gentle person exactly, but not as a violent one or even an angry one either - at least I think not. And that’s fair, at some level, because I’m really not actually prone to violent outbursts either. I may have dreamed that I threw a mug at someone’s head, but I haven’t actually done it. And mostly, I can be pretty satisfied with giving the impression that that kind of rage isn’t hiding in there.
And then I hear a passage like this one from 2 Timothy. “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.” Holy... Really? I can pull the wool over the eyes of the people around me, even over my own eyes a lot of the time. But I can’t trick God. God knows better. God knows my need to be ashamed.
And I know it. Just like I’ve always known that part of me is inclined to uncontrollable anger. I’ve always known that it’s just waiting to erupt. I’ve always been scared of it. And so I’ve always known that need to be ashamed. And knowing all that as I do, I’m very aware of how limited I am in my ability to “rightly explain the word of truth.” And so I wonder - am I really the one who should be explaining the word of truth? It seems like there’s just so much shame standing between me and it.
Except that somehow that’s not quite the end of this story. Because another funny thing happened this week. Someone pointed out to me that that part that could get uncontrollably angry isn’t just a darkness in me. It comes from my darkness, absolutely, and it’s that shadow side that I saw in my dream. But that uncontrollable anger comes from a fire deep within me. And that fire is the source not only of frightening rage, but of power and strength. It’s the fire that allows me, even spurs me, to be rightly angry when things are just really messed up. It’s the fire that made me speak out and then eventually leave the Intervarsity group in college because I couldn’t stand the way they treated my queer friends. It’s the fire that makes me stand up to people at school when I think they’re abusing their power. It’s the fire that lets me speak with assurance when I’m convinced of the truth of something.
And as I realized this, I heard the passage from 2 Timothy echoing in my head again: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.” Hunh. If the uncontrollable anger that makes me ashamed before God comes from the same fire that I just said lets me speak with assurance when I’m convinced of the truth of something…. Maybe I’m not incapable of rightly explaining the word of truth after all. Maybe rightly explaining the word of truth doesn’t mean I’m expected to have it all together - or even to have this angry piece of me completely pinned down. Maybe it means doing my best to make sure that that fire is being fed by the Holy Spirit and not the fires of selfishness or of self-hatred, and then letting that fire fuel my speech and my work. Maybe that's how I can present myself as a worker who has no need to be ashamed.
I suspect I’m not the only one who’s known this kind of anger and darkness. I know I’m not the only one who has a fire burning inside like that – I’ve seen it in a lot of you already. I’ve seen it in the way Jeremy talks about international debt and Jubilee. I’ve seen it in the way Kate talks about Jesus. I’ve seen it a lot here. And maybe your fires don’t threaten to burn out of control. Maybe you don’t feel like you need to keep that fire screened in all the time. Or maybe you do. I don’t know.
What I know is this: my dream this week made me wonder whether I was safe to touch - whether I was endangering those around me just by being near them, by being in relationship with them. I wondered whether I ought to pull myself back, separate myself more from the world, in order not to catch my neighbors on fire just by standing next to them. But then I began to wonder also, even if I learned to keep that fire totally contained, or to put it out altogether – would that just change the problem? We need more people to stand up for the voiceless more often, more people to question power, more people to speak words of comfort with assurance more often – not less. We do have to face the possibility that by touching things with that kind of heat, we may set them on fire. But if we can find ways to tend those fires carefully, to let them be fueled by the Holy Spirit – maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Showing posts with label sermons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sermons. Show all posts
Monday, October 15, 2007
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Made my parents cry...
Didn't mean to, of course. But here's the sermon I preached this morning that did it. Turns out, it's hard to keep preaching a difficult sermon when you can see your parents crying at it, but somehow I managed to preach this sermon three times this morning. Now, I'm going to bed.
****************************
I remember the first time I heard the Indigo Girls’ music. It was a Tuesday night when I was 11 years old, and I was sitting around a campfire at Girl Scout Camp listening to one of our counselors sing songs with her guitar. And she started this one:
I’m trying to tell you something about my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you’ve ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
It’s only life, after all
And I was hooked. Partly because I thought that counselor was about the coolest person ever, partly because I liked the song itself. We sang that song every night that week during our unit campfire, and when it came time to go home, I determined to find the song and buy the cassette. I had no idea then that the song, “Closer to Fine,” was the definitive Indigo Girls song, nor did I know what a major role the Indigo Girls’ music would play in my life over the next fifteen years.
And I also didn’t know, that week at camp, that as I was sitting around a campfire learning that song, that same night my grandfather was dying of a heart attack. I didn’t know that he had died until my parents came and picked me up from camp on Friday.
I didn’t have much experience with death at age 11. No one in my family had died within my memory, and I’d never been to a funeral. It was hard for me to wrap my head around my grandfather’s death, hard for me to know how to let go. But I remember standing upstairs with my family and Nick White,* before the funeral began, and I remember Nick saying to us that this service was not to say goodbye, but to say thank you – but then acknowledging, “Some thank-yous are harder to say than others.” I knew what he said was true, but it didn’t help me feel any less sad about it. I missed my grandfather fiercely for a long time.
Of course, I’ve never had an easy time letting go. So it’s a little strange in a way to think that “Closer to Fine” became my greatest musical refuge through middle school, and remains deeply significant to me. Maybe I’m just thick-headed, but you wouldn’t know to look at me that I’ve been listening intently to the message of “it’s only life, after all” for fifteen years. But while I’ll be the first to admit that I still tend to hold onto life with a vice grip, I think it’s made some inroads. And I think there’s something to this message.
Now, maybe this seems like the wrong week to suggest that we need to hold life lightly. 5 people have been confirmed dead so far, with more missing, after Wednesday’s bridge collapse in Minnesota. And while it doesn’t take the rug out from under us the same way that the tragedies of Katrina or September 11 did, it’s still shaken us. Its very ordinariness calls to our attention how fragile and temporary are the things we take for granted – from bridges to homes to our very lives. And while five is not a particularly high body count, each of those five people still had friends and family and acquaintances who must now mourn that death.
So yeah, maybe it’s not the best week for this conversation. But when is it ever the best week? We ought to talk about these things on bright sunny days, when there’s not a cloud of trouble in sight and we can talk dispassionately, prepare ourselves, think objectively about life. But those days are so few that it seems a shame to darken them with such topics.
And even if best weeks came around, or came around more often, I think today’s Gospel warns us that we can’t afford to wait for those best weeks. If we wait until we’ve planned and scraped and taken care of everything else on our to-do lists, we will find that we have run out of time. Today, now, we must begin to loosen our grasp on life.
Now, don’t misunderstand me here. Several years after the Indigo Girls released “Closer to Fine,” Indigo Girl Amy Ray said in an interview that when she first heard the song, the line "it's only life, after all" struck her as being incredibly blasé about something that she felt was so sacred. It took her awhile to see the truth of that line in the context of the rest of the song, but in stepping back and listening to the whole, eventually she learned to sing that line along with her bandmate. I think that’s what we need to do with this idea. It’s not that life is not sacred. I think if we read the rest of the Gospels, the rest of the Bible, that’s clear. Life is incredibly sacred. But precisely because it is so sacred, we need to treat it with respect by holding it lightly. There’s a Madeleine L’Engle character who says “The only way to deal with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”
I hold my friends’ lives pretty tightly. But if I have to be willing to die myself in order to be fully Christ’s, then I also have to be willing to trust that even the death of those I love most will not separate me from the love of God – or, perhaps harder, that it will not ultimately separate me from the love of those people. I have to learn to trust that I can indeed hold life lightly – others’ as well as my own – because this life is not our last chance. Our earthly life is not all there is to life.
