"Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this." Rev. 1:17-19.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Is it too late?


       The four-year-old is standing on a grassy hilltop with arms outstretched against the sky. “Ta-li-ta-koum!” she cries. She waits a second in hopeful expectation and then cries out again, with a magician’s flourish, “Ta-li-ta-koum!” Nothing happens. Growing agitated, she continues to shout “Ta-li-ta-koum!” over and over again until her fierce determination turns to sobs. The little girl is Ponette, in the award-winning French film of the same name, who has just lost her mother in a tragic car accident. In her grief, the deeply heart-broken little girl desperately picks up every scrap of religious language that adults carelessly drop her way, every miraculous story that they tell to make her feel better, and she weaves them all into a patchwork of determined, imaginative faith, as only a child can do. Having learned from her young cousins that Jesus brought back a little girl from the dead with the “magic words,” talitha koum, (Aramaic in today’s Gospel for, “Young woman, arise”) Ponette decides to try the words herself in order to bring back her mother. Of course, she fails. And her valient attempts rip our hearts in two as we watch.
What makes Ponette one of the most poignant, heart-wrenching stories about grief that I have ever seen is the contrast between Ponette’s unshakeable, courageous, yet misinformed faith, and the harsh reality of death that we, the adult viewers, know she must accept. Like her father and aunt and teachers, we know that her mother is not going to come back to her, at least in this world, for her mother is dead. But Ponette refuses to give up. When she chooses to sit and wait for her mother rather than to play with her young cousin, even he warns her: “Dead people don’t come back.”
Ponette patiently explains, “Jesus did it for his friends. I’m more than a friend. I’m the daughter of my mommy.”
“Granpa never came back,” argues her cousin.
“That’s because no one was waiting for him,” counters Ponette with certainty.
In scene after scene, I wanted to shout to her, “No, Ponette, it is too late. Give up. Go play with your cousins. Live your life. God hears your grief, but it’s not going to bring back your mother to you. Please don’t keep waiting for something that is not going to happen.”
We live in a world in which it is often too late. It is too late to bring back the homes that have been destroyed by raging fires in Colorado. It is too late to hug a loved one who has died. It is too late to have taken that other life path 30 years ago. It is too late to take back the cruel word that has destroyed a friendship. It is too late to remove the pain of a child who has been abused. It is too late to take back the drinks that have resulted in the fatal car accident. When we feel the rush of time heading into the moment of “too late,” we panic. We grasp at straws; we cry out in desperation; we try to hold back the time that is slipping inexorably through our fingers. As Ponette sobs and claws at the earth on her mother’s grave, trying to dig a pathway to the one that she loves, we claw at time, trying to tunnel our way past the blur of events in our lives that are so quickly becoming “too late,” in order to reach some kind of better resolution.
In our Gospel story, both Jairus and the bleeding woman act under the looming threat of “too late.” The woman has already spent all of her money seeking a cure for her affliction for the past twelve years, yet nothing has worked. She is at the end of her rope. Her bleeding has made her unclean, a total outcast in her community, as feared and despised as a leper. Like Ponette, digging her way through the grave to her mother, the bleeding woman grabs at Jesus’ cloak as he passes, reaching out in total desperation for that last bit of hope for her life to be restored. If this story weren’t in the Bible, wouldn’t you want to cry out to her, “Stop, you’ll just make a fool of yourself. Such desperation won’t get you anywhere!”
Jairus, too, while as wealthy and respected as the woman is poor and outcast, is also just as desperate. He, an important, respected leader of the synagogue, is frantic enough to throw himself at the feet of a poor, itinerant teacher and beg him to come and heal his daughter before it is too late. When Jesus accepts and then tarries to help the woman, letting valuable time slip away, Jairus must have been beside himself with impatience and anxiety. “My little daughter is dying,” he must have felt like shouting in Jesus’ ear. “Hurry, before it is too late!” “Oh dear, the little girl is going to die. Jesus, don’t let her die,” we plead alongside her grief-stricken father.
