The crack of the communion host
like a whip, like bone,
like the click of handcuffs;
how far we have roamed
from the upper room:
warm bread softly torn,
love-fuelled bodies, blood
fired by passion’s wine.
You come to us unnoticed,
gathering crumbs beneath the table,
trying to piece back together
those whom we have broken
When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” (Mark 3:21; Year B Proper 5)
What I think we sometimes fail to acknowledge is that they were right: He was quite mad. How could a person be human and divine and not find themselves quite outside of the acceptable norms, the sane standards of the day?
The Word of God spoke whole universes into being, out of sheer imagination, populating them with flora and fauna never before seen, or heard of, or dreamed of, then talking to them as though they were real. Madness, we would call it.
The Wisdom of God is, as has been well-documented, foolishness to the wise philosopher. Utter foolishness.
The steadfast loving-kindness of God is steadfastly insane, where insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over (by the prophets and the Incarnation), hoping for a different response from the people, a better result.
The Love of God, manic and unrestrained, indiscriminate and unrelenting, completely lacking boundaries of self-protection, proper procedure, ever over-enthusiastic, rushing in where angels fear to tread; of course it is madness.
The life of Jesus itself, refusing to play by the rules of mortality, is an exercise in madness. His family was right. Their only mistake was in trying to rein in the force that created nature, the will of God, instead of grasping the hem of Jesus’ garment and hanging on for the ride of their dear lives.
Last night, our middle cat crawled into bed with me for the first time since I got home from my trip last week. He’d been feeling pretty rotten, and ever since the vet told us it’s most likely terminal, he’s been spending a lot of time under my desk, contemplating his mortality with the help of the theology books and bibles strewn around the floor. He’s never been much of a philosopher before now, unlike his older brother and, to a less disciplined and more anarchic extent, his younger sister. Now, largely undistracted by the need to eat or sleep, he has a achieved an impressive level of mindfulness, calm, a kind of peace.
The imminence of an ending has mellowed the middle cat. Yesterday afternoon, he let his sister skulk by behind him without so much as a tremor of his tail, or a sharp, hissing intake of breath. She was not sure how to cope with such unexpected forbearance. That’s how grace works sometimes. (“If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head,”* advise Paul and the Proverbs.)
In the evening, he came to lie on the bed. Still holding himself somewhat apart, as though some part of him were ready, already, for the next mile of his journey, perhaps he remembered that love is the greater part of life, that relationship is a surer path to wisdom even than philosophy. Turning his inscrutable eyes to mine, he told him that the time had come for him to become my teacher, so close has he drawn toward eternity.
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Also published this week:
Immersive prayer: a seasonal reflection at the Episcopal Cafe
Suffer the children: what the bible has to say about immigration, ICE, and family separation, at RevGalBlogPals
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*Romans 12:20; Proverbs 25:21-22
This morning’s sermon time was dedicated to answering some leftover questions that our Sunday School students had accumulated through the school year. At the time of the second hymn, I had not yet seen any children arrive, and so I had prepared, in pencil, on the blank space of my service booklet, a brief outline of what I might say if the best laid plans fell through.
As it turned out, half a dozen children had snuck in without my seeing them and arrived at the front of the church just in time for the gospel. I will not try to recreate the conversation that we had, but since it was also inspired by their questions, amongst other provocations, this is what I might have said if they hadn’t come to my rescue:
In the story of Samuel’s call this morning, we hear God speaking to a child, having him prophesy to his elder, and the religious professional in the household. It is not as though the child raises himself in the knowledge of God; Eli’s experience is crucial in helping Samuel to listen for the voice of the Lord in the night. But it is Samuel who hears that voice.
Our children put together some questions about God and other ineffable matters to share with us today. Whilst we are charged with raising them in the knowledge and love of God, they have plenty of inspiration of their own, plenty of curiosity and conversations with God with which to challenge us.
One of the questions that they raised was the one which every child, woman, man ends up asking for themself: if God is good (which we trust), and God is all-powerful (which we hope), how does that theology permit for the existence of evil?
One answer (and it is only one answer; there are others) is that while God created the world for good, God also created it with an existence which is, if not entirely separate, or independent from God, then at least heading so far in that direction as to allow us to understand that we have free will, and that the laws of physics and the natural sciences will tend to govern what happens around us as we exercise that freedom of will.*
It is an imperfect answer, and it is grotesquely incomplete; but as far as it goes, it allows for us to understand that while God created the world for good, we have the capacity, sometimes, to corrupt God’s purposes through error, sin, selfishness.