We know that our earthly relationships can draw us either closer to or farther from God. Yet it never occurred to me until this year that even our healthy, loving, relationships might be among the possessions that can possess us – that when Jesus says “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” that might include people. Of course, we can never truly possess another human being, but we talk all the time as though we can – “Be mine” “He’s taken” “She belongs to him.” Indeed, the world around us often encourages us to tighten our grip on the people we care about, as though we could control either them or the relationship that way. I’m thinking, for instance, of the Eagles song that says
Lying here in the darkness
I hear the sirens wail
Somebody’s going to emergency,
Somebody’s going to jail
You find somebody to love in this world
You better hang on tooth and nail
But hanging on tooth and nail won’t keep the person you love from going to emergency, or for that matter from going to jail. And it has some serious repercussions for the relationship. If you’re hanging on tooth and nail, it doesn’t leave much room for things like gentleness or perspective. It makes it difficult to step back and ask what’s best for either person; to savor the time spent together; in short, to spend that time loving each other. In other words, holding life too tightly not only gets between us and God, it gets between us and those we love.
And really, that seems like just a stupid waste of life. If anything, I’ve probably tried to hold onto my friends’ lives even tighter as an adult than I did at age 11. But earlier this year, in a moment of weakness, I agreed to let a seminary friend watch the video from when St. Paul’s Youth did Godspell the first time around. Some of you know that Emily, a friend of mine who played the Jesus character, has since died. I still miss her terribly. After we watched the last scene, where Jesus returns to his friends after they’ve carried his body offstage, I told my friend, “I just want her to walk back in for real.” And he looked at me and said “It may take an unfair amount of time. But she’s going to.” And for just a moment, by trusting the friend who was in front of me, I was able to loosen my grasp and trust God to hold onto life for me – not only mine but Emily’s and my grandfather’s as well.
*Previous rector.
****************************
I remember the first time I heard the Indigo Girls’ music. It was a Tuesday night when I was 11 years old, and I was sitting around a campfire at Girl Scout Camp listening to one of our counselors sing songs with her guitar. And she started this one:
I’m trying to tell you something about my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you’ve ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
It’s only life, after all
And I was hooked. Partly because I thought that counselor was about the coolest person ever, partly because I liked the song itself. We sang that song every night that week during our unit campfire, and when it came time to go home, I determined to find the song and buy the cassette. I had no idea then that the song, “Closer to Fine,” was the definitive Indigo Girls song, nor did I know what a major role the Indigo Girls’ music would play in my life over the next fifteen years.
And I also didn’t know, that week at camp, that as I was sitting around a campfire learning that song, that same night my grandfather was dying of a heart attack. I didn’t know that he had died until my parents came and picked me up from camp on Friday.
I didn’t have much experience with death at age 11. No one in my family had died within my memory, and I’d never been to a funeral. It was hard for me to wrap my head around my grandfather’s death, hard for me to know how to let go. But I remember standing upstairs with my family and Nick White,* before the funeral began, and I remember Nick saying to us that this service was not to say goodbye, but to say thank you – but then acknowledging, “Some thank-yous are harder to say than others.” I knew what he said was true, but it didn’t help me feel any less sad about it. I missed my grandfather fiercely for a long time.
Of course, I’ve never had an easy time letting go. So it’s a little strange in a way to think that “Closer to Fine” became my greatest musical refuge through middle school, and remains deeply significant to me. Maybe I’m just thick-headed, but you wouldn’t know to look at me that I’ve been listening intently to the message of “it’s only life, after all” for fifteen years. But while I’ll be the first to admit that I still tend to hold onto life with a vice grip, I think it’s made some inroads. And I think there’s something to this message.
Now, maybe this seems like the wrong week to suggest that we need to hold life lightly. 5 people have been confirmed dead so far, with more missing, after Wednesday’s bridge collapse in Minnesota. And while it doesn’t take the rug out from under us the same way that the tragedies of Katrina or September 11 did, it’s still shaken us. Its very ordinariness calls to our attention how fragile and temporary are the things we take for granted – from bridges to homes to our very lives. And while five is not a particularly high body count, each of those five people still had friends and family and acquaintances who must now mourn that death.
So yeah, maybe it’s not the best week for this conversation. But when is it ever the best week? We ought to talk about these things on bright sunny days, when there’s not a cloud of trouble in sight and we can talk dispassionately, prepare ourselves, think objectively about life. But those days are so few that it seems a shame to darken them with such topics.
And even if best weeks came around, or came around more often, I think today’s Gospel warns us that we can’t afford to wait for those best weeks. If we wait until we’ve planned and scraped and taken care of everything else on our to-do lists, we will find that we have run out of time. Today, now, we must begin to loosen our grasp on life.
Now, don’t misunderstand me here. Several years after the Indigo Girls released “Closer to Fine,” Indigo Girl Amy Ray said in an interview that when she first heard the song, the line "it's only life, after all" struck her as being incredibly blasé about something that she felt was so sacred. It took her awhile to see the truth of that line in the context of the rest of the song, but in stepping back and listening to the whole, eventually she learned to sing that line along with her bandmate. I think that’s what we need to do with this idea. It’s not that life is not sacred. I think if we read the rest of the Gospels, the rest of the Bible, that’s clear. Life is incredibly sacred. But precisely because it is so sacred, we need to treat it with respect by holding it lightly. There’s a Madeleine L’Engle character who says “The only way to deal with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”
I hold my friends’ lives pretty tightly. But if I have to be willing to die myself in order to be fully Christ’s, then I also have to be willing to trust that even the death of those I love most will not separate me from the love of God – or, perhaps harder, that it will not ultimately separate me from the love of those people. I have to learn to trust that I can indeed hold life lightly – others’ as well as my own – because this life is not our last chance. Our earthly life is not all there is to life.
We know that our earthly relationships can draw us either closer to or farther from God. Yet it never occurred to me until this year that even our healthy, loving, relationships might be among the possessions that can possess us – that when Jesus says “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” that might include people. Of course, we can never truly possess another human being, but we talk all the time as though we can – “Be mine” “He’s taken” “She belongs to him.” Indeed, the world around us often encourages us to tighten our grip on the people we care about, as though we could control either them or the relationship that way. I’m thinking, for instance, of the Eagles song that says
Lying here in the darkness
I hear the sirens wail
Somebody’s going to emergency,
Somebody’s going to jail
You find somebody to love in this world
You better hang on tooth and nail
But hanging on tooth and nail won’t keep the person you love from going to emergency, or for that matter from going to jail. And it has some serious repercussions for the relationship. If you’re hanging on tooth and nail, it doesn’t leave much room for things like gentleness or perspective. It makes it difficult to step back and ask what’s best for either person; to savor the time spent together; in short, to spend that time loving each other. In other words, holding life too tightly not only gets between us and God, it gets between us and those we love.