It is never too late for the healing, saving power of God’s love, says Mark, by weaving together these two stories of desperation and healing. This is the Good News of our Gospel. It is not too late for a powerful, theologically educated man, who publically asks Jesus for help. It is not too late for a poor, powerless woman who dares approach Jesus only secretly. It is not too late for a young woman whose sudden sickness renders her unable to do anything but lie in bed and wait for a healing that doesn’t come until after she has died, and it is not too late for an older woman with a hopelessly chronic disease. The healing that Jesus offers is poured out on every kind and manner of human being. Jesus’ touch brings abundant life out of living death, and it is never too late.
“But wait,” you must be saying to me. “That all sounds nice and pious in a sermon. But why aren’t these healing stories like the fairytales that Ponette’s relatives tell a motherless child to make her feel better? How can you say that it is never too late when four-year-olds lose their mothers? When sin and death hound us every day? We know better than to fall for such pie-in-the-sky happy endings in real life."
The trouble is that we tend to treat the individual healings like some kind of magic. Like Ponette, confusing “talitha koum” for “abracadabra,” we focus on the amazing feats, the suspension of the laws of nature in Jesus’ miracles. “Wow, Jesus heals someone who just barely touches the edge of his cloak. How does he do that?!” we wonder. “Wow, he raises a little girl from the dead,” we squeal.
The author of our Gospel, however, knows that this is the path to misunderstanding, rather than to eternal life. That is why Mark’s Jesus always insists that no one, neither the one who was healed nor the bystanders, should spread the news about the healings that he has just done. Jesus is not just some cool worker of wonders who puts on a good show. Jesus is the crucified and risen Lord who has come to defeat the powers of both Sin and Death. The miracle cures that happen during Jesus’ lifetime are because of what happens at the end of his story; they are because of the power of resurrection. It is no accident that Mark points out that Jairus’ daughter is “merely sleeping,” the code word in his early Christian community for the death that leads to resurrection. It is no accident that Jesus says, “Little girl, arise,” instead of “little girl, get up,” choosing the same word used for his own arising from the dead. Seen apart from crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus’ miracle stories are only amazing stories to be gossiped about in the marketplace and misunderstood. But seen as part of a dawning new creation, they transform the present by way of the future. We only understand their true power after we know the end of Jesus' story. In our lives, the choice is not between the blind belief in magic words or deeds and the hopeless resignation that, as Tom Long says, “God is dead. Ad-lib the ending.”[1] In our lives, the small glimpses of God’s healing power that we grasp all around us open us to a familiar Easter ending, an ending in which we are invited to live in the present, an ending which makes the present never too late.
In the movie Ponette, the little girl’s mother returns to visit her, “in her body and in her bones” so that Ponette won’t be afraid. Many movie critics snort at the unrealistic sentimentality of the movie’s ending, unhappy that a film that so honestly portrays the reality of grief “cops out” at the end and turns to fairytale. I would disagree, however, and find the ending to be an imaginative Gospel one, not a fairytale one. Ponette’s mother doesn’t come to stay or to put the family back together happily ever after. Ponette’s mother answers the grief-filled cries of her daughter by paying her a loving visit, insisting that she is dead and cannot return again, and teaching her how to jump up in the air and catch a fistful of memories, memories of her love that will sustain Ponette throughout her life. She tells her to live, to enjoy her world and each moment of her life. Her mother grounds her in a love that goes beyond death, a love for which it is never too late.
In a world in which it is never too late, we too are challenged to live, deeply live, into the Easter truth. Grounded in love, knowing the ending of the story, can we face Death with grief, yet not despair? Can we offer healing to the poor and the outcast, as well as to the influential and the comfortable? Can we make room for forgiveness? Can we let justice and peace peek through the clouds? Can we drive off, like Ponette at the end of the movie, with a weary, yet knowing smile, a smile that recognizes that it is never too late for joy.


