On this Valentine's Day, I'm reminded of the best marriage sermon ever. It's a 10 point sermon with just one point: forgive. While Jesus' words in this coming Sunday's gospel about loving enemies may instinctively call up imagines of political opponents and/or citizens of countries we fear, the best marriage sermon ever reminds us that marriage, also, is one of God's gracious means of giving us enemies to love. I mean that last part humorously and truly, but not cynically. After all, to call someone my enemy is not to say that it is their fault and not mine we are enemies. Our conflict may expose my own difficulty in loving that which I don't control or loving beyond the boundaries of my personal self-interests. Moreover, to take Jesus seriously, to call someone my enemy is to clarify the nature of a faithful response to them; it is to commit to love them. Most people don't want to have enemies, much less love them. But if the naming of enemies is the first step toward love and forgiveness, maybe our reticence to have enemies is a kind of guarantee that they stay that way. Maybe the naming of enemies, in the spirit of Jesus' commandment, is a kind of moral achievement, if it calls us back to the work of forgiveness and love. Dietrich Bonhöffer and Jean Vanier have both said that the main work of the church, the community of faith, is to forgive and be forgiven. But it is sometimes hard to know how to prioritize this work. Remarkably, Dr. Robert Enright, professor of educational psychology and founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, is working to help faith communities, schools, and families normalize and constructively engage the good work of forgiveness. With his permission, I am sharing links to some of his resources at the end of this post. If you or your faith community would like to commit to cultivating a culture of forgiveness in your context and utilizing aspects of Enright's work, would you comment here or otherwise let me know? I am working with him to help communities of faith become "Forgiving Communities," which is to say communities that publicly express their intention to live forgiveness, so that we can become resources to one another and others who might benefit from the example of those who are a few steps farther down the road. ____ All resources by Dr. Robert Enright, shared in the hopes of identifying faith communities that might resource one another and others: The Church as Forgiving Community: An Initial Modelis a wonderful resource for developing a culture of forgiveness within a church.
My barber makes sure I don't get a big head about my beard. "You know," he says, "people will tell you you're growing a beautiful beard, but the truth is you've just decided to stop not growing one. It's weird that the verb goes to the person who has decided not to act. I mean, it's the clean-shaven look that takes the daily commitment to do something, but nobody ever says to those folks, 'Hey! I see you've decided not to grow a beard today!'
Of course, my barber is right. Growing a beard has become a source of humility for me, just to the extent that people are impressed by something I decided not to do. I didn't grow the beard, I just stopped not growing it.
Paradoxically, "stop" is a verb, too, and ceasing action is a kind of action. Still, that "stop" might be the most important action one can take to make room for a beautiful, new thing is a profoundly humbling realization.
I know it's true, though, when some action of my kids pushes me over the edge and I nearly lose it, or I do lose it, but then I stop my verbal exasperation, drop to their eye level, ask their forgiveness, and we embrace. I know it's true when, after a friend has finished talking, I stop the standard back and forth pattern meant to ensure we will each fit approximately the same number of words into the conversation and instead double down and say, "It sounds like you're hurting. Tell me more about that." I know it's true that when you play fewer of the strings for a given chord, that's when you hear the harmonies most clearly.
"Stop" is a verb, and ceasing action is itself an action. And some stopping can be fruitful.
If the beautiful, new thing born of non-action, requiring non-action, is humbling, in 2017 it is also heretical. Most of us carry powerful computers in our pockets to make sure that we do not have even a single unproductive moment. We want to change the world and make things better. Never mind that this approach carries with it an impossibly high opinion of the things we produce; whatever it is must be better than an empty moment, right?
Maybe.
Some friends and I were talking about the idea/commandment of sabbath the other day. We talked about practical considerations; for example, keeping the sabbath allows introverts time to recharge and acknowledges that human beings aren't as productive over time when we work without rest. But we also talked about some of the more challenging (i.e., less obviously productive) aspects of sabbath keeping:
Times of intentional rest confront us with the extent to which we find our identity and worth in our work and call us back to trust of God's love for us and the identity in God we receive as God's gift.
Visibly trusting God's love for us makes us, also requires gentleness with one another.
