As One with Authority: A Closer Look at How Jesus Spoke

Sunday sermon for Good Shepherd, Sun Prairie, and St. Francis House, at UW-Madison. Here are the appointed readings.

I’m not much for dictionary definitions, but when I asked Google, it told me that authority was “the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience.” This matches, more or less, my free associations with the word. I think of things like the toll booth authority and TSA, please remove your belt and shoes. In the exception that proves the rule, this one time, waiting in the security line at an airport, the lead TSA agent called out, “Keep your shoes and belt on! Your government trusts you. I don’t trust you, but your government trusts you.” These aren’t the standard instructions. I suppose they were in a hurry. I was surprised, though, to discover honest to goodness tears in my eyes at the assurance of my government’s trust. Authority. The power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience.

I am a Texan, and Texans, of course, don’t like to have our obedience enforced. I suspect Texans are not unique in this. [As a kid, it was drilled into me that, as a former Republic, Texas had the legal right to fly its flag at the same height as the national flag.] So, near where my parents used to live, about an hour outside of Austin, the state put in this toll road that promised to greatly reduce travel times in the area. The only problem was that Texans, especially South Texans, don’t drive on toll roads. Because, authority. It's complicated. So the state kept bumping up the speed limit, every other year or so, 5 mph at a time, to incentivize travelers and tempt them into trusting their government. Last time I checked, the limit was up to 85 miles an hour, and still no takers. The road is mostly empty. As it turns out, power of the government kind is hard to trust.

My first job was at a True Value hardware store, in high school. Authority in that context was my boss. He was kind to customers and cranky to employees, probably operating under the not unreasonable assumption that his high school workers (including me) weren’t the most thorough workers. The first time I was charged with sweeping the aisles and the floor at the end of a day, a co-worker warned me that it would not be unlike our employer to put a small pile of sand in a corner. A trap. Be thorough, he said. That’s right, the boss would make the mess worse just to keep us honest. It wasn’t a question of being comprehensive. It wasn’t a question of cleanliness. It was a question of not being caught. My boss thought we would apply ourselves better to the work if we feared him and doubted the adequacy of our abilities.

Authority.

When we are told today that Jesus talks with authority I suspect that most of us aren’t surprised. It figures. We might have predicted that “God is great” turns out to mean God is the biggest boss with the biggest hammer. Polish your shoes, brush your teeth, or cover your tracks and run for cover. Adam and Eve knew the drill. In the absence of perfection, hide. Most of us have spent a fair bit of our lives hiding from one thing or another. Because maybe we deserve what we’ve got coming. Maybe we don’t. Doesn’t much matter when you don’t have the hammer. And it’s a problem for us, that we assume God is this way because, as pastor Greg Boyd puts it, “Your love and passion for God will never outrun the beauty of your picture of God.”

How we think about God affects how we relate to God and each other in the church. When we project accusation-based authority onto God, the projection eventually falls onto us, such that we start to fear each other and loathe ourselves. For example, I’ve always loved living in close neighborhoods and, as a priest in these neighborhoods, I’ve loved running into friends and parishioners at the grocery store. Only, most of the exchanges haven’t matched the idyllic repartees I imagined in my head. A typical encounter might go something like this, “Hey! My friend, how are you doing? It's me. Your priest in a t-shirt.” “Uh. Say, Father Jonathan, um, fancy seeing you here, um, you know I woulda liked to have been there Sunday, but I was sick, or not sick but, you know the Sunday before, my kid was, um, I mean, work is busy, and weekends, well, you know how it goes, I’ll be there this Sunday. I PROMISE.” “Um. Okay. Sounds like life’s been crazy, maybe don’t promise. See you Sunday - or not. Anyway, it’s good to see you.” “Yeah, well, I’ll maybe see you Sunday.”

We don’t trust authority. My parents always said broccoli was good for me, but I always knew they were in the pocket of Big Broccoli. Somehow. Other motivating forces had to be at work. Nobody knows me. Nobody would actually want to know me. How could anybody in this world be genuinely for me?

He spoke as one with authority.

But then, over against all this world has taught me about authority, in his book Discipleship, J. Heinrich Arnold - leader of the Bruderhof communities from 1962 to 1982 - writes this:

When we speak about the authority of leaders in the church, it should be very clear that we never mean authority over people. Jesus gave his disciples authority, but he gave them authority over spirits - not people. In the same way, those of us appointed to lead in the church are given authority, but not over people. It is all too easy to forget this. We must seek for humility again and again.

