Scrooged: The Problems with Royal Plans

Scrooge is a name that lives in infamy.  It is onomatopoeia-ic.  You have to scrunch your nose and lips to say it, you cannot smile easily and say it. Scrooge.  It has become a descriptive word.  Most of us know what it means if it is said that someone is being a Scrooge.  The holiday mirth that floats through the title of a Christmas Carol sugar coats a story of weariness that looks both backwards and forwards.  Dickens’ tale is a haunting mixture of hope and desperate fear about the way ahead.  We all have ghosts from a past we many not remember, and we all walk with ghosts of a future we have not yet lived.

Specter’s haunt these readings today, especially 1 Samuel.  David who may not even have been born yet, he is there, floating beyond this demand of a free people for a king.  Pharaoh is there, it doesn’t really matter which one,  you can still see the outline of that large headdress and feel his stubborn greedy grasp on power & wealth. These are not silly ghosts like Nearly Headless Nick.  These ghosts are lives and lessons learned and hopes and dreams, these ghosts are bitter tears of should-a-been-s and could-a-been-s.  The witness of lives and chaos behind us and before us, a cloud of could have been-s and should have been-s.

This story of Samuel, God and a crowd of bourgeois Hebrews, it is more holy morality tale than it is history.  When the raven stole fire from the sun, or when Adam and Eve tried that forbidden fruit in the garden.  For the holy writer of this tale (likely a Deuteronomist) it is very much the choice between good and evil.  This system of kings did begin somewhere, and the desires were probably much like what is offered here.  You can see the royal and blessed (and flawed) David coming over the horizon.  Yet the trappings of majesty are just sugar coating, they are sparkles over layers that know how God loves us and the strange truth that God lets us make rotten choices. 

Parents and counselors and teachers and pastors all do this thing that God does in 1 Samuel.  You, darling children, you want to make a choice that we are certain will not lead to good things.  Or it is simply not the way we would have chosen.  Yet we love you enough to let you be free.  Sometimes things we don’t think will work out do.  And we also know that sometimes, the only way you learn not to jump on the bed, is to bump your head.  The most beleaguered character of the whole Bible is probably not Job, it is probably God.  Can you hear the resigned divine Storyteller?  The One Lord who desires for all of us safety, satisfaction and salvation.  One God who has offered us the way of a compassionate community in the Torah, offered us the way of forgiveness in Christ Jesus.  He has shown us the way and called us home, but he will not live it for us.  Yet there it is, our request.  Can we do it our way?

We are a bit distant from this monarchy idea.  Most royalty that we can easily name either have limited governmental power or are fictitious. Rolly polly ding a-ling Disney kings are less helpful here.  Emperor Palpatine is closer to the darkness that is chosen (but you might notice he is now listed in the Disney Kings!) .  It isn’t about titles, but about centralization of power and wealth and property.  It is about what happens to the people on the bottom, when everything feeds into the top.  The books of Samuel and the books of Kings are telling about the rise of the Kingdom, but it is also telling us a Scrooge story, one haunted by slavery past, and exile future.  It is dense with concerns about political influence, public pressures, dangers from other powers, the accumulation of wealth, the struggle for land that produces fruit, milk and, honey.   Wait. Are those not our worries and challenges?

These texts are haunted by the deepest tensions in ancient Israel,  fraught by this pivotal invitation for a King. It is quite unusual to let someone else decide who you will be and where you will go.  This dialogue between God and Samuel is perhaps the harshest critique of monarchy in the Old Testament.  Who does this choice benefit he asks us.  Who does it crush?  What realities will it bring and why is Samuel so opposed?  Kingdom making is a very human way of trying to manage the chaos.  It will never ultimately create a just community, because it always relies on expelling someone, or being over  someone or against someone.  It is built on being a scrooge.  It will make it harder to live in God’s way, and harder to find our way home to him.

I am not a pleasant person in the morning, especially if the dreams were strange like Scrooge.  Maybe you are as well.  Yet we are not a people who were created to stumble through life, half awake, just trying not to growl at the sun.  We are full of creativity and the same freedom that chose a system of grab, take: this same gift can wake up and choose God’s desire.  We can solve complex problems, or at least I sure hope so, and just because we made a wrong turn does not mean that this is a dead end. Roads go both ways! 

