Heartbreak

Living in the “Tragic Gap” of Heartbreak:

A September 11^th Reflection

 

The deaths now approach 3,000. 

2,752 in New York.  41 in Pennsylvania.  184 at the Pentagon.

Nearly 300 of the dead were on the four planes that crashed in those three places.  More than 400 first responders – firefighters, paramedics, police officers – gave their lives in the aftermath.  Some are now dead because of the dust they breathed. 

At least 1,600 people lost a spouse or partner that day.  Nearly twice that many children lost a parent.  Countless others lost friends and loved ones.  Caught up in this litany of loss, the rest of us, all of us, in this beloved country and all around the world – we lost something, too.  At the very least, we lost some of our illusions.  At the very least, all of us, lost a part of our hearts.

Christians, Jews, Muslims – people of many faiths do generally agree on one thing: the need for human beings to have compassion for one another, especially when we lose heart.  On September 11, 2001, we Americans suffered a huge blow to our collective heart of hearts.  In the days that followed, people all over this planet had compassion for us, suffering in solidarity, heartbroken with us.  To suffer is, literally, to allow – to let ourselves be disillusioned, to admit to ourselves that not everything in life is sweetness and light.  Darkness, bitter pain, loss, death are all real.  There will be loss of heart.  Heartbreak comes to us all.

During this year’s 9/11 observance tears still flowed when remembering the trauma.   In the eight years since that day, still more wars and conflicts have broken out.  What are we to make of all this heartbreak?  Where is God?  And how are we as people of faith to respond? 

As a particular kind of Christian called Episcopalian, I look to Holy Scripture and to the Book of Common Prayer for help with the hard questions of life.  The second letter from St. Paul to the church in Corinth offers me some help.  “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation,” Paul says.  God has reconciled us “through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation…entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.  So, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (5:17-20). 

The mission of the church, according to the Episcopal Prayer Book, “is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ” (p. 855).  And yet, although Christians may say we are in the restoration or reconciliation or forgiveness “business,” how will we ever, how can we ever forgive such grievous sins against our common humanity?  How can we be ambassadors of reconciliation when we are get so thoroughly broken-hearted?

In his article “The Broken-Open Heart: Living with Faith and Hope in the Tragic Gap,” Parker Palmer begins with a story about Basim, an Iraqi who recently worked as an interpreter for American troops.  Basim’s attempts to bridge the two cultures brought death threats against him and his family, forcing them to flee their homeland.  Was it naïve, Basim was asked, to think you could stand in the middle like that?  “If reconciliation is going to happen,” he said “there must be people who are willing to stand in the tragic gap and help the two sides understand each other.” 

This image of the tragic gap has become a way for Palmer to speak of the kind of faith and hope we need in our 21^st century world.  His words, as usual, encourage and inspire me.  Listen to some of what he says:

There is no way to be human without having one’s heart broken.  But there are at least two ways for the heart to break – using “heart” in its root meaning, not merely the seat of emotions but the core of our sense of self.

The heart can be broken into a thousand shards, sharp-edged fragments that sometimes become shrapnel aimed at the source of our pain.  Every day, untold numbers of people try without success to “pick up the pieces,” some of them taking grim satisfaction in the way the heart’s explosion has injured their enemies.  Here the broken heart is an unresolved wound that we carry with us for a long time, sometimes tucking it away and feeding it as a hidden wound, sometimes trying to “resolve it” by inflicting the same wound on others.

But there is another way to visualize what a broken heart might mean.  Imagine that small, clenched fist of a heart “broken open” into largeness of life, into greater capacity to hold one’s own and the world’s pain and joy.  This, too, happens every day.  We know that heartbreak can become a source of compassion and grace because we have seen it happen with our own eyes as people enlarge their capacity for empathy and their ability to attend to the suffering of others.

Transforming heartbreak into new life is the aim of every religious tradition at its best, as witness this Hasidic tale.  A disciple asks the rebbe, “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts?’ Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?”  The rebbe answers, “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts.  So we place them on top of our hearts.  And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”  The same point is made by the (Muslim) Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan: “God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.” 

In Christian tradition, the broken-open heart is virtually indistinguishable from the image of the cross.  It was on the cross that God’s heart was broken for the sake of humankind, broken open into a love that Christ’s followers are called to emulate.  In its simple form, the cross embodies the notion that tension can pull the heart open.  Its cross-beams stretch out four ways, pulling against each other left and right, up and down.  But those arms converge in a center, a heart that can be pulled open by that stretching, by the tensions of life – a heart that can be opened so fully it can hold everything from despair to ecstasy.  And that, of course, is how Jesus held his excruciating experience, as an opening into the heart of God….

If we Christians want to contribute to the healing of the world’s wounds rather than to the next round of wounding – and we have a long history of doing both – much depends on how we understand and inhabit the cruciform way of life that is at the heart of our tradition (from Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Volume XXIV, Number 2, March/April 2003).

I have come to believe, in the midst of my own heartbreak, that the world needs this kind of Christian witness.  I know that real reconciliation can happen through a broken open, cruciform kind of Christianity.  Real Christians, it seems to me, just go about their business – restoring one another and the world to health and healing, to the very shalom of God, in the name of Christ. 

 In the midst of your own heartbreak, what have you come to believe?

 

For more about Weavings, go to www.weavings.org

For more about the work of Parker Palmer, go to www.couragerenewal.org

 

Life, Interrupted.

Maybe love is nothing more

than a willingness to be

interrupted.