At first, that quote struck me as strange. But then, I looked again at our gospel. Sure enough, the authority has to do with casting out spirits. We 21st century folks may not know what do with authority that has to do with casting out spirits, but not knowing what to do with it is different from having permission to replace it with our own definition. What I want to notice is this: where today’s dominant authority is authority of accusation, Jesus comes with the authority of liberation. Where the authorities we’re familiar with can lock you up, Jesus’ authority promises to open up. Jesus’ authority sets the prisoner free. Which, yes, means Jesus’ authority can be an unwelcome visitor to certain other kinds of wannabe authorities. It’s like a vineyard master coming home and putting the stand-ins on notice.

It’s the tension of this story in which Jesus heals a man on the sabbath in the synagogue. He breaks a law but makes a person whole. He breaks the law but fulfills it. You could even say he heals it.

Witness four chapters after today’s story, where Jesus comes to the country of the Gerasenes. He meets a man who lives in the tombs, covered in shackles and chains. The man has broken out of the chains so many times, the pieces now cling to him like appendages. Remnants of the so-called authorities. But the new authority does not lock up, does not apply new chains to bind him up. Jesus’ authority unbinds, unlocks, raises to new life, so he casts the spirits into the pigs and they run off a cliff. And the people - watch this - the people, the same ones who had put the chains on the man, content to let him cut himself on the stones of the tombs while they traded their pigs for money, they weren’t afraid then. But now, the man put in his right mine, the local pig economy drowned, now they’re afraid. Get out, they tell Jesus. 

Because he spoke as one with authority.

The Good News is bad news if you’re a pig farmer making profits on the imprisonment of others. But if you’ve ever longed to be told that you don’t have to hide anymore, this authority is for you. If you’ve ever prayed that the dead end just might not be, that your brokenness might be only the beginning, that the delight of the One who matters is mercy, then this authority is for you. 

And, alternatively, if you’ve ever found yourself among the controlling, the conniving, or those simply not convinced that the old powers’ best days are behind them, he offers forgiveness. In addition to casting out spirits, Jesus gives authority to forgive to his disciples in the upper room: freedom to become agents of the authority that builds up the body in his very same love and opens paths of redemption and flourishing for God’s children.

Homestretch now. St. Paul is the poster child for those who have accepted the forgiveness of the new authority because they discovered full on their need of it. Today, in the epistle, he says that, where the old authority hinged on knowing the most, knowledge, the new authority rests on love. You used to be able to hold on to your position if you could prove that no one knew more than you. But Paul suggests that to be right and not in right relationship is unimportant for citizens of Christ’s kingdom because he died for us! Because, on the cross, we learn that authority is not power over so much as love poured out. Authority is not power over, is not running the show, is not having the bullhorn, but is seeking and finding opportunities to love and so to live generously toward God and each other, in thanksgiving for our Savior.

May God show us what it is to live under the authority of the One whose love for us is forever. May God give us all we need to love God and our neighbors as those set free from fear.

Amen.

Six Months Sans Smartphone: Alive and Well and Getting Better with God's Help

The unanticipated sequel to Why I Sold Back My Smartphone (& Why I Blame David Fitch).

It has now been about six months since I sold back my smartphone. Six months later, I no longer have phantom pains; I no longer reach for a device that isn’t there. (Not that phantom pains were unreasonable to expect: the average smartphone user checks her phone 80 times a day, or 30,000 times a year. I can’t think of anything beyond breathing to which I had been so regularly committed.) Now, it is not uncommon for me to lose track of my phone for days at a time, to have no idea where it is, so worthless is its utility.

Six months later, I have discovered growing edges and necessary next steps, like leaving the laptop at work so that I do not simply replace addiction to one device with addiction to a larger one. Rebekah and I even had a blasphemous conversation the other day about the possibility of discontinuing the internet at home, altogether. Stay tuned. As it turns out, leaving the laptop at work is also a good first step toward leaving one’s work at work. Who knew? I remember telling a colleague at lunch one day how I had unexpectedly discovered that I cared as much or more about my progress learning the guitar as I did about my community’s flourishing. It felt scandalous. My colleague kindly reminded me that, for creatures made to glorify God and enjoy God forever, the true scandal is that prioritizing lives of holy enjoyment would feel like a scandal. And then he confessed the same scandal in his life.

My friend and I are not, of course, alone. In his classic Leisure: the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper reflects at length about how our world thinks about work. “In his well-known study on capitalism, Max Weber quotes the saying, that ‘one does not work to live; one lives to work,’ which nowadays no one has much difficulty in understanding: it expresses the current opinion. We even have some difficulty in grasping that it reverses the order of things and stands them on their head.” Sometimes I distract myself from work. Most times, I distract myself into work. From my life and the lives of those around me. In his wonderful book Silence and Honey Cakes, Rowan Williams calls such distractions from what really is the life of fantasy for which regular prayer and long silences are good medicine. 

