Authority: Source and Righteousness

The use of the word authority has been coasting downward in English usage for over a hundred years. Who to believe how to act and what to trust, the pragmatic reality of authorities has not gone away even if our relationship with authority has changed. I am glad that I have more authority in a million public and personal arenas than my grandmothers did. 

Yet I also weep and rage at the chaos of this moment. A death toll and a lostness that could have been a different story if we had a different sense of the authority o,f the well being of the community, and the authority of following the directions of experts. For a while now, we have tended to give authority on important matters to whims or momentary feelings or Pinterest finds or who has the boldest choice of font. We might be better off if we were just a bit harder to impress and more willing to consider the sources. 

These days authority is spoken of through influencers and leadership and privilege and education and status. All of those facets dance in the anxieties of the local leaders in our Gospel lesson. Then in the Old Testament, Moses’ authority was from God, but it is also from the accident of tragedy. From being placed in a basket in the river in a crisis, of being found by the princess, being raised in the royal household. Moses’ authority starts a few rungs up the ladder. Access, education, understanding of the opposing party. The source of his authority was a mix of earthly and holy. 

Our Sunday paragraph selections of Gospel hardly ever give us the context. We are in the 21st chapter of 28 in Matthew. The hearty hosanna praises of Jesus’ royal welcome into Jerusalem, where this king of nothing and everything entered the royal city on a work a day donkey - that is what began this chapter. Then Jesus turns the tables at the halls of power: and now the verbal dance with the local religious leaders. Religious leadership in a culturally-based religion is a balancing act of authority. Civil and sacred. Your civil leadership is based on the understanding that you are commissioned and called by God. Your sacred authority is based in righteousness: which is doing God’s will, living with God’s intentions: mercy, compassion, duty, steadfast love. And your earthly anxiety may lead you to actions that are contrary to God’s intentions. 

The authority debate in our Gospel lesson is about a multitude of issues. Yet I want to focus on two things: source and righteousness. Where and what is Jesus’ source of authority - why is he followed, hailed, how can he do such wonders? He should be a nobody. There are no degrees on his wall. He may have royal lineage, but he is 149th from the throne and nearly penniless. If he is of God - if his authority is from God - like John the Baptizers, and we don’t follow him, if we - the local leaders - don’t like that what he proclaims is the good news of God, then if we are honest: we know where this is going. 

Secondly, righteousness is about repentance: And the implication is that these sacred and civil leaders have not repented, Whereas the unworthy “other people” have repented - are righteous. Like we - the leaders (insiders) - claim to be. It isn’t what we say that matters - it is what we do. Many of us like to cozy up to the ‘other people’ of this story, even if we have never gotten a penny in similar ways. Yet do we like our place on the ladder - our authority - and maybe we have not thought about it much? I know I don’t on an everyday basis. And when we are confronted with the unsettling righteous holy witness of the nobodies - what do we feel? And what about that holy call to let go of our rung of power and authority - what do we really do?

Authority has the word author in it. Our clinging to a rung is what is writing our life. Who or what is writing your life? Who or what is writing theirs? The good news for the local leader and the tax collector and the everyday schmuck is that the call to repent and get to work in the ‘vineyard’ this is a neverending call. We can choose to let go of our rung and reach a hand back to help the person below us on the ladder. How else do you sum up the activity of that Phillipians poem in today’s epistle? 

To be one with Christ, to let him be our leader and influencer and author and therefore authority: is to live as he did - in humility and service.  It is to embrace the holy and unsettling risk of not clinging so white-knuckled to our rung, not ignoring our own need to repent. The way of Jesus is the way of steadfast love and duty to a mission more essential than any earthly authority, we can hold onto.

September 27, 2020

Proper 21, Year A RCL

The Beginning Began: Creation GP Response

 

This is my work, my response, to the lesson.  In both words and pictures.  Mostly photos I took on our property after hearing the lesson.

So we wonder - what is your favorite day?

I love the firmament day.  I love the storytelling wondering of the ancients - that what is above is connected to what is below. We repeat a half truth that everyone in the ancient world thought the world was flat.  Yet the metaphors and wonderings of even the poets and prophets of Judeo-Christian scriptures suggest the fragility of that assertion.  If you get a broad enough perspective, you can see the roundness of the earth.  And the words here - dome - suggest that people saw the roundness of above matching what is below.  And then sky and sea are connected in the cycle of life.  We are a part of that cycle too - water that flows in our tears could be the same as that that washed past Jesus' body.  Lastly I also have a memory - from a day flying between Dallas, Texas, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.  I looked out of the plane and could not tell sky from sea.  Same color, same refraction of light meeting my eyes. It is the same but there is also difference, and rather than dwelling in a planet of swirling gas or liquid, these were brought into their own.

