The coolest thing that happened on Friday was that my sister graduated from college. Margaret Ann Horany was awarded (or will be, after her summer internship) the degree of Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology, Health Promotions, and Fitness, with a minor in Biological Sciences, Cum Laude, from the University of Texas at Austin.
That was Friday at noon. Closely followed by the 2nd-coolest thing to happen that day.
Friday morning, we held end-of-school-year worship for our local parish school with the staff and teachers. I gave a short sermon, in which the names of my elementary school teachers were invoked with a certain degree of thankfulness. Three hours later, at graduation, one of those teachers walked right past my nose. I had no idea I would ever see her again in my life. Dr. Dorothy Lambdin now teaches at the University of Texas.
Nobody asked for a copy of the sermon, but I'll violate my self-imposed rule this time.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Sermon at Eucharist at the end of the school year, St. Thomas Episcopal School, May 19, 2006.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Nora Garcia
Sharon Black
Bettye Lumpkins
Nancy Wade
Elaine Rushing
Elaine Peterson
Susie Jenkins
Sharon Wilson
Dolly Lambdin
Lucy Nazro
These are names which will mean nothing to you. But they mean everything to me. These are the names of my teachers and principals and chapel leaders, from kindergarten through fifth grade.
Some of you know that I attended an Episcopal school as a child. St. Andrew's, in Austin, through the 5th grade. And then we moved away. I remember 25 children in a class, two classes per grade, but that may not be right. It felt small. I felt known, and loved.
What you saw when you looked at me was an enthusiastic but slightly odd child. My mother and father showed up to drop me off or pick me up with smiles on their faces, they dutifully came to field day wearing their school-logo T-shirts. What you didn't know was that my family was in the process of going through a divorce and remarriage, and at home I was not the nicest child in the world, particularly to the step-parents. Not because they were bad people, not at all. In fact, they were both wonderful people, but people who had taken my parents away, people whose very presence cemented the brokenness of the world.
At school, from my teachers, I found nothing but love. Nothing but encouragement. It might have helped that I was an exceptionally bright little boy. I made straight A's all the way through 5th grade, with a single B in long division that marred my otherwise spotless elementary school resume.
Never, never underestimate the impact of love on a child.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
In today's reading from Acts, Philip encounters a court official from Ethiopia. This is a man who's the court advisor to the queen, the treasurer of the country. One of the best and the brightest the country had to offer, and probably a little boy who made straight A's in school. When Philip runs up to him, he is reading. Searching. Searching to understand the world, searching to understand himself, searching to understand the God he is drawn to across a thousand miles of desert. Philip's question is gentle, and is exactly the right one: do you understand what you're reading? And, in a flash of the profound and the blindingly obvious, the official says, "How can I, unless someone guides me?"
Isaiah 53 is a puzzling passage from late in the work of the prophet. My servant, in whom I delight, says God, will be despised. Viewed in hindsight, viewed from the foot of the cross of Jesus, the description of the suffering servant in Isaiah sounds like someone we know. But viewed from somewhere else, it's not easy to tell who the prophet is talking about.
And, just as before, Philip meets him where he is. Starting from the text he's reading, he begins to tell the story of Jesus. And somewhere along the way, Philip saw in the court official's eyes the same flash of insight that you have seen in the eyes of your students, the same moment when the world opens up and becomes larger and more beautiful than before.
Never, never underestimate the impact of love on a child.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
This is the end of a long year. We're all tired, all ready for a break. Well, I'm here to tell you that being tired because you've spent your year pouring yourself out into the lives of God's children is a good thing. A noble thing. You've earned the right to be tired.
When members of the church began to come to me and tell me that they thought I should be a priest, my thoughts went back to memories of school, memories of people who loved me without condition and wanted the best in the world for me. People who gave, sacrificially, of their lives, knowing that they would never see the full return.
And I thought: I can do that.
Never, never underestimate the impact of love on a child.
Amen.
23 May, 2006
17 May, 2006
Ashram Cats
When the guru sat down to worship each evening, the ashram cat would get in the way and distract the worshipers. So he ordered that the cat be tied during evening worship.
After the guru died the cat continued to be tied during evening worship. And when the cat died, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly tied during evening worship.
Centuries later learned treatises were written by the guru's disciples on the religious and liturgical significance of tying up a cat while worship is performed.
--"The Guru's Cat" from The Song of the Bird by Anthony De Mello
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A dear friend of mine got in trouble this year at seminary. No, not theological trouble. No, not academic trouble.
She wore red shoes to church.
As an acolyte.
For those of you who don't tie up this particular cat outside your sanctuary so that God can hear you, Episcopalian liturgical ministers tend to wear funny dresses to church. There's a long white one called an alb (or a cassock-alb), and a black one with a white thing worn over it called a cassock and surplice (or cota), and a red one called a chimere--we seem think it's even more stylish and hip to give them funny names than to just wear them and call them dresses.
The funny dresses are one of my favorite pet ashram cats. They were originally designed to keep people warm during long, cold, rainy, English winters, and I put one on every Sunday for worship. In San Antonio in the summer, the temperature reaches 110 in the shade. So we air-condition the building where the church meets. And I sit there and sweat in my dress, and wonder whether Jesus thinks we've gone quite mental.
Another of my favorites are candles. At my current parish, there are two on the table (or altar) where I preside. There are also, mounted on the ceiling, a set of theater-style stage lights. Lights so bright, in fact, that when I step up to the table, I can't see the back of the room because of the glare off the white cloth on the table (the student who fussed at my friend would want me to call the cloth a "fair linen"). I've taken to casually turning the lights down when it's my turn to preside at the liturgy, so I can see who I'm worshipping with. (I'm not kidding that I can't see, by the way. A couple of months ago, somebody fainted in the back, and I never saw her) Then I went on vacation, and when I came back, it wasn't a sliding rheostat on the table spotlights, it was a standard off-on light switch. oops.
But maybe my favorite of all is the gospel procession. Long before America was colonized, there were no electronic sound systems, and the gospel book was carried out into the congregation before it was read so that all could hear the good news of Jesus. But if we're going to have a parade, we have to carry the cross on the stick, and carry the torches so we can see where we're going...