Since selling back my smartphone, I have discovered the peace of waiting for someone who is late with folded hands and without anxiety. I am learning that I do not need to forgive myself for not trading my presence for more potential productivity - what could have been, or should have been - a hard lesson learned in a vocation in which nothing is ever finished and I imagine that I could have always done more. I am reading more books. I am writing letters to friends, with fountain pens and beautiful inks. I am discovering practices that help me grow my ability to receive the gift God, in a given moment, is giving, rather than seeking to control my environment for the gift I wish I had been given instead. I am making more room for possibilities I do not script or predict.

Where I used to go around filling my days with, well, filler, and then wondering where the time went, I now find myself with the opposite dilemma: more than enough time, such that I find it increasingly imperative to spend more time each day in God’s presence, calling to mind the values I pray will animate me: Joy, Listening, Generosity, Trust, and Prayer. 

Josef Pieper again writes that 

The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.

St. Thomas Aquinas named the same struggle more simply and positively: “The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult.”

Rhythms of prayer dispose me to receive the giftedness of life and the Christ whom my baptismal covenant would remind me is there, in each person, to be sought and served. To not know, therefore, to be open, to embrace the uncertainty, is an important part of allowing the present to be God’s gift.

I need God’s help to remember that I am ever walking in God’s sight. Prayer is good help. Hymns are helpful, too; prayers I can sing to my children and that they can sing back to me! What a gift. The rhythm of daily prayer, for me, is like the breaks that are built into the really good roller coasters. Up and down a hill, maybe two or three of them, and then the click, click, click, because it is relatively easy, all things considered, to go off the rails, get caught up in the speed of things, even to become disoriented and forget what the thing was about in the first place. So about the time I want to put it all on my back or, alternatively, pat myself on the back, click, click, click. Sit with the scripture. Click, click, click. Soak in the story. Click, click, click. Sit in the silence. Rest in the presence. Call to mind the things God has shown me about God’s love and its depths. Be surprised one more time by God at work in this world and the corresponding truth that it isn’t all up to me. Remember that Karl Barth called laughter the closest thing to the grace of God. Click, click, click. Receive all these things as gifts. Go back to the work, foolish enough to believe the work can be offered as prayer, sure of the fact I will forget how to pray, blessed by the truth that the rhythm of prayer will find me at about the time I forget where glory goes: “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit…” Just when things threaten to go too fast, my head get too big, my heart grow too anxious, it will find me. Click, click, click. And I’ll return to the grace that it is my privilege to proclaim.

Relieved of the burden of being salvation to the world I return to, with any luck, I will have been opened again to receive the strange, unexpected gifts it is, in God’s ocean-deep love, God’s joy to give.

From my favorite hymn:

For the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind. 

And the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind. 

If our love were but more faithful, we should take him at his word 

and our lives would be thanksgiving, for the goodness of the Lord.

Selling the Smartphone and Rhythms of Prayer (A Talk for Clergy Retreat)

I was asked to briefly share the story of my selling back my smartphone, especially as the decision connected to my prayer life, at the most recent clergy retreat of the Diocese of Milwaukee. The first half of this post, after the preface, also appears here, where it was originally published. The second half of this post will also appear in a future post, as a proper stand-alone sequel to the first. This entry puts it all in one place, with the introductory preface, which I hope adds context for the talk.

I have been asked to talk about prayer. And my smartphone. Spoiler: I don’t have a smartphone. Because it was disrupting my prayer and my ability to be present to God and those around me. So where others (at this retreat) have been asked to talk about running or cycling presumably because they are good at running or cycling, I have been asked to make a public confession. It doesn’t seem fair, but here we are. And I’m glad to share my story. In fact, I’m honored to be asked. But even my confession comes with a confession, because - get this - my initial reflection on selling back my smartphone got picked up by the Slow Church blog curated by John Pattison and Christopher Smith and went as viral as pastoral confessions about mobile devices are ever likely to go. My attempt to disconnect connected, which is strange, and feels like a kind of failure. A little bit like reading Wendell Berry’s famous letter about not having a computer via twitter. Ah well.

I thought I’d start by simply sharing that first reflection, the blog post I wrote upon selling the phone. We’ll take a break, and then I’ll share the six month later update. 

But first we should pray. Because talking about rhythms of prayer isn’t the same as entering them. Let us pray.