How do we make new dreams, how do we learn from ghosts past, present and future to follow God’s desire for us?   What is this divine desire, this system of governance?  Healing, love, community, compassion.  Service, simplicity, deep thoughts.   These dreams are not for forgetting, but a call to be the up and awake Scrooge at the end of story.  To become a generous peacemaking bundle of love, about whom the neighbors might have thought he went mad.

I sort of dislike the idea that God has a plan for us.  Desire, yes.  Intention, yes.  Roadmap, yes. I guess that is a plan, if you want to call it a plan.  'Plan' just seems to me to be another very human way to try and control the chaos.  (Can we be like other nations, can we have a king? How about an agenda?)  Though the Lord be high, he cares for the lowly.  He perceives the haughty from afar.  The ghosts of empires past and present, we must be honest about.  The ghosts of devastation future, we have a choice about that.  Does God have for us a desire, yes.  Intention, yes.  Roadmap, yes.  GPS, yes. Sadness when we get turned around, yes.  Forgiveness of our getting turned around and seeking after false kingdoms?  Yes.   Amen.

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

June 7, 2015

RCL Pentecost 3B

(No audio, because my tired brain could only handle one audio malfunction at once).

(Should go in the invisible category of sermons that started in the Whedonverse and then had that unusual element removed. Check out the show Dollhouse and think about what it means to give up your mind, but keep your heart.)

(Same sermon, two postings, because one would not share right on fb.  this one has no hyperlinks.  hmm.)

Scrooged! Ghosts, Monarchy and the Path of God

Scrooge is a name that lives in infamy.  It is onomatopoeia-ic.  You have to scrunch your nose and lips to say it, you cannot smile easily and say it. Scrooge.  It has become a descriptive word.  Most of us know what it means if it is said that someone is being a Scrooge.  The holiday mirth that floats through the title of a Christmas Carol sugar coats a story of weariness that looks both backwards and forwards.  Dicken's tale is a haunting mixture of hope and desperate fear about the way ahead.  We all have ghosts from a past we many not remember, and we all walk with ghosts of a future we have not yet lived. 

Specter’s haunt these readings today, especially 1 Samuel.  David who may not even have been born yet, he is there, floating beyond this demand of a free people for a king.  Pharaoh is there, it doesn’t really matter which one,  you can still see the outline of that large headdress and feel his stubborn greedy grasp on power & wealth. These are not silly ghosts like Nearly Headless Nick.  These ghosts are lives and lessons learned and hopes and dreams, these ghosts are bitter tears of should-a-been-s and could-a-been-s.  The witness of lives and chaos behind us and before us, a cloud of could have been-s and should have been-s.

This story of Samuel, God and a crowd of bourgeois Hebrews, it is more holy morality tale than it is history.  When the raven stole fire from the sun, or when Adam and Eve tried that forbidden fruit in the garden.  For the holy writer of this tale (likely a Deuteronomist) it is very much the choice between good and evil.  This system of kings did begin somewhere, and the desires were probably much like what is offered here.  You can see the royal and blessed (and flawed) David coming over the horizon.  Yet the trappings of majesty are just sugar coating, they are sparkles over layers that know how God loves us and the strange truth that God lets us make rotten choices.  

Parents and counselors and teachers and pastors all do this thing that God does in 1 Samuel.  You, darling children, you want to make a choice that we are certain will not lead to good things.  Or it is simply not the way we would have chosen.  Yet we love you enough to let you be free.  Sometimes things we don’t think will work out do.  And we also know that sometimes, the only way you learn not to jump on the bed, is to bump your head.  The most beleaguered character of the whole Bible is probably not Job, it is probably God.  Can you hear the resigned divine Storyteller?  The One Lord who desires for all of us safety, satisfaction and salvation.  One God who has offered us the way of a compassionate community in the Torah, offered us the way of forgiveness in Christ Jesus.  He has shown us the way and called us home, but he will not live it for us.  Yet there it is, our request.  Can we do it our way?

Mouse king?

We are a bit distant from this monarchy idea.  Most royalty that we can easily name either have limited governmental power or are fictitious. Rolly polly ding a-ling Disney kings are less helpful here.  Emperor Palpatine is closer to the darkness that is chosen (but you might notice he is now listed in the Disney Kings!) .  It isn’t about titles, but about centralization of power and wealth and property.  It is about what happens to the people on the bottom, when everything feeds into the top.  The books of Samuel and the books of Kings are telling about the rise of the Kingdom, but it is also telling us a Scrooge story, one haunted by slavery past, and exile future.  It is dense with concerns about political influence, public pressures, dangers from other powers, the accumulation of wealth, the struggle for land that produces fruit, milk and, honey.   Wait. Are those not our worries and challenges?