For example (an example I used this morning), God created us to live within a cycle that consumes food for growth, energy, nurture. One might imagine that the way in which God has provided for us to eat of the earth might be a sign of God’s loving care for us, just as a newborn infant learns that it is loved and valued because when it cries out for nourishment, its parent is right there to feed it, and soothe the fear that hunger creates (or illustrates?) within us.
But sometimes our relationship with food becomes complicated by grief, separation, insecurity, abuse, addiction; then something that was created for good can become a source of bad health, harm to body and soul.
[Of course, the simplicity of this argument leaves out afflictions such as allergies, diabetes, and so much more.]
In the gospel, Jesus uses the example of hunger to draw attention to the providence of God that underlies and underlines the law, which our own legalism sometimes seeks to undermine. God’s word to the people in the wilderness was a gift, a description of a relationship with the Creator and Redeemer designed to sustain them in their life together with God. It was not written down for use as a weapon to keep people in their place, that place being always at arms’ distance from ourselves, although close enough for judgement. That was the attitude which Jesus confronted on the sabbath, and it is familiar enough to our own culture and communities.
In the small things, it leads to hurt feelings, misunderstandings, divisions, contempt. As it grows, it eats away at the common good, seeding economic unfairness, prejudicial outcomes, cracking the cement that should bind us in community. At it extremes, and all too often, it leads to crucifixion, in all of its forms, and the killing of the innocent, the entangled, the unloved and the beloved, sometimes in the same body.
[Today was part of #WearOrange weekend, for the awareness of the scourge of gun violence, which is one of the foul fruits of this kind of corruption of the creation of God.]
When we prefer our own rules to righteousness, as defined by the generosity of spirit with which God created the world in which we live and move and have our being – well, then things get out of whack.
I listened, whilst wondering if would preach this sermon, if the children were not there, to our reader proclaim the word of Paul:
But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.
Ah, that extraordinary power that belongs to God, to created good! We are afflicted in every way, but we cannot crush the good that God wills for God’s world. We are perplexed, for sure, but do not despair, for God is with us, through the prophets, through the Resurrection, in the sacraments, speaking with and through the children to wake us up.
God speaks through the children to wake us up to the call we have as Christians: to proclaim the love of God in word and deed, in all that we say and do, working with God to create good even out of all that goes wrong and awry in this world, knowing that God has created it, has created us, for God’s good purposes, and out of God’s unmitigated love.
This, or something like it, is what I might have said had the children not come to sit on the altar step with me (and I am glad that they did. We went off on a few other tangents, too, but) I hope that it is at least in harmony with what they heard from me this morning.
I think I ended by telling them something like, “God loves you, God is with you, God wants only good for you, but come what may, there is nothing that can end or separate you from that love which God has for you. If I didn’t believe that, I would not be here, and I wouldn’t tell it to you.”
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*Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Knopf Doubleday, 2004 ) is a classic exposition of these questions and answers which I reviewed in preparation for this conversation with the children.
This post has been updated.
Riptide currents race through green
fields revealing their true colours,
wrecking sirens’ songs, drowning
desire with their own unfettered appetites;
they stain the earth with lively riot,
catching into their whirling dance
flotsam and jetsam, driftwood that passes
this way, these days, for human wisdom.
The readings for Trinity Sunday include Isaiah’s vision and call, the Spirit of adoption, and Nicodemus’ night visit to Jesus
The doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery, and in my oh-so-humble opinion, it should remain that way. It is part of our revelation as Christians, as witnesses to the godhood of Jesus, that the One, Indivisible, Eternal, and Only God comes in more than one shape, form, or person. How that gets worked out within the Godhead, within the divine economy, or the eternal dance, or the Holy Trinity, however you want to attempt to describe it – well, we can scratch at it and dissect it and reverse engineer it as a doctrine, but God knows what it all means, and for us, the more important question is, What does it matter?
What difference does it make in our lives that we worship a God whom we call Trinity, whom we call Unity, who comes to us in the person of Jesus, in the Spirit of the living God, in the name of our Father?
It matters because we are created in the image of that God. Everything we are and everything we are called to be, and to do, mirrors in some way that divine mystery of the Trinity.
It means that we are created by a God who does not rule alone like an egotistical despot removed from all reason but his own, but by a God who recognizes that the first need for life is love.