We did not mention it that day, but I feel like Walter Brueggemann would insist on including the truth that, scripturally speaking, sabbath keeping has always been about the land, too. Imagine the beard the earth might grow if we weren't always cutting it back as far as the blade can be pushed.
In all of these things, there is humility again. There is William Cavanaugh's reminder of the possibility that the assumptions that we know enough, are good enough, and are powerful enough to affect positive change do not always hold, and that "When you're standing on the edge of a cliff, progress is defined as a step back." There is, additionally, the humility that comes with trusting God and one another to meet us in the spaces we do not control and cannot fill with more of our good intentions.
Importantly, to say that God gives the growth is not an argument for complacency or passivity. Far from it! The most significant political act of the last two weeks has been a federal "stay" on an immigration order - a crucial call and action to non-action! A ceasing as doing. Part of what needs doing, says Cavanaugh, is to engage the world with the humility that knows that we are not God.
Finally, then, there is a real sense in which I am growing a beard. That is, what I first conceived of as inaction has proven to be anything but inactive: I have put down the blade. I have made room for new possibilities. I have exercised patience. I have looked for what God is doing (we're talking in metaphor here). I have asked for help when I've needed it. I have waited. I have oiled and balmed. I have received what I've been given. I have been grateful.
As it turns out, sometimes you have to move to be still. We will not find the humility proper to us by riding the raft of the society's status quo.
In addition to all the other things not shaving has meant doing, I have also grieved and remembered.
On November 11, my wife's birthday, she became concerned that she might be experiencing a miscarriage. On November 18, my birthday, the doctor's test confirmed it. At one point, I realized that the beard I had begun in July on a whim would be a year old (a "yeard" in beard parlance) about the time the baby would have been born. Though I am still not sure I will let the beard grow for the full year, remembering is why it has lasted this long. Mine has not been a melancholy remembering, but an honest one, because we faced a reality I could not change, but desperately wanted to. I was simultaneous confronted with the limits of my actions and invited in a new way into the difficult and beautiful space of humility and trust of God: the God of the cross, and the God who makes all things new.
Helpful background:the Episcopal tradition I'm a part of assigns passages of Scripture for each day, and we're invited to read them as a part of morning and evening prayer, either in our faith communities or at home.
So today I'm reading the daily lectionary readings, and I skip ahead to the gospel, just to see what it is. Immediate laughter ensues. It's a two-part reading, and the second part is the more famous of the scripture siblings: it's the account of the time some people bring children to Jesus, and the disciples try to stop them, which turns out to be a bad idea. Jesus calls out his dutiful disciples in the now famous words,
Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.
These words are so famous, they usually get quoted on their own; we don't always think about them in light of scripture sibling A, which is too bad for comedy's sake. But here's the full scene: Scripture sibling A is some Pharisees asking Jesus what he thinks about marriage and divorce. And they're probably trying to trick Jesus, but he's taking the question seriously, opening the scriptures, setting up an impromptu mini-seminar, and it's not clear that he's ready to end it when these kids show up. And every parent knows this feeling. Every parent covets the experience of even one uninterrupted sentence spoken and heard at the dinner table. OF COURSE the marriage seminar would be interrupted by children! Once Jesus started talking, it could seemingly end no other way.