[1] Thomas Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope, 115.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

On Drowning


I have already preached this year on the terrors of sitting in a tiny boat, battered by wind and waves. I have talked about the storms and chaos of life that leave us clutching onto the closest piece of security with all our might. Yet, here we are again in a little boat with the disciples, and here we are again, afraid of drowning.
Last time, I joked about my fear of riding in boats and airplanes and in anything, actually, that does not allow me to have a firm footing on solid earth, but I didn’t admit that, as a preschool child, I was even afraid of washing my hair. I was so utterly terrified by the idea of lying down in the water to rinse away the shampoo that, for several years, the only way that my mother could get my hair clean was to put on her bathing suit and stand with me in the walk-in shower in the guest room. To this day, I can still remember the terror of the tub. I can feel the slippery bathtub bottom and can hear the churning of water pouring from the faucet with the frightening power of Niagara Falls. I can see the spiral of water slurping down the drain with a force that just might take me with it. I can remember lying helplessly in my mother’s arms, head tilted back vulnerably, deafened by the water that covered my ears, blinded by the soapy splatters in my eyes, and thinking reproachfully in my panic: “Mama, don’t you even care if I drown?” 
What on earth would make a cherished, pampered 3-year-old think that her loving mother, either through incompetence or malice, would let her drown?
“Teacher, do you not even care that we are perishing?” cry the frightened disciples to the sleeping Jesus in our Gospel lesson. When the boat starts rocking and the wind starts blowing on that lake in Galilee, they too are afraid of drowning. It is true that fear is a force as powerful and irrational as a windstorm. Its paralyzing presence pushes us back to our most basic, reactive animal level. When we are afraid, our brains turn into a neon sign flashing the word “Survive!” Those “fight or flight” reactions kick in; our bodies tense up; and our rational thinking shuts down. When we were hunters and gathers out in the wilds living alongside saber-toothed tigers, we needed to be able to respond quickly to danger in order to survive. In an emergency, we still need to be able to react quickly and instinctively to escape physical harm. Fear is not all bad, but when we are afraid, our brains don’t have time for higher level functions like trust and reflection. Our Gospel story, however, is about more than just the havoc that fear can cause in our lives.
Notice that the disciples don’t reach over to Jesus and say, “Teacher, wake up! We need you to calm the storm and get us safely to shore!” They don’t even ask for Jesus’ help. They assume the worst of him; they assume that he does not care if they drown.[1] Just as I did not trust my loving mother to keep me safe in the bathtub, the disciples do not trust their loving Lord to save them from the sudden storm. They have been with him as he has healed and driven out demons. They have heard him call them his brothers and sisters. How can they assume that he doesn’t care?
I was very interested to learn that the vocabulary of our Gospel story closely parallels another storm story in the Bible: the story of the Hebrew prophet Jonah. You all know the story of Jonah in the belly of the giant fish, but do you remember how he gets there? After refusing to go prophecy destruction at Nineveh as God has commanded him, Jonah flees by ship. That is when a great storm arises, and his fellow sailors are terrified. The Gentile captain of the ship goes to Jonah, who is sleeping through the whole thing, and says: “What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god … so that we do not perish!” Even though he is in a panic, the Gentile ship captain reacts not by throwing up his hands in helplessness, not by crying, “Do the gods not care that we are going down?” but by seeking help from Jonah’s foreign god. The heathen ship captain reacts with more trust than does the wayward Jonah— and with more trust than Jesus’ clueless disciples when they are in similar danger. It is not merely irrational fear of the dangerous waters that destroys our trust; it is a mysterious blindness to God’s loving presence in our midst.
Furthermore, in the Jonah story, God does not speak to the stormy sea in order to save the sinking ship. Instead, after praying for guidance from Israel’s god, the sailors take Jonah, the source of God’s displeasure, and dump him into the sea. It is only then that “the sea ceased its raging.” In the Jonah story, it is Jonah’s disobedience that causes the storm, and it is only by his repentance, his acknowledgment of his guilt and his willingness to turn around, even by being thrown into a stormy sea, that the ship can be saved.
God does ask us to repent and to amend our ways. But guilt can also consume us. It can paralyze our souls just as fear can paralyze our brains. I know, because I was a champion at feeling guilt as a little kid. From the moment that I opened my eyes to the world as a newborn, I think that I felt responsible for the world and everything in it. If something went wrong, I assumed that it must have been my fault. If my parents were upset, it must have been because I had somehow done something bad. Anything short of total perfection in what I did or thought or said was total failure in my eyes. I knew my guilt and assumed that I just might deserve to be drowned in a bathtub. So I was on my guard. All the time. “OK, this, this is the moment when the punishment is coming,” I thought at every turn. It was my guilt that fed my fear.
So I wonder if the disciples in the boat with Jesus are worried that their guilt, or the guilt of the person sitting beside them, is the cause of the storm. I wonder if any of them think that God just might be trying to feed them to the fish at the bottom of the lake? They certainly know the story of Jonah. They certainly know their own individual inadequacies and imperfections as disciples. Jesus, however, who loves them, is certainly not worried about their worthiness. He is calmly asleep, unconcerned with guilt or blame or divine punishment for his bunch in the boat. And when the disciples wake him up, Jesus cries, “Peace! Be still!” to the wind, to the waves …. and also perhaps to the misguided guilt and shame that stir up his friends from within. A priest friend of mine always says that it is very easy to convince people that they are sinners; the difficult thing is to convince people that they are loved. Jesus died to convince us that we are loved. And he, as one whose love will indeed lead to his death, is not worried about the failings of the motley crew in his boat--even ours.
I just heard this week about a group of death-row inmates at Angola prison in Louisiana who are performing a passion play called “The Life of Jesus Christ.”[2] Those who have been found guilty in our courts, murderers, drug dealers, “dead men and women walking,” are being brought together and are finding inner transformation through the repeated performance of Jesus’ story, a story that calms and sustains and re-creates. They are finding their true identities as beloved children of God in inhabiting the characters that they play, characters who are touched by God’s love in Jesus Christ: the leper who is healed, the faithful disciple, even Judas the betrayer and Jesus himself. A prison is like a boat, floating on a sea of chaos and buffeted by all of the waves that society heaves upon it. It is a boat groaning under a load of fear, violence, guilt, and desperation … and it is one in which the hope of God’s presence is difficult to recognize. In performing and preparing their play, however, these prisoners have awakened the sleeping Jesus who is there with them. In the words of Scripture he actively responds with peace, with calm, and with a love that heals both the oppressor and the oppressed.  And we, who are so quick to condemn ourselves and others, we watch the miracle and are left trembling in awe as we stare and mumble, “Who then is this, that can change and heal the human heart?”