What day is my least favorite - none of them.  Which one am I not so good at: the 7th.  Sabbath.  Resting, holding still.  There was a month or so in early summer where I had developed a much better habit of being still.  Forced by the duty to the well being of all, I learned to do what so often alludes me.  Resting properly, taking my time.  Now that many things are back open and I am less paniced about shopping in a ventilated store with my mask and some hand sanitizer - I am not sitting as still.  I am not very good at the 7th day, and I need to be better.  So my self judgement creates a bit of a cycle of meh about sabbath.  

Where am I in this story?  I marvel at the ways that the sacred storytelling and the science storytelling match, somewhat.  There is a beauty to that - reminding me of our being made in God's image.  That we could even begin to touch the creativity and logic of the One Lord God of the Universe - is stunning.  If you haven't ever seen it, One of my favorite lessons of the Godly Play cousin Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is called something related to the engish word fettuccine.  In the lesson is a long long long ribbon (the noodle part) that is 7 colors and for the first 6 days of creation each grain of ribbon is made to represent millions of years, approximating what we believe we know about the timeline of creation.  The ribbon is supposed to stretch from the altar to the classroom.  In these two stories we have two ways of telling a story about who we are and where we came from, and that it is all in some sort of order, and also chaos, and it is both beyond our imagining and tangible to our understanding.  I hope you have a chance to see that lesson someday.  If you think these two areas are opposed - then please give a listen to this On Being episode with two Jesuit scientists.   And if you are looking for some regular places to intersect the sciency brain with the mysteries of Christian faith then check out the Liturgists podcast (it isn't about worship patterns).

I wonder how you could listen to this lesson and respond - either by art or writing or contemplation or research.  This is my response, a little bit of writing, a little bit of photography.

And some water, not from my yard.

Forgiveness Back to Zero: Darcy, Vader, and Jubilee

Over the past 200 years, Pride and Prejudice has never been out of print.  And has sold over 20 million copies around the globe. Early in the classic novel, Mr. Darcy outlines his own character Mr. Darcy who is the “king” of the county where he lives, admits that his temper: 

• is too little yielding. 
• that he does not easily forgive others, snd,
• his good opinion once lost is lost forever. 

Yet by the end of the novel (and I apologize for the spoilers) Mr. Darcy eliminates the debts of the man who has hurt him the most and in so doing - is bound to him, through marriages - forever. I imagine what lays ahead for Mr. Darcy beyond the novel is a lifetime of learning to forgive again and again. 

I recall going to see a more recent blockbuster - Return of the Jedi with my family when I was young and once again, forgive me for the spoiler, but at the end of the movie, Darth Vader has acted for the

light side and against the dark side. an act which cost him his life. Then a few scenes later in the triumphal finale - Anakin - Vaders given name - appears in his glowy ghosty Jedi self the way that all good Jedis appear after death. I was not an attentively religious young person, but I remember thinking something like - really so fast? Why wasn’t there some sort of penitential purgatory? A lifetime of cruelty and enslavement and exploitation and whatever the word would be in the Starwars Universe for dehumanization, Vader’s was a reign of terror and a masterclass in casual murder.. The nearly instant eternal forgiveness, it rubbed my weakly forgiving Darcy like temper the wrong way. 

This chapter of the gospel of Matthew has been focused on how a community of disciples of Jesus lives together in faithfulness, not in an imagined universe but in the harsh, complex, and contradictory reality of this one. Jesus has welcomed back the one sheep who did you wrong. Once was hard enough, so you get up the nerve to ask Jesus the question: Um, there's a limit to how many times I have to do this right? 

Jesus replies with a parable about the reign of God that is so straightforward it might be more accurate to call it a fable. The 'king of the county' goes about forgiving all the debts of slaves. Sometimes I notice it's hard for me to really listen when the word slave is used by Jesus, and it is not as an example of sin. Here in the USA, we have never done the truth and reconciliation work we need to do regarding how much of our long term prosperity is built on the cruel enslavement of black and brown people. So the word slave makes me react more than lean in. 