Lord, it is fitting to rejoice in your beauty and to gaze upon your handiwork. While others may call this a waste of time, we recognize that unless we sit in adoration of you, we will forget whom we serve and for what purpose. Remind us why worship is always our first response to you. Amen.(1)

Part I: Why I Sold Back My Smartphone (& Why I Blame David Fitch), the blog post I wrote last July:

Last week, I walked into my local Verizon store and said I'd like to upgrade my phone. "Sure," he said. "What do you have?" An iPhone 5s. "Great. And what do you want?" A basic phone, I explained. The cheapest you have. The sales guy gladly steered me toward the basic phones, but then something like this went down, when he tried to sell me a $150 basic phone:

To his credit, the sales guy subsequently backed off and happily sold me a $50 flip phone. "It's got no wifi," he shrugged.

Exactly.

Before I go on, a couple of notes:

1) I am not brave or courageous for selling back my iPhone. What I was was addicted to a piece of technology that suggested itself as the way to make every aspect of my life easier and more efficient, even if I - or it - didn’t know yet how it could do that. Because, you know, "there's (always) an app for that." Did you know there is even an app for monitoring your iPhone use, ostensibly so that you can pare said use back to reasonable levels? Yeah, that went about as well as you'd expect. Unsurprisingly, it turns out the mere presence of a smartphone in a room is enough to inspire distraction. Many times, at lunch with a friend, if said friend got up to use the restroom, the phone instantly came out. Because it never really left. I was not in control.

2) I am not prescribing my action for others, and I don't judge smartphone users. Plenty of people I know manage to use their phones without using them to fill in the cracks of spare time between everything else. I was not one of them. One day last week I woke up and imagined myself continuing to fill in the beautiful cracks of between-things spare time with a must-be-productive-in-every-moment sense of iPhone urgency, combined with the device's lackluster record of coming through on the productivity promise, lived out over the next fifty years, and I had something like a panic attack. I had a clear sense of wanting another life for myself.

3) I am very, very aware of the insane amount of privilege involved in the decision. First, I had an iPhone to sell. Then, I developed (thank God) the audacity to resent a device many people could never afford. And I could sell it. And I could purchase some of the capabilities I'd be losing without an iPhone, like a guitar tuner, to compensate for what I'd be missing. And yet, as I have come to understand privilege, the goal is not to deny or "take off" privilege (as if one could!), but to leverage what privilege one has for others. Surely, leveraging privilege for others requires being present to others, and I believe I am better able to make that space without the phone. That said, I take seriously critiques of how I used my privilege in this discernment.

Relatedly, part of the discernment around the trade-in involved an app by app inventory for how I could change my phone habits without thoughtlessly shifting the burden of my decision to others. For example, surrendering my bank management app might have made me feel lighter at Rebekah's expense, if I had seen selling the phone as disconnecting from all of the responsibilities I had previously invested in the phone. One of those responsibilities is to stay connected to the news of the world around me and to stay active. I fully intend to keep a social media presence. Just not at the expense of a physical presence to my physical neighbors.

4) My new phone stinks. I regret nothing, and it stinks. I won't glamorize T9 texting. It took me five minutes the other day to confirm a lunch date with a colleague: "Okay. See you then!" Auto-replies are my friend. But I made the switch so that I would talk more and text less. To that end, it works and it's great.

My new phone's name is Fitch. I named it after David Fitch, whose recent book Faithful Presence: Seven Disciplines that Shape the Church for Mission has come like balm to my soul at a needed time. To grossly generalize, the book introduces a) the disciplines of sacramental practice to evangelicals, on the one hand, and b) a robust theology of submission to the lordship of Jesus in sacramental/liturgical traditions like mine, on the other. Even if that characterization is not exactly right, the space of intersection Fitch explores between historically evangelical and liturgical emphases is rich and full of life.

I named the phone Fitch because I want to remember, on those days when not having Google Maps makes me late to a meeting, why I made this decision. To be faithfully present to God's presence.

In a world crunched by antagonisms and ideologies (for which my iPhone was sometimes a homing device!), Christians - says Fitch - are called to open space, to make space, to be present to God's presence in our midst, with one another and others, and to proclaim that "Jesus is Lord and at work renewing all things - making a new creation (2 Cor 5:17)."

Christians are called to make space. To live with. To proclaim. To be present.

Surely, selling back a smartphone doesn't make a person present. But it's a start. Admittedly, it's a start I hope gets better. I'm improving, but I confess I spent my first couple of days without a smartphone instinctively reaching for its ghost. Still, it is a start, and one I hope will both a) ask more of me over time and b) prepare me to be up for the ask. I want to make space, to live with, to proclaim, to be present. All with God's help.