These texts are haunted by the deepest tensions in ancient Israel,  fraught by this pivotal invitation for a King. It is quite unusual to let someone else decide who you will be and where you will go.  This dialogue between God and Samuel is perhaps the harshest critique of monarchy in the Old Testament.  Who does this choice benefit he asks us.  Who does it crush?  What realities will it bring and why is Samuel so opposed?  Kingdom making is a very human way of trying to manage the chaos.  It will never ultimately create a just community, because it always relies on expelling someone, or being over  someone or against someone.  It is built on being a scrooge.  It will make it harder to live in God’s way, and harder to find our way home to him.

I am not a pleasant person in the morning, especially if the dreams were strange like Scrooge.  We are not a people who were created to stumble through life, half awake, just trying not to growl at the sun.  We are full of creativity and the same freedom that chose a system of grab, take: this same gift can wake up and choose God’s desire.  We can solve complex problems, or at least I sure hope so, and just because we made a wrong turn does not mean that this is a dead end. Roads go both ways!  

How do we make new dreams, how do we learn from ghosts past, present and future to follow God’s desire for us?   What is this divine desire, this system of governance?  Healing, love, community, compassion.  Service, simplicity, deep thoughts.   These dreams are not for forgetting, but a call to be the up and awake Scrooge at the end of story.  To become a generous peacemaking bundle of love, about whom the neighbors might have thought he went mad. 

I sort of dislike the idea that God has a plan for us.  Desire, yes.  Intention, yes.  Roadmap, yes. I guess that is a plan, if you want to call it a plan.  'Plan' just seems to me to be another very human way to try and control the chaos.  (Can we be like other nations, can we have a king? How about an agenda?)  Though the Lord be high, he cares for the lowly.  He perceives the haughty from afar.  The ghosts of empires past and present, we must be honest about.  The ghosts of devastation future, we have a choice about that.  Does God have for us a desire, yes.  Intention, yes.  Roadmap, yes.  GPS, yes. Sadness when we get turned around, yes.  Forgiveness of our getting turned around and seeking after false kingdoms?  Yes.   Amen.

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

June 7, 2015

RCL Pentecost 3B

(No audio, because my tired brain could only handle one audio malfunction at once).
(Should go in the invisible category of sermons that started in the Whedonverse and then had that unusual element removed. Check out the show Dollhouse and think about what it means to give up your mind, but keep your soul.)

Puppy Can Fly!

Have you ever hosted a Butterfly house? Have you ever hosted a Butterfly house?  Like an ant farm, you begin with purchasing a kit which includes a card which you fill  out and put it in the mail. I suspect this now can begin online. Anyways, a week or so later you get a shipment of caterpillars.  You set up the box that came with your kit, or now a mesh cylinder.  Inside that box, you place a dish of water and a branch with leaves.  Then caterpillars do what they are made to do.  They eat and eat and then they cocoon.

What you might not know is that the caterpillars do not so much build a cocoon as they split open their caterpillar skin and the cocoon material emerges from within and then hardens.  If I was a caterpillar and knew what was happening, I would be terrified, perplexed, stomach groaning, weakness taking over my will.  What in your life, in our world is like this, a complete shedding of an old skin?  And in the middle of all this radical change my caterpillar self cannot even imagine the drama that comes next.  Because while in the cocoon you grow wings.  WINGS!  Send forth your Spirit, and renew the face of the Earth.

Every year monarch butterflies migrate from Mexico to Canada and then back.  This is not of journey of individual butterflies on a round trip vacation.  The butterflies that emerge and feed in Mexico, these journey north, where they feed and mate and lay eggs and and the new and older butterflies fly on.  This generational relay happens repeatedly as they travel north.  Each time the refreshed flock repeats the pattern: fly, feed, make many many new butterflies who will continue the journey.  This is much like the progress of the early church in Acts.  Go, plant, send.  Yet as in Acts, the landscape the new generation flies through is not the same as for those who came before.

Austin is not Toronto.  The world we dwell in is quite different than  the one we began in.  Much like us, much like the church as it travels through time and place.  The landscapes and forms we once knew,  are not what we are flying through now.  We are a daydream of previous generations, but they could barely imagine our setting.  Each new generation is called to explore new ways to know and share Christ’s love.  Send forth your Spirit and renew the face of the Earth.