At my current parish, we do indeed do a gospel "procession." A cross, two torches (placed where they wouldn't help even if the church was dark), and a fourth acolyte to hold the Bible while I read from it. This requires, of course, that four different families get up early and get to campus early so their kids can put on their funny-looking white dresses, so that we can do the gospel procession. But here's the best part: the building is in a cruciform shape, meaning it looks like a cross to the birds flying overhead, and the table where the Bible rests is more or less in the middle to begin with. So the gospel procession moves....wait for it.....
three feet.
The congregation in California that encouraged us to go be priests takes many of these things far more casually, but the cats are still there. (Maly, if you're reading this, I still say a gospel procession three steps to the left so you're at the top of the stairs is goofy looking. Just read the gospel from the dang lectern.)
If we were making up liturgy from scratch, we probably wouldn't do any of those things. In fact, to deliberately overuse a metaphor, you can't swing a dead cat in an Episcopal church without hitting an ashram cat. We do them because we value the long tradition of the church at worship, because we value the sense of being connected to something far older and wiser than we are, something that transcends our experience and lengthens our perspective. At our best, we're honoring the Holy Spirit speaking through the centuries of Christian worship that preserved the good news of Christ Jesus for us.
Now, back to my friend.
She's a second-year student at seminary, sponsored by the same congregation that sponsored me. At every seminary, there are people from literally all over the world, who come together to worship on a very regular basis. And you want that to go smoothly, so to establish a certain amount of orderliness in what could easily be a chaotic mess, you agree on a general standard of 'this is how we do it here.' At its best, it's a relatively short document giving guidelines so that all can get beyond the "how do we do this" mechanics and focus our hearts and minds on worship.
and then sin begins to happen.
The reality of seminary life is that the rules are complicated, because trying to learn all the liturgical traditions is a complicated business. At my seminary, the customary was over 60 pages long, single-spaced. At the beginning of every year, the first-year students have to learn the traditions of that particular place. And, unfortunately, observance of the customary often means that the focus is on the rules, on the method of worship, rather than the God who we worship.
And when my friend wears red shoes to chapel, the first thought that goes through people's minds isn't "swell shoes, Julie." Nor is it to giggle at her as she gently pokes fun at tradition. Nor is it to notice, then to notice that it irritates us, and then to ask ourselves why we give a damn and whether it's important. Instead, what often happens is that we think, and then say, "that's not in the customary," or "we don't do it that way." And that's part of the environment in which future clergy are trained for leading worship.
Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us.
When it was my turn to do chapel duty, I often found myself peering through the customary trying to make sense of it. My first time to preside at worship was at choral morning prayer (a service I'd be willing to wager a week's pay you've never participated in if you haven't been to a seminary), which was a harrowing experience just because it was unfamiliar, and I had to lead, and I had to sing solo in public...and afterward one of the third-year students criticized me for not following the customary on a couple of details that (trust me) you wouldn't have noticed. And this was a friend of mine. I damn near ripped his head off.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Now, here's why this drives me crazy. The western world is, ever more increasingly, a culture that is post-institutionalized religion. To Julie's and my generation, the goofy dresses aren't beautiful tradition, they're just plain goofy. At best, since you see them in church, in the company of other unexplained symbols, they get lumped in with the transcendent. At worst, they get in the way. They are a stumbling block to proclamation of the gospel in this generation.
Julie knows this. Her kindling passion is to proclaim the transforming grace and love of Christ Jesus, and she gets impatient with people and things that get in her way. In that impatience, she rubs people the wrong way. (Including me.) But she's right a lot more than she's wrong, and when she speaks, I listen.
After the guru died the cat continued to be tied during evening worship. And when the cat died, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly tied during evening worship.
Centuries later learned treatises were written by the guru's disciples on the religious and liturgical significance of tying up a cat while worship is performed.
--"The Guru's Cat" from The Song of the Bird by Anthony De Mello
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A dear friend of mine got in trouble this year at seminary. No, not theological trouble. No, not academic trouble.
She wore red shoes to church.
As an acolyte.
For those of you who don't tie up this particular cat outside your sanctuary so that God can hear you, Episcopalian liturgical ministers tend to wear funny dresses to church. There's a long white one called an alb (or a cassock-alb), and a black one with a white thing worn over it called a cassock and surplice (or cota), and a red one called a chimere--we seem think it's even more stylish and hip to give them funny names than to just wear them and call them dresses.
The funny dresses are one of my favorite pet ashram cats. They were originally designed to keep people warm during long, cold, rainy, English winters, and I put one on every Sunday for worship. In San Antonio in the summer, the temperature reaches 110 in the shade. So we air-condition the building where the church meets. And I sit there and sweat in my dress, and wonder whether Jesus thinks we've gone quite mental.
Another of my favorites are candles. At my current parish, there are two on the table (or altar) where I preside. There are also, mounted on the ceiling, a set of theater-style stage lights. Lights so bright, in fact, that when I step up to the table, I can't see the back of the room because of the glare off the white cloth on the table (the student who fussed at my friend would want me to call the cloth a "fair linen"). I've taken to casually turning the lights down when it's my turn to preside at the liturgy, so I can see who I'm worshipping with. (I'm not kidding that I can't see, by the way. A couple of months ago, somebody fainted in the back, and I never saw her) Then I went on vacation, and when I came back, it wasn't a sliding rheostat on the table spotlights, it was a standard off-on light switch. oops.
But maybe my favorite of all is the gospel procession. Long before America was colonized, there were no electronic sound systems, and the gospel book was carried out into the congregation before it was read so that all could hear the good news of Jesus. But if we're going to have a parade, we have to carry the cross on the stick, and carry the torches so we can see where we're going...
At my current parish, we do indeed do a gospel "procession." A cross, two torches (placed where they wouldn't help even if the church was dark), and a fourth acolyte to hold the Bible while I read from it. This requires, of course, that four different families get up early and get to campus early so their kids can put on their funny-looking white dresses, so that we can do the gospel procession. But here's the best part: the building is in a cruciform shape, meaning it looks like a cross to the birds flying overhead, and the table where the Bible rests is more or less in the middle to begin with. So the gospel procession moves....wait for it.....
three feet.
The congregation in California that encouraged us to go be priests takes many of these things far more casually, but the cats are still there. (Maly, if you're reading this, I still say a gospel procession three steps to the left so you're at the top of the stairs is goofy looking. Just read the gospel from the dang lectern.)
If we were making up liturgy from scratch, we probably wouldn't do any of those things. In fact, to deliberately overuse a metaphor, you can't swing a dead cat in an Episcopal church without hitting an ashram cat. We do them because we value the long tradition of the church at worship, because we value the sense of being connected to something far older and wiser than we are, something that transcends our experience and lengthens our perspective. At our best, we're honoring the Holy Spirit speaking through the centuries of Christian worship that preserved the good news of Christ Jesus for us.
Now, back to my friend.
She's a second-year student at seminary, sponsored by the same congregation that sponsored me. At every seminary, there are people from literally all over the world, who come together to worship on a very regular basis. And you want that to go smoothly, so to establish a certain amount of orderliness in what could easily be a chaotic mess, you agree on a general standard of 'this is how we do it here.' At its best, it's a relatively short document giving guidelines so that all can get beyond the "how do we do this" mechanics and focus our hearts and minds on worship.
and then sin begins to happen.
The reality of seminary life is that the rules are complicated, because trying to learn all the liturgical traditions is a complicated business. At my seminary, the customary was over 60 pages long, single-spaced. At the beginning of every year, the first-year students have to learn the traditions of that particular place. And, unfortunately, observance of the customary often means that the focus is on the rules, on the method of worship, rather than the God who we worship.
And when my friend wears red shoes to chapel, the first thought that goes through people's minds isn't "swell shoes, Julie." Nor is it to giggle at her as she gently pokes fun at tradition. Nor is it to notice, then to notice that it irritates us, and then to ask ourselves why we give a damn and whether it's important. Instead, what often happens is that we think, and then say, "that's not in the customary," or "we don't do it that way." And that's part of the environment in which future clergy are trained for leading worship.
Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us.
When it was my turn to do chapel duty, I often found myself peering through the customary trying to make sense of it. My first time to preside at worship was at choral morning prayer (a service I'd be willing to wager a week's pay you've never participated in if you haven't been to a seminary), which was a harrowing experience just because it was unfamiliar, and I had to lead, and I had to sing solo in public...and afterward one of the third-year students criticized me for not following the customary on a couple of details that (trust me) you wouldn't have noticed. And this was a friend of mine. I damn near ripped his head off.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Now, here's why this drives me crazy. The western world is, ever more increasingly, a culture that is post-institutionalized religion. To Julie's and my generation, the goofy dresses aren't beautiful tradition, they're just plain goofy. At best, since you see them in church, in the company of other unexplained symbols, they get lumped in with the transcendent. At worst, they get in the way. They are a stumbling block to proclamation of the gospel in this generation.
Julie knows this. Her kindling passion is to proclaim the transforming grace and love of Christ Jesus, and she gets impatient with people and things that get in her way. In that impatience, she rubs people the wrong way. (Including me.) But she's right a lot more than she's wrong, and when she speaks, I listen.
Lenten discipline, or lack thereof
Now that Lent is over (okay, we're five weeks into the Easter season), some thoughts on Lenten discipline.
This year, my Lenten discipline was to write every day. In past years it's been to say the daily office, or something similar. The most valuable discipline so far was last year, when I found and fed a homeless person every day.
But back to writing.
Part of the trouble I've been having with sermon writing is trying to say the perfect thing. I read books of good sermons, and watch good preachers on tape, as a way of getting better (that's the theory, anyway). And then I compare myself unfavorably, and try harder, and can sometimes paralyze myself with overthinking.
So the discipline for Lent was twofold. First, don't even begin to try to write Sunday's sermon until Thursday. I did the exegesis ahead of time, and let the readings wash over me, but I wouldn't do any writing, not even scribbles, no walking around and talking it out. Just go with the first thought (okay, maybe second or third thought), say something as well as I can, but don't even try to give the sermons without notes unless they came off my fingers in easily memorable format. Do a second draft, to clean things up, but not whole rewritten drafts on second ideas.
I compare this to being a kid and tinkering with my batting stance. (There will be a whole chapter about this, someday, in my long-contemplated opus one on baseball theology, but for now, you get the short version.) When you're a kid, you tinker with the stance all the time. It's part of the fun of the game. I would try to hit like Terry Puhl for a while, then switch to the Jose Cruz stance with the bat waaaay up over my head, then the Pete Rose stance, belt over almost double. Same task, different starting point, different feel, different result. And as a new preacher (at least until my 100th sermon), I feel like I should be tinkering around. This was the equivalent of two-strike hitting: see and react, protect the plate, hit the ball where it's pitched.
The second, and related, part of the discipline was to write something down daily. Preachers see sermons in rocks and trees and kids at wal-mart. We just do. It's part of the vocation. If you've talked to me for any significant amount of time, odds are good you've heard me say "that'll preach." Problem is, I tend not to write those thoughts down. And many of them would make good homilies, or short thoughts. But for Sundays, I tend to want to expand ideas, give the congregation fully-developed thoughts.
So I resolved to discipline myself to give those little thoughts away, not mentally file them for later, and to write them down as a method of prayer. This is why some people noted an increase in posting frequency--or, more commonly, accused me of blogslacking when Easter arrived.
How did it go, you ask? Well, good and bad. I almost always slip on Lenten discipline, no matter what it is. But daily writing got exhausting. And I often had trouble getting the intuitive idea from my head to the blog, usually because it required explaining the context and situation, which would take too long for too little reward. And the Lenten sermons weren't bad, just not my usual style.
I wonder if the congregation even noticed, but it felt different to me.
This year, my Lenten discipline was to write every day. In past years it's been to say the daily office, or something similar. The most valuable discipline so far was last year, when I found and fed a homeless person every day.
But back to writing.