Full disclosure: I'm a parent of a 7 and 5 year old. My wife and I are constantly getting interrupted, and (I won't speak for her) I am not always gracious receiving them. We're talking going on eight years of broken communication. For comments. For questions. For spills. For bodily injuries. For disturbingly accurate (and unsolicited) assessments of our weaknesses. For fart jokes and bugs. So I laugh at Mark's take on Jesus' failed marriage seminar, but importantly my laughter is empathic, not cynical. After all, and as any parent knows, it's the interruptions that make us holy. Of course, children make their parents holy not by any of the adorable things that end up as photos on Facebook walls (guilty as charged) but by exposing and then transforming the limits of what we had formerly called our self-sacrificing love. The presence of children, even when the prayer for those children has been a longtime coming, inevitably (and sometimes uncomfortably) reveals the control we would like to have over those whom we love. Holy, as it turns out, is less about giving off golden auras and more about learning to love more than you'd like to. Indeed, William Cavanaugh observes that commitments like marriage, the religious life, and family are (communally discerned) choices that cut off a whole range of other choices (Field Hospital, 93) and so "make it possible to achieve the options that really matter" (ibid., 91). Such commitments require habits for their living out, where a "habit is a way of relieving us from the burden of having to make choices. When we develop good habits - Thomas Aquinas called them 'virtues' - we don't even need to spend time thinking about whether we might steal or commit adultery" (ibid.). When Christians make room for the interruption called children, whether in the family or in the church, old habits and orientations are challenged. Where old habits and orientations are not challenged, it can be fairly asked whether a family or church has really made room for children in any meaningful sense. Such a determination is not a condemnation, but an opportunity to invoke new habits that would overcome our natural disposition. The difficulty, writes Godly Play founder Jerome Berryman, is that
Ignoring children in the church is an unrealized defensive act. Children present a powerful challenge to what adults conceive of as spiritual maturity....We have an unspoken theological heritage of ambivalence, ambiguity, and indifference toward children that still outweighs our understanding of children as a means of grace (The Spiritual Guidance of Children: Montessori, Godly Play, and the Future).
Understanding children as a means of grace means, at least, discovering a reciprocity of spiritual guidance. As Berryman puts it,
Children require adult spiritual guidance, because they need the permission and means to develop their spirituality. Adults require children's spiritual guidance, because by being who they are, children can refresh and recenter spiritual growth in adults. Without this mutual blessing children and adults are likely to lack the dynamic wholeness and authenticity they were created to enjoy (ibid.)
In all of this, Berryman aims to cultivate the ability to "speak Christian" and, with this gift, "to make existential meaning, to find direction in life and death, and to celebrate what truly matters" (ibid.) This aim to speak the faith well calls to mind a verse from the first scripture of today's appointed readings; it is God's promise to God's people from the book of Isaiah:
And as for me, this is my covenant with them, says the LORD: my spirit that is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouths of your children, or out of the mouths of your children's children, says the LORD, from now on and forever.
At this point, I'm hoping at least a few of you patient readers have thoughts of your own that would bless me and the others. Would you take a stab at one or more of these questions in the comments below?
What does formation in your faith community look like? What are the community's goals for the formation of each person?
When have you been a part of a community for which children were at the center? What did it look like?
What makes the inclusion of children as a) whole persons and b) occasions of spiritual guidance most difficult?
When have you experienced a one-way relationship turned reciprocal? What made the turn possible? What did such a turn require of the parties involved? What did you learn you had to give?
What habits help you love those you don't control?
Dr. William Cavanaugh spent two days with a bunch of Christian communities on campus last week, and the timing could not have been better. The immigration ban was yo-yo-ing its way through the media and our news feeds, I was two weeks into despairing of a pastor's ability to write a sermon before 2 AM and a last twitter check on the night before the day of one's preaching. As my friend Greg commented the day before the first event, "There is almost no one alive I would rather hear explain the world right now than William Cavanaugh." I live-streamed one of Cavanaugh's talks, The Politics of Humility, which I've embedded at the end of this post. The other links are resources I have come across since then, and which I think belong to the conversation, along with a brief word from me about the connection I see. We need each other in this moment, and we need a new imagination, increasingly even to access each other. Thankfully, God in Christ gives us both. History may repeat itself, but it is silly to pretend any of us have lived this life before. I don't think, either, that Cavanaugh pretends to know exactly what to do next. And I think that not pretending is exactly the beginning of the new imagination to which Cavanaugh points. What do you say? It'll be more fun together. "The Displaced Person: Reading Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Islamophobia" A timely grappling with "the radical command to love our neighbor as ourselves, to be like the Good Samaritan who sets aside deeply engrained bigotry to minister to the needy." Grateful to my friend and local poet Rita Mae Reese for pointing me to this article. How to Have a Difficult Conversation: 3 Practices In his talk, Professor Cavanaugh observed that having a conflict is a moral achievement and that our social and political moment desperately needs more conflict. This article is a good start for Christians toward taking up Cavanaugh's challenge. How the Family is Essential for Evangelism Cavanaugh spoke about unplugging from the rage machine, which named an emotional need nearly every person with whom I've spoken in the last three weeks has also expressed. It's also a need that is hard to know how to manage responsibly. After all, ignorance is not really bliss. Rightly, we recognize that the ability to unplug (depending on how we understand the verb) often correlates to one's level of privilege. However, Cavanaugh's example of what constitutes unplugging for him - he and his family weekly share meals, games, and social outings with a family of Muslim refugees in their neighborhood, whose friendship was arranged through his church - makes clear that unplugging need not be synonymous with complacency, apathy, and/or passivity. His family's experience echoes this video's emphasis on the family as a "little church," which opens up new imaginations for Christian faithfulness. "The Politics of Humility," a lecture given by Professor William Cavanaugh last Friday at Upper House, co-sponsored by Geneva, Pres House, InterVarsity, Badger Catholic, Upper House, and St. Francis House.