[1] David Lose, http://www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=598.
[2] http://www.npr.org/2012/06/23/155535620/on-this-stage-jesus-is-a-robber-the-devils-a-rapist

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Shrubs, Sickles, and the Open Table


One of the issues that The Episcopal Church will be discussing at General Convention in July is “the Open Table.” In other words, we are reflecting on whether we should continue to specify that only baptized Christians can receive the Eucharist, or whether we invite everyone present to come forward and receive Christ’s Body and Blood. I have experimented with different kinds of invitations to the Eucharist here at St. Thomas, and I tend toward defending the open Table. It seems clear to me that Jesus’ radical hospitality in all of our Gospel accounts should not be ignored by the Church who seeks to follow in his footsteps. But this is a complex issue, much too complex to do justice to in one sermon. I also understand the people who say that having an open Table damages our concept of baptism and changes our understanding of Church. If we are going to change our practice, they point out, shouldn’t we be able to defend it theologically first? Is it OK to fling open wide the gate around the Altar without a “deeper,” theologically-based reason than the desire to welcome?[1]
I was delighted to find that today’s parables in Mark’s Gospel, both the short, strange one about the seeds that grow without tending, and the well-known one about the mustard seed, speak to this question. Our parables today are not just nice little pieces of encouragement about the spread of God’s Word or about the hope that great good will come from small beginnings. Today’s parables are meant to open us up to the reign of God. Like both baptism and the Eucharist, they are meant to change our relationships to God and to each other. As parables, they both put us before different sets of jarring images, images that do not go together, images that force us to look at things differently.
In the parable of the mustard seed, we have Jesus comparing God’s mighty reign with an invasive shrub that would have been considered “unclean” in any self-respecting Jewish field. Moreover, that invasive shrub is then compared with the great cedar of Lebanon referred to in several texts of the Hebrew Scriptures, a tree that represents Israel, God’s chosen nation, who will magnanimously shelter the other lesser nations of the world in her branches. Jesus is therefore telling us that God’s Kingdom is somehow like an illegitimate, tainted, invasive, common bush replacing the strong, proud, special tree as God’s place of welcome and refuge.[2] It makes me wonder: What is our Cedar of Lebanon that Jesus wants to transform? In what do we find our identity and security and pride? In our liturgy? Our music? Or even our baptismal theology? Divine shelter and growth will be found elsewhere, and while this growth is now hidden in something so small that you can barely see it, it will burst forth and take over, says Jesus in our parable.

And in the same way, in the parable of the Man Casting Seed, we have fields unregulated by human hands, fields that produce grain purely by God’s grace, like the untended fields of the Jewish Sabbatical and Jubilee years. Yet mixed in with those fields of grace, we have a reference to God’s language of apocalyptic judgment from Joel, about the “Day of the Lord” when Isaiah’s peaceful plowshares are beaten back into swords and God judges the nations in a final harvest, with sharpened sickle in hand. Just as Jesus turns the proud Cedar of Lebanon into a scraggly bush, in this parable, Jesus turns God’s presence of violent judgment into God’s presence of abundant grace.[3] What is our image of God’s judgment that Jesus wants to mold into grace? Did you know that the pastors of Protestant, Reformed churches used to give out little Communion tokens only to morally upright, faithfully-attending members? One could come forward to receive Communion only if one had a token to deposit in the hands of the Elders. We don’t do that anymore, of course, but such an attitude would certainly look like the well-ordered fields and the harvest of judgment that our parable describes. Could our insistence upon baptism also be serving as kind of an intangible coin and an orderly barrier to God's action in the world? Could the open Table, then, be a field of grace, producing fruit for a harvest that we do not control or understand?