Part of the trouble I've been having with sermon writing is trying to say the perfect thing. I read books of good sermons, and watch good preachers on tape, as a way of getting better (that's the theory, anyway). And then I compare myself unfavorably, and try harder, and can sometimes paralyze myself with overthinking.
So the discipline for Lent was twofold. First, don't even begin to try to write Sunday's sermon until Thursday. I did the exegesis ahead of time, and let the readings wash over me, but I wouldn't do any writing, not even scribbles, no walking around and talking it out. Just go with the first thought (okay, maybe second or third thought), say something as well as I can, but don't even try to give the sermons without notes unless they came off my fingers in easily memorable format. Do a second draft, to clean things up, but not whole rewritten drafts on second ideas.
I compare this to being a kid and tinkering with my batting stance. (There will be a whole chapter about this, someday, in my long-contemplated opus one on baseball theology, but for now, you get the short version.) When you're a kid, you tinker with the stance all the time. It's part of the fun of the game. I would try to hit like Terry Puhl for a while, then switch to the Jose Cruz stance with the bat waaaay up over my head, then the Pete Rose stance, belt over almost double. Same task, different starting point, different feel, different result. And as a new preacher (at least until my 100th sermon), I feel like I should be tinkering around. This was the equivalent of two-strike hitting: see and react, protect the plate, hit the ball where it's pitched.
The second, and related, part of the discipline was to write something down daily. Preachers see sermons in rocks and trees and kids at wal-mart. We just do. It's part of the vocation. If you've talked to me for any significant amount of time, odds are good you've heard me say "that'll preach." Problem is, I tend not to write those thoughts down. And many of them would make good homilies, or short thoughts. But for Sundays, I tend to want to expand ideas, give the congregation fully-developed thoughts.
So I resolved to discipline myself to give those little thoughts away, not mentally file them for later, and to write them down as a method of prayer. This is why some people noted an increase in posting frequency--or, more commonly, accused me of blogslacking when Easter arrived.
How did it go, you ask? Well, good and bad. I almost always slip on Lenten discipline, no matter what it is. But daily writing got exhausting. And I often had trouble getting the intuitive idea from my head to the blog, usually because it required explaining the context and situation, which would take too long for too little reward. And the Lenten sermons weren't bad, just not my usual style.
I wonder if the congregation even noticed, but it felt different to me.
05 May, 2006
Mr. Spock goes line dancing
Okay, I've been accused of blogslacking. In my defense, I was out of the country, and was quite deliberately unplugged. No phone, no email, only one page of daily international news.
The good news is that we were on vacation for two weeks after Easter. The bad news is that most of the household got really sick with a stomach bug when we got home.
That's right, a two-week vacation. I've never in ten years of married life heard these words escape my spouse's lips: "I need a vacation." So when I heard them, my response was something on the order of, "yes, dear; where would you like to go, and can I come with you?" She wanted to go on a cruise, so that's what we did. Down the west coast of Mexico, with bookend stops in San Jose to see our god-child and compadres. I took the new camera along. Watch it, or I'll send you eight gigabytes' worth of pictures of beach. And birds. And seals.
One of the surreal things that happened on the trip was that one of our fellow passengers was an almost dead ringer for Leonard Nimoy. I did a triple-take that first day. That's where you glance, and then stop and look again, and then stop and take a really hard look because it just might be him, before you finally decide it's really not.
The first day, Mr. Not-quite-Spock (as I began to refer to him in my head) was wearing a dinner jacket and dark turtleneck, the same kind of outfit Nimoy wears in interviews and things. Dignified, gentle smile. But then, of course, as the cruise wore on, I got many more Spock glimpses, and every one was jarring, out-of-place:
Mr. Spock goes line dancing, in blue jeans, boots, and straw cowboy hat.
Mr. Spock in a tuxedo.
Mr. Spock in a deck chair, wearing a white spa robe, reading Tom Clancy.
Mr. Spock eating a burger and fries by the pool.
Mr. Spock in the hot tub?!?
I'm certain that this is going to work its way into a sermon someday. I can think of several ways it might go. In fact, that's one of the happy results of some vacation time for me: when I read gospel texts, the fireworks of multiple images and multiple things to say and allusions and connections are once again going off in my head.
But for today, I'll just leave you with the "Spock in the hot tub" image and let it work its own little brand of mischevious magic.
The good news is that we were on vacation for two weeks after Easter. The bad news is that most of the household got really sick with a stomach bug when we got home.
That's right, a two-week vacation. I've never in ten years of married life heard these words escape my spouse's lips: "I need a vacation." So when I heard them, my response was something on the order of, "yes, dear; where would you like to go, and can I come with you?" She wanted to go on a cruise, so that's what we did. Down the west coast of Mexico, with bookend stops in San Jose to see our god-child and compadres. I took the new camera along. Watch it, or I'll send you eight gigabytes' worth of pictures of beach. And birds. And seals.
One of the surreal things that happened on the trip was that one of our fellow passengers was an almost dead ringer for Leonard Nimoy. I did a triple-take that first day. That's where you glance, and then stop and look again, and then stop and take a really hard look because it just might be him, before you finally decide it's really not.
The first day, Mr. Not-quite-Spock (as I began to refer to him in my head) was wearing a dinner jacket and dark turtleneck, the same kind of outfit Nimoy wears in interviews and things. Dignified, gentle smile. But then, of course, as the cruise wore on, I got many more Spock glimpses, and every one was jarring, out-of-place:
Mr. Spock goes line dancing, in blue jeans, boots, and straw cowboy hat.
Mr. Spock in a tuxedo.
Mr. Spock in a deck chair, wearing a white spa robe, reading Tom Clancy.
Mr. Spock eating a burger and fries by the pool.
Mr. Spock in the hot tub?!?
I'm certain that this is going to work its way into a sermon someday. I can think of several ways it might go. In fact, that's one of the happy results of some vacation time for me: when I read gospel texts, the fireworks of multiple images and multiple things to say and allusions and connections are once again going off in my head.
But for today, I'll just leave you with the "Spock in the hot tub" image and let it work its own little brand of mischevious magic.
04 May, 2006
A preacher in the bleachers: sacrifice flies
It's well known that I grew up playing baseball, and that many of the ways I see God interact with human history, many of the ways that I see God's people interacting with each other, are things that I learned on the sandlot.
Sometimes, I see the world through baseball lenses.
For the uninitiated, a sacrifice fly is one of the ways to score in baseball. It requires deliberate action by at least two players. One is the baserunner, the other the batter. To complete a sacrifice fly, the batter has to hit the ball long and high (generally one of the easier ways to hit the ball). The runner waits on third base until the fielder catches the ball, then runs home ahead of the throw. The reason it's called a sacrifice is that the batter is out on the play, deliberately foregoing the ability to run the bases and score in deference to helping a teammate score instead.
The early church was characterized by love for one another. The book of Acts tells of great sacrifices made on behalf of the poor, careful consideration for the welfare of widows who were unable to care for themselves, and the inclusion of the outcast in the community.
Great love includes sacrificing for each other.
Great love allows the other's gain to be considered more important than your own.
And in the sacrifice fly, the whole team scores.
Sometimes, I see the world through baseball lenses.
For the uninitiated, a sacrifice fly is one of the ways to score in baseball. It requires deliberate action by at least two players. One is the baserunner, the other the batter. To complete a sacrifice fly, the batter has to hit the ball long and high (generally one of the easier ways to hit the ball). The runner waits on third base until the fielder catches the ball, then runs home ahead of the throw. The reason it's called a sacrifice is that the batter is out on the play, deliberately foregoing the ability to run the bases and score in deference to helping a teammate score instead.
The early church was characterized by love for one another. The book of Acts tells of great sacrifices made on behalf of the poor, careful consideration for the welfare of widows who were unable to care for themselves, and the inclusion of the outcast in the community.
Great love includes sacrificing for each other.
Great love allows the other's gain to be considered more important than your own.
And in the sacrifice fly, the whole team scores.
14 April, 2006
Good Friday
Was there ever a day that you cursed the sunset?
Friday might have been that kind of day for Peter. It had been a long week. First there was all the preparing for the Passover celebration. Then there was that great crowd that showed up when Jesus and the disciples entered the city, and then there was that big mess the next day at the temple. Jesus with a whip, causing all kinds of ruckus. Then came the big feast, the great Passover celebration. A long, slow, extravagant dinner party, reclining at the table with your best friends in the world, tender roast lamb and unleavened bread with honey and rich wine.
Then, after dinner, Jesus wants to go out for a walk, all the way over there, to this garden, and pray. Seems like he’s always praying. Sometimes by himself, but this time he wants the disciples to come along. And, of course, they go. He’s the Rabbi, after all. They go where he goes, if he asks. He’s the one they have given their whole lives up for, bet the farm on, laid on him all their hopes and secret dreams. For three years now, they’ve been wandering around the countryside, stopping to preach in every little village they could find. Peter, every so often, jokes that he’s forgetting how to fish, not that he really wants to go back to it.
The garden is quiet at night. Jesus takes Peter, and James, and John, and says to them, stay here and watch while I go right over there and pray. Okay, Rabbi. Peter sits down, puts his back against a tree trunk, and waits. The night air is cool, and the tree branches rustle soothingly in the gentle breeze. The stars are clear and bright. The night birds and the little bugs make soft, quiet, contented sounds. The breeze wafts over him the delicious scent of blooming flowers. And Peter leans his head back against the smooth wood of the olive tree and closes his eyes. Only a moment later, it seems, Jesus is shaking him awake. Peter! Wake up! Can’t you watch with me a little while? Okay, Rabbi, I’m up, I’m up. But his eyelids are heavy after the great feast, and soon once again Peter dreams.
The next time he awakes, it is to the flickering light of torches reflected on swords and clubs. And for the last twenty-four hours, Peter has been wide awake, with some tiny part of him thinking that he is, in fact, still trapped in a horrible nightmare.
The disciples have deserted Jesus and fled. Peter denied him three times, and the mocking call of the rooster still echoes in his ears. He was mocked, beaten, executed.
He is dead.
Friday night, Peter has neither eaten nor slept since the feast. And now, as the sky darkens from royal purple to empty black, as all light and all goodness slowly leach out of the world, as all the colors of all the objects around him turn to a lifeless gray, the exhausted disciple slumps to the ground, leans his back against the great stone that covers the mouth of the tomb, and stares with empty eyes into the void.
Peter must endure the long, slow, still hours of this night, not daring to sleep for fear of the horrors that crowd in every time he closes his eyes. He can’t even think about tomorrow, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, or the next day, or the rest of his life.
In today’s gospel story appears for the first and only time a man named Joseph of Arimathea. A disciple of Jesus, so we’re told. The gospel writers tell us that he was wealthy, and a member of the Sanhedrin. And he was probably an older man; with his wealth, he bought a garden, and in the garden he had carved a new tomb. Joseph knew his scriptures. He was seeking the kingdom of God. And he also understood that people die. That’s just the way it is. So he was making preparations.
When Jesus died, this disciple did a stunningly foolish and courageous thing: he went to the governor and asked for the body of a man executed that same day for being dangerous to the state. Working in haste to finish the work before sundown, Joseph carried the broken body of Jesus to his own tomb. In the place the disciple had prepared for his own burial, instead there lies the Son of God.
A huge stone seals the mouth of the tomb. Jesus lies in silent blackness, the air of the tomb filled with myrrh’s bitter perfume almost, but not completely, covering the coppery smell of spilled blood.
* * * * * * * * * *
When I was a little boy, I loved to run and play outside. My grandfather, who was in his youth a semi-professional ballplayer, taught me to love the game of baseball. Along the way, he introduced me to the writings and teachings of a man who would become one of my boyhood heroes: Theodore Samuel Williams.
Ted Williams! Fighter pilot, United States Marine, decorated war hero, sport-fisherman par excellance, and almost unarguably the greater hitter in the history of the game. "The gospel according to Ted Williams" is called The Science of Hitting. My copy is an ancient brown hardback. The cover and spine are almost worn out, the pages are dog-eared and stained, with the dust of thirty years of sandlot ballparks deep down in the creases between the pages.