I like to tell about a favorite church sign I saw one day in North Carolina, at a church in a small coastal fishing town. The sign read, “Be fishers of people. You catch ‘em, I’ll clean ‘em. - God.”
That sign invoked Jesus' promise to teach his followers to fish for people, but the sign also changed - if just for a moment - my picture of God. Suddenly, God Almighty was down on the river, under the shade of bald cypress trees, decked out in camo, sitting on the back end of a pickup truck, grinning with a big filet knife and a Coleman cooler filled with bagged ice and canned beer. The image raised for me all kinds of questions, like, “Where does God get God’s koozies?” And “What do they say on them?”
It’s a great reminder that, lots of times, our cultural experiences inform our first responses to Scripture. The Texan imagines camo and coolers. The Wisconsin fly fisher maybe gets excited at the prospect of fly tying with Jesus. We start with known categories, and all the more if we don’t fish. The non-fishers among us will want to reduce the metaphor to the basics: hook, line, and sinker. We’ll draw on secular fishing grammar: idioms like, “She took the bait,” which translates roughly, “I fooled her.” Or “bait and switch,” which means I promised them one thing and substituted another. Or “We hooked him,” which indicates that even we haven’t persuaded the other person, we’ve at least hit his emotional triggers in such a way that we can manipulate his energies.
That most of our pictures for fishing involve baited hooks and deception conveniently fits the narrative many Christians and non-Christians have constructed for what Jesus is asking his disciples to do when he invites them to become fishers of people. Evangelism is an activity many people do not trust. Evangelism, the thinking goes, is a practice designed to get someone to do something they didn’t want to do in the first place, either by fooling them into it or changing their minds in ways they didn’t ask for or invite.
The mistrust of evangelism as unwanted meddling in other people’s lives further reinforces secular categories of the private and public, where religion is decidedly private. Religion is fine to have, but it’s best kept out of sight. Which is a terrifying expression of political power, when you think about it, because you’re talking about the power to make visible and invisible, where the lines demarcating “religion” from the rest of life are oftentimes arbitrary and decided by the state. If we defined religion as “that for which you’d sacrifice your life”, the military power of the state would show up in the search results, for example. If we defined religion instead as “that which commands our fullest attention and devotion,” the Green Bay Packers would trump the Catholics and Lutherans combined in this state. Can you imagine a secular agreement by which it is acceptable to be a Packers fan in a purely private sense?
But I digress. I think it’s enough to say that the militant relegation of religion to private categories is both founded on mistrust and somewhat arbitrary in where the line gets drawn. While some of the mistrust of religion has been earned, it is also true that this mistrust of religion is sometimes exploited to justify agendas we would not accept if society called them religious.
So Jesus hands us the promise of evangelism in a fishing metaphor rife with hooks and a cultural mistrust of religion, and we smile and nod our heads in the way a boyfriend or girlfriend smiles and nods to be polite to his or her significant other when, unbeknownst to the other - but well known to everyone else - we are already seeing someone else. He can say what he wants. We see that he’s kind and means well. But we’re not really interest. We’ve moved on.