 

- from a Methodist Church sign

 

 

            Ten years ago Angelina Jolie won an Academy Award for her role as Lisa, a young runaway sociopath in the movie Girl, Interrupted.  Since that time this phrase about interruptions has been used in many places, including the latest book by religion professor Bart Ehrman, called Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them).  In our age of constant distraction and disconnection, how do we handle interruptions?

            Regardless of what we may think about Angelina Jolie’s acting ability or her personal life, it seems she is committed to being part of the solution to the suffering of the children of our world.  Jolie has been on global field missions, meeting with refugees and displaced persons in more than twenty countries.  She was named a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador in 2001, joining other celebrities around the world who use their talent and fame to advocate for refugees.  “We cannot close ourselves off to information and ignore the fact that millions of people are out there suffering,” she said on that occasion. “I honestly want to help.  I don’t believe I feel differently from other people.  I think we all want justice and equality, a chance for a life with meaning.  All of us would like to believe that if we were in a bad situation someone would help us.”  Clearly, her life has been interrupted by a greater good, if not a higher power. 

In a recent sermon I said that “racism and sexism and classism and ageism and homophobia are old, sinful habits that need to die, if we are to follow Jesus, to become truly alive in Christ.”  When we allow stereotypes – such as “Surely movie stars can’t be authentic UN ambassadors of goodwill” – to die, we become, I believe, more faithful people, regardless of the faith we practice.  Consider Jesus, interrupted in Mark’s Gospel account, not by another faithful Jew but by a Gentile woman with a daughter in a bad situation.

“The story begins with Jesus entering a house where he did not want anyone to know he was there’ (7:24).  Was he tired, perhaps exhausted from all those people who needed healing?  ‘Yet he could not escape notice,’ it says.  How did Jesus feel about this woman interrupting his desperately needed peace and quiet?  Was he still angry with the Pharisees and now with this woman who won’t leave him alone?  Has he lost sight of his mission?  Is this woman trying to help him re-connect with that mission, even though she is second-class?  Is this a conversion moment for Jesus?  Is Jesus changing?” (sermon, 9/6/09, www.allsaintsmd.org/sermons).

In my experience, interruptions, especially those that might change our lives, are important.  Some have said interruptions ARE one’s lifework, one’s call, one’s ministry, rather than simple distractions.  Years ago the direction of my spiritual life was interrupted by a woman who suggested that, rather than going to Africa, literally, as a missionary, I needed to go to the Africa within my own heart.  My heart, I have come to understand, is my primary mission field.  “Open my heart,” singer and composer Ana Hernandez (www.anahermusic.com) prays.  Open my heart, indeed.

“Why Women’s Rights Are the Cause of Our Time” was the title of a recent (8/23/09) issue of The New York Times Magazine.  As I read this article and gazed at the photographs of women and children, mostly from Africa, I realized that the Africa of my own heart has been opened and interrupted, more times than I can count, in the fifteen years or so since that woman, interrupted more than once in her life as a faithful nun, spoke truth to me. 

I read that story, and I wept, as I thought of another woman, interrupted from her singing career long enough to write a song, helping me see how my life – perhaps yours, too? – is a series of interruptions:

Pearls

 

There is a woman in Somalia
Scraping for pearls on the roadside
There’s a force stronger than nature
Keeps her will alive
This is how she’s dying
She’s dying to survive
Don’t know what she’s made of
I would like to be that brave

She cries to the heaven above
There is a stone in my heart
She lives a life she didn’t choose
And it hurts like brand-new shoes

Hurts like brand new shoes

There is a woman in Somalia
The sun gives her no mercy
The same sky we lay under
Burns her to the bone
Long as afternoon shadows
It’s gonna take her to get home
Each grain carefully wrapped up
Pearls for her little girl

Hallelujah
Hallelujah

She cries to the heaven above
There is a stone in my heart
She lives in a world she didn’t choose
And it hurts like brand-new shoes
Hurts like brand-new shoes                                 

- Sade Adu

True Religion

According to a survey at the start of this millennium, there are 19 major world religious groupings in the world, subdivided into a total of about 10,000 distinct religions.  At that time 270 of those religions and para-religions had over a half million adherents.  Within worldwide Christianity, 34,000 separate groups (communions, denominations, sects, individual unaffiliated churches, para-church groups, etc.) were indentified.  Even Christianity within a single country often has thousands of individual confessions and denominations.  This same survey shows 4,684 Christian groups in the United States alone. 

 

On the website www.religioustolerance.org, where I found that survey, it says that “most religious groups teach that their own beliefs and practices are the only true (religion), and that all other faith groups contain some degree of error. For example, the largest single faith group in the U.S., in Canada, and in the world is the Roman Catholic Church.”  A statement also released at the turn of the century entitled Dominus Iesus (Lord Jesus) implies that “Churches such as the Church of England, where the apostolic succession of bishops from the time of St. Peter is disputed by Rome, and churches without bishops, are not considered ‘proper’ churches.” Only the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches are “churches in the proper sense.” The others suffer from “defects.” Dominus Iesus further states that religions other than Christianity are considered to be “gravely deficient.” Their rituals can constitute “an obstacle to salvation” for their followers.

