"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, September 29, 2012

How Broken Playmobile Figures can be Relevant: On Christian Cooperation and Responsibility



          This week, I was coming back to St. Thomas from running an errand out in the Industrial Park, and, as always when on unfamiliar roads, I got lost. I decided to pull over so that I could look at the maps on my trusty i-Phone and pulled into what I thought was some giant industrial complex, with its fairly full and busy parking lot on this weekday morning. When, to my surprise, I saw the sign that said, “Southeast Christian Church,” I immediately went into defensive mode. “I wonder what fear-mongering Bible study they are having at Six Flags Over Jesus this morning,” I thought uncharitably, as I looked with some jealousy at all of the cars. “They are probably trying to stop all these people from thinking for themselves…! "The church building looks like the Astrodome,” I mumbled as I looked around the campus. "How can you have Christian community in a place that big?!”
Jesus would not have been pleased with me, as I was acting just like those disciples in today’s Gospel lesson, the ones who were trying to censure another group of Christians for casting out demons, just because they belonged to a different group. “Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward,” he explains, probably with exasperation in his voice. Contrary to the idealized portrayals in the book of Acts, the early church was as fragmented and quarrelsome as the Church has always been, and Mark has Jesus addressing the issue of “us” versus “them” in no uncertain terms in our Gospel lesson. Instead of accusing other groups of wrong deeds or wrong beliefs, says Jesus, you had better pay attention to how you yourselves are acting. You are all my disciples, and we are all walking the same path.
Jesus goes beyond just chastising the disciples for a lack of unity, however. With frightening hyperbole, Jesus warns me and every self-righteous little group of disciples that it is going to take all that we have and all that we are to live lives of Christian discipleship; our attention needs to be on our own ways of caring for fellow disciples (“these little ones who believe in me”) and on the series of roadblocks that litter the path of a Christian life, a life that even our own hands and eyes and feet can pull dangerously off course from one moment to the next. All the talk of “hell” in this passage might cause us squeamishly non-hellfire-and-brimstone-Episcopalians to squirm and shut our ears. That would be unfortunate. “Hell” here is not Dante’s Inferno of eternal fire that we imagine when we read Jesus’ words. This “hell” in the Greek text is “Gehenna,” a real valley near Jerusalem where, at once point in the history of ancient Israel, human sacrifices were once offered to a foreign god. As such, it was a defiled and unclean place, a place that was in Jesus’ day a garbage dump for the city, a place where burning trash smoldered night and day, and a fitting image of desolation and decay.[1] If you want life in God, Jesus is saying, you need to rid yourself of everything that is a stumbling block, even if it seems as essential to your present life as your hands and feet and eyes. If you hang onto it, it will burn away your time and your will, and you will smolder in the garbage dump of living death, until nothing is left but dust and ashes. We need to get rid of whatever is preventing our Christian communities from being places of deep responsibility, responsibility for the salvation of the “little ones,” total commitment to the healing of our brothers and sisters.
To be in community these days is tough. In our fragmented, often isolated and lonely, modern world, we long for community, but we don’t really know what it means. Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, a pastor who specializes in community and Christian practice, points out the longing fascination of our “radically autonomous society” with all things communal: we have “online communities” like Facebook and Twitter and Match.com; we have “planned communities” like Norton Commons, that promise the safety and closeness to neighbors of bygone days; we have “community-supported agriculture” and “community investments,” that bring us together for a common goal. “Community Churches” spring up like weeds, hiding the implied fragmentation and institutional bureaucracy of a denominational name, and marketing a sense of cozy camaraderie. At the same time that we strive to create the communities that we long for, however, we avoid making commitments and seem lacking in “any collective capacity to prioritize the common good.”[2] We resist “joining” churches and clubs, preferring the freedom to float around at will. We promote individual success and reward, being the “best that we can be.” We have little common moral ground, and are disillusioned with the role of government and institutions in solving our problems. We are left with “communities” that compete with one another, communities that provide a sense of belonging without the discipline of community interest.
Here at St. Thomas, I have to say that, whatever our own stumbling blocks, we do pretty well in caring for the little ones among us. We have the discipline and sense of responsibility that is often lacking in communities these days, and we need to honor that in ourselves. Our little community follows the practices outlined in today’s reading in James’ letter: we pray faithfully for the suffering, anointing one another with oil every Sunday at the Prayer Chair. We openly confess our sins and tend to live our lives without pretention. We pray, and we sing songs of praise. We look out for one another and encourage one another in discipleship. The way that we come together to support our children and those in our parish who are ill or in need is proof that we take our responsibilities for one another seriously.
Nevertheless, I still think that we, like all churches these days, suffer from a lack of understanding our role in and our relationships with the greater community—the community of believers and nonbelievers in which we live our lives. In our strategic planning sessions with the Vestry, we face again and again the question of what on earth we mean when we talk about “community.” Are we talking about our parish community, about the Westport Road community, about our community in the Deanery or the Diocese, about the community of Christians throughout the world?
We’re talking about them all, Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel. We are responsible not just to our own parish community, but to everyone who bears the name of Christ, whether they agree with us or not, whether we like them or not, whether it is easy for us to share with them or not. I hope that here at St. Thomas, we will be able to open up to work more with the Episcopal churches in our deanery, to participate more fully and more often at Diocesan events, to work together with the many denominations of Christians in our area to care for the little ones who would otherwise be out of our reach. I hope that we can get more involved with the work of Eastern Area Community Ministries, that we can work with Zachary Taylor Elementary, that we can join in all kinds of projects with the many churches that line Westport Road. Working to cooperate and to take responsibility with all of our brothers and sisters in Christ to meet the needs of the world and one another will not leave us time to waste in judging one another, and it might just save us from dwindling down to ash on society’s trash heap.
          In Confirmation Class this week, my challenge was to present the whole of Church History in about thirty minutes. To engage the kids in what might have been an intolerably long and boring lecture, I gave them each a handful of Playmobile figures that I had scavenged from a box of old toys in my basement. Like the real Church, these figures were a motley crew: some were holding props like guns and canoe paddles, some were missing body parts, and some were expressionless adults and children. The task for our young people was to move these figures in and out of groups as I outlined the history of the Church.[3] As we went from a small community of persecuted Christians, to a church split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, to the divisions and wars of the Protestant Reformation, to the fragmentation within the Protestant Churches that creates all of our present-day denominations, the kids were kept constantly busy moving the figures, as the communities in our story fought and morphed and divided and dwindled. At the end of the exercise, looking at the tiny groups of pitiful Playmobile figures, clumped in irrelevant disarray all over the table with their guns and canoe paddles and missing limbs, we couldn’t help but shake our heads in sorrowful self-recognition as today’s Church (with a capital C.) Finally, one of our wise middle-schoolers commented, “Why can’t all these groups just concentrate on what they have in common, instead of on the things they disagree about?” Jesus couldn’t have said it better.