But. Well. This won’t change everything, but what if we took a step back. You know, before we projected our cultural understanding of fishing onto Jesus’ conversation with his friends. After all, fishing for Jesus’ friends was different from the fishing granddad did with us. There were no hooks or lines or beautifully crafted ties of one thing made to look like something else. Admittedly, the gospels aren’t fishing manuals, but every time we see them at it, they’re casting nets. They’re gathering fish. They’re bringing what was scattered in the water together. And I wonder if this changes how we hear Jesus’ invitation to fish for people. In other words, what if it’s not about deception, the bait and switch, or emotional hooks and manipulating others. What if it’s not about giving people a change they didn’t want or didn’t ask for? What if it’s about gathering and being gathered? What does it look like to be a part of God’s work of gathering all people to God?
Lots of things that sharing the gathering work of God could mean, but three things I see when I look at the disciples to whom the invitation was first given. When we ask what difference the metaphor makes, we look to the lives of Jesus’ disciples, what they did, when they did become fishers of people. They lived it
by forgiveness, received and extended,
by telling their own personal stories of being noticed and called and loved by God, and
by going out in pairs to heal and preach, in other words, by risking vulnerability and loving others in the same way as the one who loved and sent them. By love that lays down life for one’s friends.
If we describe the phrase retroactively, by the lives of the first disciples, that’s what it is to fish for people. So evangelism now includes saying, "I'm sorry" and working to make things right. Evangelism includes the spiritual practices that will help us better attend to God's presence in our lives, to discover and better tell the story of God's love for us and the world in our own words. And evangelism includes being made into seamless garments, who are the same people on the streets that we are in the churches. As Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has said, "Don't try to be hip. You're Episcopalians! Just be that. Don't stop being who you are."
Evangelism becomes less us for them and more us with one another, because my salvation is caught up with yours. And it's hard. And vulnerable. With the potential to change all parties involved. It's honest. And demanding. And beautiful. And exactly what Jesus promised.
Millions of women and others marched yesterday. I bet you’ve already seen the breathtaking aerial photographs. The pink hats with pointy ears. Signs of both inspiration and opposition. Millions of people discerning the shape of resistance. Maybe you were among the marchers! Maybe you weren’t. Maybe the shape of your discernment is different, even where you share many of the marchers’ values, hopes, and concerns. I want to say that that is okay. In 2017, there is an unprecedented amount of secular pressure to be on the right side of a thing, even from what appears to be the same side of a thing, and our impatience with one another quickly turns to shaming and the assumption that we must be in the same place to share the same space. But because Christians seek and serve Christ in one another and others, Christians resist impulses to shame. We speak truth in love, even challenge each other, but we also listen and learn from one another, as if Christ himself was there to be known, because Christ himself is there to be known. And so we recognize that the lives of saints constitute a diverse tapestry of faithful witness and response to the challenges Christian face. And we recognize our need of one another. I both am glad many people marched and trust the wisdom of those who didn’t. Truth be told, the marchers weren't all of one mind, either, but love makes room for each other.
I saw one photo of women protesting from a ship in Antarctica. My favorite sign had an icon of the Virgin Mary on one side. It said, “I’m with her.” On the back was quoted a portion of Mary’s song, the Magnificat. Luke 1:52: “Cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly.”
I think all marching, at its heart, is trying to imitate Mary. Like Mary’s response to the angel Gabriel - who appeared before Mary and laid out the plan before nervously adding, “So, what do you think?” - marching is an attempt to say “yes” with our bodies. It’s a yes that says no to the thing being protested but also no to the remaining lip service in one’s life. Marching says yes to living it out. Marching sings Mary’s song. And marching sings the 1991 chart topping hit by the hair metal band Extreme, inviting us to a moral imagination that is “More Than Words.”
Whether yesterday or some other day, maybe you’ve known first hand the feeling, the change that happens, when a conviction of the head moves south, to the heart, yes, but then it keeps going. The conviction keeps going until it lands on your feet. And feet were made for moving. Maybe your feet started moving you even before you recognized the fact of it. Maybe you were just trying to keep up with others and movement that began with your feet only later traveled north to your head and your heart. There is wisdom in bodies and the imitation of holiness.
Moving feet to the beat of faith does not always look like marches on capitols. In fact, as many of yesterday’s speeches attested, most days marching will look far less dramatic. Most days, marching will look like day in and day out showing up to your life. Loving God and your neighbor. Caring beyond the fences of your obvious self-interest. At first making room for the interruptions of others and then, over time, interrupting your own self when you see, when you spot, the new possibilities, how a thing might become otherwise with sacrificial love.