In case you’re getting worried, that’s about as far as I ever want to go comparing Ted Williams to Jesus of Nazareth. Ted was an atheist, for one thing. And a foul-mouthed, misogynistic, arrogant old man. His temper and foul mouth were legendary, he spit at the fans, and threw and smashed things in his rage.
Before he died, he and his son and one of his daughters made a pact to undergo a bizarre post-mortem procedure. Supposedly written from a hospital bed, where the old man was confined, close to death, the handwritten note was scrawled on an oil-stained piece of yellow legal sized paper. The key line read: "To be able to be together in The Future, even if it is only a chance."
Almost immediately after Ted Williams took his last breath, his son John Henry Williams went to the doctors and asked for the body. There was no announcement of death, no funeral arrangements, no memorial. The body was immediately packed in ice, loaded onto a private jet, and flown, faster than the speed of sound, to a cryonics laboratory in the Arizona Desert.
His body was drained of fluids and filled with an anti-freeze solution. His head was shaved, and then crudely separated from his body. Holes were drilled in the skull. In the process it was cracked nine times. Both head and body were coated with a glycerin solution and lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen.
The greatest hitter who ever lived, the fighter pilot John Wayne emulated, the man about whom Pulitzer Prize winning author John Updike once wrote "immortality is non-transferable... gods do not answer letters," floats, upside-down, in the silent blackness of a nine-foot-long steel tube maintained at a temperature of 350 degrees below zero.
Only a few short years later, his son John Henry died of leukemia. He was subjected to the same procedure. And now, father and son lie together, in the same shabby warehouse on a side street somewhere in Arizona, in a bitter, unnatural cold, preserved forever.
Just in case.
I dearly wish I was making this up.
* * * * * * * * * *
We are a resurrection people. Tomorrow at the great vigil we will proclaim again the greatest news ever recorded in the history of the world.
But today we remember: he is dead.
Jesus, the Son of God, the Son of Mary, lies in the darkness on the other side of a great stone. He’s not asleep. Not faking it. Not preserved in hope of some future advance of medical science.
He’s dead.
Friends, the wondrous news of Easter is not that death is cheated. It’s that death is conquered. But that’s tomorrow. For tonight, keep watch through the long slow hours. And wait.
Friday might have been that kind of day for Peter. It had been a long week. First there was all the preparing for the Passover celebration. Then there was that great crowd that showed up when Jesus and the disciples entered the city, and then there was that big mess the next day at the temple. Jesus with a whip, causing all kinds of ruckus. Then came the big feast, the great Passover celebration. A long, slow, extravagant dinner party, reclining at the table with your best friends in the world, tender roast lamb and unleavened bread with honey and rich wine.
Then, after dinner, Jesus wants to go out for a walk, all the way over there, to this garden, and pray. Seems like he’s always praying. Sometimes by himself, but this time he wants the disciples to come along. And, of course, they go. He’s the Rabbi, after all. They go where he goes, if he asks. He’s the one they have given their whole lives up for, bet the farm on, laid on him all their hopes and secret dreams. For three years now, they’ve been wandering around the countryside, stopping to preach in every little village they could find. Peter, every so often, jokes that he’s forgetting how to fish, not that he really wants to go back to it.
The garden is quiet at night. Jesus takes Peter, and James, and John, and says to them, stay here and watch while I go right over there and pray. Okay, Rabbi. Peter sits down, puts his back against a tree trunk, and waits. The night air is cool, and the tree branches rustle soothingly in the gentle breeze. The stars are clear and bright. The night birds and the little bugs make soft, quiet, contented sounds. The breeze wafts over him the delicious scent of blooming flowers. And Peter leans his head back against the smooth wood of the olive tree and closes his eyes. Only a moment later, it seems, Jesus is shaking him awake. Peter! Wake up! Can’t you watch with me a little while? Okay, Rabbi, I’m up, I’m up. But his eyelids are heavy after the great feast, and soon once again Peter dreams.
The next time he awakes, it is to the flickering light of torches reflected on swords and clubs. And for the last twenty-four hours, Peter has been wide awake, with some tiny part of him thinking that he is, in fact, still trapped in a horrible nightmare.
The disciples have deserted Jesus and fled. Peter denied him three times, and the mocking call of the rooster still echoes in his ears. He was mocked, beaten, executed.
He is dead.
Friday night, Peter has neither eaten nor slept since the feast. And now, as the sky darkens from royal purple to empty black, as all light and all goodness slowly leach out of the world, as all the colors of all the objects around him turn to a lifeless gray, the exhausted disciple slumps to the ground, leans his back against the great stone that covers the mouth of the tomb, and stares with empty eyes into the void.
Peter must endure the long, slow, still hours of this night, not daring to sleep for fear of the horrors that crowd in every time he closes his eyes. He can’t even think about tomorrow, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, or the next day, or the rest of his life.
In today’s gospel story appears for the first and only time a man named Joseph of Arimathea. A disciple of Jesus, so we’re told. The gospel writers tell us that he was wealthy, and a member of the Sanhedrin. And he was probably an older man; with his wealth, he bought a garden, and in the garden he had carved a new tomb. Joseph knew his scriptures. He was seeking the kingdom of God. And he also understood that people die. That’s just the way it is. So he was making preparations.
When Jesus died, this disciple did a stunningly foolish and courageous thing: he went to the governor and asked for the body of a man executed that same day for being dangerous to the state. Working in haste to finish the work before sundown, Joseph carried the broken body of Jesus to his own tomb. In the place the disciple had prepared for his own burial, instead there lies the Son of God.
A huge stone seals the mouth of the tomb. Jesus lies in silent blackness, the air of the tomb filled with myrrh’s bitter perfume almost, but not completely, covering the coppery smell of spilled blood.
* * * * * * * * * *
When I was a little boy, I loved to run and play outside. My grandfather, who was in his youth a semi-professional ballplayer, taught me to love the game of baseball. Along the way, he introduced me to the writings and teachings of a man who would become one of my boyhood heroes: Theodore Samuel Williams.