I was sitting in a book group with David Fitch and Rebekah at last week's Gathering of the Ekklesia Project. We were just about to start. Suddenly, Fitch's smartphone went off. Startled, he turned it off and threw it down, with some visible (theatrical) disgust. "So much for presence," he said.

Questions for reflection:

Where/when does being present come most easily to you?

Where/when is it most difficult for you to be present?

What patterns of presence do you notice in yourself?

Where is your desire to be present at odds with the reality?

Where has an investment in presence opened up new life for you?

Why I Sold Back My Smartphone: an Update

Part II: Selling the Smartphone: A 6 Month Update 

It has now been about six months since I sold back my smartphone. Six months later, I no longer have phantom pains; I no longer reach for a device that isn’t there. (Not that phantom pains were unreasonable to expect: the average smartphone user checks her phone 80 times a day, or 30,000 times a year. I can’t think of anything beyond breathing to which I had been so regularly committed.) Now, it is not uncommon for me to lose track of my phone for days at a time, to have no idea where it is, so worthless is its utility.

Six months later, I have discovered growing edges and necessary next steps, like leaving the laptop at work so that I do not simply replace addiction to one device with addiction to a larger one. Rebekah and I even had a blasphemous conversation the other day about the possibility of discontinuing the internet at home, altogether. Stay tuned. As it turns out, leaving the laptop at work is also a good first step toward leaving one’s work at work. Who knew? I remember telling a colleague at lunch one day how I had unexpectedly discovered that I cared as much or more about my progress learning the guitar as I did about my community’s flourishing. It felt scandalous. My colleague kindly reminded me that, for creatures made to glorify God and enjoy God forever, the true scandal is that prioritizing lives of holy enjoyment would feel like a scandal. And then he confessed the same scandal in his life.

My friend and I are not, of course, alone. In his classic Leisure: the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper reflects at length about how our world thinks about work. “In his well-known study on capitalism, Max Weber quotes the saying, that ‘one does not work to live; one lives to work,’ which nowadays no one has much difficulty in understanding: it expresses the current opinion. We even have some difficulty in grasping that it reverses the order of things and stands them on their head.” Sometimes I distract myself from work. Most times, I distract myself into work. From my life and the lives of those around me. In his wonderful book Silence and Honey Cakes, Rowan Williams calls such distractions from what really is the life of fantasy for which regular prayer and long silences are good medicine. 

Since selling back my smartphone, I have discovered the peace of waiting for someone who is late with folded hands and without anxiety. I am learning that I do not need to forgive myself for not trading my presence for more potential productivity - what could have been, or should have been - a hard lesson learned in a vocation in which nothing is ever finished and I imagine that I could have always done more. I am reading more books. I am writing letters to friends, with fountain pens and beautiful inks. I am discovering practices that help me grow my ability to receive the gift God, in a given moment, is giving, rather than seeking to control my environment for the gift I wish I had been given instead. I am making more room for possibilities I do not script or predict.

Where I used to go around filling my days with, well, filler, and then wondering where the time went, I now find myself with the opposite dilemma: more than enough time, such that I find it increasingly imperative to spend more time each day in God’s presence, calling to mind the values I pray will animate me: Joy, Listening, Generosity, Trust, and Prayer. 

Josef Pieper again writes that 

The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.

St. Thomas named the same struggle more simply and positively: “The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult.”

Rhythms of prayer dispose me to receive the giftedness of life and the Christ whom my baptismal covenant would remind me is there, in each one, to be sought and served. To not know, therefore, to be open, to embrace the uncertainty, is an important part of allowing the present to be God’s gift.

I need God’s help to remember that I am ever walking in God’s sight. Prayer is good help. Hymns are helpful, too; prayers I can sing to my children and that they can sing back to me! What a gift. The rhythm of daily prayer, for me, is like the breaks that are built into the really good roller coasters. Up and down a hill, maybe two or three of them, and then the click, click, click, because it is relatively easy, all things considered, to go off the rails, get caught up in the speed of things, even to become disoriented and forget what the thing was about in the first place. So about the time I want to put it all on my back or, alternatively, pat myself on the back, click, click, click. Sit with the scripture. Click, click, click. Soak in the story. Click, click, click. Sit in the silence. Rest in the presence. Call to mind the things God has shown me about God’s love and its depths. Be surprised one more time by God at work in this world and the corresponding truth that it isn’t all up to me. Remember that Karl Barth called laughter the closest thing to the grace of God. Click, click, click. Receive all these things as gifts. Go back to the work, foolish enough to believe the work can be offered as prayer, sure of the fact I will forget how to pray, blessed by the truth that the rhythm of prayer will find me at about the time I forget: “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit…” Just when things threaten to go too fast, my head get too big, my heart grow too anxious, it will find me. Click, click, click. And I’ll return to the grace that it is my privilege to proclaim.