Author Nora Gallagher tells a story about a time when her ex-mother-in-law was dying. She had been divorced from the woman’s son in her early twenties, and she had not kept in touch with the family. The day after the mother-in-law’s death, however, Nora’s former brother-in-law called to ask Nora, a well-known Christian author, to speak at the funeral. As you can imagine, Nora was very hesitant to walk into such an awkward situation, but something pushed her to accept the invitation. It turned out to be a wonderful moment of healing and grace for all involved. In writing about the experience, Nora contrasts “the world of propriety, rules, and regulations, what is done and what is not done, lines that are drawn to keep people out … a world of sticking to principles” with a world of grace, a risky world of vulnerability and invitation and joy and welcome. In the world of propriety, she would not have been offered, nor would she have accepted, what turned out to be a grace-filled invitation.[4] Our parables, too, show us such a world in which grace is stronger than propriety, in which messiness is no barrier to God’s presence—indeed messiness and a certain “letting go” are the way into God’s presence.
I had a day-dream this week that sprung up like a seed, I don’t know how. In my dream, there was a little Episcopal church where the priest didn’t like finishing all of the wine out of the chalice after every service. Since the wine had been blessed, it was holy and was not to be poured down the sink like old Coca-Cola that had lost its fizz. Instead, the members of the Altar Guild carefully opened the stained glass window in the Sacristy and poured the left-over wine out onto the ground. Sometimes it splashed against the bricks in a messy way that worried the Altar Guild ladies, though. Visiting priests sometimes frowned at this barely acceptable practice. Sometimes there were broken pieces of bread, too, or wafers that had gotten stale or damp, and they were put out the window and out onto the ground for the birds to eat.  Day after day, service after service, tiny bits of holy bread and small sloshes of holy wine were returned to the earth right outside of that window. It was, despite a certain lack of respectability, a peaceful, ordered, simple act, done without reflection and with great respect.
One Easter, the children were having an Easter Egg hunt, and a couple of five-year-olds were poking around outside that Sacristy window looking for eggs. Down in the grass, they saw something that looked hard and round, like a cement egg, so the children kicked at it with their shoes and then dug at it with their hands. Quickly realizing that it wasn’t an egg or a prize, they ran off in search of more fertile ground. The little stone mound, though, kept growing, somehow getting taller and taller every morning. Finally, one day the lawn service company reported that, as they were cutting grass, they found what looked to be a miniature bird bath under the sacristy window. They reported it to the Building and Grounds Committee, but the Committee had bigger headaches to deal with than little birdbaths in neglected corners of the property, so no one did anything about it.
One day, the rector was walking through the Meditation Garden and was shocked to see what looked just like dozens of baptismal fonts bursting up through the lawn outside of the Sacristy window. It was a sight that was almost obscene, reminding her of those dozens of toilets on the lawn in the movie The Help. “Who could have done such a  thing,” she wondered? If she had been strong enough, she would have hauled those errant fonts down to the basement. Fonts don’t belong outside, where they can get covered in bird droppings and where anyone can mess with them. What if those skateboarding teens use them as an obstacle course?! In a tizzy, she went inside to call the Wardens.
By the time that the Wardens could get there, the fonts had multiplied and filled with wine, wine that was spilling over the sides and watering the ground which seemed to be producing more fonts as they looked on. What should the Rector and the Wardens do? Should they gather the people outside and cry with one voice, “It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth?” 
Or should they try to control the chaos?
Decide which world you want to live in, says Jesus.


[1] See Stephen Edmondson, “Opening the Table: The Body of Christ and God’s Prodigal Grace,” Anglican Theological Review 91:2.
[2] Bernard Scott, Hear Then the Parable (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 386-87.
[3] Ibid., 370-71.
[4][4] Nora Gallagher, The Sacred Meal, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009), 82.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Reflections on asking for kings and living with beagles, or is that asking for beagles and living with kings?


         When my daughter was in the ninth grade, she decided all of a sudden that she wanted to show dogs. The group of girls who were becoming her new high school best friends all showed dogs, and she wanted to be like them.

          “OK,” I said, “You can learn how to show our family dog, Max. He’ll enjoy the attention.”

          “Oh Mom,” she moaned. “You can’t show just any old dog. You have to have a pure-bred, AKC certified show dog. I love Max, but he won’t do at all. I need to get a pure-bred puppy.”