And really, that seems like just a stupid waste of life. If anything, I’ve probably tried to hold onto my friends’ lives even tighter as an adult than I did at age 11. But earlier this year, in a moment of weakness, I agreed to let a seminary friend watch the video from when St. Paul’s Youth did Godspell the first time around. Some of you know that Emily, a friend of mine who played the Jesus character, has since died. I still miss her terribly. After we watched the last scene, where Jesus returns to his friends after they’ve carried his body offstage, I told my friend, “I just want her to walk back in for real.” And he looked at me and said “It may take an unfair amount of time. But she’s going to.” And for just a moment, by trusting the friend who was in front of me, I was able to loosen my grasp and trust God to hold onto life for me – not only mine but Emily’s and my grandfather’s as well.
*Previous rector.
Monday, February 26, 2007
1 Lent
This is the sermon I preached at field ed yesterday. I haven't usually posted Sunday sermons here, because I think most of my parish sermons haven't been as good as my Seabury sermons (regardless of which parish). But I think I've improved some on that this term, partly because my field ed parish doesn't expect 15 minute sermons, so I don't have to keep writing after the sermon is done. Anyway, here's yesterday's.
************************
One of the things that’s hardest for me about the Christian life is that I can’t look Jesus in the eyes. Looking people in the eyes is a big part of how I come to trust people. There’s a line from the musical of Jekyll & Hyde that always strikes me, where the woman who Hyde beats and Jekyll heals sings “In his eyes, I see a gentle glow, and that’s where I’ll be safe, I know.” I always think that if I could just look into Jesus’ eyes, then I’d find that kind of safety, the kind that makes the danger not matter, because it can’t touch me. But Jesus isn’t standing physically before me, day in and day out, for me to learn his eyes that way.
So I look into other eyes instead, looking for Jesus there. And I usually do find Jesus there in some guise. I look into a mentor’s eyes and see a promise that he won’t give me up if I happen to fail. I look into a friend’s eyes and see a fierce protectiveness for women’s bodies, her own as well as other women’s. I look into another friend’s eyes and see unguarded playfulness.
But then I’m often also troubled by much of what I find in my friends’ eyes. I see things there that I don’t want to see there. I don’t want to look into a friend’s eyes and see that he’s learned not to trust his own body. I don’t want to look into a friend’s eyes and see that the church I love so much, and that she loves too, is basically eating her alive. That’s not what I meant when I said I wanted to find Jesus. That kind of pain makes me want simultaneously to pull back, protect myself from, and to make it better. Of course, I know that I can’t make it better, and that it would be selfish to pull myself back – and, as it turns out, not even helpful to me, really.
I’ve seen these kinds of things in my friends’ eyes for as long as I can remember. But I’ve never been able to name what I was seeing. This week, though, I read a story in Nora Gallagher’s book Things Seen and Unseen that helped me understand a little better. She says that one Maundy Thursday, she went to a footwashing service where it was so dark you couldn’t see who would wash your feet, or whose you would wash, until you got to them. She says that when it was her turn to wash, she looked up and saw her friend Ben, for whom she was caring as he was dying of AIDS, and that after she washed his feet, she lifted her head to kiss the foot, and caught his eyes.
And she says, “I saw in him not the best that was in him, but what made him uniquely Ben, what made him not any other person in the world: his memories, his imagination, his tenderness, and his hope. And I saw something else, Good Friday’s shadow, way in the back of his eyes.”
Good Friday’s shadow. That’s what I’ve seen in all those eyes. And today, I’m wondering if those who had been with Jesus before he went into the wilderness saw that same shadow in Jesus’ eyes when he came out. I think it was there. I don’t know whether Jesus always knew what was going to happen in his life, even in a broad sense.
But whether Jesus knew going into the wilderness that the cross awaited him, I think he knows coming out that Good Friday is the inevitable end to this path that he’s on. He walks out of the wilderness with the shadow of Good Friday in the back of his eyes. Even Jesus can’t have this kind of encounter and come out of it unchanged. The wilderness gets into who Jesus thought he’d be.
But Good Friday is not all there is. And if, as I suspect, the tempting in the wilderness gave Jesus a clearer sense of who he was meant to be on earth, then I suspect that piece was more clearly visible in his eyes after the desert too. I’d guess that his companions saw there a new power to cast out demons, born of his recent victory in the wilderness. Maybe they saw a new depth of compassion, probably beyond any compassion they’d ever known before. Even before the cross, I think his eyes must have held not only the shadow of Good Friday, but everything that made him uniquely himself. And I believe that that included the shadow of Easter as well. Not in the sense that Jesus knew exactly what would happen after he was crucified, though maybe he did – but I think there was a new, unquenchable hope in God, that whatever would happen on Good Friday would not be the final word.
For now, though, Jesus’ face is set toward Jerusalem, where prophets go to die. And if we want to observe a holy Lent, we have to set our own faces toward Jerusalem, toward the cross. We have to accompany Jesus into the wilderness today, and then once we walk out of the wilderness, we have to set our faces toward Good Friday. We need to keep looking into each other’s eyes, right at that Good Friday shadow. Not trying to fix the shadow or make it go away, even out of genuine love for each other. Lent is not about fixing the darkness, but about sitting with each other in the depths, moving deeper and deeper together. And that’s how we find Jesus – not by trying to scramble up the slick sides on our own, but by following him down into the deepest parts, trusting that he’ll lead us out into the light on the other side. Each Sunday, each day of Lent, we strip away another layer that stands between us and our acceptance and experience of Good Friday, until finally we stand before the cross, undefended. Not because we’ve pretended our way through the story, but because we’ve lived our way into its heart.
It won’t all happen this Lent, for any of us. It will probably take us all our lives really to be able to stand at the foot of the cross totally undefended. But the point isn’t to get there this year so much as to take the next step. Today, it’s our job to walk into the wilderness – intentionally, knowing that it will be hard. Tomorrow, maybe, it will be time for us to face the devil, even though we’d rather not. And the next day, God willing, we’ll walk back out of that wilderness and start moving toward what’s next, toward what’s going to be even harder.
I should warn you – if you cross that threshold today, and let the Spirit lead you into that wilderness, you will come out changed. And that change will not remain secret. It will show in your eyes. Your friends will look into your eyes and see a new shadow there, a deeper knowledge of what awaits on Good Friday. The wilderness is not a safe place, and it does not lead to a safe end. But if we can bring ourselves to go out into the wilderness anyway, and to keep looking at the Good Friday in each other’s eyes, eventually there will be a glimmer of Easter – a glimmer and then a brilliant shining, and love will conquer the danger once and for all.
************************
One of the things that’s hardest for me about the Christian life is that I can’t look Jesus in the eyes. Looking people in the eyes is a big part of how I come to trust people. There’s a line from the musical of Jekyll & Hyde that always strikes me, where the woman who Hyde beats and Jekyll heals sings “In his eyes, I see a gentle glow, and that’s where I’ll be safe, I know.” I always think that if I could just look into Jesus’ eyes, then I’d find that kind of safety, the kind that makes the danger not matter, because it can’t touch me. But Jesus isn’t standing physically before me, day in and day out, for me to learn his eyes that way.