Relieved of the burden of being salvation to the world I return to, with any luck, I will have been opened again to receive the strange, unexpected gifts it is, in God’s ocean-deep love, God’s joy to give.

From my favorite hymn. 469, not 470. Give it up for Calvin Hampton:

For the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind. 

And the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind. 

If our love were but more faithful, we should take him at his word 

and our lives would be thanksgiving, for the goodness of the Lord.

______

(1) From www.commonprayer.net, morning prayer for January 23.

A Prayer for Before Receiving Communion

Continuing my wandering through the revised St. Augustine Prayer Book today. This is a (small) piece from a substantial section of prayers for preparation before receiving the Eucharist. Praying for our prayers both individually and together, as the Body of Christ, is a good and beautiful thing to which it is good and beautiful regularly to return.

Lord Jesus Christ; I come, as one sick, to the physician of souls; blind, the light of eternal spender; desolate, to the kind source of all consolation; guilty, to the One who offers forgiveness to all; as one in poverty, to the generous Lord of heaven and earth; as a creature, to a most Gracious Creator.

In the abundance of thy great mercies, cleanse my corruption, enlighten my blindness, bring home the wandering, comfort the forsaken, reconcile the guilty, pardon the sinner, forgive the wretched, restore life to the condemned, and give justification to the dead.

I long to receive the Bread of the Angels, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, with reverence and humility, contrition and devotion, faith and single-heartedness, and with such purpose and intention as will strengthen my faith, conform my life to they will, and bring me to know, love, and serve thee more fully.

Grant me so to share in this celebration and to receive the sacrament of Christ's Body and Blood that I may know the joy of being made a fellow citizen with the saints and a member of the Household of God. O most loving Father, grant me that thy Beloved Son, whom I now receive veiled from sight, I may at length behold for ever face to face, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A Thanksgiving for Life within the Church

Continuing my between-semester time with the revised St. Augustine Prayer Book. I appreciate this prayer for its simplicity and rootedness in Baptism and the Eucharist. I appreciate this prayer because it's an institutional prayer in an anti-institutional age that nevertheless feels capable of being subversive, just to the extent that it calls the institution to the heart of of who and whose we are. Lastly, I appreciate this prayer because of the holy friends its petitions call to mind and for whom it invites my thanks to God.

We give you thanks and praise, Lord Jesus Christ, that you have called us into your fellowship:

For those who first taught us to pray and opened the gospels to us;
we give you thanks.

For those who stood with us at the font;
we give you thanks.

For the abundance grace of baptism, by which we were granted forgiveness and a place in your kingdom;
we give you thanks.

For the faith we confessed in the Creed and the call we accepted in the Baptismal Covenant;
we give you thanks.

For the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the sign of the cross, marking us as your own;
we give you thanks.

We give you thanks and praise, Lord Jesus Christ, that you have welcomed us at your table;
we give you thanks.

For the joy of worship with brothers and sisters;
we give you thanks.

For the Word proclaimed and heard anew week by week;
we give you thanks.

For hearing our prayers on behalf of the world, for those we love and our own needs;
we give you thanks.

For accepting our gifts and making them part of your eternal offering to the Father;
we give you thanks.

For giving us a place within the awe-filled hymn of all creation;
we give you thanks.

For the regular remembrance of your passion, death, and resurrection;
we give you thanks.

For the outward signs of inward grace you so freely give into our hands;
we give you thanks.

For the peace that passes understanding and the joy of service;
we give you thanks. Amen.

Grant us, O Lord, to receive with grateful hearts and with attentive minds all that you would give us. Make us to know your grace and to believe your promises, to offer with generosity all that you ask of us and to follow where you lead, into lives of service and an eternity of joy in your presence. Amen.

Move and See: the Truth about Turning Toward Jesus

Sermon for Good Shepherd, Sun Prairie. Here are the Sunday's readings.

Good morning!

My name is Jonathan Melton, and I serve the Episcopal Student Center on campus, St. Francis House, at the University of Wisconsin, just down the road. Go Badgers!

A lot of you know that information already, because we have had occasion to get to know each other, at least a little; Good Shepherd and St. Francis House have shared a special friendship through the years, for which I am grateful. If we haven’t gotten to know each other yet, I hope you will introduce yourself over the coming weeks. I look forward to spending this next season with you, through May, and I look forward to sharing with you the good work of praise that God gives to God’s people. It is a real joy to be with you for these weeks and months - and - as we lift up our hearts this morning. Can I ask you something? Not that you've given off anything to occasion my asking. Just want to check in...Are you glad to be here?