          “No way,” I protested in my best “because-I-said-so” voice, determined to nip this bad idea in the bud. “We can’t afford a fancy show-dog, and you have no idea what you would be getting yourself into. You can’t go out or spend the night with your friends with a puppy to take outside every few hours. You’d get the dog, and then a week later you’d decide that you don’t like showing dogs. It will be just like Max, and the rabbit, and the gerbils, and the hermit crabs, all of which I ended up taking care of. No way.”

          Six months later, my daughter came to me again, looking so grown-up this time that I was thrown off guard. I learned that she had quietly spent all of her spare time babysitting and secretly scouring the Internet for information on dog breeds and breeders and kennel-club rules. Somehow, she who had always let money drift straight through her fingers and out into the Mall, had managed to save more than enough money to pay for a show dog. She was so earnest, so sure of herself, so determined that this dog and this new hobby would finally bring her happiness, keep her out of trouble in high school, assure her of a place in her new group of nice friends, and give her the self-confidence that she lacked …. that I caved. One fateful, late-summer day we brought home a cute little harmless-looking beagle puppy with a pedigree. His papers said, “The Cowboy in Me,” so she named him Buck.

          To be fair to my daughter, she did pretty well caring for Buck, and she became quite a dog-handler, earning blue ribbons and keeping up her hobby throughout high school. But Buck was also trouble from the minute that we brought him home as a puppy, and those of you who have met him in my office know that he is now totally my disaster of a neurotic, misbehaving dog, ever since my daughter left for college six years ago. He’s kind of like those kings that are described in our reading from 1 Samuel, a burden to me and a usurper of freedom, marking everyone’s territory as his own, quick to steal what does not belong to him and ferociously violent in keeping what he steals. In fact, I hope that you recognize the dynamics of Israel’s desire for a king in the conversations with my daughter that I just described. We can be so sure that we know what is best for us, can’t we? We can make ourselves so knowledgeable about the things that we want; we can work so hard to get them, pouring our lives into that desire, praying and begging and pleading to God, hoping that God will relent like a guilty, loving Parent and give us what we clamor for—the desires that we are sure will make us happy and successful and popular and finally as good as our neighbor.

          The trouble is, writes C.S. Lewis, that “[o]ur Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea.”[1] God offers us exhilarating freedom, and we beg for the security of a king; God offers us a sparkling, unique soul, and we want to be just like our friends. God offers to transform us with divine fire, and we complain that it hurts. As a matter of fact, our prayers are often so driven by all of the little things that we want from God that we fail even to recognize the earth-shattering transformations that God wants to make in our lives. While my daughter was scheming and dreaming for that show dog, she never once noticed the devotion of good old Max, the elderly mutt who followed her faithfully from room to room, waiting for a pat on the head and wishing for nothing more than to love her with all of his heart.

          In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus has come with the power of God to heal, to love, to set us free, to establish among us the Kingdom of God. Yet even his own family fails to recognize God’s work in his words and deeds. Instead, they think that Jesus is crazy, or even acting in the name of Evil itself. He doesn’t look like the God that they have pictured for themselves; he doesn’t act like the Messiah that they have been praying for. They are looking straight at pure Goodness, pouring down upon them from heaven, and they call it Satan. “Heal us! Save us! Give us what we need!” we cry, too, holding out our arms toward heaven, yet when God comes to lift us up to lives of joy and meaning, we are too busy bending over and searching the ground for a path that we can recognize.

          C.S. Lewis writes that, like my insecure teenage daughter, we all want more than anything “to be acknowledged [in the depths of our souls], to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between [our lonely selves] and reality.” This is our “inconsolable secret.”[2] We think that kings and other things will be the bridges that we need, but they cannot be, because what we hunger for is God. In 2 Corinthians, St. Paul calls God’s acceptance of us the “eternal weight of glory.” God’s glory, God’s “welcome [of us] into the heart of things,”[3] cannot be seen in our eyes or stance, in our successes or in the things that we so carefully gather around us. God’s glory in us is the undying love with which God continually sustains us, the love that death cannot kill, the love that suffering cannot dim. God’s glory in us is the love that ties us to one another and to the Spirit’s glorious and mysterious presence in the world around us.

          I remember that, when I first read our Gospel from Mark as a teenager, the part about the eternal and unforgiveable sin against the Holy Spirit set me to trembling in my boots. If there was an unforgiveable sin, I sure wanted to understand exactly what it was, because I knew that I would be just the one to commit it—and then, oops, I’d be in big trouble! Jesus is not trying to set some kind of an esoteric trap for us here, however. Jesus is merely stating that we had better look beyond the surface of things, beyond our expectations, beyond our fears, to see the Holy Spirit at work in and around us. We had better recognize God’s glory in ourselves, in our world, and most especially in our fellow human beings. We had better avoid calling that Glory evil, rejecting it, or ignoring it. Because if we cannot recognize the Good, then we put ourselves out of reach of that Goodness. If the Holy Spirit comes to us and we flee, as if from the Devil, then the Holy Spirit cannot enter into our hearts, and we close ourselves off from the repentance that leads to forgiveness.  