[1] Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to St. Mark (Blacks New Testament Commentaries, 1991), 232.
[2] Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Awakening of Hope: Why We Practice A Common Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 114.
[3] Thanks to lesson plan from Confirm not Conform.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

"And Jesus said, 'My wife ...'"



        Have you heard the news about Jesus’ wife?! It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but I am being quite serious! A Harvard professor announced last week that she is in possession of a fourth-century Coptic manuscript fragment that says, “And Jesus said to them: ‘My wife …’”[1] Now, before we get too excited or upset, there are scholars who dispute the authenticity of the wording on the ancient papyrus , claiming that the writing is a modern forgery. And even if the manuscript is authentic, its fourth century composition date is even later than the dates of any of our canonical Gospels, so there would be major questions about the historical accuracy of such a text.  And yet, the news reports and the Twitter feeds are spreading like wildfire, as scholars line up on one side or the other of the question. My favorite of all the jokes on Twitter quips, in the tone of Jesus’ wife: "If you can feed thousands with a few loaves and fishes, then why do I always need to run to the grocery store?”
Seriously, though, the idea of Jesus having a wife seems to dredge up all of the anxiety that we still have in the Church over sex and over the role of women, anxiety that sets us to bickering. I can’t help but relate the issue to the angst created by today’s Old Testament reading, for the same reasons. The book of Proverbs ends with the poem in our first reading, a poem that describes the ideal wife from A to Z, each line beginning with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This ideal wife, this “superwoman” of the ancient world, spends her time serving her husband’s household, managing home and lands and family and cottage industry with skill and untiring devotion, working so hard that “her lamp does not go out at night.” While she is hard at work taking care of everything on the home front, her husband is free to sit with honor “in the city gates,” governing and making the important political decisions.
On the one hand, many very traditional Christians still hold this text up at face value as God’s will for all women. I was amazed at the number of Internet websites devoted to “Proverbs 31-wives,” sites that are full of recipes, devotions, childcare advice … and rants against contemporary American society. These websites give advice such as the following: a woman has but “one purpose which is to be a crowning joy to her husband, to make him as joyful as a king.”[2]
On the other hand, many feminist Christians are horrified at yet another biblical text that asks women to deny their personhood, to give and give of themselves while men take all the credit and make all of the decisions. They cringe at the history of interpretation of this text, interpretations written by men, stereotypical interpretations like the one that I found by good old allegorizing St. Augustine (who, like the new papyrus fragment, is also a product of the fourth century). He explains: “To prevent the flapping folds of carnal desires from getting in the way of her work, [the ideal wife] girds her loins … as she hurries about her work. There lies the chastity of this lady, tightly bound by the girdle of the commandment and always ready for good work.”[3] While some pious Christians might agree that such a virtuous and chaste woman could even be a suitable wife for Jesus, for many modern women, this text is merely an outdated example of the evils of stereotyping, oppression and patriarchy.
          While we immediately jump on the cultural stereotypes portrayed in this text, I would like to point out that the real wisdom of Proverbs 31--what women and men can both learn from it--lies in the ways in which the wife portrayed here does not fit ancient cultural patterns.