And not just because it's warmer here than outside? Good! Turn and tell someone! Say, “I’m glad to be here.”

It's what Bishop Curry calls Evangelism 101: turn and tell someone something about something.

It’s a good thing to do, to turn and tell, but today it is especially meet and right so to do, because you are in some especially good company this morning: in the gospel we just heard, Philip turns and tells Nathanael, “Friend, we found something beautiful. The Messiah, come from Nazareth.” 

It’s beautiful, and y’all are beautiful, but Nathanael isn’t biting so easy. Nathanael’s been around the block enough to have a healthy skepticism about him. You don’t just go running into messiahs every day, he knows this. Not least from the hill country, he says. And in this, Nathanael strikes me as a realist, if not a cynic. In other words, Nathanael would fit right in with us 21st century folk. Nathanael has chased his hopes, he’s been burned, felt disappointment; maybe he likes his job, maybe he doesn’t; maybe he’s reached his dreams, maybe he hasn’t; Nathanael has trusted and been failed by institutions, leaders and anti-leaders, and Nathanael has learned that sometimes resignation is a noble thing. At least it’s honest. Nothing’s changing. “Same problems that we’ve got now, me sitting here under this fig tree,” he reasons, “will still be with us when I get up.”

But this is what is beautiful about Nathanael: all that going through his head, he gets up anyway. He follows Philip. Why? Philip answers his cynicism not with a guarantee, but with a challenge; instead of more information, he gives an invitation: “Come and see.”

Come and see!

And maybe Nathanael sees the glint, the sparkle, in Philip’s eyes. Maybe there is this smallest part of him that feels himself beginning to doubt his doubts. 

Maybe he just figures he can shut his friend up by humoring him, and that will be the end of it. In any case, Philip says, “Come and see!” and Nathanael does.

Now, the lectionary hid this from you this morning, but when Philip says, “Come and see!” Philip, for his part, is plagiarizing Jesus. Maybe not plagiarizing, but he’s already starting to act like Jesus. In John’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t call the first disciples out of nowhere, but before that John the Baptist is out there by the river in his camel hair, eating bugs, preparing the way, and he points to Jesus, yells out, “There! That’s the one!” and a couple of John’s disciples turn around and start following Jesus. Jesus notices, because it’s not like social media, where strange followers aren’t creepy, and he turns and asks them, “Uh, excuse me. What are y’all doing?” They ask him a question. Where are you staying? Now, they ask for information, but they’re praying for invitation. Jesus, knowing this, makes the invitation, “Come and see.”

Philip does, too, but before he comes and sees, he runs and turns and tells his friend Nathanael. And there’s a favorite prayer of mine that Philip’s turning toward Nathanael to tell him the news makes me think of. The prayer goes like this

“O Lord…give us such a heart that as we turn toward you, we turn also to each other, in perfect charity and in the bonds of friendship; for you have called us friends and welcome us all into the one and eternal kingdom.”

Turning to God, Philip turns to his brother. And the same generosity Christ gave to him, he gives in his turn to Nathanael. Oh, this is good. 

Philip speaks this invitation, and Nathanael receives this invitation because (I think) they have both experienced the fairly ordinary truth that sometimes you have to move in order to see. Sometimes you have to move - or be moved - to see clearly.

Have you experienced this? A family member, trying to show you a full moon through the window. I don’t see it. Well, there, it’s right there. I see a tree. And your finger. Oh. I guess you can’t see it from where you are. Come over here. There. Do you see it now? Ah! Now I see.

Or maybe, as a child, someone hoisted you up high, on their shoulders, so you could get a better look. Or a mentor brought you under her wing so you could see how things really work. They say seeing is believing, but sometimes you have to move in order to see. So faith, says St. Paul in the epistle today, is about our bodies and movement. Faith, like love, is not a head game, not a trivia contest. Belief is not a secret answer held behind the curtain of your mind. Sometimes we have to move before we can see. Abraham and Sarah received a promise, but they had to move before they could see it. Moses and the Israelites, wandering through the desert, and they had to move for forty years before they saw the promise with their eyes. Zacchaeus climbs a tree! The magi follow the star. Even at the end that’s not the end, the women at the empty tomb, Jesus says, “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee. There I will meet them.” It’s not so much conditional, as logical. Trust happens, faith happens, in the moving, in the entering the promise, by abiding in the presence of the living and moving God. There is faith in the moving.