When Isaiah beheld the glory of God, he was terrified. “How will I live?” he asked. But God touched him on the lips, with a live, burning coal as unconsumed as the burning bush which faced down Moses. God touched Isaiah on the lips, speaking, “Peace, child. I’ve got this. I’ve got you.”
The terrifying, seraphim-defying, smoky and smouldering glory of God was tempered by the touch of tenderness, and of encouragement.
“Now, who will go for me?” asked God, and Isaiah, strengthened and emboldened by God’s love, which translated God’s glory into something he could work with; Isaiah said, “Send me.”
It matters because we may recognize the authority that comes from God when it power is tempered with compassion, and authority serves those who are under it, when status is not wielded for its own purposes, but in order to empower and embolden those in need of encouragement to find their own way, their own status as God’s children, God’s prophets, God’s beloved.
“It is not good for the human to exist alone,” says the God who has never known loneliness, and dreads it for God’s children. It matters that we know a God who will not allow for isolation, or desolation, who does not disown God’s children, but who sets out time and again, through the prophets, through the wilderness, through the sacraments, through the Spirit to remind us that we are not only created in God’s image, but that God has committed Godself to us, irrevocably, unbreakably. We are not alone. We always have someone to whom we can turn, who will listen, who will love us unconditionally. And that is very good news.
The Trinity matters because we are named for a God who knows how to wield humility. In the person of Jesus Christ, God made the ultimate sacrifice, to live for us, to live among us, with us, enduring the best and the worst of what the world has to offer us, faithful to us through death and beyond.
The Trinity matters because, when Nicodemus met Jesus that night after dark, Nicodemus did not meet one-third of God. In the mystery of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, through the mysterious mathematics of the Trinity, Nicodemus met the entire Wisdom of God in human form that night, and was schooled in the ways of the Spirit and in the mysteries of our spirituality, by the God who came not in clouds of glory to be worshipped, but clothed in flesh and girded to serve God’s own servants.
Each of these encounters: Isaiah’s experience in the house, the Spirit of God whispering through our prayers, Nicodemus seeking out Christ by night; in each of these God was fully present. Not one-third of a God, but the full and sufficient glory, mercy, and love of God; God’s wisdom, compassion, and grace, and yes, God’s judgment. Nothing was missing.
So it is that when we encounter a person, a living human being, we do not see one-seven-billionth of the image of God, but the complete, sufficient, somewhat tarnished and dented perhaps, but faithfully rendered image of God, not divided and diluted between individuals, but fully present in every person that we meet.
The Trinity matters because it not only inspires our worship of God, but it informs how we see one another; how much value we place on the least significant individual in our lives; how much grace, and how much praise, and how much encouragement we are prepared to spend upon the 7.6 billionth person in the world’s pecking order, compared to simply the billionth.
When we encounter the Spirit of God, in our prayers, on public transport, in the hymns of praise and procreation sung aloud by the birds – we know the whole of God’s love for us.
When we encounter the glory of God, in worship, in terror, in turmoil – we know the whole of God’s tenderness towards us, raising us back to our feet.
When we encounter Jesus, in the sacraments, in the songs of children, in the old stories – we know the lengths to which God will extend Godself in order to reach us.
The more we enter into the mystery which multiplies grace without dividing it, and
diffuses love without diluting it, the closer we come not to understanding, but to accepting and rejoicing in the manifold mercies and magnificent, mysterious love that is our gift from God.
This summer I will have lived in the United States for 15 years. This year, I have been a US citizen for six years already, and just the other night I was once again reminded that American English is not my mother tongue and that I still don’t always know the words to make myself understood, or to understand.
So it is a gift on the day of Pentecost to read in the Acts of the Apostles that the people can understand each other no matter what language they speak, no matter where they come from, no matter their background. They all hear the Spirit of God speaking to them in their own language, one that they can understand; and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that the story implies, with its buzz of excited conversation among the crowd, that they understand one another. Certainly, they all heard Peter, that fisherman from Galilee who in his time crossed the borders of Lebanon and Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, without let or hindrance. They heard, and understood the gospel that he brought to them straight from the life and love of Christ.
It makes me wonder what we have done, how far we have come from that moment which threatened to reunite humanity within the Spirit of God, within the unity of understanding, standing under the love of Christ revealed to us by the cross and the empty tomb.