Ted Williams! Fighter pilot, United States Marine, decorated war hero, sport-fisherman par excellance, and almost unarguably the greater hitter in the history of the game. "The gospel according to Ted Williams" is called The Science of Hitting. My copy is an ancient brown hardback. The cover and spine are almost worn out, the pages are dog-eared and stained, with the dust of thirty years of sandlot ballparks deep down in the creases between the pages.
In case you’re getting worried, that’s about as far as I ever want to go comparing Ted Williams to Jesus of Nazareth. Ted was an atheist, for one thing. And a foul-mouthed, misogynistic, arrogant old man. His temper and foul mouth were legendary, he spit at the fans, and threw and smashed things in his rage.
Before he died, he and his son and one of his daughters made a pact to undergo a bizarre post-mortem procedure. Supposedly written from a hospital bed, where the old man was confined, close to death, the handwritten note was scrawled on an oil-stained piece of yellow legal sized paper. The key line read: "To be able to be together in The Future, even if it is only a chance."
Almost immediately after Ted Williams took his last breath, his son John Henry Williams went to the doctors and asked for the body. There was no announcement of death, no funeral arrangements, no memorial. The body was immediately packed in ice, loaded onto a private jet, and flown, faster than the speed of sound, to a cryonics laboratory in the Arizona Desert.
His body was drained of fluids and filled with an anti-freeze solution. His head was shaved, and then crudely separated from his body. Holes were drilled in the skull. In the process it was cracked nine times. Both head and body were coated with a glycerin solution and lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen.
The greatest hitter who ever lived, the fighter pilot John Wayne emulated, the man about whom Pulitzer Prize winning author John Updike once wrote "immortality is non-transferable... gods do not answer letters," floats, upside-down, in the silent blackness of a nine-foot-long steel tube maintained at a temperature of 350 degrees below zero.
Only a few short years later, his son John Henry died of leukemia. He was subjected to the same procedure. And now, father and son lie together, in the same shabby warehouse on a side street somewhere in Arizona, in a bitter, unnatural cold, preserved forever.
Just in case.
I dearly wish I was making this up.
* * * * * * * * * *
We are a resurrection people. Tomorrow at the great vigil we will proclaim again the greatest news ever recorded in the history of the world.
But today we remember: he is dead.
Jesus, the Son of God, the Son of Mary, lies in the darkness on the other side of a great stone. He’s not asleep. Not faking it. Not preserved in hope of some future advance of medical science.
He’s dead.
Friends, the wondrous news of Easter is not that death is cheated. It’s that death is conquered. But that’s tomorrow. For tonight, keep watch through the long slow hours. And wait.
12 April, 2006
Bringing an ass to church
A long time ago, in a land far, far away, a land that some of my people claim as their original homeland, a great general stood on the banks of a stream. It was just dawn. All around him his army stood, ready for orders to march. Young men from the provinces, some from noble families, all up before dawn, armor on, tents packed, animals loaded, a hurried breakfast in the dark. Horses saddled for the officers to ride, a great white stallion for the general, and the donkeys hitched to the wagons, ready to roll forward.
But the general hesitated. For in one critical way, this was no ordinary stream. It was a boundary. A line between the north of the country and the south. A line which, so said the government, could not be crossed by a standing army. If the order was given, if the parade of soldiers and supply wagons began, then the general was in fact declaring himself king. A king set in opposition to the current government. Civil war would not be far behind.
The story is told that the general turned to his friends, his advisors. We can still retreat, he said. But then he took a trumpet from one of his heralds, crossed the bridge over the stream called the Rubicon, and sounded the advance. And Julius Caesar cried, alea iacta est! The die is cast.
And mounting his great white stallion, polished armor shining in the dawn’s early light, Caesar rode toward the capital, and immortality.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Some eighty years later, a certain teacher from Nazareth, the leader of a rag-tag band of traveling homeless people, spent the night with his friends in a tiny house in a tiny village just outside the capital city of a far-flung province of the vast Roman Empire. And as the dawn’s light began to break, he rose from his bed, shook his sleeping disciples awake, and went outside, gazing into the distance at Jerusalem.
Jesus hesitated. And then he took a deep breath, and grabbed two of his disciples by the arms, and said,
James and John! Fetch me... a donkey!
Um, sorry, you want what?
A donkey!
Where are we going to get a donkey?
Oh, I don’t know. Go into the next village and borrow one.
What do you want a donkey for, Rabbi?
Just go get one, will you?
And so the parade began. No generals in polished armor on great stallions. No troops marching in proud formation. No, just that up-country preacher and his hick disciples, a great parade of lepers and loose women and beggars, fishermen and tax collectors, stirring up the crowd, hollering and disturbing the peace.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Now, one of these years (but not this year), I’m going to bring a donkey to church.
Yep.
A real live donkey.
And right about the time we do the palm procession, we’re going to open the back doors of the church, and I'll go back there and try to get on its back, so everyone can see what it’s like for a full-grown man wearing a dress to try to climb on the back of an animal he’s never ridden before.
And then I’m going to ride him right down the center aisle. Now, while I do that, I’m going to have the congregation yelling at me as loud as they can, and waving palm branches all over the place, and try to high-five everyone on the way down the aisle, and just for good measure I‘ll have some of the gentlemen take off their coats and throw them out in my way.
Yessir, right down the middle of the aisle. Right where the donkey will want to go, because, as we all know, donkeys love to carry about two hundred pounds of freight while they’re being shouted at and having things thrown at them.
And, of course, donkeys always do this while maintaining an air of dignified humility.
This is how Jesus entered Jerusalem. A great, riotous, undignified mess. In fact, a delicious farce on the way kings usually entered the capital city. Most undignified. Definitely un-Episcopalian. But a sense of humor is a mighty asset if what you're seeking is God's kingdom.