So I look into other eyes instead, looking for Jesus there. And I usually do find Jesus there in some guise. I look into a mentor’s eyes and see a promise that he won’t give me up if I happen to fail. I look into a friend’s eyes and see a fierce protectiveness for women’s bodies, her own as well as other women’s. I look into another friend’s eyes and see unguarded playfulness.
But then I’m often also troubled by much of what I find in my friends’ eyes. I see things there that I don’t want to see there. I don’t want to look into a friend’s eyes and see that he’s learned not to trust his own body. I don’t want to look into a friend’s eyes and see that the church I love so much, and that she loves too, is basically eating her alive. That’s not what I meant when I said I wanted to find Jesus. That kind of pain makes me want simultaneously to pull back, protect myself from, and to make it better. Of course, I know that I can’t make it better, and that it would be selfish to pull myself back – and, as it turns out, not even helpful to me, really.
I’ve seen these kinds of things in my friends’ eyes for as long as I can remember. But I’ve never been able to name what I was seeing. This week, though, I read a story in Nora Gallagher’s book Things Seen and Unseen that helped me understand a little better. She says that one Maundy Thursday, she went to a footwashing service where it was so dark you couldn’t see who would wash your feet, or whose you would wash, until you got to them. She says that when it was her turn to wash, she looked up and saw her friend Ben, for whom she was caring as he was dying of AIDS, and that after she washed his feet, she lifted her head to kiss the foot, and caught his eyes.
And she says, “I saw in him not the best that was in him, but what made him uniquely Ben, what made him not any other person in the world: his memories, his imagination, his tenderness, and his hope. And I saw something else, Good Friday’s shadow, way in the back of his eyes.”
Good Friday’s shadow. That’s what I’ve seen in all those eyes. And today, I’m wondering if those who had been with Jesus before he went into the wilderness saw that same shadow in Jesus’ eyes when he came out. I think it was there. I don’t know whether Jesus always knew what was going to happen in his life, even in a broad sense.
But whether Jesus knew going into the wilderness that the cross awaited him, I think he knows coming out that Good Friday is the inevitable end to this path that he’s on. He walks out of the wilderness with the shadow of Good Friday in the back of his eyes. Even Jesus can’t have this kind of encounter and come out of it unchanged. The wilderness gets into who Jesus thought he’d be.
But Good Friday is not all there is. And if, as I suspect, the tempting in the wilderness gave Jesus a clearer sense of who he was meant to be on earth, then I suspect that piece was more clearly visible in his eyes after the desert too. I’d guess that his companions saw there a new power to cast out demons, born of his recent victory in the wilderness. Maybe they saw a new depth of compassion, probably beyond any compassion they’d ever known before. Even before the cross, I think his eyes must have held not only the shadow of Good Friday, but everything that made him uniquely himself. And I believe that that included the shadow of Easter as well. Not in the sense that Jesus knew exactly what would happen after he was crucified, though maybe he did – but I think there was a new, unquenchable hope in God, that whatever would happen on Good Friday would not be the final word.
For now, though, Jesus’ face is set toward Jerusalem, where prophets go to die. And if we want to observe a holy Lent, we have to set our own faces toward Jerusalem, toward the cross. We have to accompany Jesus into the wilderness today, and then once we walk out of the wilderness, we have to set our faces toward Good Friday. We need to keep looking into each other’s eyes, right at that Good Friday shadow. Not trying to fix the shadow or make it go away, even out of genuine love for each other. Lent is not about fixing the darkness, but about sitting with each other in the depths, moving deeper and deeper together. And that’s how we find Jesus – not by trying to scramble up the slick sides on our own, but by following him down into the deepest parts, trusting that he’ll lead us out into the light on the other side. Each Sunday, each day of Lent, we strip away another layer that stands between us and our acceptance and experience of Good Friday, until finally we stand before the cross, undefended. Not because we’ve pretended our way through the story, but because we’ve lived our way into its heart.
It won’t all happen this Lent, for any of us. It will probably take us all our lives really to be able to stand at the foot of the cross totally undefended. But the point isn’t to get there this year so much as to take the next step. Today, it’s our job to walk into the wilderness – intentionally, knowing that it will be hard. Tomorrow, maybe, it will be time for us to face the devil, even though we’d rather not. And the next day, God willing, we’ll walk back out of that wilderness and start moving toward what’s next, toward what’s going to be even harder.
I should warn you – if you cross that threshold today, and let the Spirit lead you into that wilderness, you will come out changed. And that change will not remain secret. It will show in your eyes. Your friends will look into your eyes and see a new shadow there, a deeper knowledge of what awaits on Good Friday. The wilderness is not a safe place, and it does not lead to a safe end. But if we can bring ourselves to go out into the wilderness anyway, and to keep looking at the Good Friday in each other’s eyes, eventually there will be a glimmer of Easter – a glimmer and then a brilliant shining, and love will conquer the danger once and for all.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Feast of St. Brigid
I preached tonight at Seabury, which I love doing, even if it scares me. This one certainly scared the hell out of me, mostly because I preached it without notes (something I've only ever dared in class before) but a little because it's more vulnerable than most of mine.
I'm not sure that I've ever had such a powerful experience preaching before. The whole service was really powerful, actually, in a lot of little ways. I had an especially hard time distributing communion - a couple of times I had to try twice to get the words "the body of Christ" to leave my mouth. But the preaching was a lot of it. Preaching always takes something out of me, and at Seabury it always takes a fair amount, but this one really took almost everything I had. From the feedback I got, the sermon seems to have worked for the congregation also.
I did write a text for organizational purposes, and I'm putting it below, though I'm not sure this sermon works as well in text form as it does spoken. It's obviously not exact, since I didn't use the text, but particular words stick in my mind, so it's pretty close. Oh - the biblical text is 1 Cor. 1:26-31.
*****************************
Last week my roommate stopped writing, looked around her room, and said. “Every flat surface in this room has a book on it. I think I’m looking for the words I can’t seem to find in my head.” Boy, did that ring true for me. My gut reaction to most problems, certainly most writing and thinking problems, is to look for another book to fix it. Someone asks me, “What do you know about…?” and my first instinct is that I know I have a bookshelf. I start thinking about what I’ve read that I could give them, not what I know about x. In fact, if someone asks me about my own experience, I’m likely still to reach for a book. I’m likely to ask someone else to explain it for me, to flip through pages until I find someone who has.
Words hold wisdom. In words, the wisdom of one time can be pinned down and passed forward to future generations, and we can pick it up again a hundred or a thousand years later. Words are what let me in on all the marvelous thinking that people far more insightful than I are figuring out. Words are how I figure out what I’m thinking. That’s a lot of why I feel so at home in this place. The seminary often wants to tell us that words, especially written words, are of immense worth – are, in fact, worth more than experience. And I already tend to hold words over experience as a source of wisdom, so that becomes a pretty comfortable place for me to live. I get to hide out in my love of books, and call it wisdom.
But the things that mean the most to me, the things that show me God most clearly, are not, in the end, books. In fact, maybe part of why I look so quickly to books is that when it comes to God, words don’t come easily to me. I want to hear how someone else has taken a smell, a glance, a texture, and translated it to the written word, because I need to put it into words somehow in order to preach it.