Yet slavery in the Mediterranean in Jesus's lifetime was a different thing. It was not racially assigned or something that was generation after generation. The parable could have said tenants but it says slaves, and when thinking about forgiveness, it's an important detail. It should remind us of the ancient biblical ideal of Jubilee. where every 49 to 50 years all the debts that have been piled up between peoples are zeroed out, and all slaves are set free. How completely this was truly ever practiced is an open question. But that it is the desire of God for what perfected human life together is to be like: this is clearer.  

Jubilee takes everything back to zero. Jubilee is connected with Jesus's response about how much are we to forgive. In the idiom Jesus's day - that number play - it means infinitesimally. The Divine inaccessibility of absolute zero and absolute Infinity are so beyond us, that they're two sides of the same coin. The directive of Jesus to forgive until everything is back to zero: it is a difficult command because most of the time even wholehearted forgiveness, it doesn't eliminate the wound. The terror of Vader's reign didn't evaporate from the universe at his turning. 

Forgiveness it is a skill of community one that should:

• preserve truth, 
• enable balance, 
• and compel generosity.  

Forgiveness is an unbinding of ourselves from all that weighs us down and keeps us stuck in the past. Reconciliation is freedom for holiness that isn't a fictional novel or otherworldy movie plot. Sacred forgiveness compels generosity through responsible action against all forms of enslavement, against all forms of everything in this world of sin and spin that is against the Jubilee of God. 

So what are the skills of forgiveness: 

• Trust: sometimes that's easy and sometimes that's hard. 
• Healing speech. it's not enough to just let it go in our minds. And the last skill of forgiveness is
• Silence.

The silence in which we can listen. Listen for truth,  listen for healing speech. Which of those skills are you best at - Which ones need practice? 

The Star Wars universe doesn’t pretend to be based in the worldview of Christian discipleship,but the answer Jesus offers to my childhood (and continuing) discomfort with the instant forgiveness for Darth Vader is that the forgiveness is God’s to give - and it is already given. We are promised that the God of steadfast love and mercy is ready and waiting infinitely for when we are ready to make amends. 

Our task as disciples of Jesus, and as humans in life together, is much like my imagined post novel life of Mr. Darcy One that can still trace the scars, yet called to live in peace as people commanded to forgive again and again and again. Forgiveness is the start of a journey wherein at the end, we discover ourselves to have become free enough to receive God's endless reconciliation. How many times do we who walk with Christ put it back to zero - Infinitesimally. 

May the Lord be with me - cause I am sure gonna need it.

Proper 19 RCL: A

Christ Church, Ridley Park

Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania

find us on facebook and Instagram and at our web-page: christchurchridleypark.org 

ps: if you want to see the best modern adaptation of PnP search for the Lizzie Bennet Diaries.  A 100 episode interpretation for this era - it is amazing.  

Memories of How the Church Tells Time

There are so many calendars that overlap in our lives.  We have personal calendars of birthdays and anniversaries and memories.  We have the seasonal calendars that are on paper, and then the seasons as the retail world sees them.  The colors of the stores change - even just at Wawa - in anticipation of upcoming holidays.  And then in this church, we have the liturgical calendar.  The round and round progression through the colors and stories. I love having a liturgical calendar.  Some of you who know me I like to play with liturgical colored clothing - especially tights.  That behavior connects the rhythm of the church to the whole of my life, connects it to my thinking first thing in the day.  

One of the questions of the Godly Play lesson is what is your favorite part.  My favorite color is blue, and so I very much love being in a place where blue is the color for Advent.  The lesson remembers the connection to Mary, Jesus' mother (Theotokos/Blessed Virgin) and that is of course important.  More so I admit I think of interstellar space, of Christ being before and beyond time and then being born in human flesh at Christmas.  I also think of the wisdom of the prophets discerning that God was going to do something new: and in those texts we see Jesus.  I don't know why I think of blue as a wisdom color.  Perhaps because it is my favorite color and I would like to be known as wise.  However, my favorite color/season is the red of Pentecost.  I have loved the focus on energy and movement and comfort and knowledge that we celebrate as attributes of the Holy Spirit: which is our focus on Pentecost.  

There are many memories associated with different seasons.  I wonder what memories you might have connected with seasons.  For me, the memory of Pentecost is now that it is that a Pentecost was my first Sunday as a priest.  And the power of God and human ingenuity that was able to get my ordaining

bishop to the church on time for the service the day before (Alleluia!).  I wonder if in the years ahead I will always connect the start of Lent with the start of this pandemic, and practicing church leadership in such trying and isolated circumstances.  A wilderness time to be sure.

