Converting from the Conventional: Buffyverse (post 2)

(post 2 of tbd)

What does one convert to and from in the ‘Buffyverse’ (BV)? Conversion happens when someone is connected to a community, when they participate in communal rituals for consonant goals, when “the interpretation of life is transformed into a religious frame of reference”, and someone’s role is guided by this interpretation of life, ritual structure and communal commitment. One thread of conversion has been the transformation from evil to good – usually due to some sort of intervention. A character such as Spike entered the epic as a several hundred-year-old vampire, passionately hell-bent, to later become a compatriot in the battle against evil. 

The most dominant thread of conversion in the series’ is from the conventional worldview to the mystical worldview. The mystical worldview resides in the same world as the conventional worldview. The mystical worldview is the acknowledgment of the multidimensional, demonically dominant cosmos in which humanity and others are the incarnation of redeeming grace. Crossing over into the mystical worldview employs soteriological significance when we appreciate that the pursuit of higher purpose is portrayed as a right relationship with the cosmos and the divine. People of the conventional worldview experience the effects of the mystical, however they tend to rationalize and suppress it. It would be fair to state that from the perspective of the mystical worldview people with a conventional worldview are the norm. Conventional people in the BV are not damned for their isolation, even if they are blissfully ignorant of the real danger and salvation that persists in their periphery. 

With the exception of the demon characters, most regular characters in the series’ convert from the conventional to the mystical worldview at some point in their life (or death). It would be difficult to be paranormally evil or fight such evil if you don’t acknowledge its reality. This progression happens for Giles when he is told as a child that he is destined to be a Watcher, and for Buffy as a teen who is informed by a mysterious Watchers Council member that she is the Slayer. A person who is fed on by and then sired by a vampire is forcibly converted. Association converts a few people – for example Buffy’s immediate friends and family cannot stay out of the loop. On one occasion Buffy crashes her own surprise party by smashing through a window and then dusting a vampire. Oz, the newcomer to the immediate circle (on a date with Willow), stands in awe. Xander says to him “I know this is hard to understand but, vampires are real, a lot of them live in Sunnydale.” To which Oz responds – ‘Actually, it explains a lot!” 

The conversion from a conventional worldview is analogous to religious conversion in several ways – communal mediation, sanctified focus, and ritualism. Communities, groups and institutions always mediate conversion. In the Buffyverse an encounter with supernatural evil does not automatically convert; in general even multiple encounters do not convert. It is the involvement with the Scooby Gang of BTVS or the staff of Angel Investigation that mediates the conversion to the mystical worldview and the responsibility of the converts to affect this worldview. 

A second similarity is the shared religiousness or sanctity focus. Religion has to do with life experiences and the way in which these experiences are conceived by self and community and the according response. Religious is a suitable description of the BV because it is particularly concerned with the dynamic established between the human being and the phenomenonenal and experiences that surpass the bound of currently dominant rational, mechanical and empirical assessments. This includes emotion, imagination, tradition and particularly in the BV, morality and justice. 

Overall the BV assumes the paranormal reality of the created cosmos as the concern of the mystical worldview. In the logic of the BV it is this mystical dimension that actually comprises the power of defeat and redemption in the conventional world. This is the paradoxical nature of the relationship between these worldviews. It is the phenomenal characteristics and power of the mystical worldview that makes the shift from one to the other a religious conversion. 

This has extraordinary implications for the contemporary ecumenical church; in that it’s organizing principle is by enlarge the same as the mystical worldview. Religions today dwell in the mystical in the context of a global arrangement that is constructed in the rational and commercial worldview. People may experience the phenomenal and demonic in the BV and continue with their conventional lives – so to in our experience. The difference often includes the transformative power of liturgy. A conversion process in the BV takes root if the initiate begins to participate in the Scooby or AI rituals. This ritual is a regular patterning of gathering due to crisis, investigation and reading of ancient texts, dialogue to prepare a response, the gathering of ‘ordained’ instruments and going out to act in light of the research and reflection. If a person remains in relationship with the missions against evil, the process of initiation is extended as well as complicated. It usually involves several phases and cycles of multiple conversions within the mystical worldview. Conversion from an average nominally/non-religious life to a religious life is profoundly demonstrated by conversion to the mystical worldview in the Buffyverse.

It is important to recognize a related facet of the tandem dichotomy for the church with the mystical and the conventional worldviews in regards to the socio-economic associations with these worldviews. The conventional worldview of the BV is primarily consumer driven and individualistic, much like the pervasive ideology of the contemporary 'West'. The mystical worldview is predominantly communitarian and focused on the pursuit of collective redemption and the ultimate good – arguably the consistent emphasis of the Christian and other religious testimony. 