As you may know, the writer of the Gospel of Luke and the author of the book of Acts are believed to be the same person, or at least from the same community.  Yet they these are substantially different texts.
Luke’s gospel is all about what is going on now in light of the past.  Acts is all about what is emerging to prepare for the journey that lies ahead. Luke is like friends gathered around a campfire with mugs of warm drink.  Acts is like an ecstatic historical-ish lecture fueled by multiple espressos.  Luke is like a loving and grown up german shepherd.  Acts is rather like a puppy.  A constantly moving and exploring, full of love and excitement, fuzzy creature who is making muddy footprints on the white rug kind of puppy.  You want your church solid and unchanging and having neither risk nor passion?  Then do not follow the model of Acts.

It is worth noting that in our Acts passage today the Spirit of God is not a wind or fire but rather compared to wind or fire. In the ancient world, as well as today, fire is a common metaphor for experiences of inspiration.  Think of Wesley with his heart burning or Isaiah tongue touched with coals. This fire-iness draws us into that moment of power draws us into living with God, his creation and his mission for us in fresh and inspired ways.

Maybe you are a butterfly and maybe you recall those legs but when you try to shake them,  they simply are no longer there.  They were good legs, they helped you become the creature you are today. If you try to walk on those legs, nothing happens.  They are not there.  Now imagine you are a butterfly, and you are laying on the bottom of that box on your belly, searching for legs you no longer have, all the while you already have wings.  It is an absurd image, yet most of us do this frequently.  The methods and modes that served 20th century churches, and people and societies, many of these are simply no longer with us, or no longer serve Christ’s mission.  We can choose to react to changes by trying to remain still in the whirlwind, looking for our caterpillar legs.  Or we can FLY!  Which we are created to do.   Come Holy Spirit and renew the face of the Earth.

I once had a butterfly house. The caterpillars became cocoons, and from the cocoons burst butterflies. It noght.  They did what they were created to do in ways we could never have dreamed of.

was a terribly awfully windy spring. We didn’t want to set them free.  We had images of those precious friends being ripped to shreds.  We held off.  We offered more branches and more water.  But we knew.  We knew they would die if they stayed in the same old box.  Butterflies cannot live as caterpillars did.  So we gathered our courage.  We took that box outside. We found a protected garden full of lush azaleas.  And we opened the box. Those butterflies lept out, they flew straight up into the whirlwind.  All of our imaginings of doom were for nothing.  Those butterflies knew how to fly and where to go, because they are made that way.

So too the Spirit leads us with the insight of a butterfly that knows it must change, and somehow, knows how and where to fly.  We are no longer caterpillars or disciples confused in an upper room.  That skin, that self, it was more than a life cycle ago.  We who are grown dogs will never be the puppy we remember, but we must find in ourselves that puppy like love and passion.  And we who are monarchs will never be a caterpillar again. Yet all around us are new generations of caterpillars and puppies who we are called to nurture now, here in this place and time and looking toward the undreamed of good things that are emerging. The Spirit of God is alive and well and leading us from one generation and into the next. A butterfly who lives as a caterpillar will not survive. The Spirit of God has made us to fly.  Come Holy Spirit, and renew the face of the Earth.

Pentecost 2015 (RCLb)

St. Stephen's Episcopal Church

Spokane, Washington

USA

    

Good Magic: I am a Potent Package

Ten thousand years ago in the West Asian regions where many years later Abraham journeyed and many years later still, Jesus walked; in these very same lands, most of your diet began.   Wheat and barley, lentils and green peas, goats, sheep, pigs, and cows: human agriculture begins there in the Fertile Crescent.  The first farmers, the first cowboys and the first shepherds were all there in what today we know as Jordan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Lebanon.  Scientist and popular author Jared Diamond calls this combination of earliest domesticated plants and animals “a potent and balanced biological package”.  This package spread quickly and to this day forms the base of most of the world’s diet and renewable resources.  All this is to say,  that in West Asia shepherding has roots as deep as civilization itself. 

I am the good shepherd. Beautiful, and deeply ancient.   Of all Jesus’ ‘I am’ statements it is certainly the most obvious and least metaphorical.  A shepherd is a leader, a shepherd is human.  I am the vine.  Also deeply ancient, however, um, Jesus, we know what vines look like.  You do not look like a vine.  I am the bread.  Um. Huh?  