 In St. Exupéry’s story of The Little Prince, the Prince, who had left his home planet in confusion over his love for a very difficult little rose, arrives on a planet filled with rose bushes. Seeing thousands of blooms that resemble the beloved rose that he had believed to be unique in the world, he falls into deep despair. The rose garden, no matter how beautiful, gives no meaning to his world; there is no special welcome in it. And then a small fox finds the Prince and asks to be tamed. Day after day, the fox and the Little Prince slowly grow closer until they become friends. Then the fox shares a secret: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,” he whispers. “What is essential is invisible to the eyes…. It is the time that you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important… You become eternally responsible for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.”[4]

Perhaps we avoid that “sin against the Holy Spirit,” too, by taming one another and our world, by looking for Christ beneath the surface and by taking responsibility for one another’s flourishing? If God has poured God’s eternal Glory into each of God’s creatures, then isn’t it by taking the risk of taming them that we will open ourselves to God? Again, C.S. Lewis writes that “It is a serious thing …. to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day [because of God’s glory within them] be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship…It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.”[5]

Even when we ask God for the moon, ignoring our own best interest, and God says, “No way. No more,” God, out of infinite love and mercy, relents. In the power of the Holy Spirit, God even enters into our very being, digging eternity out of time-filled clay. In return, God asks us to look at the people around us and to see mothers and brothers and sisters, a family tamed and bound together in love. If I can tame even my daughter’s crazy beagle, then there is hope for us all.



            [1] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1965), 2.
[2] Ibid., 11.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (Paris : Gallimard, 1946), 72. (My translation).
[5] Lewis, 14-15.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