And yet... the Rubicon was crossed. The crowds proclaimed him king. And before the week was over, he would receive the answer of the governing authorities.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I’ve always felt somewhat schizophrenic about Palm Sunday’s readings. Every year, we dress up this celebration of the triumphal entry. Every year, we tell the story of the arrest and crucifixion, with even a tiny amount of solemn theater to highlight the importance of the story. Every year, we the congregation are asked to sing, "hosanna!" with the voices of the crowd, and we’re also asked to shout "crucify him," and it’s the same crowd.
It’s all too tempting, in the private chambers of our hearts, to assign the good parts to ourselves and the bad parts to someone else. All too tempting to imagine ourselves in the first celebration but not the second.
But that would be dishonest.
We love winners. We love it when God does what we want. We love it when the hero rides into town on the white stallion and trounces the bad guys. But we don’t like being made fun of. We don’t like it when the one we’re cheering for goes to the church and begins turning over the furniture. If I walked into church and turned over the big honkin' table on the grand high platform under the spotlights, or really brought a donkey to church, some of my beloved parishioners would be planting "for sale" signs in my front yard.
But that’s more or less what Jesus did. He came to town, rejected the movement that would have risen up with swords and clubs, and instead humbled himself before God, doing what God wanted rather than what we wanted. And we killed him for it.
On Ash Wednesday, we called each other to the observance of a holy Lent, a time of prayer and self-examination, a time of self-denial and repentance. Now it is time for the observance, to the remembrance, of Holy Week. Not to forget the tragedy, but to remember.
And to remember that God’s love is the only thing that makes sense out of suffering, conflict, tragedy, and death. God’s love does not do away with these things; the cross should teach us that. No, God’s love doesn’t do away with it, but rather it the thing that makes it possible to bear the pain, to see it, to share it, to pass through it.
But the general hesitated. For in one critical way, this was no ordinary stream. It was a boundary. A line between the north of the country and the south. A line which, so said the government, could not be crossed by a standing army. If the order was given, if the parade of soldiers and supply wagons began, then the general was in fact declaring himself king. A king set in opposition to the current government. Civil war would not be far behind.
The story is told that the general turned to his friends, his advisors. We can still retreat, he said. But then he took a trumpet from one of his heralds, crossed the bridge over the stream called the Rubicon, and sounded the advance. And Julius Caesar cried, alea iacta est! The die is cast.
And mounting his great white stallion, polished armor shining in the dawn’s early light, Caesar rode toward the capital, and immortality.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Some eighty years later, a certain teacher from Nazareth, the leader of a rag-tag band of traveling homeless people, spent the night with his friends in a tiny house in a tiny village just outside the capital city of a far-flung province of the vast Roman Empire. And as the dawn’s light began to break, he rose from his bed, shook his sleeping disciples awake, and went outside, gazing into the distance at Jerusalem.
Jesus hesitated. And then he took a deep breath, and grabbed two of his disciples by the arms, and said,
James and John! Fetch me... a donkey!
Um, sorry, you want what?
A donkey!
Where are we going to get a donkey?
Oh, I don’t know. Go into the next village and borrow one.
What do you want a donkey for, Rabbi?
Just go get one, will you?
And so the parade began. No generals in polished armor on great stallions. No troops marching in proud formation. No, just that up-country preacher and his hick disciples, a great parade of lepers and loose women and beggars, fishermen and tax collectors, stirring up the crowd, hollering and disturbing the peace.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Now, one of these years (but not this year), I’m going to bring a donkey to church.
Yep.
A real live donkey.
And right about the time we do the palm procession, we’re going to open the back doors of the church, and I'll go back there and try to get on its back, so everyone can see what it’s like for a full-grown man wearing a dress to try to climb on the back of an animal he’s never ridden before.
And then I’m going to ride him right down the center aisle. Now, while I do that, I’m going to have the congregation yelling at me as loud as they can, and waving palm branches all over the place, and try to high-five everyone on the way down the aisle, and just for good measure I‘ll have some of the gentlemen take off their coats and throw them out in my way.
Yessir, right down the middle of the aisle. Right where the donkey will want to go, because, as we all know, donkeys love to carry about two hundred pounds of freight while they’re being shouted at and having things thrown at them.
And, of course, donkeys always do this while maintaining an air of dignified humility.
This is how Jesus entered Jerusalem. A great, riotous, undignified mess. In fact, a delicious farce on the way kings usually entered the capital city. Most undignified. Definitely un-Episcopalian. But a sense of humor is a mighty asset if what you're seeking is God's kingdom.
And yet... the Rubicon was crossed. The crowds proclaimed him king. And before the week was over, he would receive the answer of the governing authorities.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I’ve always felt somewhat schizophrenic about Palm Sunday’s readings. Every year, we dress up this celebration of the triumphal entry. Every year, we tell the story of the arrest and crucifixion, with even a tiny amount of solemn theater to highlight the importance of the story. Every year, we the congregation are asked to sing, "hosanna!" with the voices of the crowd, and we’re also asked to shout "crucify him," and it’s the same crowd.
It’s all too tempting, in the private chambers of our hearts, to assign the good parts to ourselves and the bad parts to someone else. All too tempting to imagine ourselves in the first celebration but not the second.
But that would be dishonest.
We love winners. We love it when God does what we want. We love it when the hero rides into town on the white stallion and trounces the bad guys. But we don’t like being made fun of. We don’t like it when the one we’re cheering for goes to the church and begins turning over the furniture. If I walked into church and turned over the big honkin' table on the grand high platform under the spotlights, or really brought a donkey to church, some of my beloved parishioners would be planting "for sale" signs in my front yard.
But that’s more or less what Jesus did. He came to town, rejected the movement that would have risen up with swords and clubs, and instead humbled himself before God, doing what God wanted rather than what we wanted. And we killed him for it.
On Ash Wednesday, we called each other to the observance of a holy Lent, a time of prayer and self-examination, a time of self-denial and repentance. Now it is time for the observance, to the remembrance, of Holy Week. Not to forget the tragedy, but to remember.
And to remember that God’s love is the only thing that makes sense out of suffering, conflict, tragedy, and death. God’s love does not do away with these things; the cross should teach us that. No, God’s love doesn’t do away with it, but rather it the thing that makes it possible to bear the pain, to see it, to share it, to pass through it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