Joseph found himself marching with Mary and a newborn Jesus to Egypt when, by faith, he refrained from an apparently justified divorce. That’s right, marching that day took the profoundly unremarkable shape of not divorcing. Joseph knew the script, what to do, what he was entitled to do, what the rulebooks called for. But he took heaven’s cue and went off-script. He decided to show up the next day anyway. He decided to stay; to love. Marching, at first, just meant not leaving. The footsteps of faith are supremely ordinary steps taken over and over again in sacrificial love.
Speaking of ordinary steps.
Matt Klein saw me write most of another sermon on Thursday at Johnson Public House over a fine vanilla latte. It was a fine sermon about Jesus calling his followers to become fishers of people. About how the way we think of fishing - which is nothing like the way Jesus’ friends, with their big nets, would have fished - gives evangelism, faith sharing, today a bad rap. About how fishing is not bait and switch or hook, line, and sinker, deception and/or manipulation but gathering and being gathered together in nets, about being made whole. When we ask what difference the metaphor makes, we look to the lives of Jesus’ disciples, what they did, when they did become fishers of people. They lived it by forgiveness, received and extended, by telling their own personal stories of being noticed and called and loved by God, and by going out in pairs to heal and preach, in other words, by risking vulnerability and loving others in the same way as the one who loved and sent them. By love that lays down life for one’s friends. If we describe the phrase retroactively, by the lives of the first disciples, that’s what it is to fish for people.
So far, so good.
But then, yesterday, with all those feet and all those hats and all that hurt and all that beauty and hope, and even imperfect and unfinished as resistance goes, a prayer of a beginning, it occurred to me that becoming fishers of people didn’t start with the disciples’ even mostly understanding what they would become. It started with a simple “yes” to “follow me.” It started with sand covered steps in sandals and “Good bye, Mom.” It started with movement. Someone today says to a preacher, “Your sermon moved me,” usually it means the sermon evoked an inner emotional response. Bad pizza can do that. But when was the last time the Gospel moved you, not just in an inner sense, but in a feet under your body sense, in a “I’d still be doing some other thing over there, but now I’m here, if not for that Good News” sense, in a “I realize that, without Jesus, this whole thing looks crazy” sense? In a, “I was lost but now am found” sense? In a “How else was I gonna get close enough to see Jesus?” sense? I do think that movement leads followers of Jesus to the space of forgiveness, storytelling, and sacrificial love, but I also trust the wisdom of the body, and yesterday reminded me of the wisdom of bodies, and I wonder what the movement of your faithful feet has shown and taught you about the goodness and mercy of God.
Finally, a last word. It would kill me if exploring marching as a metaphor for the Christian life the day after the Women’s March was somehow read as my equating participation in one party or another with Christian faithfulness. Let me be clear: I am not the first and won’t be the last thoughtful person to denounce the idolatrous patriotism of the president’s inauguration address, and I won’t be the first to observe that the cure for idolatrous patriotism is not fulsome allegiance to the other - or any other - political party, however much we might share with and learn from them. The cure for idolatrous patriotism is sustained and loving collective attention to and movement after the voice of the one who first said, “Follow me,” and who today says it still. Because justice begins with right relationship to the God who created us for the praise and worship of God. (This is why Compline has us say, “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit…” like three billion times. Because justice is human creatures giving glory to the God who made and saved them and acknowledging the giftedness of all things for the flourishing of all people.)
Christians don’t follow a donkey or elephant, Christians worship the Lamb. And the lamb says, love your enemies, bless the other side, put down the swords, share what you have, give glory to God, love one another. Following this one will not make our lives apolitical but will show us the fullness of the alternative to the powers of this world we have been given in Jesus Christ. It may take you to St. Louis! To move with this one is to move toward love without fear not just of losing, but love without fear of giving, love without fear of forgiving, love without fear of being forgiven, and love across all fences of our obvious self interests.
Pray the Spirit so moves God’s people! Not in the pizza sense, but really moves followers of Jesus, as in, with their feet, toward the glory of God and love for each other. Let the Song of the Lamb be the song that we sing as we walk together with our own sand covered feet the Way of our Lord Jesus Christ.