 

If you Google “true religion,” you’ll also find the predominant listings for a popular company with the same name.  True Religion is better known as a brand name for very chic and very expensive jeans and accessories.  True Religion was founded in 2002 with the intention of redefining premium denim. The vision was “to make quality, American-made, authentic, timeless, great fitting, 1970’s inspired jeans wear, with a trend-setting appeal for today’s consumer. True Religion’s commitment to “perfect fit, timeless style” and a “hippie bohemian chic flair” have solidified True Religion’s “brand position as a leader in premium denim . . . .”  The founder of True Religion Jeans said of his company’s name, “To me it meant (there are) many religions in the world, but there’s only one real religion and that’s people. And all the people in the world wear jeans.”

 

Religion means, literally, to be bound together.  Can jeans be truly religious? Maybe it depends on how tight they are.                        Fathermom, 8/30/09

holy habits for Lent: sabbath-keeping

Whatever is foreseen in joy

Must be lived out from day to day.

Vision held open in the dark

By our ten thousand days of work.

Harvest will fill the barn; for that

The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

 

And yet no leaf or grain is filled

By work of ours; the field is tilled

And left to grace.  That we may reap,

Great work is done while we’re asleep.

 

When we work well, a Sabbath mood

Rests on our day, and finds it good.

                                                                                 – Wendell Berry

 

This farmer poet’s little piece about the gift of and need for sabbath has arrested me since I heard it a week ago at a Courage to Lead retreat day (go to www.couragerenewal.org for information about the wondrous work of Parker Palmer, a courageous, sabbath-keeping Quaker teacher).  I am arrested by it because it stops me in my tracks and keeps me honest.  I am arrested by sabbath each and every time I let myself hear what true sabbath-keeping might mean for my life.

Today, my regular day off, begins with journalling, meditation and silence – my intended sabbatical practice on my working days.  Although there is a part of me (the pastor) that thinks sabbath needs to be “anything that is NOT religious, the spiritual (the human) part of my life needs this daily rhythm, this routine of “returning and rest” so that “I shall be saved” (Isaiah 30:15).

Even on my day off, I need salvation.  And today my sabbath-keeping includes a visit to the dentist to keep a part of my body safe; a time of reading and reflection, which saves my self from working too hard; and a visit to the movie theater, one of my favorite forms of re-creation.  Hopefully I will exercise and nap, two other favorite forms of sabbath-keeping that always bring some good rest to my day.  Whatever brings me some form of healing ointment, some salve, some balm, some health – whenever I practice shalom (wholeness), I practice shabbat (sabbath).

Yet it is still hard for me, a person who has practiced for most of my adult life, to believe that my practice will not make me perfect.  My imperfect practice is imperfect in ways that are different from yours.  Yet as human beings we share the inevitabitlity of imperfection.   Why is it so hard for us to believe that NO leaf or grain or budget or sermon or class or task is ”filled by work of ours?”  Why do we keep tilling the field, thinking, “Well, grace is nice, God, but why don’t you give it to someone who really needs it?”

Today, while I practice sabbath imperfectly, I pray that God would help me (and you) pry open the fingers of our need for control and perfection.   Open the hands of our minds and hearts, O God.  Help us believe that even (especially!) when we sleep, we will reap.

a sixtieth birthday reflection

AN EPISCOPAL PRIEST’S MINISTRY

WITH GAY AND LESBIAN PEOPLE

“Gay and lesbian people?  Full inclusion.

I’ve had a conversion experience.”

(The Rev. Canon Eugene Sutton, Bishop-Elect, Diocese of Maryland)

 

 

            The year, I think, was 1984.  I had recently been given the role of seminary newsletter editor as my campus job that year.  And I had finally gotten into a rhythm of publishing The Chelsea Round at the same time each week.   

 

Chelsea is a Manhattan neighborhood with a large gay and lesbian population.  Ministry within that local community means caring for lesbian and gay people.  Not surprisingly, the ministry of the seminary includes making its buildings available for local meetings.  In any given week notices of these meetings were posted all over the bulletin boards.  There was also a small, rather unremarkable periodic notice posted that said something like: “Gay and lesbian seminarians who wish to gather for fellowship, reply to Box J.”  Since I did not think I knew any gay or lesbian people at that time of my life, it was merely a curiosity.  That changed one day when I received an article for the newsletter.  It was a story with an announcement about meetings for gays and lesbians, the first time a notice would be run in such a public way.  The notice had been slipped under my apartment door several hours after the deadline for that week’s issue.

 

When I read it, I felt uneasy, but I did not know why.  I knew that, as the editor, it was mine to publish or not.  Next week would be too late to publish something about this upcoming meeting.  Was I going to get myself into some kind of controversy by running it?  Should I publish things that come to me after my deadline?  What was the right thing to do?  I called my best seminary friend and asked him if he would come and take a look at the notice.  He read it and said, “I don’t have a problem with this.  What’s your problem?”

 

Traveling teacher and spiritual guide Parker Palmer suggests that when someone says or does something that troubles us, we might benefit from this wisdom: “When the going gets tough, turn to wonder.”  On that evening in my apartment, my friend invited me to wonder: “This article bothers me.  What it is within me that makes me resistant to this request?  Is it simply my need for control, knowing this article wasn’t submitted on time?  Or is it something larger, something about myself that I am unwilling to look at?  I wonder what’s going on with me and this article?”

I ran the article, but I wasn’t ready then to do any real self-reflection.  Nearly twenty-five years later, I now see that I have been immersed, time and again, in intense pastoral situations with people who have been in very different places with how they think we as a church should respond to lesbian and gay people.  When I am honest, I see those differences in my own internal times of ambivalence.  It is through personal, ongoing reflection – including prayer, study and confidential conversations with fellow clergy, spiritual directors and psychotherapists,  all of whom have been willing to struggle with me over these issues – that I began back then and continue today to face my own fear of the children of God who look, seem or feel different from me.

 

In congregations in Pennsylvania and Kansas where I served as rector, gay and lesbian members of those parishes came to me and said, “We want to form a chapter of Integrity, and we’d like you to accompany us when we ask the Bishop.”  I did this, and both chapters were formed.  As rector I also presided over dialogues on human sexuality, recommended by the General Conventions of 1991 and 1997, in each of those congregations.  What I learned in those two faith communities over ten years was that, while people’s minds and opinions might not change, their hearts could be and were indeed often transformed.  People began to feel safe enough to talk about the deeper, common issues and experiences of life.  Men and women who would not speak to each other before the dialogues began were embracing each other when we were through with those sacred conversations.   

 

As an Episcopal priest and an Anglican Christian, I look to the tripod of Anglican authority first suggested in the 17^th century by theologian Richard Hooker: scripture, tradition and reason.  Since Jesus had nothing to say about homosexuality, we have tended to turn to other parts of the Bible for guidance.  Scholars are increasingly clear that the kind of relationships referenced in Leviticus  and the writings of Paul have little if anything to do with being lesbian or gay and much more to do with promiscuity, violence and abuse.  Regardless of our feelings about it, tradition changed for Episcopalians in 2003 when Gene Robinson was elected a bishop.  And reason keeps telling me that we have more to learn about how to be open to what God’s Spirit has already been doing in our midst.  As one of our hymn texts puts it, “the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his word” (George Rawson, #629, Hymnal 1982).

 

In one parish I served, a member said, “you clergy have been dealing with these issues for years.  I’ve just started.  Give me a chance to catch up.”  My conversion experience about full inclusion of gay and lesbian persons in ministry has indeed been a gradual one, a slow and steady realization that, if we are willing to baptize someone, why can we not extend to them all areas, all rites, all vocations in ministry?  I believe strongly that this is also an issue of power.  As a white, male, heterosexual, married priest – as a very privileged person of power, it is, I continue to see, incumbent upon me as a Christian and priest to relinquish that power in ways that make it truly possible to share ministry.  When I give up power and control, I empower others who do not enjoy entitlements that freely come to me, benefits I enjoy both consciously and unconsciously.  Of course, I do this letting go reluctantly, imperfectly, always needing God’s gracious help.      

 

In twenty-two years as priest, I have had the privilege and pleasure of serving alongside gay and lesbian persons, lay and clergy, including staff and vestry members.  Regardless of circumstance, they have always had to labor under the burden of “don’t ask, don’t tell” or “if you ask, I’ll tell.”  Although I pledge to stand with them when it is time to tell their stories, some may never be able to do so.  The decision for someone else to “come out” is never mine to make.  Discrimination against lesbian and gay persons takes many forms, including abuse at the hand of other Anglicans, here and around the world.  They can tell their stories only to safe people in safe places, where everyone can, to borrow St. Paul’s image, grow up into maturity, into the full stature of Christ

 

I firmly believe there is, in all of this, Good News.  As a lifelong Episcopalian, I am proud of my beloved Church.  Together I believe we are on an intentional spiritual journey toward God’s reign of mercy, justice and love for all of God’s children.  The full inclusion of women and people of color as well as gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and trans-gendered persons is, for me, exactly what God’s mercy, justice and love demand.  We are each unique strands of the same beautiful quilt, woven together by God in Christ for ministry.  God needs us to need each other, so we can be the church God keeps calling us to be.  St. Paul, in speaking of the church as the body of Christ, reminds us:

 

God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.  If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.  (I Corinthians 12:24-26) 

 

                       The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg, Rector

                                              All Saints’ Episcopal Church

                                               Frederick, Maryland

                                               February 1, 2009

THE PLAIN TRUTH OF SCRIPTURE

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning:

Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them,

that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life,

which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ:

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, for ever and ever.  AMEN.

 

            “’ALL holy Scriptures?’  Can we really learn something from ALL Holy Scriptures?  And if so, what is it and how is it we can learn?”  This is how I began my sermon on Sunday, November 16^th.  (You can find my sermons on the All Saints’ website at www.allsaintsmd.org).  In that sermon I quoted from a sermon preached by a university chaplain.  Her sermon is worth reading in its entirety:

 

How Anglicans ‘Read, Mark, Learn, and Inwardly Digest’

 

A sermon given at The Episcopal Church at Princeton University, Princeton University Chapel, November 13, 2005

 

The Rev. Joan E. Fleming, Associate Chaplain

 

As we come down the home stretch of the Church’s year, with only one more Sunday to go before we hit Advent I and the beginning of a new lectionary cycle, the Collect of the day focuses our attention on the grounding of our faith in the Bible. It is about our biblical foundation from the perspective of the Anglican tradition that I want to speak today.  Here is the Collect again:

 

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 

This Collect was composed for the very first Book of Common Prayer, the 1549 book, introduced by the boy king Edward VI who, having had a very Protestant upbringing, wanted the book to reflect his own reforming zeal. The watchword of the reformers was Sola Scriptura [“Only Scripture”], a reaction against the tightly authoritarian control the medieval Catholic Church had exercised in all matters pertaining to salvation, especially in controlling not only access to the Bible but also interpretation of the Bible.