A Seat at the Table


          Long ago, as a newly divorced single mom, new in town and with children aged 2, 5, and 7, I found my way to an Episcopal church, pulling an invisible suitcase packed full of needs behind me. While I might have looked on the outside as if I fit in, there probably weren’t many parishioners more lost, lonely, and spiritually desolate than I was. After each service, hungrier for companionship than for any food or drink or even prayer, I would drag my squirming children to whatever fellowship opportunity was available. With my toddler on one arm, balancing a cup of punch and a flurry of Sunday School coloring pages with the other hand, alternately prodding and luring my whining older children with bribes of doughnuts and cookies, I would peer through the doors of the fellowship hall and survey with wary eyes the groups clustered around the tables. Invariably, I would find happy families and friends huddled together at small round tables, laughing, sharing smiles, turned toward each other in closed circles of complicity, with little room for me and my rowdy bunch to slip smoothly into any group. Almost as a kind of dare, I would plop down at a totally empty table and busy myself with my children, waiting to see if anyone would join us. They never did.
          I think that those difficult memories are why I am so fond of Rublev’s famous icon of the Trinity. Instead of depicting the Trinity in the usual way, as a stately, white-bearded Father, joined to a crucified Son, with a chubby white Spirit dove flying around their heads, Rublev’s 15th-century icon shows us three angelic figures sitting at a table.[1] Called The Visitation of Abraham, this icon is based on the story from Genesis of God’s visit to Abraham and Sarah in the desert, disguised as three strangers. Abraham and Sarah welcome the strangers with open arms, bathing their feet and preparing a feast for them, and as the men leave, they promise the aging couple that Sarah will soon give birth to a son. Interpreting the Old Testament allegorically, medieval Christians saw these three divine messengers as a manifestation of the Trinity.
The Russian icon-writer Rublev paints them as three figures with gender-neutral robes and hair-styles, seated around a table that holds a golden chalice. The central figure, who represents Christ, is holding his hand over the chalice in blessing, as the other two look on. What is most interesting about this icon is that there is both an openness and a swirling movement to it. Christ is neither looking down nor out at the viewer but cocks his head clearly toward the figure to his right. That figure nods his head across the table to the other figure on his right, who, in turn, inclines his head back toward Christ, as the wings and background objects bend as if caught in a gently turning, circular breeze. The figures are not huddled around the table like the people in my old church fellowship hall, though, either, focused only on their satisfying and already-established relationship. There is a clear break in the circle, a clear empty seat at the table right at the front of the icon, right across from Christ and in front of the chalice. Anyone who looks at this icon, automatically becomes the fourth person at the Table and is caught up in the circular fellowship of the other Three. This Trinity excludes no one from its conversation; if our whole congregation were to look at the icon at once, we would all be with the others at the Table.
There is in an increasing isolation and distance in our modern lives, I find, that encompasses more than lonely single mothers at church. Technology allows us to communicate without openness, both to love and to hate from a distance. When I’m waiting for a plane in the airport now, I no longer seek to connect with my fellow travelers. I no longer even look at them. Instead, I poke at my I-phone and check my mail or the latest weather alerts. Everyone else is doing the same thing. The last time that I taught Sunday School to young third and fourth graders, I was surprised to look out to find them all pressing buttons on their I-pod Touches, rather than engaging in the lesson. When I want to reach out to my beloved children or to you, my dear parishioners, I can send heartfelt greetings with an email or a text, greetings that do not share my voice or my person or even the personal loops and squiggles of my unique penmanship. With technology, we can even kill and destroy from a distance now, a sniper’s bullet from a fancy gun or bombs from a computer-driven drone, making human hatred impersonal and mechanical and therefore somehow more acceptable. These days, we desperately need the Doctrine of the Trinity, not so much to describe the perfect recipe that will whip us up a serving of Divine Being, but to keep us from clustering around tables closed by technology and distance, as well as by plain old human insularity.
Not only do we tend to exclude one other in our human communities, but we tend to shut out the openness and movement within God, as well. Looking at God from our human vantage point is like looking at the earth from outer space and seeing a solid, multicolored rubber ball, lost in the darkness of the universe. From space, we cannot see the busy life, the dizzying relationships, the movement of the oceans, the zigzagging paths of cars and airplanes, the flowing love, or the ever-shifting winds. Yet all of that movement, all of those relationships, is what makes the earth our habitable, living home. God, too, is not that solid, unchanging being that we tend to box up in our imaginations. Left to our own devices, we tend to scoot our chair up close to Jesus, turning our backs to the world and gazing only into our Savior’s understanding face, as we try to imitate his every gesture. Or we dive only into the mystery of the Father, seeking rest and security in the darkness of God’s “eternal changelessness.” Or we abandon ourselves to the movement of the Spirit within us or our communities, totally shutting our eyes to the equally powerful dance of suffering that is going on outside. Or we give up on a Being who seems to watch the world ineffectually “from a distance,” and we go sit at a table by ourselves, busying ourselves with our human lives and daring Him to join us.
The Doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that God is neither a changeless, distant object that we can view from across the safe emptiness of space, nor is God three friends before whom we can pull up a chair and visit individually according to our needs. Writes Rowan Williams: “Knowing the Trinity is being involved in [God’s own] circling movement: drawn by the Son towards the Father, drawn into the Father’s breathing out of the Spirit so that the Son’s life may be again made real in the world.”[2] If God is Love, then God must be movement, constant reaching out for the Other, constant exchange, constant and active relationship. Theologians have recognized this truth again and again throughout the ages. The Trinity is like Love, the Beloved, and the Lover, explained St. Augustine, so long ago. The Trinity, as Love, “supposes the one, the other, and their unity” writes modern theologian Hans von Balthasar.[3] “We are only able to love each other because the Father loves the Son through the Holy Spirit,” proclaims our contemporary, Richard Lischer.[4] Love both requires and bridges separation, differentiation. Love both binds and rips open. Love is constant invitation. Love both calls out and answers, “Here I am.”
In the book of Isaiah, God cries out, “I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ to a people that did not call on my name.” Can the Trinity be as vulnerable as the needy single mom peaking longingly into our fellowship hall? Can you see the Trinity sitting at the Table in the Divine Fellowship Hall in the sky, Christ with his hand raised in blessing over a cup of his own blood, whispering a loving “here I am,” to the Father, who whispers, “here I am” to the Spirit, who whispers, “here I am” back to the Son, as they wait and wait for us to join them at the Table, as they wait for us to take the cup, as they wait for us to cry out in response, like the prophet Isaiah, “here I am, send me!” as they wait in love so that Love can flow into the distant, empty spaces of our world?


[1] My description and analysis of this icon are based on Rowan Williams’ wonderful reflections in The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 45-63.
[2] Ibid., 57.
[3] Hans Urs von Balthasar, “A Resume of My Thought,” trans. Kelly Hamilton and found on a friend’s Facebook page ….
[4] Richard Lischer, Open Secrets (New York: Random House, 2001), 81.