What does it look like to respond as an adult learner to a Godly Play reflection?  The wonderful facet of learning for discipleship is it can work through your best gifts and skills.  If you knit - then knit a response.  If you like decorating - what if you began a way to follow the liturgical calendar color changes in decor?  Can you relearn a piece of music for a particular season?  If you work with wood or gardening or writing - respond that way.  Sometimes adult learners need to learn more about something - could some research about the liturgical calendar enable you to know more and find new ways to connect it to your life? If you do can you write it up and share it with the CCRP October newsletter?  For example, if you ask the question are the colors the same in all churches - the answer might be nope.  

God is inviting us into the circle of how God tells time: kairos (hey look that up).  A mystery of wonder and a knowable returning cycle of redemption.  I hope you take the time to respond, in whatever way you desire, to this lesson.  This is my response.  

Stay safe, Jesus loves you, and be so much more than kind.  

ps..Thank you to Sharon for sharing her gifts of Godly Play storytelling.  Thanks be to God for the hands that made that lesson and the technology to share it with you.  Praise be to Jesus for the discerning work of many years of the Godly Play storytellers.  

Stray Cats, Lost Sheep: Plugged In Together

I am probably one of the oldest persons you will hear say I grew up around computers. A childhood friend once told me that I was the first person she ever heard say “that the computer was on the phone”. Some of us, we grew up with computers and the internet, and there's this unexamined expectation that it's all grown up and mature. When reality is it is a brand new way to communicate and dwell together in community. 

We've had many thousands of years of verbal communication and a few thousand years of written communication and a few hundred years of widespread literacy that was shared via paper and mass-produced books. Therefore - comparatively our relationship with one another over the world wide web is an infant. In some ways, this is like handing a 1-year-old an encyclopedia and expecting them to know what to do with it. 

I've celebrated more than once in the last 6 months how grateful I am for all of the technology that has made this time safer and not feel quite so isolated that tech already existed. The equipment we film this on the digital waves and hardwires that we share videos on these gifts were not only in existence but installed in my life and in many of your lives. Yet I would have had to have had my head deep in the sand to not realize that we don't know how to live together in peace with these methods of connection and communication. 

Our five lines of the Gospel of Matthew are part of a larger chapter of teachings about community life. When you read the whole chapter you will find it is mostly a Jesus’ greatest hits playlist. Teachings about how we are to live wholeheartedly together in complicated communities. If we go back to the beginning of the chapter Jesus starts off with calling us to become like children and welcoming children. Hold on a second though: remember Jesus's audience hears children and thinks about something like we would imagine stray cats. Germy grubby independent creatures who have their uses and but also love to rumble. 

Right before what we heard today is the parable of the lost sheep. Sheep which are the precious backbone ancient Judea. Yet sheep - are dirty and stubborn and unable to think for themselves: and Jesus' first hearers knew that. Maybe it can be helpful to read these five verses using some of the parabolic imagination that Jesus practiced and imagine these recommendations for community life being for a cartoon for an assembly of stray cats and sheep - and you are one of them. 

The Christian assemblies for which the sacred storyteller of Matthew wrote originally were new-ish. Probably a mix of first and second-generation Jesus followers and in this gospel, mostly people who are Jewish and dwelling closely with synagogue famil, and with people with who they have many differences. Which created uncomfortable tensions - at the least. These dynamics are set in the middle of a time of terror and trauma most likely in the context of the war that destroyed the second temple. There was widespread anguish, painful illuminations of our limitations,wounds of heart, wounds of body, wounds of community. 

Jesus is calling us then and now to grow into mature discipleship in the world one that doesn't triangulate - one that empathizes and one that does not turn away from hard conversations but does tap out Of the unhelpful comments section. In our new community of living together in the digital space, we're rumbling with new ways of figuring out what it means to practice healthy relationships when we can't look the other person in the eye Or feel their feelings in the room with us. All you young cats and precious sheep we've just moved in together online. It's all brand new - even 6 months in - and the troubles are as old as humanity itself. 

In this time of challenging connection and so much to fear but also with so much collaborative possibility, Jesus offers us both an ethic and direction and invites us to listen bravely to speak courageously, snd trust that when we live in his way - online and in-person - he is with us.

 

Proper 18   RCL A

Christ Church, Ridley Park

Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania