"Hearing the Holiness" reflections on Annie, Joy, & Buechner

I grew up singing the Lord's Prayer.  One day I stopped singing it because the church at which I worshiped stopped singing it.  In place of the singing, the congregation simply said it together.  This was not a big deal to me.  The priest at the church was my dad, and he had a habit of letting me in on his liturgical thinking.  This one was convincing: "The Episcopal service is strange," he explained, "and the Lord's Prayer might be the only part of the service that the guest or newcomer feels comfortable joining."  In the overwhelming context of the Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer stares back at the stranger like a solitary familiar face in the midst of the unfamiliar throngs.  "Good enough for me," I thought to myself, and I never looked back.

I should probably pause long enough to say that I am not one who gets bent out of shape much over questions of liturgy.  I grew up in a Rite I Anglo-Catholic parish with a parochial school whose rhythm was daily prayer.  After high school, I went to Wheaton College (God's good sense of humor, and after a brief but formative time in a Canterbury Community engaging the Taize tradition in South Bend, Indiana), subsequently enrolled at Duke Divinity School (a Methodist school with an Anglican Studies program), and have happily lived out the first five-plus years of my ordained ministry in the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas.  That is to say I've "gotten around" about as much as is possible for a life-long, cradle Episcopalian.  Rather than feel pulled in many directions by these experiences, I have grown to find my patch-work history shaped and centered by the gravity of St Paul's words when he writes:

There is one Body and one Spirit;
There is one hope in God’s call to us;
One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;
One God and Father of all.

I remember these words and I particularly remember, too, the image of our div school chaplain, Sally Bates, breaking the bread time and again as light streamed in the chapel and speaking the reality that "we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf."

All of that is to say that I don't find myself interested much in the "freshman jostling" of inflexible liturgical decision making - life is too rich, and my economics background is always thinking "trade-offs" before absolutes anyway, and so my main point just now is not whether it is right or wrong to sing the Lord's Prayer in corporate worship.  But we did stop singing it, and I never looked back...until one day this past week.

Annie is two and a half, more or less.  She'll be three in August.  She "reads" books voraciously, memorizing the pages and speaking the words, often to other books.  Recently she's taken to singing.  She has always sung - a favorite past-time the two of us have shared together from her beginning - but she has recently taken to singing songs to tunes with the original words kept intact.  This is new.  This has mostly happened suddenly: one day she wasn't, the next day she was.  This past week she unexpectedly interrupted my knitting and sang the Lord's Prayer to the heavens.   As Bek and I listened in, my heart was swallowed by the prayer that I would never forget the awe and the magic and my jaw-dropped disbelief in that moment.

She was singing to God, but grace found our ears.  And every word was there: this ritual ending to our family's evening prayers, sung at Bek's whim one night, continued because Annie enjoyed her parents' singing, and two months later she's belting it out from the heart and from memory.  Maybe that's what I am striving to appreciate in this post: how music stains the memory; how prayers so sung make ready homes in us.

A few days later, this moment very much alive in my memory, I was listening to a speaker at our diocesan clergy day.  He was telling us about Frederick Buechner's encounter with mystery in the space of a "particular Episcopal church he attending while lecturing at Wheaton College."  My heart quickened as he spoke.  I also went to a particular Episcopal Church while at Wheaton...  "In Glen Ellyn," the speaker continued.  My eyes went wide - "Saint Barnabas!" we nearly said together.  And I wondered how many times I sat in Buechner's pew, two decades after his visit.  Anyway, I looked up the book, Telling Secrets, from which the speaker's story came, and found the following words that helped me make sense of the joy that flooded my being as Annie flooded our home with her song.  Before I share them, my point, the moral, my main advice to the patient reader who has nearly made it to the end of this long and winding post: sing as much as possible. 

Here's Buechner:

I also found myself going to an extraordinary church or, with my rather dim experience of churches back home, one that was extraordinary at least to me.  Its name was Saint Barnabas, and it was described to me as an evangelical high Episcopal church, and that seemed so wonderfully anomalous that what took me there first was pure curiosity.  What kept taking me back Sunday after Sunday, however, was something else again.  Part of the service was chanted at Saint Barnabas, and I discovered that when a prayer or a psalm or a passage from the Gospels is sung, you hear it in a whole new way.  Words wear thin after a while, especially religious words.  We have spoken them and listened to them so often that after a while we hardly even hear them any more.  As writer, preacher, teacher I have spent so much of my life dealing with words that I find I get fed up with them.  I get fed up especially with my own words and the sound of my own voice endlessly speaking them.  What the chanting did was to remind me that worship is more than words and then in a way to give words back to me again.  It reminded me that words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.  The chanting italicized them, made poetry of their prose.  It helped me hear the holiness in them and in all of us as we chanted them.

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.

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.