It is often the case in the BV that a character converts from individualism and consumerist pursuits, and the enemy is often a capitalist-style demon or perversion. It takes no great leaps to pick up the radical flavor as one writer observed, “In BTVS and Angel there is a persistent association of capitalist values – among them the accumulation of wealth, the rationalization of production, the commodification of labor – with literal inhumanity.” (I will add the attribution when I find it). He goes on to point out that in the BV unselfishness, compassion, forgiveness, community, love, and self-sacrifice are critical to human freedom and well being. 

It has been suggested that this emphasis represents the feminist spirituality of the Buffyverse, given the immanence of the sacred, personal responsibility in a subjective and relational framework. This liberation ethic does not mean that individualist hierarchies and capitalist ventures are always in the way of redemption. The BV is resolutely postmodern in its approach to good and evil. Neither fit in a typology, the boundaries are not only fuzzy but good can be used for evil and vise versa. There are evil people and good demons, good magic’s gone wrong and so on. Someone of the conventional worldview is not evil per say because of their consumerism, but they are ignorant of the both the evil taint of the capitalist structures and the regular sacrifice committed on their behalf to maintain their lives and conventional worldview. There is a vast difference between being saved by the actions of the Scooby Gang or AI and acknowledging what really happened. However for those who are lifted from this ignorance, an amazing percentage of BV denizens join the fight. Which brings us to the conversion of Cordelia Chase.

(post 3)

Converting from the Conventional: Buffyverse, Conversion, and Progressive Chrisitian mission

(post 1 of tbd)

The title Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggests humor, horror, action and drama all in one phrase. The opening narration suggests this is a story about one girl battling evil – but that is a bait and switch. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its spin-off series Angel, is about the communal pursuit of redemption and safety in the face of intense forces of evil and fragmentation. Buffy is the one Slayer, a bit of a Barbie who saves the world a lot. What is the plural of apocalypse anyways? Contrary to tradition she has attracted a team with whom she turns back the tide of horrific and humorous dark magic’s, demons, vampires and human perversions. It is a love story; an epic of affection for a world that feels like it has gone mad; a questing for holy intervention; a sketching of the necessity of a community; and a striving against violent waves of darkness.

Outside of my professional responsibilities as a Christian pastor I know I have converted people to four other things. 1 – baseball 2 – Todd Snider, no really, check him out, he’s good (a poster for an album decks the outside of the Magic Box at one point), 3- Buffy  4- Craft Beer.  Buffy/Angel are a pair of 20/21st century television shows that were a postmodern-ish playground for the interaction of the daily crisis and otherworldly spiritual forces. This is in stark contrast, if not battle with, the modernist empiricism, materialism and capitalism of the late 20th century. The crises of the people (and other beings) are demonically demonstrated reflections of our own. 

I cannot imagine anyone finding this hashtag who doesn't know the Josh Whedon created shows  - but they both are commonly referred to as the Buffyverse.  Here the heroes of the Buffyverse are creatures constantly in the processes of conversion to their mission and vocation. Conversion is not only a persistent experience within the Buffyverse, but it is also the way many people describe their entry into following the show(s). So it feels  natural to reflect on religious conversion from a progressive religious perspective using the hours of narrative of the most theologically dense shows ever. 

In this blog series I will be adapting an old paper to discuss conversion in the Buffyverse generally – from what to what, the kinds and stages of conversion. At the same time I identify the stages and types of the threefold conversion process of Cordelia Chase, a primary character first on Buffy and then on Angel. Spike might take the prize for the steepest conversions, but I chose Cordelia not only for the extremity of her conversions but because of her initial allegiance with the conventional world that religious institutions can feel in battle with every day.  If high school was hell, conventionality might be worse.  What did CS Lewis say, a world full of nice people being nice is that much harder to save?

There is one further reason for choosing to examine the conversion of Cordelia in the Buffyverse. Given our individualist culture, evil tends to be assigned to individual interactions. The context of these shows provides an alternative narrative: evil is dangerously large and not a one on one phenomenon. This is an attractive and resonant vision for the youngest adults in our society who have felt acutely victimized by their forbearer’s constant scapegoating. To confront persistent systemic evil, the collective courage and appreciation of difference in a multicultural society is demanded. The youngest generations respond to Buffy and friends because they provide a post-modern story to find each other in. It is a vision of how we can meet the ever-present critical challenges that are worth our blood, sweat and tears. 

Furthermore, the concurrent attraction for philosophical, sociological and religious academics suggests that the Buffyverse may be a meeting place between the overeducated and the everyday citizen. Academia of the humanities has consistently struggled to communicate with conventional people effectively regarding the complex but essential issues we study and everyone lives with. These shows portray these topics on a regular basis, sidestepping the sometimes emotionally loaded traditional sources. This makes Buffy an excellent medium to examine the sometimes verboten topic in progressive Christian zones - that is religious conversion. 

“How do you know the other world is any better than this? Because it has to be.”

-Rupert Giles

(post#2)

Everything: Psalm 1 and Thresholds and Caregiving in Community

The only high school graduation gift I really remember, and still have is this book you may remember called ‘All I Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten’. I'm not entirely sure the title holds true for me, or anyone else anymore. Life is so complex and daunting, but then I hear of friends giving kindergartners lessons on how to blow your nose and think, oh yeah, that is really important. So maybe.

Our Psalm today is Psalm 1 . Somebody, somewhere, some time, was led to put this psalm first. It is a prelude of sorts, intentionally written, or reshaped to serve as a prologue that informs us about the book that is to come. Psalm 1 is a preview that proclaims that the whole Psalter is to be instruction for life together. How do we pray as we journey into the borderlands and promised lands in troubled times? The answers this book travels through are a road trip dialogue between God and humanity that is as scenic and complicated as life itself.

Taken as a whole, the sacred song of the Psalms is this: we are called to be a community whose foundation is the God of compassion. The Psalms keep their eye on the destination, which is the ultimate reign of God. A reign which is not of raw brutality but steadfast love. It is motherly compassion and an ideal commitment of the beloved friend, neighbor, or caregiver.

Psalm 1 and 2 belong together and they open this library by summarizing this collection of poetic songs and prayers as everything you need to know. To emphasize this point the first word of Psalm 1 basically begins with the Hebrew version of the letter a and the last word begins with the Hebrew version of the letter z. Kindergarten stuff. However, there are two words we need to consider a little deeper comprehend today’s Psalm.

First is happy. There is a part of happy that is utter joy, warm cookies delight. But there is also a side of how we use the word happy that is saccharine shallow vapidness. The part that is a smiling dayglow glitter emoticon. There is a part of happy that is an unattainable goal that shames our doldrums and griefs and steals the satisfaction and the holy from the daily reality of life.

What is translated in the prayer book as happy is elsewhere sometimes translated as blessed. It is that wish or prayer for well being we utter when we say bless you. It is the naming of the glowing centeredness and glad purpose with which we desire you leave this Eucharistic liturgy with. However, there is also a way in which blessed gets used as implying privileged or prosperous. A way in which the idea is that if you follow the rules God is pleased and you get not only your allowance but also a bonus. Which isn’t the way the God of Jubilee works. Isn’t evident in the God who is on the side of the least the last and the lost. And it is really difficult to find in the life of Jesus who we understand to be the very essence and image of God.

So to begin this Psalm in deep understanding if you want to imagine, grabbing a pencil, and crossing through the word happy, and write Centered Gladness instead. But hold on to that pencil. Because the second word to reconsider, is law. Imagine crossing it out too and now write instead torah. The Hebrew text says torah, and a sort of straightforward translation of the word would be instruction. Torah is not just recited text, it is more accurate to think of Torah as a way of life. The difference between law and Torah is rather like the difference between knowing about Jesus and following Jesus. Torah is the instruction of God as learned through people dwelling with text and teaching and tradition and each other. It is holy and communal knowledge of what makes the difference between a healthy society and one that is lost and broken and fragmented. The torah wisdom way that leads to divine gladness and not wickedness, is dwelling day in and day out with a rooted community.

Today we are celebrating our graduates, Sending your loved ones out into the world is what we have been striving for it brings us gladness and delight and it is oh so difficult too. I think this time of the year is a good time to remember that caregiving Does seem to require a Divine sort of countenance. The ones we love may not make the choice you would make the first time or the second time or the evertime, but still we love you support you hold you in prayer and welcome you home again. Like the psalms, there are moments of thanksgiving and praise and lament moments of orientation when you think you have it all figured out, and then the disorientation when you have no idea what is going on. Maybe all we needed to know we could learn by studying and praying the Psalms.

So friends we are sending some of you out across the Cascade curtain and one Whitman graduate across the pond. And there are two things that I want all of us to remember from our Psalm today. The first is that you are never alone or unloved. You are made for community and welcome in this community (in the broadest understanding of this). I urge/invite you to make a deliberate effort to find a sacred community to be a part of a place where you can give and receive a foundation of steadfast love across generations and peer groups. Now I really want that to be a church and I absolutely want that to be an Episcopal or Anglican one, because I'm a bit partisan. I urge it because part of my story in my college years is that getting involved in the church community being lured there by free dinner on Sunday night gave me a beloved community when I felt lost and all alone. Thanks be to God. Furthermore, studies show that the correlating factor for success in high-pressure collegiate studies is participating in an active spiritual community.

The second bit of advice I want you to take from Psalm 1 is that there is wickedness and villainy out there, but you already know that. I want to remind all of us that sometimes we can miss how evil creeps in by casual forms like ‘everybody's doing it’ and ‘nothing I can do really matters’. More than that I urge you to use your voice STAND UP SPEAK UP ACT UP. Name cruelty and injustice when you see it. Pursue gladness for all with your whole self. Because the divine wisdom of the ages is that true happiness, real blessedness doesn't come from a momentary selfish high but from loving yourself and your neighbors as much as God loves you.

I cannot stand here in this place today and not make a brief mention of the Acts lesson as well. Of how in the mystery of the lectionary, which is a set three-year rotation of readings, chosen a while ago by a committee far from here, and they not only gave us this Psalm for today but also the Acts lesson which is about choosing a new collaborative leader. And so are we. Our prayer for St. Paul’s, which we have taken to heart is rather like the Psalms. It is built out of the personal and communal, it is thanksgiving and wisdom and lament, and its hope is on the goal and the purpose of this community - the reign of God made real in real time. As we all journey across this threshold, will you take it home with you and pray it? How could you adapt it to be for yourself, or for all who graduate or make discernment decisions at this time?

Spiritual author Kathleen Norris once said she didn’t read the paper because every reality that would be in the paper is already present in the Psalter which she prays every single day. Maybe it is rather like kindergarten lessons for a centered and glad life today. All we need to pray and live to journey in the Jesus movement. Love God, care for people, name evil for what it is and FIGHT IT, give thanks for blessings, and don’t bury your feelings. 

So graduates and congregants, parents, friends and loved ones, go forth, pray, cry, laugh, give thanks, act up, and learn fervently JUST AS THE PSALMIST SAYS. Take to heart the word of God this day, be blessed and guided and rooted. Be centered in the holy community of Jesus Christ wherever life leads you. And always, always, love as you are loved, all the time and everywhere.

Amen.

St. Paul's, Walla Walla

Easter 7 RCLB

May 13, 2018

Abiding a bit Further: Are we Branches or also, Raisins?

What is it like to be a grape? I don’t know. Are they curious or cynical? Deluded or daring? If you are a grape you are a grape in a cluster, you were once a flower, on a branch, on a vine, and now you are a fruit. 

The cultivation of grapes goes back at least 5000 years in West Asia. In the Hebrew scriptures, a fruitful vineyard is a sign of peace and settledness and abundance. Because in times of bloody conflicts, which West Asia has seen an eternity of, vineyards are trampled and torched. The image of Israel being a vine and the vineyard being God’s own is old and complex. It casts a vision that we are fostered in hope as a gift for the world. That we are rooted in blessing but sent out to be a blessing.

To speak of God as the vineyard keeper is to speak of God as the infinite source of everything we are and everything we have yet to become. It is a marvelous blend we heard in today’s two new testament lessons. The first letter of John and a selection from the Gospel of John. It is broadly understood that these two texts are from a common community, but not from the same author. Same varietal, same company, different label, different season.

In the 1 John letter, we hear love love love over 25 times and abide more than 5 times (link to readings t the bottom). Even if you pay no attention at all you heard the commission: abide in love. This isn’t some sappy gnarly pop song version of love, but vivacious compelling gut-wrenching commitment of heart and soul and mind. The kind of Love that grows and endures in the community.

Following this letter we heard a classic parabolic ‘I am’ statement. In John we hear Jesus say, I am the gate, I am the Good Shepherd, I am the Bread. Here he says ‘I am the true vine and God is the vineyard keeper’. Theologically and imaginatively Jesus offers a vision of blessing where God is the vineyard owner and protector, and in this text, the Greek is vineyard worker. God is present in his own vineyard. God abides with us deeply in the world, loves this vineyard wholeheartedly. Loving our possibilities and desiring change for our ‘pests’.

In the gospel this imagery goes one stage deeper, Jesus says he is the vine. He is the hope and the sustenance and the long commitment and the structure. Being one with Jesus is being in the living vine of the beloved vineyard. The vine gives us life and makes us one, it doesn’t care about your perfection or your past. And this oneness does not limit where we go or what we become.

My guess is something like 97% of ancient grapes were not grown to be table snacks. Most ancient grapes were fostered and harvested to be two things. Wine and raisins. Now, if you store grapes without refrigeration, what happens? They ferment. It is the way of the world. Grapes have about four possibilities: Eat them. Ferment them, or let that process keep going into vinegar, or raisins. The only way to store a grape in the ancient world was to transform it. Ancient common wines were much denser and foamier and of lower alcohol content than anything sold around here. They were everyday lifesaving nutrition. So of course, vineyards and wine were precious and praised.

When you dry a grape and make it a raisin, you make it incredibly storable and much more transportable that wine or vinegar. Raisins are storage food, and they are also journey food, trail mix. The church is at its best, fruit in a peaceful cluster, abiding with one another as God abides with us, and then offering that goodness to the neighborhood. The church at its best is fruit that is ready to be transformed, is ready to be changed so that it may be shared.

Wherever we all are a year from now I trust that we will be ready to love as we are loved. To trust the strangeness of new leaders and new neighbors, as part of our intention and our transformation. For all the earthy plantedness of this lovely vineyard, we know that our days to come include traveling songs. The work we have been doing over the last 2 years is like wine aging in the bottle And raisins in a pocket. We didn’t do this work and pursue this vision and dwell in a loving cluster to stay on the vine. Grapes left on the vine are bird food and deer snacks.

If I were a grape I might have a hard time trusting the process, there is so much long unknowingness in the life of a grape. The image Jesus offered is crucial to his answer to our questions. How do we grow together on the vine? Common prayer, fellowship, service. Why do we grow together? To go out and be a blessing. So I wonder. What does it mean for the reign of God and the redemption of the world that Jesus is the vine and you are the branch or the grape or the raisin?

Today we celebrate together with Morning Prayer; which is part of our connectivity and branches that go back deep into our Anglican life together. How could a weekday practice of communal morning or evening prayer, lay-led be a blessing here? What if a sign on the street said, come practice being the vineyard? Would an invitation to connect quietly to the true Vine be the answer to the question that someone in your neighborhood doesn’t even know they have?

In the baptismal font there are raisins, and also grapes, Because I realize not everyone likes raisins. I invite you to take a few with you. Eat them. Savor them. Consider three questions.

What does it mean for our life here and beyond, that Jesus is the vine?

Then if you are a grape, what does that mean?

And if you are a raisin, where will you go with that insight?

It might be nice to be a grape. No fundamentalisms or addictions. No grief to numb nor breaking news to tune into. Your rules are pretty simple. Live with your neighbors. Grow on structures that are built for your fruition. But you also trust that this moment is not the end of your story. May we know that we are fruit of good courage that we are watered in abiding love, and ready to go wherever God leads us. Amen.




April 29, 2018

St. Paul's, Walla Walla

Morning Prayer Homily

RCL Easter 5b

More than Planting the Vineyard: Lifelong Formation makes the Wine

This is not the abandoned vineyard.

In the last thirty or so years, Walla Walla county went from no vineyards to nearly 3,000 acres. They grow lots of things around here: mustard seeds, chickpeas, lentils, onions, apples, wheat, alfalfa, and wine grapes.  The geological history and seasonal variations and being the wettest part of the dry side of the state make for world-class viticulture. The industry here isn't very old, yet not far from my house is an abandoned vineyard. It still has the wooden structures and vines that grow wildly and even produce grapes in between the overwhelming blackberry vines. Why I asked a winemaker, why would someone abandon a vineyard?

Disease and changes in water availability are the two primary reasons. There are some vineyards that once made good wine and no longer do. That is good and healthy to name out loud. The same winemaker asked me, why are you planting new churches, isn’t Christianity dying? Maybe, I said, maybe we are evolving into something more authentic and true to the love of God. We used to think we were making a whole lot of wine and that was a verifiable measurement and we felt satisfied with the big shallow number. Lot's of wine, but not particularly remarkable or memorable or eye-opening or daring. Now I think we desire to make more authentic wine that heals and transforms; sometimes in huge volumes and other times in a single barrel garage vintage.

I believe in planting new vineyards and find the work that we are doing in these efforts of church planting and evangelism are damn exciting and good good news. However, I am concerned that if you look at our proposed budget, we are investing in planting new vineyards but not budgeting for their long-term care and feeding; nor are we budgeting for the ongoing re-evangelization of lifelong congregational formation, settings old and fresh. The current draft budget seems to be spending much more on fancy new toys and equipment and new vineyards than it does for supporting the daily work of making wine at all the production facilities. It is hard to escape the impression that we are supporting the showy parts of the whole body of God faith experience, and not the rather tedious but redemptive work of local nurture, education, and formation.  We cannot plant new vineyards, and buy the equipment, and expect any of the wine to get itself to the feasting table.

There are thousands of practitioners, lay and ordained, nurturing and dug into this work of fermentation/formation every single day.  A field that is constantly evolving and changing and demands attention and new learning and re-evangelizing and being re-evangelized all the time. FORMA is the established, collaborative, grassroots network that equips and supports and ferments lifelong formation all across the church for all ages and congregations.  If you teach or pastor or plan or lead in the shaping of Christian lives then you should discover what the networks of FORMA can do to assist your mission.  

Whatever the ecosystem is that your congregation is planted in, you are called to teach and transform across whole lives.  The alliance of experts, experimenters, gardeners, and winemakers is already in place in FORMA. We want to help you make the wine of faithful lives as part of the reign of God. 

Funding FORMA continues the mission and movement and fermentation on the ground all across the church.  Funding FORMA collaborates with the amazing and limited staff at DFMS and helps meet the need they are woefully understaffed and underfunded to meet.  Funding FORMA helps us get from vineyard sprout to cup on the table (and then back out into the world to heal and repair and shine).

Garden Playzones Breaking Open and Sprouting New Life

We have a fantastic office assistant he has bright ginger hair and today he turns 1. Gavin has people he trusts and those he looks at suspiciously, and he likes to climb when we are not looking. He can play on his own, yet even if there were other children in the room, he wouldn't know how to play with them. As he grows and develops there will come a time when he plays next to, but not with others. The experts call this parallel play: multiple children working with the same toy set, yet each is in their own story. Much of adult work life can be like this.

Later in childhood most of us develop the capacity to play with others, to play along. This is the experience of imagination where a box of sand can become an epic landscape. All of these phases are important parts of human growth and intellectual development and most of us are always utilizing different parts of these different stages as needed. Entering into another person’s story knowing how to play along how to say ‘yes-and’ or ‘no-but’ is a crucial part of lifelong human being togetherness.

When I was 12 years old I was the constant volunteer in the church nursery and there was this moment it was such an everyday moment I doubt anyone else recalls that morning at all. Yet I can tell you where I was and what the weather was like outside. I was sitting on the floor in the middle right side of the room near some mirrors. There were probably 10 other children and two other caregivers in the room, all of whom were playing or watching or napping. I was sitting on the floor with a boy named Toby, and he had chosen to play with the blue and yellow Fisher-Price Little People house. Maybe you remember those, with it's chairs and cars and swing set with holes for the round figures to fit in. He was delightfully playing through a story with this house and these figures, and it was real and it was alive, and I knew I wasn't in the same place that he was. The imaginary world that was his I was no longer able to access in the same way, and I knew it. I could see right then and there that part of my childhood-self had broken open and fallen aside. It probably had diminished well before that moment, I just never noticed it until then. To this very day I can feel the mournfulness of that moment. The loss of something beautiful and connective. It seemed as if a door to a room I loved had been shut.

This developmental shift I felt that day is completely normal part of the maturing process. It's not that imagination goes away, it's just that it's retooling, sinking in deep, interiorizing. Some people stay in the concrete factoid zone most of the time. It's reasonable to suggest that in our culture where what is valuable is what is countable and readable, that this stage of concrete thinking is even more pronounced. We build our lives and our world out of signals and data more than we dwell in the playful garden that sprouts unverifiable things like emotions and dreams and heartaches. 

Earlier in the Gospel of John Jesus said that he comes to us so that we may have life abundant and love abundant. Throughout this gospel we are invited into a non linear non data-based storytelling experience that shows that the world is both blessed from the start and now horribly gone wrong. Wrong about what is powerful and wrong about what is holy. Jesus says servanthood is union with the divine; loving your life is letting go of it; and through our union with him in his humiliation, the corrupt authorities of this world will be cast down. John’s gospel isn’t a concrete explanation of yes and no but a life story we are invited into. Where strangely, somehow, Jesus shares that love is stronger than hate, or isolation, or even death. This is an upside down story that the bitter system cannot bear.