 

Access

 

It may be virtually impossible for us to imagine a time when the Bible was literally off limits to the faithful, but consider this. William Tyndale had been hunted down and killed quite brutally by members of King Henry VIII’s spy network a mere thirteen years before the 1549 Prayer Book rolled off the presses. His crime: translating the Scriptures into the English language at a time when the king still refused to permit any other version than the Latin [or Vulgate] Bible to be used in worship. It turns out that this seemingly gentle-spoken Collect of ours has a political edge to it.

 

Its insistence that “all holy Scriptures” were “written for our learning” [edification] is undoubtedly a barb directed at the medieval Church’s rigid selectiveness in the choice of Bible texts actually read in worship, and it also celebrates the new availability of the whole Bible. Indeed by now [Alas, poor Tyndale, born a decade too early], every parish church in England had a “chained” Bible–in English–on open display. Moreover, this prayer makes the astonishing assumption that by reading and reflecting on the Scriptures, ordinary Christians can deepen their own understanding and grow in faith.

           

Read between the lines of this Collect and you see that the Reformation,” Chaplain Fleming suggests, “was in fact a revolution.  In a few short decades the medieval Church’s monopoly on the means of salvation had been shattered…The Protestant reformers (insisted) that individual Christians could be trusted to handle the Word of God independently; to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Scriptures for themselves.

 

Interpretation

 

Today, the Bible is a global best-seller. It is available in thousands of languages and in hotel bedrooms from Bangkok to Brazil. By 1996, the Scriptures had been translated into 2,167 different languages, and scholars are adding about 30 more languages every year. The Bible is hot, hot, hot–and the fastest growing churches throughout the world are those which claim the validity of a literal reading of Scripture. From this perspective, the meaning of the Bible is sufficiently plain and self-evident not to need “interpretation.”

 

It may come as a surprise that such a view is actually of rather recent origin. For at least the first 1500 years of the Church’s history, the Bible was uniformly regarded as having multiple meanings, the surface or “plain” meaning being generally regarded as the one of least ultimate significance. Metaphor, allegory, typology, poetry and symbolism were all assumed to be at work within and behind the text, connecting one text to another in a cunning web of mutual reference; and the reader must, like a squirrel in search of the nourishing kernel in a nut, crack open and dig beneath the surface to come at the treasure contained within. Literalists are a minority in the Episcopal Church today, but their perspective is certainly present, and quite possibly growing within Anglicanism, if we take into account the current high conversion rate, for example, in parts of Africa where a literalist/fundamentalist view of Scripture is strongly entrenched and Anglican bishops typically confirm hundreds of candidates at a time.

 

At their ordination all Episcopal clergy affirm that “I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God.” It is important to recognize that there is more than one way to understand that affirmation.

 

There is a splendid exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art just now, of medieval art from Prague. One of the most arresting pictures is of a positively bug-eyed St. Luke, his pen poised to take down dictation from the small ox (his iconographic symbol) who is whispering in his ear. The Evangelist is straining to hear the words literally being dropped into his ear, intent on not missing a single astonishing syllable. The painting, a huge canvas, is a charming and graphic depiction of the theory of direct inspiration of Scripture.

 

In just what sense is the Bible “Word of God” for us? Anglicans believe that the Spirit of God did indeed inspire the authors of Scripture, but that the words of Scripture themselves are human words that bear the imprint of their human origin in particular circumstances and moments in human history. We believe therefore that it is appropriate to apply to them all the tools now available to scholars to help discern the context in place and time, and the human dynamics –the power plays, persecutions, family feuds, or realpolitik–which formed their original backdrop and could not fail to influence their authors.

 

The words of the Bible are anchored in human history and mediate actual events, but they are words which both reveal–and conceal–events, and the human motives that prompted, and lie behind, them. It should come as no surprise that they invite us into speculation, probing research, conversation, and debate. Jesus himself, after all, rarely seems to have given a “straight answer” to any question, often responding to one question with another, always challenging and inviting people to think more deeply, to “put out into deep waters.” Today’s parable is a case in point: like so many of Jesus’ stories, it seems designed to raise questions as much as to answer them, and to puzzle as much as enlighten, through a process that Paul Ricoeur once described as “reorientation by disorientation.”

 

Authority

 

Let us return for a moment to the Puritan reformers’ watchword, Sola Scriptura, and the question of authority. For Anglicans, Scripture never stands alone. We are always mindful that the Bible is the Church’s book and that the Christian community itself brought it into being. The Hebrew Scriptures, in which Jesus and his disciples, all of them Jews, had been steeped from earliest youth, were the only sacred Scriptures they knew. The stories and memories of Jesus that the first Christians told among themselves and handed on to the next generation formed the matrix out of which the gospels and other New Testament materials developed, but always in dialogue with their own existing sacred texts.

 

We simply cannot regard any of the written records in our Scriptures as “eye-witness” accounts or verbatim reports. While the Bible is indeed foundational for us, thoughtful reasoning forces us to recognize that oral tradition and Christian worship preceded the Christian Scriptures. Classic Anglicanism, indeed, has always looked to both tradition and human reason as well as to the Bible, as our source of authority.

 

Let me conclude with two quotations.

 

The celebrated 19th-century preacher, Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts and author of O Little Town of Bethlehem, once wisely observed: “The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope then he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through, to see that which is beyond, but most people only look at it; and so they see only the dead letter.”

 

And from A. E. Harvey: “The Bible is inspired by the same God who accepted the constraints of the Incarnation.” In Jesus we see what the life of God is like constrained in the vesture of humanity, in all its material contingency, in all its vulnerability.