       The first surprise in our text is the emphasis on the wife’s strength and boldness. What our translation calls “a capable wife,” is really in Hebrew a “valiant wife,” or a “wife of competent strength.” Usually used to describe men, this Hebrew word is used for someone who is a valiant warrior, a mighty and strong hero, a man who is set over the people, someone who is expert and in charge. The only other woman described with this word in the Hebrew Scriptures is Ruth, so called by her kinsman Boaz, who is impressed with her loyalty, strength and courage when she dares to come to him at the threshing floor. The woman in our text is no wilting lily, hiding behind her husband’s coattails. She is bold and confident like Ruth. She is “clothed in strength and dignity.” She even “girds herself with strength, and makes her arms strong.” Such “girding of the loins” and strengthening of the arms are not, like Augustine suggests, signs of feminine chastity. They are common masculine images of preparation for battle or for hard physical labor. The valiant wife is physically and spiritually prepared to surmount whatever obstacles are put before her. All of us, women as well as men, could use some of her wise valor in our lives. Jesus’ wife would need such valor and strength, I imagine, as she watches him walk away to die in Jerusalem.
The second surprise in Proverbs 31is that the characteristics of beauty and charm, so often ascribed to women, are derided here as deceitful and vain. This poem is not about Miss America winning the swimsuit competition. Its emphasis on the ideal wife’s industry rather than on her physical charms makes me think of the clever Shakespeare sonnet that I was delighted to discover in high school. Buried in the anthologies of sickly sweet love sonnets is Shakespeare’s number 130, describing the poet’s beloved as one who, “If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head… And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. … And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.” Just as Shakespeare is parodying the typical love poetry of his day, it could be that the author of Proverbs 31 is rejecting the widespread emphasis on outer beauty in Near Eastern literature in order to call attention to the importance of wisdom, wisdom that is defined as “fear of the Lord.”[4]  
I doubt that the Bachelor on that addictive TV show of the same name lists “fear of the Lord” as one of the characteristics of his ideal wife! But Psalm 112 utters similar praise to the wise man: “Happy is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments.” To fear the Lord is not, of course, to curl up in a ball of abject terror before a cruel Judge. It is not to expect punishment or to second-guess one’s every move as sinful. To fear the Lord is to know that God is God and that we are God’s creatures.  To fear the Lord is to worship God and to obey God’s commandments, to keep in covenant with God. From the valiant wife in our text, we see that we see that fearing the Lord means to help the poor and take care of the needy; and that we are to relate to everyone, rich and poor, with loving-kindness.
So, if we were to fill in the blank on the papyrus fragment about Jesus’ wife, we could write, “Jesus said, ‘my wife … is strong and valiant and wise; she does her duty and lives as a child of God.” Modern women could deal with that description. I wonder, though, if all of our fighting over the role of women doesn’t resemble the fighting of the disciples in our Gospel lesson over who is to be the greatest. Wisdom deals with our “place” in the scheme of things, with order and hierarchy, with works and duty.  Yet, for us Christians, there is a paradox when it comes to wisdom. Wisdom can teach the way to right action in our daily lives, but we cannot grasp hold of our categories and roles and hierarchies for security, as we are wont to do, for Jesus invariably turns them all on their heads. Remember the words of St. Paul, “Where is the one who is wise? …Where is the debater of this age? For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (I Cor. 1:20-25)      
When Jesus heard his disciples arguing, he took a little child and put it among them, throwing all society’s roles and hierarchies to the wind: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” Jesus says.  A child in the ancient world had no role. He could be here today and dead tomorrow of some disease. He had no status and no legal rights. Yet Jesus welcomed him and put him at the center of his group of disciples.
          It is fitting, then, that the ancient papyrus is missing an adjective. “And Jesus said, “My wife…”
“And Jesus said … “my disciple”
“…my friend”
“…my child”
“…my beloved”
With God, it’s not the role that matters. It is the relationship. 


[1] Deirdre Good, Daily Episcopalian, “On the ‘Jesus’ Wife’ Fragment,” found at http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/scripture/academic_conferences_are_not_u.php.