There are dark clouds of manipulation and shallowness haunting our well being each and every day. Gloom hovers over the neighborhoods where seeds of hope have been buried. Will they be watered and fed or abandoned? Our choice. Jesus asks, are we going to be gardeners or are we going to be waste managers? Maybe there are people in your life who come to you asking why church? But they may be saying is: we wish to see Jesus. Maybe you're the kind of person that doesn't say the J word outside of this property. A person who tries to be good, and likes something unnamable in the motions of Christian worship, but who doesn't show faithfulness in any company at all. That is a tough skin a hard shell that may have carried some of us through calmer waters. Is this the time for shedding that hard shell that used to protect us but now is choking us? 

Jesus says to let his life become our life to let his story become our story. He doesn't want us playing independently of him, I don’t even think that he wants us playing alongside him, unless we are mirroring him. Jesus Christ calls us to follow him and let our imaginations weave together into lives of mercy and justice. When we enter into the imagination of life with Jesus we will change and this neighborhood and this congregation will change. Shallow, reactionary otherizing isn't that different from that selfish play of our youngest years. When Jesus says we need to be like children to enter the kingdom of God he's not talking about that selfish part of childhood, the part that doesn't know how to control the unjust passions or how to live in moral community. The part that Jesus is inviting us into is the part where we know how to play WELL with each other. Play is not leisure or silliness, but incarnate meaning-making. And every age of person does it, even if some of us keep it on the inside. The playfulness of faithfulness is to enter each other's imagination and God's imagination and live into it with our whole selves.

We can't just pretend and wear Christian-ish costumes anymore. They are too thin to answer the real questions of this hour. Why do we walk out for those who were slaughtered, because we are one with Jesus who absolutely walked out. Why do we hold hands together, because Jesus stands there with us holding our hands. He knows our unacknowledged hatefulness and he loves US and forgives US. We can experience our place in the story with daring and candor or we can bury ourselves in the little bits of truth that we like and ignore the rest.

If I were to take a guess at why the last few years have been fruitful and life-giving for St. Paul’s, even in the context of panic and embarrassment and waiting, it could be that we have learned to play along with each other and God. There's a ground of wholehearted trust that playing along well reveals. I feel like we've gotten better at leaning into each other's stories, and figuring out how dense weights could become the compost where seeds have sprouted new life. I hope we've gotten better at trying new things, of hearing our neighbor suggest something holy daring and our saying, okay, I am not really sure I get it, but how can I come along and make your dream real?

Many years after I sat on that floor and noticed that something was gone, I was watching a friends daughter after-school. Willow and I were playing out a story in their front yard. One with heroines and evil doers in a baseball game. I was so involved in the story that I believed I could jump down three steps and take off running while wearing flip-flops and holding a water bottle. I fell flat on my face. Six-year-old Willow felt no malice at this occasion, she was concerned that I was ok. And I felt very little humiliation. Falling on your face is normal when you are a child. As I got up off the ground And wiped the dirt from my skirt, I laughed. I laughed at the absurdity of believing I could have made that leap successfully. And I laughed because I could see that I really knew how to play along again. That mournful shell of unimagination of my younger self had been shed. The other side of being broken open, is getting up, stepping out, and playing again.

 Amen.

Lent 5b, RCL

March 18, 2018

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington 

Other Commandments: Temples, Getting Closer, and What We Can Hear

Cognitive behavioral science tells us that when we are in the heat of the moment when we are busy with adrenaline and excitement, we don't process instructions the way we do when we are at rest. If you see a person is running where they shouldn't be running, and you yell ‘don't run’, what our minds hear is RUN! We can't process the don't part of the instruction in that moment. In today's lesson from Exodus we are invited into a framework for an undiminished human community, or as it is more commonly known, the Ten Commandments. The people of Israel have come out of Egypt, out of slavery, and through the waters in the life-defining Exodus event. They are now in the desert, A people on a nomadic journey of many years trying to figure out who they are, and how to live together and survive. This set of commands is intended to shape our life together. Shape it into something that looks like the compassionate God who delivered us.

These commands set the framework for a bold attempt to locate the best ways to live around our fidelity to God and God's priorities. Even though the wilderness setting is anxious, This revelation doesn't seem to come from a place of fear and hurt. If anything it's trying to reduce the systems of adversity and alienation. Most of the Commandments are phrased from that do not stance, and we teach them over and over from the place of stillness because it would be hard to hear in the context of crisis. And we teach many of them from negation ‘you will not’ and ‘do not’ because there are times when saying ‘do not run onto the field’ is much clearer than the verbal gymnastics of ‘help us maintain the integrity of the game and keep all guests and players and staff safe by staying inside the guest seating area.’ However, I want to look more closely at two positively phrased Commandments: Sabbath and Elders.