 

Anglicans, I would suggest, are profoundly sacramental – in our worship, in our theology and, in the final analysis, in our perspective on the Bible. And within this perspective, the spiritual truth within the material words of Scripture is the Word Incarnate, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It is that Word that we seek, and that Word that we encounter, most especially when we are gathered in community as Jesus’ friends and followers–as we are even now–and together listen for the reconciling, saving Word in the good news of the Gospel proclaimed in our midst, to be broken open and shared among us in community, in sacrament, and in service to the world.

 

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT

During a recent talk at Washington National Cathedral, Garrison Keillor told a story about the songs he grew up singing in church as a child.  We didn’t sing those happy, “7/11” songs, he said.  “Do you know what I mean?  Songs with seven words sung eleven times.”  He shared his love of poetry and hymns, spiritual tunes set to beautiful texts.  Knowing he was an Episcopalian, someone asked, “Which hymn do we need to sing to help bring harmony to the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church?”  After thinking for a few moments, he said he could think of no one hymn.  But he suggested a song that can bring us back together again as a nation.  And he launched into America the Beautiful, guiding us line by line through all four stanzas.  He knew each verse by heart.

 

That’s not management.  That’s leadership. 

 

In a book called Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practice for Congregations, church consultants Alice Mann and Gil Rendle use the story of Moses and Aaron in the book of Exodus to explain how leadership and management, though different, are equally vital.  Here’s their wisdom:

 

The story of the Exodus can be instructive for a congregation’s planning.  In the wandering in the desert, it is clear that it was the journey much more than the destination that shaped the people.  Had Moses been a better planner and pathfinder and discovered a straight route to make the trip to the Promised Land in a matter of months instead of wandering for years in the desert, the people may not have been changed when they arrived.  They might have arrived much as they left Egypt – as a slave people.  It was the journey, when they had to ask questions of how they would form community and what was important about their relationship to God, that shaped them as a nation.

 

Allow planning and discernment to take the needed time.  An axiom of general systems theory is that a congregation (or any system) cannot learn faster than it can learn.  Don’t rush ahead, despite the reality that there will be those in the congregation or on the board – including yourself – who will be anxious to get to the “answer” and know what to “do.”

 

The story of the Exodus also reminds us that leadership is a dance in which we seek a more distant future that is both meaningful and faithful, while simultaneously managing the specific day-to-day realities of the trip.  A friend who is a rabbi once shared a more contemporary midrash (an ancient rabbinic way of interpreting scripture- Ed. note) about the relationship between Moses and Aaron in the desert that points to this dance of equal necessities. Moses’ task, of course, was to envision the future.  It was Moses who went off alone to encounter God face to face.  He would return with new energy, a sense of direction, and a visible radiance from the encounter.  Aaron, on the other hand, was the voice of management.  He structured the trip from day to day, organizing tasks, assigning responsibilities and making decisions.

 

In this midrash, the teller focused on the part of the story of the delivery of the commandments.  It was visionary Moses who, alone on the mountain with God, received the commandments.  It was Aaron who waited below with the people, organizing daily life and trying to address the needs and anxieties of the people.  The irony of this story was that just as Moses was receiving the commandment not to make graven images, Aaron was working below with the people who were busy creating these very same images in an effort to offer a visible leader (“gods…who shall go before us”) on their journey. (See Exodus 32:1-35).

 

The lesson of the midrash is that both Moses and Aaron were needed for the journey.  Leadership needs to search for vision and ask the big questions of purpose and identity.  Management needs to take care of the travel – determining the steps to take, giving people appropriate tasks and making decisions.  The only risk is to let Moses and Aaron get too far apart.  It was when Moses and Aaron, vision and management, got disconnected that things fell apart.  A planning process cannot be all vision and without structure and direction.  Neither can the planning process simply be a list of tasks or exercises that will magically lead somewhere.  The leader and the planning team must be willing to dance between Moses and Aaron – to slow down enough to allow vision to take shape while also structuring a plan that will assist the people to move toward a future.  Being flexible about the planning process, instead of rigidly following a set process, allows the congregation to be open to discernment. Structuring the planning conversation with appropriate questions and tasks allows the congregation to move ahead and make progress on the journey (pp. xvii-xviii).  

 

In Memphis I learned the expression “I’m going to be in a slow hurry about that.”  It has stood me in good stead.  As Christians, we need to be in a slow hurry, discerning and considering carefully when to lead, when to follow, when to get out of the way, when to manage and when to let go, on our spiritual journey with Jesus – who teaches us how to sing and dance divinely.                                                               

                                                                                                           - God’s peace, fathermom       

Is There An Eleventh Commandment?

God, we pray for the many

who are trapped by growing burdens of debt,

who see no way out, and who despair for their future:
give them courage to tackle the problems they face,
clarity in taking decisions which will turn their situation around,
and faith that, as they cry to you in their trouble,
you will deliver them from their distress;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

                                   (from the Episcopal News Service)

 

 

A priest once told me he thought that, for Episcopalians, there was an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt be nice.”  Sometimes we church folk think we need to be nice and polite, even a bit witty, so that we don’t have to talk about the not-so-nice, impolite, serious and more challenging things in life. 