John’s gospel isn’t the most straightforward.  It is a mystical journey with Jesus that assumes you already know the story.  You know him, his incarnation, his teaching, his death and his resurrection.  These ‘I am’ statements are poetry and metaphor pointing beyond the details and back at himself in ways that are almost magical.  Trying to bring forth that un-nameable thing that draws us to him.

I am the good shepherd.  I want to stop for a moment and examine that qualifier: good.  Good is both a throw away word and one of those words that maybe should only be used by God.  How are you feeling?  The noncommittal casual answer is ‘I’m good.’  Have you noticed those ‘life is good’ t-shirts?  They tug at our deepest hopes and bring to mind memories magical that make us utter ‘yeah’.  In English the adjective good can mean high quality, or high-but-not-excellent quality.  Good can mean suitable, pleasant, proper and loyal.  The competent-but-not-excellent shepherd doesn’t sound like someone who would lay down his life.  The proper shepherd doesn’t sound like Jesus at all.  The Greek word here actually means something like model or noble.  It hints at originality, this is the shepherd from which all shepherds descend.  This is the icon, the ultimate one that we should strive to find ourselves in.  He is the good shepherd, the ultimate holy-enchanted-beloved kind of good shepherd.

It all started there, these people, this witness.  John is telling us what happened before Jesus laid down his life, but he is also telling us what resurrection means, telling how in Jesus God broke open our systems of death and destruction.  John is telling us both of these stories at the same time.  If you walk forward three verses you learn more about the third story that is being told.  “There was another division among the Jews because of Jesus’ words.  Many of them said, “He has a demon and has lost his mind. Why listen to him?” Others said, “These aren’t the words of someone who has a demon. Can a demon heal the eyes of people who are blind?” 

Ancient Eucharistic Bread stamps

The third story being told is much like the situation in our Acts lesson, where there has been a healing by the Apostles in Jesus’ name, and the authorities are upset.  The proclamation of the Good News brought new life, but it also brought division with the early church’s closest friends and neighbors.  The mission to fellow Judeans was being met with division and deafness.  By the time that John and Acts were written divisions are deeper and sharper and meaner.  The invitation that 'I am the gate' and 'I am the good shepherd', this is filling out the deeper truth of the healing of the man born blind.  He is one who steps outside the boundaries established by the authorities.  He enters the gate, which is Christ our Lord.  Outcast by his or his parents presumed sins, this one who was outcast and rejected, he is a sheep who follows the loving voice of his original master.  Where the proclamation failed at home, it spread elsewhere fast and far and wide.  This Good Shepherd brought light, and life and food and healing.  The witness of the early Christians wasn’t just words about healing, feeding, light, and life.  It was the actual experience of healing, eating, seeing and knowing new life.

It isn’t enough to think Jesus teaches righteous things, it isn’t enough to think he is adequate.  The early church struggled with neighbors and empire, just as we do.  Yet they were so bound to the experience of the Incarnation that no human boundary was able to quash or silence it.  To know this good shepherd is to know the one who loves us beyond what words can say.  Walking through this gate, following this shepherd, sharing this bread, it pulls us into the an ancient community that reveals God’s desire for a world healed of violence, death and destruction.

The archeological record shows that all that prehistoric shepherding and gardening spread incredibly fast and broadly through temperate the zones of Asia, Europe, and Africa.  I find it interesting that the early spread of the Christian witness followed almost the exact same pattern and speed.  Good news that changes everything for the better is like magic.  Gardens and herds for people who had only known subsistence, this was good news.  It found hungry people seeking nourishment, in need of guidance, healing, and love.  It was very good.  So too did this One who says he is bread, vine, gate, way, truth life.  He is the amazing-awesome-holy and way beyond everyday good shepherd. 

Easter 4B RCL

St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Walla Walla, Washington
April 26, 2015

A Field of Dreams: Vigil Keeping

The MLB season and Easter collaborated beautifully this year.  It was opening night and it smelled like he is risen, Alleluia and Amen!!!  A most amazing day that felt like spring had bloomed at last. In the empty tomb of Easter the universe figuratively explodes.  Easter should amaze like a grand slam, it should pop like kettle corn. There should be much in common with the feeling of Opening Night and Easter.  Christ is Alive! Alleluia!  