The closest I can come to articulating my desire for God is very often to open the hymnal and sing “Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm, whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm, be there at our sleeping, and give us, we pray, your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day.” The closest I can come to articulating what I believe, what the Church believes, about God, is usually to quote Scripture or Augustine or Madeleine L’Engle. For the same reason, I was never much good at writing Happening affirmations or psych notes or love letters. I was always better at collecting quotations for my friends and lovers than writing out my own sentiment.
But even there, even with the most articulate words I can find, they don’t go far enough. No words can convey to you the way that I know God by the touch of your hand, by the taste of fresh chamomile, by the smell of my grandmother’s perfume. Maybe some of you know something about what that’s like – maybe words can take us far enough to meet in the middle between our experiences of God – but they’ll never take us all the way across. How can I tell you about the particular glow of a torch on the lake, when it’s not really about the glow at all but everything that brings me to the place where I see that glow? How can I tell you?
I can’t. But I find a little comfort, and a little clarity, in wondering whether maybe God couldn’t either. Whether maybe that’s why the Word became flesh; as Paul says, “became for us wisdom from God.” I’d like to think that God can shape words to do exactly what they ought to do; that God’s eloquence far outshines any of ours. But after centuries of speaking to us, maybe even God couldn’t explain God’s love for us without coming himself and looking us in the eyes.
I'm not sure that I've ever had such a powerful experience preaching before. The whole service was really powerful, actually, in a lot of little ways. I had an especially hard time distributing communion - a couple of times I had to try twice to get the words "the body of Christ" to leave my mouth. But the preaching was a lot of it. Preaching always takes something out of me, and at Seabury it always takes a fair amount, but this one really took almost everything I had. From the feedback I got, the sermon seems to have worked for the congregation also.
I did write a text for organizational purposes, and I'm putting it below, though I'm not sure this sermon works as well in text form as it does spoken. It's obviously not exact, since I didn't use the text, but particular words stick in my mind, so it's pretty close. Oh - the biblical text is 1 Cor. 1:26-31.
*****************************
Last week my roommate stopped writing, looked around her room, and said. “Every flat surface in this room has a book on it. I think I’m looking for the words I can’t seem to find in my head.” Boy, did that ring true for me. My gut reaction to most problems, certainly most writing and thinking problems, is to look for another book to fix it. Someone asks me, “What do you know about…?” and my first instinct is that I know I have a bookshelf. I start thinking about what I’ve read that I could give them, not what I know about x. In fact, if someone asks me about my own experience, I’m likely still to reach for a book. I’m likely to ask someone else to explain it for me, to flip through pages until I find someone who has.
Words hold wisdom. In words, the wisdom of one time can be pinned down and passed forward to future generations, and we can pick it up again a hundred or a thousand years later. Words are what let me in on all the marvelous thinking that people far more insightful than I are figuring out. Words are how I figure out what I’m thinking. That’s a lot of why I feel so at home in this place. The seminary often wants to tell us that words, especially written words, are of immense worth – are, in fact, worth more than experience. And I already tend to hold words over experience as a source of wisdom, so that becomes a pretty comfortable place for me to live. I get to hide out in my love of books, and call it wisdom.
But the things that mean the most to me, the things that show me God most clearly, are not, in the end, books. In fact, maybe part of why I look so quickly to books is that when it comes to God, words don’t come easily to me. I want to hear how someone else has taken a smell, a glance, a texture, and translated it to the written word, because I need to put it into words somehow in order to preach it.
The closest I can come to articulating my desire for God is very often to open the hymnal and sing “Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm, whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm, be there at our sleeping, and give us, we pray, your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day.” The closest I can come to articulating what I believe, what the Church believes, about God, is usually to quote Scripture or Augustine or Madeleine L’Engle. For the same reason, I was never much good at writing Happening affirmations or psych notes or love letters. I was always better at collecting quotations for my friends and lovers than writing out my own sentiment.
But even there, even with the most articulate words I can find, they don’t go far enough. No words can convey to you the way that I know God by the touch of your hand, by the taste of fresh chamomile, by the smell of my grandmother’s perfume. Maybe some of you know something about what that’s like – maybe words can take us far enough to meet in the middle between our experiences of God – but they’ll never take us all the way across. How can I tell you about the particular glow of a torch on the lake, when it’s not really about the glow at all but everything that brings me to the place where I see that glow? How can I tell you?
I can’t. But I find a little comfort, and a little clarity, in wondering whether maybe God couldn’t either. Whether maybe that’s why the Word became flesh; as Paul says, “became for us wisdom from God.” I’d like to think that God can shape words to do exactly what they ought to do; that God’s eloquence far outshines any of ours. But after centuries of speaking to us, maybe even God couldn’t explain God’s love for us without coming himself and looking us in the eyes.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Stand Up
Here's the sermon I preached tonight for Missional Preaching class. I still don't feel like it's really finished, and I didn't preach it exactly like this. I added a little, finessed a little; I think it flowed a little better on my feet. Really it's part manuscript, part outline. But here's the gist of it. More than maybe any other time I've preached, this time I was really overwhelmed with all there was to say and work with, and therefore it ended up on the short side. And yes, you've already heard the opening this week. Anyway....
****************************************
When I lived in Germany, one of the things that I got asked about was the pledge of allegiance. The Germans didn't understand, in the wake of World War II, how we could require American schoolchildren to stand and pledge blind allegiance, not even to the country but to a symbol thereof. They’d seen how easily that path leads to destruction.
This week my friend Nicole blogged a reminder that it happens every day, that we set ourselves at the head of that path. Nicole is an ESL teacher in Minnesota, whose kids mostly don’t understand the English texts they’re speaking and reading in school. So she spends a fair amount of time working them toward that kind of comprehension. Here’s what she related about teaching them the pledge:
“…even though students are required to say the pledge of allegiance every morning in their classrooms, a teacher can get in trouble for presuming help them to read the words…. Apparently, saying "under God" in school is okay, but discussing why you're saying it or what it means is not…. So essentially, the importance of the pledge, it's [sic] actual relevance to America, is completely superficial- the act of repeating it without comprehension is the purpose, I see now…. I really can't understand why those words are still there, spoken enthusiastically by students who have no idea what they're saying, every single school day.”
Don’t worry your pretty little head about what it means; just fall in line behind the flag.
Sound familiar? “Stand up, stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross; lift high the royal banner, it must not suffer loss.” The royal banner must not suffer loss. Of course, it’s supposed to represent the gospel and Jesus, but the focus is the banner. Also it’s questionable what we mean by the gospel not suffering loss – isn’t suffering loss a part of the Christian life – certainly a part of Jesus’ life? But – what are we doing? Are we reducing the gospel to one more banner behind which we’re supposed to line up?
No wonder the Christian mainstream and secular leftists have so little patience for the idea of “standing up for Jesus.” There’s a particular kind of conservative Christians who have coopted the idea – the ones who look around at distress among nations and tend to say, “that’s good! that means Jesus will come back faster! let’s help the distress along!”
Now, it’s not that the rest of us don’t see the distress. We’ve certainly got distress among nations in our day. I’m not sure any day has been without it. But mainstream and lefty types are usually appalled - I think rightly - by the attitude that our response to distress should be one either of coerced acceptance of the gospel or of fueling distress in order to bring about the second coming. That kind of response isn’t compassionate, and it’s not biblical. It’s not the way God’s people respond to disaster throughout Scripture. But we in the mainstream and to its left usually want to hide under the bed, theologically speaking. Yes, we want to fix the earthly mess, but when it comes to making theology of it, we hide and say nothing instead of giving an appropriate alternative to the ultraconservative response. And we’re pretty good at letting ourselves off the hook about it.
Too bad the gospel doesn’t.
Admittedly, this particular gospel reading’s been tainted by centuries of royal banners whose own importance comes to overshadow that for which they stand, but the gospel tells us nevertheless, “Stand up.” “Stand up and raise your heads.” Not “stand up and cheer and then go back to fueling more distress.” Not “fix what you can and ignore the theological ramifications.” Stand up and raise your heads. Look around.
Don’t pretend the distress isn’t there. Don’t stop responding to it. We still need earthly compassion.
But take a minute to stand up and look around for the Kingdom of God breaking in among distress – because Luke’s Jesus tells us that the distress is a surefire sign that the Kingdom is around somewhere.
So, in other words, go ahead and “stand up, stand up for Jesus.” If we know what we’re about when we stand up, we can raise our heads unashamed of the gospel.
****************************************
When I lived in Germany, one of the things that I got asked about was the pledge of allegiance. The Germans didn't understand, in the wake of World War II, how we could require American schoolchildren to stand and pledge blind allegiance, not even to the country but to a symbol thereof. They’d seen how easily that path leads to destruction.
This week my friend Nicole blogged a reminder that it happens every day, that we set ourselves at the head of that path. Nicole is an ESL teacher in Minnesota, whose kids mostly don’t understand the English texts they’re speaking and reading in school. So she spends a fair amount of time working them toward that kind of comprehension. Here’s what she related about teaching them the pledge:
“…even though students are required to say the pledge of allegiance every morning in their classrooms, a teacher can get in trouble for presuming help them to read the words…. Apparently, saying "under God" in school is okay, but discussing why you're saying it or what it means is not…. So essentially, the importance of the pledge, it's [sic] actual relevance to America, is completely superficial- the act of repeating it without comprehension is the purpose, I see now…. I really can't understand why those words are still there, spoken enthusiastically by students who have no idea what they're saying, every single school day.”
Don’t worry your pretty little head about what it means; just fall in line behind the flag.
Sound familiar? “Stand up, stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross; lift high the royal banner, it must not suffer loss.” The royal banner must not suffer loss. Of course, it’s supposed to represent the gospel and Jesus, but the focus is the banner. Also it’s questionable what we mean by the gospel not suffering loss – isn’t suffering loss a part of the Christian life – certainly a part of Jesus’ life? But – what are we doing? Are we reducing the gospel to one more banner behind which we’re supposed to line up?
No wonder the Christian mainstream and secular leftists have so little patience for the idea of “standing up for Jesus.” There’s a particular kind of conservative Christians who have coopted the idea – the ones who look around at distress among nations and tend to say, “that’s good! that means Jesus will come back faster! let’s help the distress along!”
Now, it’s not that the rest of us don’t see the distress. We’ve certainly got distress among nations in our day. I’m not sure any day has been without it. But mainstream and lefty types are usually appalled - I think rightly - by the attitude that our response to distress should be one either of coerced acceptance of the gospel or of fueling distress in order to bring about the second coming. That kind of response isn’t compassionate, and it’s not biblical. It’s not the way God’s people respond to disaster throughout Scripture. But we in the mainstream and to its left usually want to hide under the bed, theologically speaking. Yes, we want to fix the earthly mess, but when it comes to making theology of it, we hide and say nothing instead of giving an appropriate alternative to the ultraconservative response. And we’re pretty good at letting ourselves off the hook about it.
Too bad the gospel doesn’t.
Admittedly, this particular gospel reading’s been tainted by centuries of royal banners whose own importance comes to overshadow that for which they stand, but the gospel tells us nevertheless, “Stand up.” “Stand up and raise your heads.” Not “stand up and cheer and then go back to fueling more distress.” Not “fix what you can and ignore the theological ramifications.” Stand up and raise your heads. Look around.
Don’t pretend the distress isn’t there. Don’t stop responding to it. We still need earthly compassion.
But take a minute to stand up and look around for the Kingdom of God breaking in among distress – because Luke’s Jesus tells us that the distress is a surefire sign that the Kingdom is around somewhere.
So, in other words, go ahead and “stand up, stand up for Jesus.” If we know what we’re about when we stand up, we can raise our heads unashamed of the gospel.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Peace offering?
I've been mostly silent on here in recent days, and still don't have much to say here. So in lieu of my usual posts, here's the sermon I preached in Seabury's chapel yesterday - more or less as I actually preached it:
Last week after Matriculation, a few of us ended up in the chapel looking at the space, and talking about it. And one of the things that came up for me as we talked was the importance of where I sit in this chapel. I need to be able to see things to give them my full attention a lot of the time, and it turns out there are only about five seats in this chapel where I can reliably see the pulpit, the crossing, the presider’s seat, and the altar. So I sit in one of those. But it would actually be important for me to sit on that side of the chapel even if sight lines weren’t such a problem for me, because it matters to me that I sit on the side of the theologians.
Now, that’s partly a positive statement, in that I think of myself much more readily as a theologian than as a missionary, something I’m sure is shocking to many of you. But it’s the flip side, the negative of that statement, that really makes it so important to me. It’s less a matter of needing to sit with the theologians than it is of needing to sit facing the missionaries. I’m in very little danger of forgetting about the theologians, or of forgetting that doing theology is part of my call. If I’m going to forget something, I’m going to forget that I’m also called to mission. Even when I remember, I often feel as though when Jesus says “You also are to testify,” he can’t possibly mean me - he means you all. So as I worship in this chapel, I need to look up and remember both how much the church needs its missionaries, and that I too have a part in God’s mission. I may be theological in my reasons for why mission is so important, but my theology becomes incomplete, maybe even false, when I neglect the missional elements.
I think this is part of the church’s message to all of us on this particular feast, the feast of Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer. By lumping these three bishops together, the church reminds us not only that they knew each other, but that we don’t get one without the others. Cranmer was a scholar and theologian who more or less had to be pulled into the public life. Latimer railed against clergy who stayed safely in their studies and universities and never preached the gospel. The whole calendar of saints operates this way, to a certain extent. The Church put Ridley on the calendar for his reforming zeal in tearing out images and altars – but in only a few weeks, we’ll celebrate the feast of John of Damascus, whose Defense of Holy Images helped ensure that icons and liturgical art would have a place in the Church. And the church tells us that they’re a package deal. Not Cranmer, or Latimer, or Ridley; not liturgy or preaching or theology; but all of these together, all at once.
Last week after Matriculation, a few of us ended up in the chapel looking at the space, and talking about it. And one of the things that came up for me as we talked was the importance of where I sit in this chapel. I need to be able to see things to give them my full attention a lot of the time, and it turns out there are only about five seats in this chapel where I can reliably see the pulpit, the crossing, the presider’s seat, and the altar. So I sit in one of those. But it would actually be important for me to sit on that side of the chapel even if sight lines weren’t such a problem for me, because it matters to me that I sit on the side of the theologians.