How is it that we no longer understand one another even when we allegedly speak the same language? How is it that we are so divided that some of us feel duty bound to arm ourselves against our own neighbours, instead of loving them to death? How is it that we are so threatened by the love of Christ’s death on the cross that we carry death in our pockets and expect it to lead us to life? How is it that instead of the empty tomb, we stand witness too often to the graves of God’s children who are no longer playing at killing one another?
What have we done, since that day of Pentecost, when the Spirit of God blew out the doors and let rip the gospel, the love of God demonstrated to us in Christ Jesus for the whole world to see?
Yesterday, I suspect that a good many of you saw our own Presiding Bishop Michael Curry offer a wedding homily. I knew that it would be a good one. The language of love can bridge wide oceans. The language of the gospel is always crossing boundaries. The Spirit of understanding can even heal the division between British and American English, with a little good grace and a following wind.
I knew that Bishop Curry would blow the minds of many who heard him. I knew that he would preach that love of God, that love of Jesus which threatens our divisions and thwarts our fears if we let it, which heals wounds that cannot be sewn shut by any other power; which heals them even they may still leave a scar.
I didn’t know that he would quote Teilhard de Chardin on the discovery and the use and the harnessing of fire, which of course is perfect for Pentecost, thought all the preachers in the land – except that really it isn’t. Whoever thought that fire could ever be a positive image for the Holy Spirit? I know, it’s in the Bible, and that without the fiery combustion engine of the sun we would have no life here on earth, but still …
We know the destructive force that fire can be – we see it in the melting of the earth and the ash that rises from the volcano on Hawai’i. We see it in wildfires and house fires, and we see it in the controlled explosions that ring out from shotguns and semi-automatic rifles and service revolvers. Only when it is tightly controlled and curbed does fire become useful to us, life-giving instead of life-stealing, productive instead of destructive. Only when it is drawn back, held back, reasoned with … even then, let’s be honest, having seen all that we have seen, can we still call fire our friend? If fire represents the Holy Spirit, then we have blasphemed the Spirit of God by making fire the creature of our destruction instead of the essence of our life.
The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, cannot be tamed, and does not destroy when given free reign, because she is not our creature to control, but she is the very essence of God, who is love.
De Chardin says that if we can but learn to harness the power of love, that Spirit which is God; if we can learn to use love to power our lives, our homes, our schools, our communities; if we can learn to share love as God has shared love with us, then it will be as revolutionary for humankind as when our ancestors learned how to pluck fire from the earth without getting burned.
If we can learn, not to hoard or to restrict or to control love, but how to live with it, live within its dance, let love live within us, then we can change the world.
Bishop Curry also quoted the Revd Dr Martin Luther King, Jr:
We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that, we will be able to make of this old world a new world. Love is the only way.
If we can learn the language of love, instead of fear, or of fire; if we can learn the language of love then we might once again understand one another, and hear the voice of God on the wind, telling all who will listen of the love that gave up life itself for us on the cross, and plucked life itself from the grave, all for the love of God and of God’s creation.
If we can learn the ways of love – well, Bishop Curry said it this way:
When love is the way, the earth [our world] will be a sanctuary.
When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields down by the riverside
to study war no more.
Can you imagine a world without war? Can you imagine a world without gunfire? Can you imagine a world in which the murder of schoolchildren, and their teachers, and our neighbours, was unimaginable?
That is the world imagined by the Holy Spirit which blew through Jerusalem on Pentecost morning, bringing people from different backgrounds, languages, nations, ethnicities, and histories into an understanding of this: that God is love. That God would do, has done, anything for us to know love. That what God wants more than anything else in the world is for us to love one another, because in doing so, we live the life that God created for us, and because perfect love drives out all fear, and because when we love one another, we love God, because God is love.
Love God. Love your neighbour as yourself. It is still, and always, the only way to change the world.
Amen.
Denial is my spiritual practice (and other failures of faith),
Rachel G Hackenberg & Martha Spong (Church Publishing, May 2018)
In her epilogue to the book, Rachel writes*
Our best hope is not that you read these stories and say, “Wow, cool dirty laundry,” but that you find a mirror for your spirit somewhere within these pages, a glimmer of a reflection to assure you that you’re not alone – in faith or in life, in pain or in change – and that you recognize yourself within God’s broader story.
I had already marked the page where Martha described arriving for a coffee date:
Once inside, I listened carefully to the orders of the people in line ahead of me, managed to request a cup of coffee without sounding inept …
because I do so recognize that grown woman covering her adolescent anxiety about fitting in with careful tactics designed to demonstrate competency. I saw her in the mirror on her way out of my house this morning.