Wherefore, dearly beloved, we who have come to know that this special night has been illumined by the grace of our Lord's resurrection must also take particular care lest any least part of it become dark in our hearts.  -Venerable Bede

One of the many blessings of friends who are new to the Episcopal traditions is their excitement.  The 'this' and the 'that' which have become for me dull and unremarkable, are brought into the light of new hope.  Easter Vigil was once this new spark of mystery and wonder for me.  The fire, the darkness, the sacred story and the outrageous party that followed. In my career, I have experienced this same pop in Vigils that were standing room only, and I have even found a small gracious light in celebrations that were elegant and elaborate but dull and cold.  This is Opening Day.  It should call strongly to the avid fan and entice the casual fan.

On this night, because of the mystery of our Lord's resurrection, the order of time was changed.  He rose from the dead during the night, and on the following day he showed the effect of his resurrection to his disciples.  Having shared a feast with them, he proved the truth of his power as they wondered and rejoiced. -Venerable Bede

Some Easter liturgies do not feel much like Opening Day.  There is much clanging of cymbals but something is missing, or perhaps there is a bit too much of everything.  Maybe it is like an overcooked gourmet hot dog with every elaborate topping anyone can conceive of.   Peeps! Shaved fermented brussels sprouts!  Salted Caramel!   Perhaps like the great game, the accessorizing has gotten out of control. Spiderman movie advertisements on the bases!  Foam fingers make good pillows, and tonight, tonight we shall prove that we really do read the Bible and put you to sleep in one absurd double play!  Why pull out all the stops this night? Is it the costumes or union with Christ?  Stagecraft or the amazing Easter walk-off win of all time? 

Long before there was a 2015 MLB Opening Day, there were men on a field with a bat and a ball. And long before the 20th century liturgical science reforms there were people gathered with fire and candles and stories and meal.  This is ancient and primordial stuff.  This is a celebration of faith that digs deep into the selves that we barely remember but are called to enter into.

If you build it, they will come.  This is not always a successful ministry strategy.  Such moments are heart breakers in the life of the pastoral leader.  Many of us who enter into pastoral ministry love liturgical occasions like the Vigil, we love the elaborateness and the movements and the sacred silliness.  We want our friends to find the same wonder there, but they never make it out to the field of dreams.  In the cold light of a spring day, many of our faithful friends might hear the crack of the bat, but they do not make it to the game.

Middle of the night sounds amazing to a night owl, however plenty of  parishioners do not want to come out late at night for a rather long occasion. Some have children with tender sleeping schedules, some are mature and night driving is a dangerous choice, and there are of course other reasons both realistic and diverted.  So I have to wonder, are not clock time and things such as midnight are human constructs?  Are we telling the wonder of the Resurrection on human terms, or are we peering into the timelessness of a holy corn field?   How do we take particular care to keep this sacred game alive? 

I call it the Original Vigil (which of course, it is not). We begin at sundown because that is how the ancients told time.  We gather at a home, like the first Christians did.  We begin around a fire pit in the backyard.  We bring out the expired linens and oils and set the holy fire aflame.   We remain around the fire with our vigil candles while people take on telling of our sacred story.  Some read them, some act them out. The family of Christ gathered around the fire interact with the story, they have it remembered into their beating hearts and God willing, their everyday lives.

The liturgical leadership is shared, choosing to have the clergy lead only what they absolutely must. Thanks be to God for some amazingly playful priests and deacons!  Then we share a blessed feast in the Hippolytus manner with cheese and olives and fruit and sparkling Washington wine and bread (and hummus).   It is by no means what many might think of as a Vigil, but is an almost ancient and mindful opening night.   To me it feels like God's people in love with Christ and seeking to live in his way.   We tell our stories, we share food, and it is both simple and bursting with resurrection life.  And somewhere in the melding of people and narrative and nurture is the mystery of Easter.  A risen Christ full to the brim with unexpected life, calling us into a sacred freedom, leading us toward his reign. 

The liturgy is a “hearts and minds”strategy, a pedagogy that trains us as disciples precisely by putting our bodies through a regimen of repeated practices that get hold of our heart and “aim”our love toward the kingdom of God.  -James Smith

This homestyle liturgy is embodied formation.  It not only says that the resurrected life happens beyond the nave in the midst of everyday life, it actually practices this kind of life, this kind of Resurrection.  The neighbors cat is wandering around our feet, the weather is less than cooperative.  Yet still we rise.  We rise with him to love unbounded.  We are not museum pieces but  'desiring, affective, liturgical animals.' (Smith)  Our deepest formation happens on the levels of experience, of basic needs such as warmth and food and community.  The Easter Vigil is full of words but it is also beyond words.  That may be where we sometimes over decorate it.  We hope that one more topping will reveal the sacred hope of this night.  