 

Take the Ten Commandments, for example.  Today lots of us heard them in church.  The first four are about our relationship with God; the last six about our relationship with other people.  Preachers place all kinds of emphasis on most of them.  But you almost never hear a sermon about the last (Tenth) Commandment: “You shall not covet…anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

 

This commandment means, of course, that God wants us to resist the urge to want what other people have.  When it comes to coveting, however, we as a consumerist nation in an enormous financial crisis have gone way past the temptation stage.  We don’t just give in to the temptation of coveting.  We have moved past wanting what others have, all the way to expecting it, demanding it, even feeling entitled to it.  We want what we think we need – and we want it when we want it.  I don’t know about you, but I have come to believe that our consumerist coveting is perhaps the most seductive sin and sickness from which we need to repent and recover. 

 

Compulsive spending and debting are, I believe, the manifestation of that covetousness run amok.  Some say it is also an addictive behavior; others don’t.  In any case, there is help.  For those who want to consolidate and learn how to manage debt, I have had good experience with Consumer Credit Counseling Services in several cities of this country.  In Frederick they are located at 103 West Seventh Street, near the corner of Fairview.  Their local number is 301-698-0006, and their regional office is in Rockville, MD (www.cccswdc.org).

 

If your problems with money are indeed part of an addiction, perhaps you can also find help in the wisdom of the first three steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Step #1.  We admitted we were powerless over…(in this case, compulsive spending or debting) – that our lives have become unmanageable.  Step #2.  Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.  Step #3.  Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood (God)” (“The Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition, p. 59). 

 

Debtors Anonymous (www.debtorsanonymous.org), a 12-step recovery program modeled after AA, currently has no local meetings, but there are fifteen to choose from in the metro DC area, with the closest one in Germantown, Maryland.  Go to their website and select “find a meeting.”  For local AA meetings, visit their office at 2 East Church Street; call 301-662-0544; or go to www.westcentralaa.org

 

Christians find the God of our understanding in Jesus Christ.  But where’s Jesus in our country’s current crisis?  Is there any Good News here?   I am reminded of the suggestion that, before we can hear any Good News, we need to acknowledge the bad news.  Barbara Crafton suggests where the Good News of Jesus might be found amidst our bad-news financial fiasco in her blog reflections on today’s Gospel reading:

 

RAGS TO RICHES, RICHES TO RAGS

 

Have you never read in the scriptures:

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;

this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes”?

– Matthew 21:42

 

This is the righteous inversion of power for which human beings long.  It lives in the fairy tales we tell our children: poor little Cinderella elevated over her awful stepsisters, orphaned Hansel and Gretel prevailing over the wicked witch.  We read it in scripture: Joseph, betrayed and outcast, elevated to headship over all of Egypt’s wealth; Moses, defenseless in his little boat, plucked from danger by a princess and raised in a palace.  We love it when the rejected one becomes the most important one of all.

 

The words are already old when Jesus speaks them: he is quoting Psalm 118. When Christians use it today, we mean Jesus himself, stripped of everything, stripped of his very life, and then gloriously risen from the dead.  But he is telling his parable before those events take place, and he’s not talking about himself here.  Jesus means people outside the community of Israel, people who are not “chosen.”  People with whom an observant 1st-century Jew will not even eat. The people his people reject.  Do not think you are entitled to a special status where God is concerned.  God is free to choose and choose again, free to bless without borders.  Don’t be too sure just who is in, especially if you think it’s you.

 

We can rest in the love of God, but we can never rest in our own chosen-ness.  The moment we begin to believe in the inevitability of our own triumph, that moment marks the beginning of our decline.

 

We are experiencing this in a cataclysmic way at this very moment: businesses that were “too big to fail,” a market that would just take care of all our bad decisions by absorbing them, growing bigger and bigger, debt that need never be paid, that could just grow and grow — all these chickens now seem to be coming home to roost.  We seek to delay our own moral reckoning by accusing others — It was Wall Street that did this, we tell each other. And certainly, greed abounded there.  But it lived in us, too, showing itself in our enormous houses, our multiple huge cars, in the huge sums of credit card debt we accumulated because we had forgotten how to say “no” to ourselves.  Our actions have not been unrelated to what has happened on Wall Street.  Treating our own greed for more and more as if it were an entitlement, we have made it easy for corporate greed to victimize us.

 

God will not save me from the consequences of my own unwise or unrighteous actions. Sooner or later, I will pay for them.  And God will not punish me for them, either: the world will take care of that.  The fact that I am a person of faith does not mean I have inherited immunity from the law of cause and effect. There’s no such thing as a free lunch for me, either, not here.

 

And if I fail to govern myself, someone else will govern me.

 

(This reflection comes from Barbara Crafton’s “The Almost Daily eMo” from October 3.  If you go to her website www.geraniumfarm.org, you can also find “Ways of the World,” a helpful blog on financial stewardship by business economist Carol Stone.)

 

 

Finally: you can ask for help by replying to this blog.  Your reply will be held in confidence; no replies to this article will be posted.  Simply let me know how I can help and tell me how you’d like me to be in touch (phone number, e-mail address, etc.).  If I can do nothing else, I will pray for you.  

 

God’s peace,

fathermom

I LOVE TO HEAR (AND TELL) THE STORY

“Tell me a story,” says the child to her parent at bedtime.  “Well, once upon a time….”

 

Today, at bedtime, I like nothing better than a good novel or biography.  I want a story.  Enough already of those church books and magazines.  Tonight, I just want to fall asleep with a good book that might keep me up late.

 

Some of us live a story that others might like to tell or to hear.  If we become a celebrity, our story will be told, despite ourselves.  Some of us are weary of our own stories.  One friend put it this way: “I’m sick and tired of my little drama.”  Whose story would you like to hear?  Which story would you like me to tell?