Now, that’s partly a positive statement, in that I think of myself much more readily as a theologian than as a missionary, something I’m sure is shocking to many of you. But it’s the flip side, the negative of that statement, that really makes it so important to me. It’s less a matter of needing to sit with the theologians than it is of needing to sit facing the missionaries. I’m in very little danger of forgetting about the theologians, or of forgetting that doing theology is part of my call. If I’m going to forget something, I’m going to forget that I’m also called to mission. Even when I remember, I often feel as though when Jesus says “You also are to testify,” he can’t possibly mean me - he means you all. So as I worship in this chapel, I need to look up and remember both how much the church needs its missionaries, and that I too have a part in God’s mission. I may be theological in my reasons for why mission is so important, but my theology becomes incomplete, maybe even false, when I neglect the missional elements.
I think this is part of the church’s message to all of us on this particular feast, the feast of Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer. By lumping these three bishops together, the church reminds us not only that they knew each other, but that we don’t get one without the others. Cranmer was a scholar and theologian who more or less had to be pulled into the public life. Latimer railed against clergy who stayed safely in their studies and universities and never preached the gospel. The whole calendar of saints operates this way, to a certain extent. The Church put Ridley on the calendar for his reforming zeal in tearing out images and altars – but in only a few weeks, we’ll celebrate the feast of John of Damascus, whose Defense of Holy Images helped ensure that icons and liturgical art would have a place in the Church. And the church tells us that they’re a package deal. Not Cranmer, or Latimer, or Ridley; not liturgy or preaching or theology; but all of these together, all at once.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Link
Those who follow debates over interpretations of Scripture, particularly in the current Anglican climate, may find this Sermon on the Current Dispute Over Turning Off Cellphones in the British Library Reading Rooms more amusing than those who don't follow such debates, but it's worth reading either way.
For my part, I've already read it, so I'm heading back to Rory and Ryan and Kate's house to shower and iron and warble in preparation for Hope and Andrew's ordination to the priesthood tonight.
For my part, I've already read it, so I'm heading back to Rory and Ryan and Kate's house to shower and iron and warble in preparation for Hope and Andrew's ordination to the priesthood tonight.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Feast of St. Monnica
The Sheil Center, across the street, has a new copier. It’s a very helpful copier, from what I hear – very polite, and not at all passive-aggressive or confrontational the way copiers so often are. This one simply tells you its state and its needs, very calmly. For instance, “Please be patient. I am warming up.” Or – my favorite – “The job you have selected exceeds my capacity.” And I have an image in my head of standing at that copier, asking it to run off the lectionary readings for today, and an image coming on the screen, a digital image of Monnica, that says “My capacity exceeds the job you have selected.”
And she’d be right. Whoever put together this set of lessons selected a job for Monnica that’s pretty disconnected from the capacities for which we remember her in our calendar. We started with an Old Testament reading – all of three verses, sort of cobbled together – which tells us: Hannah weeps. Hannah asks God for a male heir. Hannah receives a male heir. That’s apparently all we need to know about Hannah. (The psalm is, well, a psalm – as well matched as most of our Lesser Feasts and Fasts psalms are. ) Then we have the Gospel reading, where Jesus tells us what childbirth is like – sort of a strange lecture to be getting from a man, and a single one at that, but ok. To hear it from these lessons, one gets the impression that there was one very important thing to know about Monnica: that her uterus was in good working order, so that she could give birth to a son.
That’s a strange sort of legacy. Certainly, there are plenty of famous men who presumably all had mothers, and most of those mothers don’t get their own feast days. Luckily, by the time the powers that be got around to writing a collect and biography, they seem to have gotten a better picture of Monnica’s life. Our collect points out her spiritual discipline, her perseverance, and her talent at sharing the Gospel. We don’t have a ton of information on her, but we know that she never gave up on bringing her son and her husband to Christ. In his Confessions, Augustine thanks God that she brought him “from her heart to life eternal.” He tells us also of her incredible discipline in her own life – how she would not gossip at all, for instance, and how she exercised such patience even with her difficult mother-in-law that the two women eventually became friends. Her capacity was great indeed.
Her capacity was great, and her example to us is great, and they far exceed the job the lessons have selected for her. But the most troubling part is not even that the picture these lessons give us is historically problematic, though it is. The most troubling part is the way that picture lends itself to being generalized. The calendar of saints is there to be generalized – to provide models of life and piety for all Christians. If Monnica’s achievements and contributions as a woman of deep prayer and absolute perseverance warrant less attention than her ability to give birth, we have sold not only her but also ourselves short. We have cheapened her example by turning her from a model for all Christians to an example of a woman’s proper place, just as we cheapen the work and the value of motherhood when we make it a woman’s only choice.
For Monnica’s sake, for the sake of all the women of the church who get painted with the same brush, and for the sake of all the baptized, we need our calendar to give us lessons that match her capacity. Perhaps we might consider the story of Abigail, who patiently negotiated what was in her husband Nabal’s best interest when he was too stubborn and boorish to do so himself. We might consider the parable of the unjust judge, who agreed to do justice for the persistent widow, who would not stop her prayers and her pleading until she received it. We might consider the story of Lydia, who also worked to bring her family to Christ. With such lessons, such stories, I could go to the Sheil Center and stand fearlessly in front of that copier, knowing that Monnica’s image would just smile at me as the copier did its work – for then her job and her capacity would be well matched, and her memory truly honored.
And she’d be right. Whoever put together this set of lessons selected a job for Monnica that’s pretty disconnected from the capacities for which we remember her in our calendar. We started with an Old Testament reading – all of three verses, sort of cobbled together – which tells us: Hannah weeps. Hannah asks God for a male heir. Hannah receives a male heir. That’s apparently all we need to know about Hannah. (The psalm is, well, a psalm – as well matched as most of our Lesser Feasts and Fasts psalms are. ) Then we have the Gospel reading, where Jesus tells us what childbirth is like – sort of a strange lecture to be getting from a man, and a single one at that, but ok. To hear it from these lessons, one gets the impression that there was one very important thing to know about Monnica: that her uterus was in good working order, so that she could give birth to a son.
That’s a strange sort of legacy. Certainly, there are plenty of famous men who presumably all had mothers, and most of those mothers don’t get their own feast days. Luckily, by the time the powers that be got around to writing a collect and biography, they seem to have gotten a better picture of Monnica’s life. Our collect points out her spiritual discipline, her perseverance, and her talent at sharing the Gospel. We don’t have a ton of information on her, but we know that she never gave up on bringing her son and her husband to Christ. In his Confessions, Augustine thanks God that she brought him “from her heart to life eternal.” He tells us also of her incredible discipline in her own life – how she would not gossip at all, for instance, and how she exercised such patience even with her difficult mother-in-law that the two women eventually became friends. Her capacity was great indeed.
Her capacity was great, and her example to us is great, and they far exceed the job the lessons have selected for her. But the most troubling part is not even that the picture these lessons give us is historically problematic, though it is. The most troubling part is the way that picture lends itself to being generalized. The calendar of saints is there to be generalized – to provide models of life and piety for all Christians. If Monnica’s achievements and contributions as a woman of deep prayer and absolute perseverance warrant less attention than her ability to give birth, we have sold not only her but also ourselves short. We have cheapened her example by turning her from a model for all Christians to an example of a woman’s proper place, just as we cheapen the work and the value of motherhood when we make it a woman’s only choice.
