Alcoholism and the Episco-Baptist Phenomenon

I just got home from a really fantastic diocesan workshop on the role of alcoholism in families, congregations, and clergy life.  This post is a partial-processing of that experience.

All denominations in Texas are functionally Baptist.  That was the observation Stanley Hauerwas made somewhere I can't find just now.  There are in Texas, he contended, Lutheran-Baptists, Episcopal-Baptists, Methodist-Baptists, Catholic-Baptists, and even a few Baptist-Baptists.

If this is true (and I believe that, on the whole, it hits close to the mark) then it follows that - over against whatever imagined distinctiveness a given denomination sets out to achieve - each denomination inadvertently picks up unintentional and unique marks which emerge out of the otherwise homogenous sea of denominational anti-diversity.  Moreover, these unintentional marks are probably more empirically decisive than the ones we imagine for ourselves.

For Episcopalians, the most notorious example of an unintentional mark in the church's common life is our friendly disposition toward alcohol.  If Episcopalians in Texas are really Episcopal-Baptists in terms of congregational polity, interpretation of Scripture, and even worship (which is at the very least plausible as evangelicals continue to discover the liturgy and as Episcopalians - at least in West Texas - regularly seek new ways to re-imagine the words "snake-belly-low") then the lay person floating between the two is left with only this question of practical observation: "Why do/don't you drink?"

Importantly, I think there is a great deal more that distinguishes the Baptist and Episcopal traditions than drinking, but when you dilute all the rest, booze is what's left.  I know a great many individuals who would not find offense in the description of an Episcopalian as a Baptist whose church lets her drink in front of others openly.  Captain Obvious point: Drinking is probably a dangerous reason to prefer one denomination to another.

Two quick things to say in the interest of full-disclosure:

1) I drink, to borrow a favorite phrase of my tradition, "in moderation."  Mostly beer, and only good ones; as a hobby in diversity, I try one new six-pack each week.  Two beers is my limit in a single sitting, and that would indicate a special occasion.

2) I teach confirmation classes, and I unapologetically begin with the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral.  That is, I believe there is a great deal more distinctive about the Episcopal Church than the room she provides for moderate drinking.  (Ironically, the distinctiveness of the Episcopal tradition relative to other Protestant traditions is often our grounding in Jesus' prayer from John's gospel: "that they all may be one.") 

But here we are, in Texas, where everybody's Baptist, and so #2 gets washed away by #1.

[Aside: In a similar vain, how many Catholics does the Episcopal Church attract because Catholics are not permitted to remarry?]

Drinking, which the Episcopal Church permits on good and theologically sound grounds - grounds like the goodness of God's gifts used for God's purposes - is decidedly not the focal foundation for the Anglican identify Thomas Cramner first envisioned.  But that, I suppose, is the whole point: stripped from its grounding in the foundations Cramner did have in mind, all we're left with is the assumption of moral laxity from a Baptist perspective that increasingly makes its home inside the Episcopal Church, just to the extent that there exist Baptists who enjoy moral laxity.

All of this leads me to two goals for the Episcopal Church, which I'll only have space to mention briefly:

1) Don't shy away from your Episcopal foundation!  And don't let the Baptists fool you: you are a far richer tradition than Schlitz Malt Liquor on a Saturday.  If you go to an Episcopal Church and don't feel as comfortable with that foundation as you'd like to, ask a friend whom you suspect of usefulness in this department out to coffee.  I would pee my pants if you asked me.  I love my church because Jesus met me here - long before my first beer.  Most Episcopalians would be honored to share what they have gleaned of God's mercy, love, and presence in and through the Episcopal Church.  (Parenthetically, among other things, you will find there spiritual foundations for recovery from addiction.)

2) Be aware that the world (or at least Texas), without the time for more than sound-byte stereotypes, sees you/me/us (the Episcopal Church) as the Baptists who drink.  Be mindful that this stereotype leaves you/me/us especially vulnerable to abuse of alcohol, precisely because we already have the reputation for doing so openly.  It is more difficult for us to say things to one another than it would be for a Baptist, and it is far easier for us to rationalize our abuse of alcohol on theological grounds.  In this, we must be loving in our care for each other, vigilant in our exercise of Christian freedom, and so formed in the community created by the promises of baptism - the death and resurrection of Jesus - that we can speak or hear the truth with our brother or sister in the crucial moment and - hopefully - long before it.

I say, "long before it," because, honestly, we have a lot to share with one another about the unfathomable and unexpected gift of this new life in Christ, long before we get to drinking.

Why Christians Don't Need Institutions in Order to Screw Up

In an earlier post we looked at Lesslie Newbigin's contention that denominational institutions are a particular kind of anti-sacrament. An odd thing, maybe, for a Protestant to contend, but the idea that schism is bad is not new, either.  What IS new is Newbigin's subsequent contention that a) institutions AND b) unaffiliated individuals (oftentimes perceived as the opposite or alternative of institutions) ironically share the same doomed trust in the prevailing secular ideology that relegates spirituality to the purely private sphere.  This insight should challenge anti-institutional folks to nuance their surface critiques and look for real and developed alternatives of hope.

Plainly, Newbigin believes he has discovered the flaw that makes institutions worthy of suspicion, and it happens to be the same flaw that those not committed to institutions often make.  Such a revelation is vitally important to explore since the goal is the flourishing of the Church's mission and eliminating an identified challenge is not the same as constructing a positive solution.  

Not surprisingly, Newbigin believes this hope has as its source the Gospel of Christ, and especially here he makes an appeal to reclaiming a "true apocalyptic".  Notice what is happening: the flaw is no longer the mere existence of institutions (a clumsy thing to blame since institutions refer to people working together in any kind of organized way) but is now located in how we relate and respond to the action of the living God - the hope we have in Christ.  Here is Newbigin:

There can be no missionary encounter with our culture without a biblically grounded eschatology, without recovering a true apocalyptic.  The dichotomy that runs through our culture between the private and the public worlds is reflected in the dissolution of the biblical vision of the last things into two separate and unrelated forms of hope.  One is the public hope for a better world in the future, the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century French philosophers, the utopia of the evolutionary social planners, or the classless society of the revolutionary sociologists.  The other is the private hope for personal immortality in a blessed world beyond this one.  This dissolution is tragic.  It destroys the integrity of the human person.  If I pin my hope to a perfect word that is to be prepared for some future generations, I know that I and my contemporaries will never live to see it, and therefore that those now living can be - and if necessary must be - sacrificed in the interests of those as yet unborn; and so the way is open for the ruthless logic of totalitarian planners and social engineers.  If on the other hand I place all my hope in a personal future, I am tempted to wash my hands of responsibility for the public life of the word and to turn inwards towards a purely private spirituality.

That tragic split runs right through our lives and our society, and only the biblical understanding of the last things can heal that dichotomy.  The apocalyptic teaching that forms such an important part of the New Testament has generally in our culture been pushed to the margins of Christian thought.  It has been treasured, of course, by small oppressed groups on the margins of our society, but it has been generally silenced in the mainstream of our established Christianity.  Essentially this says to us: If I ask what in all my active life is the horizon of my expectations, the thing to which I look forward, the answer, it seems to me, cannot be some future utopia in the future and cannot be some personal bliss for myself, it can only be, quite simply, the coming of Jesus to complete his Father's will.  He shall come again.  He is the horizon of my expectations.  Everything from my side, whether prayer or action, private or public, is done to him and for him.  It is simply offered for his use.  In the words of Schweitzer, it is an 'acted prayer for His coming.'  He will make of it what he will.  My vigorous and righteous actions do not build the holy city.  They are too shot through with sin for that.  But they are acted prayers that he will give the holy city.  And that embraces both the public and the private world.  The holy city, as its name indicates, is on the one hand the crown and perfection of all that we call civilization.  Into it the kinds of the nations bring their cultural treasures.  But it is also the place where every tear is wiped from our eyes and we are the beloved children of God who see him face to face.  Only in that vision and hope is the tragic dichotomy of our culture healed.

Are Denominations Anti-Sacraments? (and who do they worship?)

I am currently on the home-stretch of Paul Weston's Lesslie Newbigin Reader. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The more I read, the less patience I have for any missional/emerging conversation that is not in knowledgeable and active conversation with Newbigin's writings. Newbigin consistently asks the difficult questions upon which the missional church rightly insists, but he steadfastly avoids Pelagian solutions that would turn missionary efforts into technical attempts to "get it right." Better said, Newbigin perceives the theological resources available to the whole system, rather than zero in on a particular perceived "issue", read in isolation of the whole. And "the whole" for Newbigin is always the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

A great example of this Christ-centered perspective at work comes in his consideration of denominational institutions. Rather than pit institutions in the bad camp and all other forms on the good, his analysis lands him at the heart of the challenge: a gospel-based rationale for freedom of thought that is capable of stepping outside of the inherited basis for that freedom in Western thought, which comes via the Enlightenment. So doing, he saves us the embarrassment that occurs when well-meaning Christians change everything only to realize that they have really changed nothing, because we have not been able to accurately see ourselves, much less sufficiently see ourselves.

Here are some highlights from his observations:

"...the denomination is simply the institutional form of privatized religion. It is a voluntary association of individuals. It is to put it simply - the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual surrender to the ideology of our culture."

"They cannot confront our culture as Jesus confronted Pontius Pilate with the witness to the truth, since they do not claim to be more than associations of individuals who hold the same opinion."

"I believe that it is possible to act effectively in each local situation in such a way that the Christians together in each place begin even now to be recognizable as the Church for that place."

"If we are to escape from the ideology of the Enlightenment without falling into the errors of Corpus Christianum, we must recover a doctrine of freedom of thought and conscience that is founded not on the ideology of the Enlightenment but on the gospel."

Holiness, Virginity, and Texas Football

The gospel lesson for this coming Sunday - Easter 7 - contains this marvelous phrase from Jesus' prayer to his Father: "Sanctify them in the truth."  The words imagine a fundamental unity between the life of holiness and truth so that - as Newbigin, Hauerwas, and others have long contended - there is no such thing as truth that is not embodied truth.  This is not novel, only easily forgotten.  Sanctification - the life of holiness - is necessarily embodied for Christians, realized in the Body of Christ, the Church, whose head is the Incarnate Son of God.  Truth is this Son with whom God's People are in living relationship.  The Truth has a name and makes claims on our embodied lives as Christians.

So Hauerwas, in his book entitled Sanctify Them in the Truth, cites Bruce Marshall in the following footnote:
"Bruce Marshall rightly argues that believes which identify Jesus and the Triune God cannot be held as true except by engagement in worship and prayer in the name of the Trinity.  As he puts it, holding such beliefs as true 'changes your life and unless it changes your life, you are holding true some other beliefs'" (p5).

All of which leads to the following hilarious introduction to Hauerwas' chapter, "Gay Friendship: A Thought Experiment in Catholic Moral Theology."  What I particularly appreciate about the humor in the introduction is the way Hauerwas borders on irreverent with respect to Mary in a way that is not intended to be disrespectful, I think, so much as highlight the greater irreverence that occurs when Christians do not faithfully embody what we say we profess.  Our beliefs are not static, but represent claims of the Triune God on us.  Anyway, here it is:

"'Do you believe in the virgin birth?' That was the question we were asked in Texas in order to test whether we were really 'Christian.'  At least that was the way the challenge was issued during the time I was growing up in Texas.  I confess I was never particularly concerned with how that question should be answered.  I was not raised a fundamentalist, but I believed in the virgin birth.  The problem for me was not believing in it but what difference it might make one way or the other whether I did or did not believe in it.  My preoccupation was not with Mary's virginity, but with my virginity and how I could lose it.  In the meantime, of course, we Texans had football to keep us from being too torn up by any anxieties that might come from questioning the virgin birth" (p105).

Mommas and the Love that Lays Down Life

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

From the first letter of John this morning: "Everyone who loves the parent loves the child."

What apt words, and a beautiful image, for Mother's Day - a providential coincidence of our lectionary this morning - God's good sense of humor.  The author of John observing that the relationship between parent and child is such that love for the one necessarily must entail love for the other; that it makes no sense to talk about loving the one without loving the the other, so deeply united are the persons of the parent and the child in their own mutual love. This is love at its contagious best, where love without condition begets love without condition: "everyone who loves the parent loves the child."

On a personal note, the providential coincidence that gives us this scripture to consider on Mother's Day is especially sweet to me because I have the especially rare gift of sharing this Sunday morning with my mother, whom I never have called "mother" but mostly "Momma," whose love for me is a gift beyond describing.

Everyone who loves the parent loves the child. In this verse's particular context within John's letter, we learn that God the Father is the Parent and Jesus is the Child; that you can't have the Father without the Son. "I am the way and the truth and the life," we remember Jesus saying. "No one comes to the Father except through me." Love of the Father necessarily entails love of the Son. And this is the beginning of the mystery we call the holy Trinity.

But John's logic isn't finished: if God the Father is the Parent and Jesus is the Child, and if everyone who loves the Parent loves the Child, John's gospel won't let us miss this important, climactic point: that in the person of Jesus, we worship the Child who makes us God's children.

We worship the Child who makes us children of God. From now on, when we hear the words, "everyone who loves the parent loves the child," we are moved toward one another. We become a people in the process of learning that love of God and love of each other have become inextricably united in the person of Jesus: the Child who makes us God's children. So now all who love God are given the privilege of loving one another.

This is how the author of 1st John can say elsewhere, "Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their
brothers or sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also."

So you can't have the Father without the Son; neither can you love - and this has been a great disappointment to many people for more than 2,000 years now - neither can you love the Father and/or the Son without the tawdry group of sinners called the Church, even priests; and the Church in turn cannot truly love the Triune God without relationship with the ones outside her walls for whom Christ also died.

Everyone who loves the parent loves the child. And this room and the world are filled with the children of God.

That we are called to love one another may seem obvious. But then, that we struggle with the call to love one another should be equally obvious. As one humorous example, the 17th century French physicist, mathematician, and Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal once wryly observed that "if everyone knew what others said about him (in his absence), there would not be four friends in the world." We can fail quite cruelly in our love for one another.  There is always room for each of us and all of us to grow more deeply into the simple call to love one another as children of the God we love.

So John's epistle reminds us that God's Child has made us God's children and we as God's children have been given the holy privilege of loving all the children of God; our participation in God's love for his children is an extension of our love for the Parent. More pointedly, our participation in God's love for his children is evidence of our love for the Parent.

Having established on what grounds we ARE to love, Jesus goes on in John's gospel to describe the shape of the love we are to share with one another, and Jesus is the shape and source of the love we are called to share: "no one has greater love has this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." These words are a clear reference to what God in Jesus does for us on the cross: laying down God's own life, making us friends of God. But what can it possibly mean for us to love one another like this? To lay down one's life? And here, in these words, I think of mothers again.

I am thinking especially of the routine sacrifices that mothers learn to make like instinct in ways that leave scars and marks and wounds on their bodies, the results of loving vulnerably, even - maybe especially - when no one else notices the sacrifice or cost.

I think of Glennon Melton (no relation), an online blogger who writes hilariously and from a faith perspective about her life as a mom. Not too long ago she shared this experience - she writes:

"...last week, a woman approached me in the Target line and said the following: 'Sugar, I hope you are enjoying this. I loved every single second of parenting my two girls. Every single moment. These days go by so fast.'

"At that particular moment, Amma had arranged one of the new bras I was buying on top of her sweater and was sucking a lollipop that she must have found on the ground. She also had three shop-lifted clip-on neon feathers stuck in her hair. She looked exactly like a contestant from Toddlers and Tiaras. I couldn't find Chase anywhere, and Tish was grabbing the pen on the credit card swiper thing WHILE the woman in front of me was trying to use it. And so I just looked at the woman, smiled and said, 'Thank you. Yes. Me too. I am enjoying every single moment. Especially this one. Yes. Thank you.'

"That's not exactly what I wanted to say, though.

"There was a famous writer who, when asked if he loved writing, replied, 'No. but I love having written.' What I wanted to say to this sweet woman was, 'Are you sure? Are you sure you don't mean you love having parented?'

"I love having written. And I love having parented. My favorite part of each day is when the kids are put to sleep (to bed) and Craig and I sink into the couch to watch some quality TV, like Celebrity Wife Swap, and congratulate each other on a job well done. Or a job done, at least."

Later she adds, "But the fact remains that (one day) I will be that nostalgic lady. I just hope to be one with a clear memory. And here's what I hope to say to the younger mama gritting her teeth in line:

"'It's (hard as heck), isn't it? You're a good mom, I can tell. And I like your kids, especially that one peeing in the corner. She's my favorite. Carry on, warrior. Six hours till bedtime.' And hopefully, every once in a while, I'll add -- 'Let me pick up that grocery bill for ya, sister. Go put those kids in the van and pull on up -- I'll have them bring your groceries out.'"

Love that lays down its life. Kind of like mothers. Even when others don't see it, appreciate it, how hard it is, how much it costs. And John's gospel is thinking especially of the routine sacrifices that all followers of Jesus are asked to learn like instinct in ways that leave scars and marks and wounds on our bodies, resulting from the vulnerability of Christian love and mission, life in community, even - maybe especially - when no one else notices or appreciates the sacrifice.

It is not uncommon to hear people in the church talk about their desire for their church to feel like family. This is good news because, as we discover in John's gospel, God in Christ has loved us into God's family. That we have been made one family is also hard news because the love that has made us God's family is the love that lays down life. This is a difficult and humbling gift to receive, much less want to learn how to do. For us to learn to act in this love without sowing seeds of entitlement, self-righteousness, or resentment cannot be easy, if it is possible at all. If it is possible, it is surely and only because we know that God has become like a mother to us, that we have been reborn in Christ as daughters and sons in the Kingdom of God, where love without condition begets love without condition as we are miraculously swept up into the love that moves the sun and the stars, even the greater love of the Son. So found in the love of this Child whose Parent we love, we can seemingly do no other than seek, serve, and love the image of the Child who makes us God's children in every member of God's family. What a marvelous and unexpected gift.

Amen.

Sermon preacher on Easter 6, also Mother's Day, May 13, 2012.

On What Grounds Do We Preach One Flock?

Sermon excerpts from Easter 4, April 29, 2012

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

Today is the 4th Sunday of Easter - we’re going on a full month of Easter now, good practice in becoming an Easter people - and the 4th Sunday of Easter sometimes goes by the nickname “Good Shepherd Sunday.”  We call it Good Shepherd Sunday on account of the prayer assigned to this day and the readings, especially Psalm 23 - “the Lord is my shepherd” - and our lesson from John’s gospel - “I am the good shepherd,” Jesus says.

On a personal level, I love these readings.  But if I am honest, I don’t at all know what to do with these readings.  In particular, I don’t know what to do with a gospel that tells us that there will be one flock and one shepherd because, this morning, I am preaching to two services at one church.  Two services for somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-five combined worshipers.  If statistics prove true, fewer than half of us this morning will be among the seventy-five worshipers who show up next week, which means that our church is really made up of at least three congregations: the two that are here this morning and the one that will be here next week, plus the half of us who will join them.  One flock, one shepherd, three separate assemblies.  Moreover, I am preaching the news that there will be one flock and one shepherd in a town with no fewer than twenty-one churches.

Tell me: can you think of any other business, non-profit, or other public entity that the good citizens of Portland, Texas, have decided we need twenty-one of?  I mean, can we get somebody as excited about bringing in some really good restaurants as our town is excited about founding new churches?

Even this number, though, gets dwarfed when one does a quick search for churches in the Corpus Christi area via the online yellow pages; such a search yields results for some four-hundred churches.

Please note that I am not saying that any of this a good thing or a bad thing; it’s simply the thing.  And the thing makes me wonder on what grounds I stand before you and preach one flock and one shepherd.

Importantly, I do not think that these things necessarily mean that we Christians have missed the point of the Gospel.  I cannot say for sure that we have missed the point of the Gospel because I know that each and every one of you, and me, and all of us together have very dear friends in every one of those twenty-one churches - and even at our other service (that’s a joke).  Friends whom we love, friends with whom you have worked and laughed and served closely.

Still, it is a strange thing that on the morning we gather to worship the God who has made it possible for us to be friends of God and one another, we worship without many of our dear, neighborhood friends, a good number of whom are worshiping in separate buildings just down the road, even as I speak.

I know better, but - at least on the surface - rather than God making our friendships possible, it sometimes looks like Jesus gets in the way of our friendships.  Like we get along better - Monday through Saturday - when we just don’t go there.  And I wonder: what does it tell us about the nature of our friendships when we discover that Jesus is getting in the way of them?

Many times, as Christians, we find friendship with others as we rally together around shared causes.  Causes like breast cancer, poverty, addiction, justice and wealth - and we are right, I believe, to hear God’s call to action in all of these things.  We tell ourselves that it is enough that we do these things because of Jesus.  We collect our friendships around these causes or lesser ones, like our children’s soccer and gymnastics practice schedules, our common love or hate of take-your-pick Texas universities, golf, biking, ceramics, whatever.  And again, here we are exactly right to imagine friendships in such a way that allow us to partner with people of all types and persuasions...

And yet, I wonder if even a small part of our souls is still bold enough to hope for the possibility of friendships centered on Jesus.

....


Good Shepherd Sunday - and John’s gospel in particular - mean to call us back to the miraculous possibility of just such friendships.

The grounds for our preaching one flock and one shepherd is Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, who calls his sheep by name.  Because he calls them to himself, he also calls them together, and he becomes their center.  The flock is one because the Shepherd is one.  The unity of the Church becomes a mirror of the oneness of God.  This is the vision of St John’s gospel.

I do not think this vision of Christ-centered friendship means that everybody in a given church must or should be soul-mates.  But I do think that all Christians should set as our goal friendships with Christ at the center.  And so I feel the gentle but persuasive nudge to ask myself these questions:

Am I willing to ask my brothers and sisters here: “How is your spiritual life?” as often as I ask, “How are you?”  Am I willing to listen charitably when they answer?  I think of the question Cursillo small groups ask each time they gather: “When in this past week did you feel closest to Christ?”  Do I offer to pray with people as often as I commit to pray for them?  Do our leaders - do I as a leader - take time in the midst of our planning to ask the question out loud, “How does this plan connect to what we know about the God of Jesus Christ?” or “What image from Scripture inspires our understanding in this moment?”   Do I talk to my children - whatever their age - about my own life’s direction and how I understand it in relation to God’s call?  And even with folks I haven’t seen in some time, perhaps this is the question: “What has God revealed to you about who God is since last we sat down and spoke?”

I put these questions out there to hold myself accountable in asking them to you.  I hope they can be questions that rescue daily life from the stale, safe, default settings.  I believe they are questions of the living Kingdom and an Easter people.  I hope they are questions you can use not just at St Christopher’s, but with friends in the other twenty-one churches and even in our other service.

Because Good Shepherd Sunday - and John’s gospel in particular - means to call us back to the miraculous possibility of just such friendships.  Christ-at-the-center friendships.  So there will be one flock, one shepherd.

Amen.

The Original Occupy Movement

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

Abide in me, Jesus says.  What does Jesus mean when he says that, I wonder?  The picture Jesus gives his disciples to help us understand is a vine with branches.  We are the branches, and that is what Jesus says abiding looks like: branches on a vine.  So one grape says to the other grape: “You know, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be in this jam.”  The other grape replies: “You know I’ve about had it with you.  All day long with you it’s wine, wine, wine.”  (I know, I know...I'm 'pressing.')

“I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says. 

That we are the branches tells us that Jesus is our source and our center - and we talked about friendships centered on Jesus last week.  But the image of branches is also somewhat confusing because branches do not decide to be centered on a vine - that branches are at all rests solely on the action of the vine - the vine acts and makes it so.

If a branch could un-choose her connection to the vine, not only would that branch not be a branch, the branch wouldn’t be anything else, either.  She simply would not be.  Everything it means to be a branch comes from being grown out of and connected to the vine - the good work of the vine.  Branches are not independent agents apart from this work.

So instead of “What does it mean to abide?” maybe the question is “If we are like branches, and branches are automatically dependents of the vine - always abiding - why is abiding something Jesus has to tell us to do?”  And maybe the most honest question behind both of the others is, “What is the point of abiding?”

As a beginning of the answer to that last question especially, we need to back up a bit to the chapter just before this morning’s lesson, where there’s an important back-story that today’s lesson picks up.

In chapter 14 of John’s gospel, we find Jesus telling his disciples that he is about to leave his disciples.  Jesus is about to die.  Jesus explains that, by the departure he will achieve through his death, he goes to prepare a dwelling place for his friends - “in my Father’s house there are many mansions (we might also use the word “rooms” or “dwelling places” here)” and the word used for dwelling places shares a root-word with our word “abide” in John 15. 

Jesus goes on in chapter 14 to explain that the “room” he is preparing for his friends - which again is a twin for our word “abide” - is the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus leaves them in order to send his Holy Spirit.  To those who love and obey Jesus’ teaching, we’re told, Jesus promises his Holy Spirit to the end that “my Father will love him, and we will come to him and  make our home with him.”  So “dwelling place” - which, to beat home the point, shares a root-word with “abide” - is about receiving the Spirit and having the fullness of God come make a home in the life of the one who receives it.  The dwelling place made possible by the Spirit is also about our being made able to find our home in God.

It’s important, I think, that after saying all this Jesus gives his disciples his peace and tells them that, knowing these things, they do not need to be afraid.

So in chapter 14 we learn that Jesus goes to prepare a dwelling place for us, and just because he goes off to prepare it does not mean we have to go off to find it.  Jesus isn’t just talking about heavenly rewards when we die.  Jesus will send his Spirit to his friends, and God will make his home with them.  The word for what’s being prepared is dwelling places, but the effect here is a mutual indwelling.  God’s home with us and our home with God.  In chapter 14, abiding is about the mutual indwelling of God and God’s friends.

And we’ve heard this kind of talk before.  We hear it in our eucharistic prayers, when we pray that “he may dwell in us, and we in him.”  Holy Communion is meant to be a living picture of God in us and we in God.  And this is what it means to abide.

Among other things, abiding is a great relief.  If abiding is about God in us and we in him, then when we abide, we are free to give up our repeated, lame, and tiring attempts to impress God, as if we could do anything good apart from him.  If we do as we’ve been told to do in the gospel this morning - if we keep our home with him, abide in him - we will not have anything with which to impress God for which we will not also be moved to thank God.

And again, we’ve heard this before: in the words we say each week at the early service: “All things come of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee.”

And abiding like this makes a certain kind of intuitive sense.  When we welcome someone into our house, for example, and tell them to “make themselves at home” - a crude picture of what we’re calling “abiding” this morning - we are giving both parties a mutual permission not to impress one another.  So I tell you to help yourself to the fridge, by which you understand that I won’t be serving you - if you want it, you get it - and also that I forego the right to complain when you take the last of my favorite beer.

There’s a tender side to this, too.  Rebekah has long counted it the sign of a true friendship when a friend says, “Sure, come on over.  There will be laundry on the sofa but what the heck, you’re family.”

When God pitched his tent and made himself at home with us, he certainly did not come to impress us.  Isaiah tells us he was despised and rejected, that we esteemed him not.  Christ’s coming among us was the beginning of the oblation - the pouring out - of himself, stooping in love, in the end washing the feet of his friends, like a slave, before his betrayal, rejection, and death.

Still, it is one thing to know this and another to live it, to enjoy freedom from the temptation - almost like instinct - to continue putting on a good show for God.  “Lord, did you see that?  Huh?  Huh?  Not so shabby - I mean, you know, for me, all things considered, if I do say so myself.”

But the mistake of our attempts to impress God is that we imagine a distance between ourselves and God that God in Christ has bridged.  God is not simply interested in you; God lives inside you!  Animates you!  Makes his home in you.  Not perfectly, certainly, but that’s the opportunity.  But so often we’re all: “Yo God, did you see how I edged and manicured the lawn?  Those vacuum marks are fresh.”  And God is all: “mi casa es su casa.”

Now, hold on here.  Does this mean that how we live our lives with God is unimportant?  This question is not unlike St Paul’s question to the Romans: Should we therefore sin that grace may abound?  Knowing that God doesn’t care about my laundry, should I just wear the dirty underpants?  And the answer is the same as St Paul’s:  Heck no!

But do you see - can you appreciate - the miracle that has been opened?

The conversation now when it happens, you and God at the table, will not be about dirty dishes or all the chores you’ve complete or smudges on the windows; it will be about the things that dear friends who have given up impressing one another talk about.  Matters that matter.  Come on over, appearances be darned, because there are things beneath appearances that I long to share with you.  So we knock on the door or call too late.  God answers the door with a yawn and a stretch.  And we say, “Your presence does not simply comfort me; your presence is a challenge to me in all the best ways and toward the very best of who I had hoped to become.”  Like Simon Peter, we say “You alone have the words of eternal life.”  And he says to us in reply: “Make yourself at home.”
The Spirit of God making it possible for him to dwell in us and we in him.

Long before Occupy Wall Street, there was what might be called the original Occupy movement.  It went something like this: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”  The Word became flesh and literally “pitched his tent” in our camp.  God made a home with humankind.  We are blessed by God’s presence.

God’s abiding presence, his Holy Spirit, poured out on his people, we people, the People of God.

The lessons today teach us that, just as Easter came along unexpectedly and shouted, “Wait, wait, the cross looks like the end but this is not the end,” now we pick up the scent of Pentecost, just a few weeks off now, and it, too, is shouting: “Wait, wait, Easter looks like the end, but Easter is not the end!  The power and life you saw in the risen Lord is power and life meant for you, too!  Jesus himself will breathe his Spirit in you and God will make his home with you.

In your life, in my life, in the life of our church: if the Good News is that God wants to bunk up, then out, out! with everything else that gets in the way.  Out with the idea that we’ve got to do this by ourselves or it doesn’t count.  Out with shame.  Out with fear.  Out with backup plans and safety nets, like stockpiles of wealth and closets full of things we might need someday.  Give them to the ones who need them now, because they need them now, and we need room.

And in this way we offer up our hands, our feet, our work, our lives, our bodies, souls, our minds, our strength, with the expectation that God in us will move them, move us, shape them, shape us, through the great and unexpected fact that God has made his home with us. 

It is because this indwelling is God’s delight, purpose, and stated goal that we too seek to live lives whose delight, purpose, and stated goal is no less than this: that he abide in us, and we in him. 

Amen.

Sermon preached at St C's for Easter 5, May 6, 2012.

Choosing the God Who Has Chosen Us

What do you think of when you hear the word “idolatry”?

What does it mean to say that someone has made an idol of something in his or her life?

Do you resonate with the challenge to resist idolatry?  Or is idolatry, to you, a kind of outdated word that points back to ancient times and golden calves and pagan gods - all with a general lack of application for our present circumstance?  Many people these days don’t believe in any gods, much less the wrong ones.  Surely idolatry is not a pitfall that enlightened people like you and I face today.

What’s more, I wonder if our showing up here – our being in church today, the front end of Spring Break, time change to boot – doesn’t prove that - even if idolatry still happens from time to time - we, at least, have not been fooled into lifting up our hearts to shiny bovines?  What I’m looking for is the honesty to ask: why do we even bother anymore with readings like our reading from Exodus today?

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.  You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

“You shall not make for yourself an idol.”  None of us do that.  Is this simply another case of preaching to the choir, a message for the heathens out there, with the bizarre but unavoidable realization that the ones who need to be called away from idolatry will, by definition, never be in church to hear that word?

Not so fast, says Martin Luther.  Luther believed that idolatry remained a challenge for Christians.  Indeed, Christians experience the challenge, he thought, more acutely, exactly because Christians commit through baptism to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  Christians state our living intention to trust wholly in the living God.  We have promised ourselves to God.  And so, relative to those who never give themselves over to God in baptism, we experience the pull of idolatry, unfaithfulness, perhaps more destructively than they do.

Writes Luther:

Many a one thinks that he has God and everything in abundance when he has money and possessions; he trusts in them and boasts of them with such a firmness and assurance as to care for no one.  Lo, such a man also has a god, Mammon by name, i.e., money and possessions, on which he sets all his heart, and which is also the most common idol on earth.  He who has money and possessions feels secure, and is joyful and undismayed as though he were sitting in the midst of Paradise.  On the other hand, he who has none doubts and is despondent, as though he knew of no God…So, too, whoever trusts and boasts that he possesses great skill, prudence, power, favor, friendship, and honor has also a god, but not the true and only God.  This appears again when you notice how presumptuous, secure, and proud people are because of such possessions, and how despondent when they no longer exist or are withdrawn.  Therefore I repeat that the chief explanation of this point is that to have a god is to have something in which the heart entirely trusts…[So] ask and examine your heart diligently, and you will find whether it cleaves to God alone or not.

Three observations here:

First, Luther is adamant that idolatry afflicts believers in God.  Idolatry finds us all, even in Church.

Second, I’m struck by Luther’s observation that love of money affects rich and poor alike, to the extent that money is the place wherein our hope comes to rest.  Being a poor person or a poor church does not insulate us from putting our hope in the false god of Mammon.  And of course, wealth almost certainly means we will require the daily reminder to not rest in - not become attached to - that which does not actually belong to us.  Hope that is not in God is not our lasting hope.

Third - and most significantly, I think - notice Luther’s language at the end: “…ask and examine your heart…you will find whether it cleaves to God alone.”  This language of cleaving is familiar; it comes from Genesis 2:24: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they will be one flesh.”  Sometimes the word “cleave” is translated “be united to.”  A man will be united to his wife.  Made one flesh.  And Luther asks us if our hearts cleave to God like this.

This language of cleaving is helpful, I think.  It takes idolatry from the land of stone pillars and golden cows and places it in the context of living, intimate relationship.  Like husband and wife.  Bridegroom and bride.  In the introduction at the beginning of the marriage liturgy marriages – somewhere after, “Dearly beloved: We have come together in the presence of God” – we hear these words: marriage “signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church.”  The Church cleaves to Christ as a spouse cleaves to her spouse.

Does your heart cleave to God? asks Luther.

I think this is why, just after the commandment to not make idols, we hear these words in Exodus: “…for I the Lord your God am a jealous God…”

A jealous God.  But isn’t it bad to be jealous? we think.  What does it mean for God to be jealous?  The jealousy of God makes sense, I think, when we remember that word “to cleave.”  God’s desire is marriage to God’s people.  Holy union.  What I’m trying to say is that idolatry understood in the context of relationship with the living God is less about laws of stone and more about temptations to lust: the constant, furtive, and faithless glances we cast at false gods, even ourselves - idols in whom we place the trust of our hearts meant for God alone.

I remember a sermon I heard on marriage once.  The pastor didn’t beat around the bush.  He said, “Some days I come home, grab a beer, and hole up by myself, don’t check in with my wife, my family, don’t offer to help with the routine of the evening chores.  I just check out.”  He went on: “On those days, my actions say out loud, ‘I’m acting as if I don’t want to be married.  I am un-choosing my marriage today.”

Does your heart cleave to God?  Are there days, times, in which you un-choose the promises of baptism (which is analogous to our marriage, as a people, to God)?  Which are the short-skirted culprits that most often steal your eye and your trust?

What truths do our actions speak about the priority of God and the places of ultimate trust in our lives?

This is something of what Jesus is on to when he tells his friends and followers that he didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfill the law.  For it is exactly in Christ that the relationship between God and His People finds its fullest expression.  Idolatry not as a breech in the tax code but as un-choosing the union, the marriage, that God re-chooses, perfects on the cross.  Because he is jealous.

One early church theologian writes of our gospel today - the jealous Jesus, chasing out the money changers and all the rest from the temple - that: “Christ is [also] jealous for the house of God in each of us, not wishing it to be a house of merchandise or that the house of prayer become a den of thieves, since he is Son of a jealous God.”

So what began as a consideration of golden cows becomes admission of our unfaithfulness by which we discover the Good News of the jealousy of God.  The Good News of the jealousy of God is this: God has not, will not, give up on you.  God’s love is from everlasting.  And the invitation of that love is to receive it.

Thus Lent comes with the invitation to repentance and self-disciplines.  We acknowledge that, some days, in our life with God, we come home, grab a beer, and hole up by ourselves, don’t check in with the church family, don’t offer to help with the routine of the evening chores.  We just check out.  There are some days, that by our actions we say, ‘I’m acting as if I don’t care that I am God’s wholly beloved child.  I am un-choosing my baptism today.”

We name this truth about ourselves in Lent, and then we are confronted with the glorious and honest question with the power to defeat even bad days like this – God’s question when he comes to you and says, “I love you.  I forgive you.   I am wildly jealous for you.  I pray that you will become wildly jealous for me.  But just now, will you believe me – this is the question – will you trust me when I tell you that I choose not to un-choose you - ever?

Amen.

[Sermon preached at St C's, March 11, 2012, Lent 3]

When Ministry Doesn't "Work"

Like so many others, my church is finding new life and renewed energy through recent, creative, small - and not so small - attempts to step beyond our comfort zones into relationship with neighbors and strangers.  I'm proud of my church, God's People in Portland.  We're rising to the challenge.  God is surprising us.

And/but/yet/even so...

Like so many others, our church members, on their honest days - in the midst of all of these really good things - have the courage to ask: What if it doesn't work?

What if it doesn't work?

It's an interesting question.  The question reveals a hidden tension that exists in most quasi-missional organizations.  The tension is that, while St Christopher's and others may be convinced that the old ways of being Church are passing away - remember Bishop Spong's provocative book title: "Why Christianity Must Change or Die" - the compulsion to change issues from the implicit promise that "this new way will work."  But whether or not the new way "works" remains evaluated, ultimately, by the measure of people who begin coming to church, if not by increased financial giving, as a result of these efforts.  The new ways are (perhaps erroneously) accepted as means to the old ends.

What if it doesn't work?  What if the people we serve in God's Name never come around?

Of course, put that way, God Himself, on an honest day, might have asked the question.  It's the story of the whole Scriptures: a wayward People running from the God who will not stop loving them.  What can we learn from God's love?  In our growing to share God's heart for others, are we discovering the full depth and breadth of unconditional love, which of course is love without strings and conditional expectations?

Maybe this is precisely the door to the intersection of our passions, God's call, and - as Frederick Buechner put it - the world's deepest need: that in asking ourselves what else we would be doing if what we are presently doing doesn't work, we find the permission to give that part of ourselves, freely, abundantly, without reservation and/or resentment.  Maybe we discover the true selves God has given us to share with God, one another, and the world.  And we glorify God.

This whole past week, I've been remembering a stranger I met years ago in Chapel Hill.  It was late at night, I was driving home - the familiar 15/501 - when the car began making a terrible noise.  I pulled over at a gas station.  A flat.  I am proud to say that I am much more equipped now for such a moment and such a discovery, but the truth in that moment was that I didn't know where to start.  I was a theology student.

A security guard checked in on me, made sure I was okay, and left.  Said he didn't have time, that it wasn't his job, which was true.  It was getting really late.  A few, panicked minutes later, the gas station clerk emerged from his store and made his way up to me.   He playfully chided me for my lack of knowledge, and then he jacked up my car and changed the tire.  I helped some.

As he was finishing, I reached for my wallet to see if what I had to give him.  The clerk, now more friend than clerk, stopped me.  "No, no," he said.  "But Allah be praised."

What if the only thing that "works" in our efforts as Christians, as Church, is that God is glorified as we reach out in the Name of Christ to the poor, the lost, the rich, the hungry, the theology students?  No expectations.  No strings.  Do things become simpler when the strategic mission before us is "glorify God in all things"?  Can that ever not "work"?

Unconditional.