The gift that Martha and Rachel offer in their stories is not found in the information about their lives per se, fascinating and generous as they are, but in that invitation to the reader to find herself (himself, themself) within the stories that we share; the ones that haunt us since our days growing up within or without families, within or without the embrace of our spiritual ancestors, whose stories creep out of the Bible to interweave with these pastors’ words and remind us that it was ever thus, and that God was ever so.
In the years between moving to America and becoming an Episcopal priest, through a series of associations I won’t go into here, “The Summons,” that beautiful song by John Bell of Iona has become my mantra of sorts; my theme song. One verse opens, Will you love the “you” you hide if I but call your name? The song kept singing itself to me as I read these women’s words. In a way, they are asking the same question, and laying their own struggle to answer it on the table.
Rachel’s writing style has the texture of that brittle shell that we cast around those parts of ourselves we most need to protect, even from ourselves, even from God; its touch unmasks the truthfulness of her storytelling, the depth of her honesty, the leap of faith it takes to put down on paper the prayer that names the fear,
Unless
God doesn’t come.
Martha’s writing opens a well for the reader to dip her pen (his, their pen) and write themselves into the story, write their own story. The conversation between the two, indirect, yet lilting, like songs answering each other across a fence, brings the reader home.
I’m not sure when a book last sang to me.
I recommend that you acquire yourself a copy, read it, savour it, and then keep it close for those moments when, for the sake of faith or sanity, you need once more to find yourself reflected in the mirror of another soul, another spirit, one that has wrestled with God, and, against all expectations, lived to see dawn’s light limping across the valley.
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Christ, have mercy,
we expostulate once more; he says
You do not know how often I
long to gather you to my arms
as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wing;
but are you sure that it is mercy that you want?
Instead of tenderness, how many times
have you sought solace in metal and kevlar;
instead of safety, preferred a hard perimeter;
instead of common ground, built
walls, chasms, barricades, as though history
were not littered with the ruins of your fortresses,
their stones repurposed to remember the dead?
Have mercy upon us, we pray, laying down
arms full of floral, teddy-bear tributes.
Have mercy, we say, from a sniper’s shot away,
watching the cross like a hawk for signs of life.
This article was first published at the Episcopal Café
A hundred years ago, or so, when they took my tonsils out, hospitals didn’t let families stay with their small patients. And they kept you for months (okay, maybe a week). As luck would have it, my mother worked next door to the hospital and could visit on her lunch breaks. In the meantime, I became quite attached to a rather worn, rather bald, brown teddy bear. When they finally released me into the wilds, the nurses very kindly let me take the ragged old thing with me. I do not know if they knew how generous they were being. The stuffed animal still sits in my entrance way at home, greeting me at the front door.
This month, during our irregular education hour at church, we talked about expansive and alternative images for God, in the Bible and in our prayers. It was interesting to stretch our imaginations, and to find out where the stiffness of our necks and our prayer muscles pulled us back.
Male and female pronouns were fine, we found, in their place; but when we messed with their assigned gender roles – letting Mother rule almighty and Father tenderly nurture – some of us were in danger of straining something.
Nonhuman images seemed safer: a soft-winged hen was less of a leap than a birthing, nursing human mother to describe God. Lions were easy. Pillars of fire, anonymous and impassive pillars of cloud and dust presented few problems. The lamb – that one gets complicated. We are not sure about making God cute.
God as the she-bear protecting her cubs kept coming back around to haunt us. The image comes from Hosea 13:8: the prophet threatens the enemies of God’s people with the ravening wrath of a mama bear. It could certainly be considered less than comforting; yet it was an image that encapsulated our awe, even our caution, while inviting us to trust in the faithful protection and fearsome love of a God beyond our strength to reckon with.
Eventually, I was reminded me of my bear back home, the one who has been with me since one of my first dips into that valley of shadows. It reminds me of the pain, both physical and spiritual, of that time of separation, as well as of the comfort that was available. It speaks to me of a simple and profound generosity which goes beyond the logical understanding of an eight-year-old, or of an adult taught to measure out gifts given and received; which entered my heart without touching the sides on its way into my soul.
Great God
if I am fearfully and wonderfully made
you are more fearsome and wonderful
since I am a pale image of your essence
yet you let me take you in my hands
I am lost to the mystery of your body
wounded and whole, dangerous, untame
but soft as bread on the tongue, speaking
in the wild, unintelligible language of love.
over the water 