For Monnica’s sake, for the sake of all the women of the church who get painted with the same brush, and for the sake of all the baptized, we need our calendar to give us lessons that match her capacity. Perhaps we might consider the story of Abigail, who patiently negotiated what was in her husband Nabal’s best interest when he was too stubborn and boorish to do so himself. We might consider the parable of the unjust judge, who agreed to do justice for the persistent widow, who would not stop her prayers and her pleading until she received it. We might consider the story of Lydia, who also worked to bring her family to Christ. With such lessons, such stories, I could go to the Sheil Center and stand fearlessly in front of that copier, knowing that Monnica’s image would just smile at me as the copier did its work – for then her job and her capacity would be well matched, and her memory truly honored.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Palm Sunday
I've had various bits of unfinished thoughts floating around my head all day, none of them ready for a post. Since it's been a couple of days, though, I'll share the Palm Sunday sermon I preached in class Friday, which is of course already written. I didn't preach it absolutely precisely according to the script, but this is pretty close. (I should probably note that the audience for this sermon was a classroom full of seminary people, not a parish congregation.)
*******
Palm Sunday makes me batty. We start out with a beautiful liturgy of palms, which fits well into the Lenten progression of time through the Gospel, and then bam! before the service is over, Jesus is dead – except, not really, because we’ve still got Maundy Thursday and Good Friday ahead of us, and he can’t really die until we hear it from John’s Gospel on Friday. We’re expected to fit all of Holy Week into Palm Sunday - not giving anything away for those who will actually be around for the Triduum, but also making sure that the people who won't be back until Easter don't walk in and say "Jesus died?" I just don’t understand Palm Sunday.
Add it to the list of things I don’t understand about Holy Week. Palm Sunday, I can scoot by on. Last year, I had a much more terrifying realization during Holy Week: when Good Friday came, I discovered that I didn’t know who Jesus was. And in fact, a year later, after courses in systematic theology, in New Testament, in biblical theology, I can report that I still don’t know who Jesus is.
Don’t get me wrong here - I both loved and passed those courses, and wrote more than one of my papers on who Christ is and what the cross means. In fact, my final paper for theology talked about that Good Friday experience and how Dr. Wondra’s Magic Chart describing the main theologies of the work of Christ had helped me find some clarity about the matter. And it was all true. Theologically - or, more accurately, intellectually - I can manage. I can do the mental gymnastics. But it’s like taking an online quiz: “What’s your soteriology?” So I can confidently tell you that on that quiz, I scored as a mix of Christus Victor and union/communion with God - God is the agent of our salvation, we experience sin as having power over us, reconciliation plays out in union with God, etc. That’s my preferred theological understanding of Christ and salvation.
I just don’t know who Jesus is. I don’t get it, deep in my gut, even after a year of letting it marinate, just as I know in my gut that it doesn’t make sense to skip straight from the procession into Jerusalem to the crucifixion. This year, though, I think I'm ok with that.
I’d still prefer to know. I’m used to knowing things. I like knowing things. That’s where I’m comfortable, is learning and knowing and understanding things inside and out. And I still think it’s important to keep pushing at that understanding. But it’s ok, for now, that I don’t entirely understand this.
Thinking about the Palm Sunday propers this week, I started humming a song that I hadn’t thought about in several years, at least since college. It says:
Listen to the Lord as he speaks softly
Listen to the words of a perfect man
Listen to the miracle of God incarnate
Listen even when you don’t understand
We used to sing it as a round, so that the last line would echo - “listen even when you don’t understand, understand, understand.” That’s how it sounded in my head this week, too. And as powerful as that line can be in the middle of July, I think it speaks especially directly to us as we prepare to enter Holy Week. Listen even when you don’t understand. Not “listen to hear x, y, or z” – as I learned last year, we don’t get to qualify what we’re willing to hear. Just listen.
So that will be my discipline for the rest of Lent this year, as we head through Holy Week. I’m asking for God’s help in trying to unclench my intellect’s iron grip, and in listening even when I don’t understand. I expect to understand very little, this week - and perhaps that’s the way it’s supposed to work. But I’ll be listening, and I invite you to listen with me, as we move through the marvelous, terrible, mysterious events of Holy Week, watching and hoping for Easter.
*******
Palm Sunday makes me batty. We start out with a beautiful liturgy of palms, which fits well into the Lenten progression of time through the Gospel, and then bam! before the service is over, Jesus is dead – except, not really, because we’ve still got Maundy Thursday and Good Friday ahead of us, and he can’t really die until we hear it from John’s Gospel on Friday. We’re expected to fit all of Holy Week into Palm Sunday - not giving anything away for those who will actually be around for the Triduum, but also making sure that the people who won't be back until Easter don't walk in and say "Jesus died?" I just don’t understand Palm Sunday.
Add it to the list of things I don’t understand about Holy Week. Palm Sunday, I can scoot by on. Last year, I had a much more terrifying realization during Holy Week: when Good Friday came, I discovered that I didn’t know who Jesus was. And in fact, a year later, after courses in systematic theology, in New Testament, in biblical theology, I can report that I still don’t know who Jesus is.
Don’t get me wrong here - I both loved and passed those courses, and wrote more than one of my papers on who Christ is and what the cross means. In fact, my final paper for theology talked about that Good Friday experience and how Dr. Wondra’s Magic Chart describing the main theologies of the work of Christ had helped me find some clarity about the matter. And it was all true. Theologically - or, more accurately, intellectually - I can manage. I can do the mental gymnastics. But it’s like taking an online quiz: “What’s your soteriology?” So I can confidently tell you that on that quiz, I scored as a mix of Christus Victor and union/communion with God - God is the agent of our salvation, we experience sin as having power over us, reconciliation plays out in union with God, etc. That’s my preferred theological understanding of Christ and salvation.
I just don’t know who Jesus is. I don’t get it, deep in my gut, even after a year of letting it marinate, just as I know in my gut that it doesn’t make sense to skip straight from the procession into Jerusalem to the crucifixion. This year, though, I think I'm ok with that.
I’d still prefer to know. I’m used to knowing things. I like knowing things. That’s where I’m comfortable, is learning and knowing and understanding things inside and out. And I still think it’s important to keep pushing at that understanding. But it’s ok, for now, that I don’t entirely understand this.
Thinking about the Palm Sunday propers this week, I started humming a song that I hadn’t thought about in several years, at least since college. It says:
Listen to the Lord as he speaks softly
Listen to the words of a perfect man
Listen to the miracle of God incarnate
Listen even when you don’t understand
We used to sing it as a round, so that the last line would echo - “listen even when you don’t understand, understand, understand.” That’s how it sounded in my head this week, too. And as powerful as that line can be in the middle of July, I think it speaks especially directly to us as we prepare to enter Holy Week. Listen even when you don’t understand. Not “listen to hear x, y, or z” – as I learned last year, we don’t get to qualify what we’re willing to hear. Just listen.
So that will be my discipline for the rest of Lent this year, as we head through Holy Week. I’m asking for God’s help in trying to unclench my intellect’s iron grip, and in listening even when I don’t understand. I expect to understand very little, this week - and perhaps that’s the way it’s supposed to work. But I’ll be listening, and I invite you to listen with me, as we move through the marvelous, terrible, mysterious events of Holy Week, watching and hoping for Easter.
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