It is a spring night and a full moon and frogs croaking and corks popping.  Christ is alive and we are bound to him and his reign.   We are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our gut and aim our heart to certain ends. (Smith)  This Jesus, this union with our risen Lord is our end.  A wise friend once told me of how important Christmas eve was to her parenting.  This story, this story of Christ's salvation, it is important that it gets lived into before the deluge of the profiteering chocolates and gifts.  It is not best experienced like a commercial break.  This is the night, this is the story.  It seems important to me that the amazing brilliance of Vigil continue, and that it continue in ways that are both mysterious and broadly accessible.  Because on this night the order of time was changed.  Christ is Risen!  Alleluia!  Play Ball!!

Quotes from the Venerable Bede

Smith, James K.A.  Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Cultural Liturgies). Baker Academic (2009). 

Copies of the text of the Original Vigil available on request.  Primarily sourced from Common Worship and the BCP1979.

Silence and the Empty Space Beyond the Text

Passover was celebrated each year of Jesus’ life.  Yet, we know very little about what that looked like then.  There are references but few descriptions until more than 100 years after Jesus death.  In our text there is an unwritten assumption that you know what this Passover meal involves and what it means.  The telling of the Passion is a dialog with realities and remembrances about which the text is silent.  The ability of printed words to convey meaning is amazing and powerful.  However, text is limited by its own lines and curves.  It cannot convey everything.  There are infinite lives that we cannot see all around the dark lines of text.  Look at those pages.  Dark text on an infinite field of silent space.

Our four gospel accounts all place Jesus’ death in the vicinity of the Passover festival, even if they do not agree on how or when or why.  The memory and theology of the Passover is deep and personal and irremovable from the Passion narratives. It so imbedded that it is very much left unsaid.  To know the salvation of this devastating week, we have to enter the silent spaces between the words.  We have to enter the thousands of years of Exodus and Exile memories, to stand in the infinite soundless space that is a challenging re-membering of every Passover.

Biblical scholar Raymond Brown reminds us that,  ‘were scholars agreed on a portrait of the 'historical Jesus,' it would not cover one hundredth of the actual Jesus.’  If there was agreement on what happened that wretched week, it would not cover one fraction of the experience abandonment, or of the cruel agony of crucifixion.  The gospels do not clarify in words on a page how or why the death of Jesus is salvation.  They only insist that it is.  

The practices of Holy Week can only bring us into a fraction of the silent memories of that week that will live forever.  We are called to follow Jesus the Christ, We are summoned by him to enter the dark spaces where devastation and hatred laugh and mock.  We are called to follow him in this way of the cross and into a new kind of Passover.

When you eat this bitter herb, you become one with the people who cry under tyranny.  When you eat this bread, you become one with the people who flee under the cover of a terrible night.  You drink this cup and you become one with God, it is a cup of a new covenant that rises from the depths of God’s love and sacrifice.  

This Holy Week of liturgical truth-telling is a call to grasp the unfinished and the conditional experience of emptiness that lies between each line of these written words.  It is unfinished and conditional because we can never actually be in the story, and yet at the same time all these words and actions and failures are also our own story of brokenness.  It is unfinished and conditional because in all its terror,  it is told through Easter eyes.

We read from that space beyond the text, from what looks like white but is actually a brilliant spectrum of color.  This is where the empty tomb shines on his Passion.  For when we rise and live in union with Christ that is where we can begin to understand the incomprehensible silence of the words: that it was necessary.  

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

Palm & Passion Sunday 2015

The 'children's sermon' portion included a brief explanation of the Passover tradition, the searching for the hidden matza and the sampling of matza and parsley.  

Recording from the 8am service.

Things that Come Back to Bite Us and the Way that Killeth Death

Mount Sinai is in the rear view mirror.  The terror of Egypt was a generation ago.  The wretched tears have faded in the sands of time.  Looking back, even slavery begins to look like safety.  At least we had boundaries, at least we had grain.  Ahead of us, we see unknown and hostile territory.  We are agitated and fearful. We are uncomfortable in this space between what was and what is not. 

  ‘The people became impatient’.  A child endlessly wiggling, a spouse looking in the full cupboard and claiming there is nothing to eat.  The cat pawing your face at the hint of dawn, or a cartoon character running over a cliff.  We are impatient, and this is the source of much comedy.  The people whine at Moses, they moan at God, ‘we have nothing to eat and this manna is awful! Why did you bring us out here to die?!?’ 