In this day and age with all of our expected productivity and demands for perfection, Sabbath may be the most unfollowed commandment. The sabbath God invites us isn’t just for the elites, it is for all. It is a day of leveling the playing field. The servants have to rest. The women who do most of the household chores have to rest. For a people who had been slaves in Egypt and will later find themselves in Exile and trampled under the foot of Empire again and again, for any vulnerable people, the guarantee of rest is liberating. Sabbath is about healing and freedom and interrupting the systems that demand go go go. God calls us back to Sabbath, to honoring each other and the real weight of the gift that God believes we are.

Then we are directed to honor our elders. It says parents, but let us choose to expand its neighborhood just a bit. This word to honor in the Hebrew it means to give weight to, it is a word that implies heaviness. Honor does not demand that we obey blindly. To honor is to treat the wisdom of those who have lived before us and longer than us with hefty seriousness. I do wonder however if this one needs a footnote. Perhaps that quote frequently attributed to Chief Seattle: remember that we are borrowing our today from our children's future. In a recent interview sociologist, Brene Brown said: People are hard to disregard close up; so move in, get curious, get closer. Make connections, try to discover how we are enmeshed with each other in ways that are bigger and deeper than any of our ideas or borders are.


Part of the point of these Commandments is setting a space where we walk with God, A framework where God's presence and intention for our life is made evident. And paradoxically one of the primary points that John is trying to share in his gospel lesson today is that Jesus is the framework and shape of God's presence in this life. In the scene today we are at the rebuilt Temple with its holy of holy chamber and porticos and hallways teeming with people. A few years ago I realized how close the measurements of this sanctuary are to the measurements of the Jerusalem Temples. It is easy for us to imagine ourselves in the Temple if you just look around. Imagine the tables set up in the narthex, and sheep and oxen in the atrium. At this moment in the gospels, during the festival of the Passover, imagine it would be as busy as an arena on a game night. Now in this space and in the middle of this busyness, John wants us to see that the uncontainable God who is supposed to be held by this structure, this same God is in the whole life of this man who is here In this Jesus from before the beginning began.

With him we have the concrete presence of the absolute aliveness of God and an authentic, compelling and creative witness to who God is and who God is calling us to be. However, it is our enmeshment with the powers that be and fence builders of the world that are thrown into chaos by Jesus’ very presence. Our response to this truth-telling and brilliant holy life Is panic. The mob response to his closeness and his difference Is to cast him out to try and resolve our shame and dismay and chaos with a scapegoat. Jesus will be found at the center of a terrible game that is a murderous lie. The systems that keep us running, keep us blind and harmful and never able to sit still, these mechanisms are hidden from us because we are knee deep in them. But in Jesus’ death, we can see it. He is the victim who judges all of our unjust systems of grind and push and pull and kill. Jesus will turn the tables over and send the critters out into the streets. Jesus will expose all the little accommodations to the ways of God. All the little ignorances that give the authorities their power. Can we open our hearts and be set free from unquestioning participation in the systems of death?

I found myself wondering this week if the lovely framework of commandments covers all the complexities of contemporary life? In many ways, the whole set is broad enough to include all sorts of complexity that the Ancients could never have imagined. On the other hand, if you look at our history the people of God maybe we could have used a couple more operating instructions. One of the things we struggle with over time is fear of the other, our anxiety about the stranger, the widow, the different person who we continue to exclude and diminish. Maybe we could use the command to not fear the stranger. To see every neighborhood as a temple, every person in every neighborhood as precious and revelatory as any holy mountain could ever be.

The new commandment I'd really like to have is: don't be a jerk (or a troll or a bully). The problem is if you're being a jerk, you're probably caught in adrenaline and anger and loneliness and in that moment like that, we are the child who is running who can't hear the don't part of the command. In Martin Luther King, Jr’s book Why We Can’t Wait he outlined ten duties participants in the Birmingham protests were to abide by. I wonder if they can help us, Help us shape our lives as temples of the presence of God, Help us confront the systems of diminishment that grind and scapegoat every day. These are the duties (slightly interpreted), let us pray them together:

Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus
Remember that we seek Justice and Reconciliation not victory
Walk and talk in the manner of love for God is love
Pray daily to be used by God in order that all might be free
Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all might be free
Observe both friend and foe with the ordinary rules of courtesy
Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world
Refrain from the violence of fist tongue or heart
Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health
Follow the directions of the movement and of the Captain.

In the name of our Lord and Captain, Amen.

Lent 3  B
RCL
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Walla Walla, Washington