 

In yesterday’s gospel account (Matthew 21:23-32) we hear Jesus tell another story, a parable of two brothers, working in a vineyard.  Jesus is the author of many stories.  He tells this story after the religious authorities question him about his authority.  Someone with authority is, simply put, an author.  Jesus, we say, is the author of our salvation.  Jesus creates and tells us the best bedtime story of all – the story of how God loves us and saves us and heals us.

 

There was a Newsweek article recently called “Heard any Good Stories Lately?” (9/22/08).  Here’s the summary: “A (presidential) candidate’s personal narrative might sway more voters than (their) experience, positions on issues and policy proposals.  Blame the power of emotions.”  Actually, there is nothing and no one to blame.  It’s not about blame.  It’s about the power of story.  We human beings love a good story.  People of faith love, as the old hymn puts it, to tell the story.  We Christians love to hear “the old, old story of Jesus and his love” – love even for the likes of us! 

 

Music can be powerful, as one wise woman once put it, because music releases the feelings,  and feelings release the healing.  That’s why so many of us come to church.  To tell and to hear the story.  To sing.  To pray.  To share communion.  To be strengthened.  To be renewed.  To be saved.  To be healed.  We come because we long for the healing power of the greatest story ever told.  Blame?  Blame the power of the story on God, on that storyteller Jesus.

 

That Newsweek article’s last sentence? “Sit back and get ready for seven more weeks of storytelling” (p. 42).  Yes, get ready.  We have three straight weeks of Jesus’ vineyard stories, then one more week with a wedding story.  Sit back and get ready for stories, those old, old Bible stories we’ve heard time and again.  Won’t you come to church and hear the stories of Jesus and his love?

Peace, fathermom

Seven years later

Where were you? 

I was in a classroom, watching someone’s videotaped sermon as part of my residency in Clinical Pastoral Education.  Suddenly Jessie, our overall supervisor, gently entered the room.  He told us to turn off the tape and turn on the TV coverage. 

Emotions flowed freely as we student clergy watched.  Today, seven years later, we have learned to live in the afterworld of that day.  No one can fly anywhere without experiencing all the changes of seven years, now simply routine: longer airport lines, no more liquids or gels without bagging them,  removing shoes, constant recordings about orange alerts, additional anxieties.

Barbara Crafton, an Episcopal priest whow has a great gift with words, communicates through her e-mailed blog called The Almost Daily eMo from Geranium Farm.  Today, she sends the wonderful reflection below of her sense of September 11th, seven years out. 

LIVING MEMORY

It’s darker and quieter at 6:00 in the morning here in Florence than it is in New York, for a few more minutes, anyway, before the buses begin their runs. Hotter, too: we have another few weeks of summer heat, it seems, before the air turns cooler. At home, though, this is the glory season: bright sun, blue sky, temperatures that don’t wilt your spirits or your shirt even before the day begins. I can see them now, hurrying to the trains, stopping at the newsstands, waiting for the bus.

No one here remembers what day it is. And why should they? It’s been seven years since the World Trade Center collapse, and it didn’t happen here. The disaster of Florence’s living memory is the flooding of the Arno, 42 years ago. You can see markers, here and there throughout the city, that show how high the water got. You can see the washed-away bottoms of the outdoor frescoes on the corners of buildings. Our older parishioners remember it well, and all have a story they will tell you if you ask: where they were, what they did, what was lost. Cars, trees, mattresses, pieces of wood were swept along in the powerful current until they reached the low-lying Ponte Vecchio, where they stopped, lodging there and forming a dam. The river surged up over its banks and through the narrow streets. The world, immediately aware of what was lost, came to help: scientists, students, everyone — it was surely the largest art restoration effort the world has ever seen.

Living memory — it comes to an end. The last passenger on the Titanic died last year, I think, and the next-to-last veteran of World War I this year. The veterans of the Second World War are all in their 80s now — maybe there are a few in their late 70s, men who lied about their age back then. But not for long. Everything takes its place in the past. We can’t hold onto any of it.

We should tell people what we saw. What we thought. Where we were and what we did. Last night was the first of St James’ Wednesday night dinners for college students; over dessert, Q talked about elections he remembered, going back to 1940. He was a child then: he had been given a little printing press, and turned out flyers for Wendell Wilkie’s presidential campaign: WENDELL WILKIE WON’T LET US DOWN! HE HAS A HATRED OF PERSECUTION INHERITED FROM HIS ANCESTORS!

That’s so cute, I tell him. How big was the printing press?

He shows me with his hands. It was about the size of a laptop computer. That was the beginning of my journalistic career, he says.

People forget. People change — I have a feeling that Q would not be a Wilkie man if that election were held today. But history has happened, and its events were real. Only human beings record them; the animals don’t bother. It doesn’t matter much to the natural world of which they are a part, not over time. But it matters to us.

Seven years later: sometimes I still cannot believe that 9/11 happened. That all those people went off to work, on a day like today, and never returned. I still cannot believe that they felt the terror I know they felt. I still can’t believe we did the things we did in the weeks and months that followed. Sometimes I still think that the towers will be there when I return.

Now, what happened to that book? an old lady here in Florence asks herself, scanning her bookshelf for a volume given her by her father. Oh, of course. She lost it in the flood.

Silly me, she thinks.

Readers, you can subscribe to Barbara’s “almost daily” reflections by sending an e-mail to bccrafton@geraniumfarm.org.  Her website is www.geraniumfarm.org

Peace, fathermom