It is comic enough already.  And then, come the snakes.  If you suffer from ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes, then today's reading, and the next few minutes, might be a bit uncomfortable.  The formal name for a snake is serpentes and it comes from the ancient Greek meaning I crawl.  They are native to most temperate land masses, except for New Zealand, Iceland, and sorry lads, Ireland.  The vast majority of snakes are non-venomous and most snakes only bite when they are trying to make their dinner!  The Sinai tourism website tells us that snakes there are found primarily in sandy areas with vegetation.  Maybe the impatient whining people went looking for something better in a crevice of desert foliage, and maybe they happened to disturb a snake convention.  Or, maybe, this unprovoked brood of vicious vipers  is so unusual as to suggest we look in another direction. 

What if the snakes are not really snakes? What if the snakes are not really snakes?  What if they are metaphor, what if they are something more interior?  Snakes can be a symbol of potency, of vital energy:  the coiling of energy ready to move upward.   Their process of molting, the shedding of its entire skin, this recalls new birth and renewal.  In dreams, the experts say,  snakes may point to challenging issues, to difficult emotions, to the untamed self which is ready to transition into healing.  These refugee tribes are on the edge of their difficult migration toward Canaan.  They are distressed and impatient and confused and hungry.  We have all been here before, which is exactly what makes it a bit funny.  We are human.   We are impatient. 

When you are stuck in a place of anxiety, what happens?  Do you snap at people?  Do you burrow in the sand?  Are you liable to forget your promises, to betray yourself?  Are you apt to turn from your loved ones, even God?  Do you try to numb the discomfort with spending or screens or food?  Do any of these reactions come back and bite you? Oh dear God, yes.  We know they do.  Scriptural scholar Walter Bruggemann says that, “We are greatly tempted by autonomy, commodity, and the technical.  When covenant fidelity is nullified in the interest of these modes, something deathly happens to all the parties.”  When we forget the best ways to live, the paths that he has shown us, when we get caught in snares of angst, we might start ‘shooting at snakes’. Caught in the jaws of numbing, we cling to the false hope of individuality and materialism.  How can we shed this skin? Come my way, my truth, my life.  Such a way as ends all strife.  Such a way as killeth death.

This serpent is a reminder that we are misled by passion and impatience.  Those times when we utter again the nostalgic error of ‘if only’: if only it was like it was when I was a child; or if only we could fill in the blank, then all of the raindrops will be lemon drops!  These ‘if only’ moments are exactly when we must stop and remember that God is present in every moment that has ever been, in every place ever created and in all the time that can be.  He is, in the words of St. Patrick’s Breastplate,  before us, and behind us, above us, under us, he is within us and all around us.  Come my way.

The story doesn’t end in a comic book worthy attack of the snakes.  For even in our most trivial and absurd moments of anxiety, even in these moments God heals us.  We who practice the way of God in Jesus, we come to the table because we are confused and wrong and hungry.  We come to the table to shed our old skins, to renew again our fidelity to God and to neighbor.  The mystery of the sacraments, and even of the bronze serpent, is that we know they heal us even though we know not how.  The deep truth of Eucharist, of breaking bread is that we are transformed by it.  All our muttering and numbing is a way of resistance, a way of trying to be comforted by remaining in the desert, rather than journeying forward into the unknown. 

‘The people became impatient.’  And I laughed.  I know that story.  It is my story and your story. It could sum up the whole human side of the scriptural story.  ‘The people became impatient on the way.’ The End.   It is however, a comedy, and not a tragedy.  Not a comedy like stupid slapstick nonsense, but the classic meaning of a comedy.  The story is not one-sided, it is also a story of the graciousness of God,  who seems to love us more and more each time we stray and wander.  A Lord and Savior whose love for his creation seems to arise in deeper ways through each and every crisis that we find ourselves in.  

It is a never-ending story that calls us back to the path of reconciliation and a life that tramples down death.  It is union with God that offers food for the hungry and healing for the bitten.  If this tale were a tragedy, it would end in destruction and hopelessness.  It is instead a holy comedy, because it ends in union with God, because it concludes with an amazing feast. 

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:  Such a way as gives us breath;  Such a truth as ends all strife, Such a life as killeth death.

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Walla Walla, Washington, USA
RCL B Lent 4
March 15, 2015