Which isn’t to say you have to move in exactly the right by yourself to do this life of faith thing. Sometimes it’s hard to move. Sometimes you’re tired. Sometimes you’re hurting. Sometimes you don’t know where to go. God gets that. The witness of Scripture is that, when we couldn’t move, God moved first. God moved for us. God moved toward us. God even helps us to move toward God. The invitation isn’t to do it alone, but to be open to God. God will help us, even to be open to God. But make no mistake to desire to see is to be ready to move.

Most of the world isn’t ready to move. The world, by and large, is stiff. Arthritic. We belong to a world in the habit of picking sides and polarizing and avoiding the ones on the other sides and, just to make sure we don’t pick up cooties, we back ourselves into corners and sit in the familiar, with the faces that most remind us of us. And if that’s your game, you’re not alone, you’re just not in the rhythm of Jesus. Jesus moves. To believe, to be oriented to God’s presence, is to pick up a posture that’s open and willing to move, even and especially when you don’t see how it all fits together.

You might not be much up for moving or feel like you can do it alone. And you are probably right. But God will help move you. Because God knows sometimes you’ve got to move in order to see. The name for this movement, inspired by God, is what the Christian calls freedom. And through the centuries this freedom has taken Christians like you and me into prisons and schoolyards and apartments and hospitals and all kinds of hopeless places, dangerous places, even inside-themselves broken places, where they in their turn have witnessed and tasted the goodness of God.

I don’t know about you, but when I don’t move, it’s because of this thing I learned about in science class, called inertia. Objects in motion are gonna stay in motion and also the opposite: it’s easier for a stayed put thing to stay put. So I’ve gotta move before I want to move, but the moving will make it easier to keep moving. A man one time asked the famous poet Gerard Manly Hopkins how the man might grow in his faith. What advice did he have? Hopkins' answer was short. Two words. Give alms, he said. Sometimes you’ve gotta move in order to see.

Are you stiff? Have you been moving but your movements have grown predictable? It happens. What would a new movement look like? Where in your life is the unexplored forgiveness, the unwritten letter, the unspoken prayer, the unspent generosity? Where in your life have you stopped looking for God? Hoping in God? Where in your family or workplace or neighborhood or church are you avoiding, with your body, for fear? I’m not talking abstractions, I’m talking your ordinary life and being open to the personal call to seek and serve, to take up the vulnerable, self-surrendering love of Jesus, that you’ve been excusing yourself from for days, weeks, months, because it all felt so uncertain. Maybe the call is to ask another for help and so to experience belonging and trust in the Body of Christ. What could it look like to follow your Lord into the love and trust of his goodness, though how it’s all gonna work, where it might lead, doesn’t yet fully compute?

Come and see. Jesus says. To this table. Out these doors. Back again. Today and every day, come and see.

Amen.

That Your Presence May Be the Joy of Our Home (A Parent's Prayer)

During this break between semesters, I've been spending time with the prayers of the revised St. Augustine Prayer Book, a lot of which are really great. Previously I've shared this one, For the Lonely, which is equally a prayer about friendship. Today I want to share another to which I've been regularly returning, A Parent's Prayer:

O gracious God, I commend my children to you; let them know you to be their God and protector, their creator and savior, the rock of their life and the goal toward which they move. Pour your grace into their hearts, and confirm and multiply them in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, that they may abound daily in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus; may they find joy and wonder in all your works, and grow in faith, hope, and love toward you and all people. Of your infinite goodness, provide whatever they lack from my fault or negligence. As you have called me to this great work, awaken in me the patience, the wisdom, and the love necessary to complete it, that your presence may be the joy of our home and our eternal hope. Amen.

A Prayer for the Lonely

During this break between semesters, I've been spending some time with the prayers of the revised St. Augustine Prayer Book, a lot of which are really great. This one (For the Lonely) beautifully considers friendship and its opposites from a variety of perspectives and as an offering to God:

Lord Jesus, in Gethsemane, your friends were not able to stay awake and watch with you, and, when you were taken, they all fled leaving you alone; remember with compassion and for good those who are alone; those who have lost friends or family to death; those whose lives have been solitary because of work or particular burdens. We pray also for those who in selfishness or other faults have broken every tie, those whose guilt or sin leaves them alone or despised. We pray for those who have been falsely accused and shunned for no reasons, those embittered through what they have endured, and for all caught in the isolation of mental confusion. 

In all of these, O Lord, let your Spirit work forgiveness and reconciliation, renewal and hope; give to each of us such a sense of your abiding love, such a confidence in the communion of saints and such a heart that as we turn toward you, we turn also toward each other, in perfect charity and in the bonds of friendship; for you have called us friends and welcome us all into the one and eternal kingdom.

Amen.