[2] relijournal.com/.../what-is-a-proverbs-31-woman-anyway
[3] St. Augustine, from the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, vol. IX, 187.
[4] Bruce Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, Chapters 15-31. Eerdmans, 2005, 517.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

A Growing Church



It has been almost thirty years, but I can picture those big French Reformed Church buildings, made of stones as stubborn and sturdy as their Huguenot builders, yet now slumped on their foundations and looking inward with wide, vacant eyes. In every town, it was the same: On Sunday mornings, the empty balconies that framed the proud central pulpit looked down on a dozen or so elderly men and women who were huddled for warmth around a gas stove in the center aisle. The pastor didn’t bother to climb into the pulpit anymore; its tall canopy and high steps were too grand for the small number of worshippers huddled together in their winter coats and practical shoes. Birds made their nests in the balconies now, and the paint on the walls was buckling and ripping open the drywall like old wrapping paper. The organ no longer worked, and so the elderly congregation croaked out the old Goudimel psalms unaccompanied--sad, like an old record that was playing on slow speed. The pastor stood with a smile pasted on his face in the midst of his flock, bravely proclaiming resurrection. At home, though, he spent his time wondering if it would help attendance if they moved the services to Fridays, before the weekends when busy French families found other occupations. And the pastor’s wife spent her time wondering if the government allocations from a fifth child would buy them a new stove for the drafty kitchen of the ancient, crumbling manse.
Way back in 1982, I raised my nose from my theology books and peered out at this foreign religious world that seemed to be collapsing in front of my eyes. I had come, full of youthful enthusiasm, to study, and then to serve, the descendents of the courageous Huguenots who had held firm in their faith through centuries of persecution. The Reformed Protestants were still widely recognized and admired in their secular country for their strong moral stance, for their work for justice and peace, for their care of the poor and outcast … but strangely, their churches were dying, and icy gusts of hopelessness blew through the chinks in the church windows and swirled constantly around our heads during worship.
“How do these French pastors do it?” I wondered, a product of flush, program-sized American parishes, remembering the full parking lots back home.  “Social justice and outreach work are nothing without faith and prayer and worship, without the beauty of the Episcopal liturgy” I opined. “Where did the French Reformed Church go wrong, to be dying like this? They must be doing something wrong,” I muttered to Jesus, more and more desperately. Instinctively, in an attempt at self-preservation, like Peter in our Gospel reading, I turned away from this dismal and disintegrating world, unwilling to stay on board a sinking ship when life and hope and love beckoned in the sunshine outside the church walls. A husband and babies and life, not death, were what I wanted. So I quit even going to church, and I didn’t hear Jesus when he hung his head and sighed at my self-righteousness: “Get behind me, Satan.”
Having run from the struggling French church, here I am back home, a priest in my own country. My priesthood is proof that Jesus has a sense of humor and a never-ending stock of mercy. Thirty years after telling Jesus that suffering, death, and rejection do not belong in the Church, I am the pastor looking up at cracked ceilings and negative budgets, doing the disheartening math of ever-declining attendance and ever-increasing age, wondering if it would help to move the services to Fridays, and serving in an American religious world that is quickly catching up to the one that I abandoned in France.
We come to church looking for Life, do we not? Eternal Life—now and in heaven—that is what Jesus promises us, is it not? There’s enough death and failure in our lives, already, without finding it at church, too. Our jobs suck away our energy or our morale. Our family relationships are complicated. The news that bombards us now 24 hours a day from TV’s and computers and smart phones frightens us with violence and overwhelming social problems and natural disasters and financial meltdown. In church, we want happy music to lift our hearts, clever words to inspire us, sacraments that are filled with the Holy. We want a giving church, not a needy one; a life-giving church, not a dying one … and yet, and yet, we follow a Savior who brings life by dying.
“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Jesus plainly proclaims. While we might cringe at the force of his hyperbole, we know deep down that what he is saying is true. At St. Thomas, we are filled with individuals who know about giving. We know the powerful joy that fills the giver of gifts, whether we are buying a present for a loved one or for a needy child on the Zachary Taylor angel tree; whether we are using our musical gifts or our artistic gifts or our leadership gifts to give pleasure to others or to God; whether we are spending our time with a lonely shut-in or doing an errand to help a friend. Therapists will tell us that helping others makes us feel better about ourselves. Experience shows us that giving love is just as life-producing as receiving it. Giving brings life and happiness, because in giving we join with our Creator, the Giver of life itself. We all recognize the truth of St. Francis’ famous prayer that concludes: “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”    
Should we be surprised that it is the same for our Christian communities, as it is for our individual souls? There was a blog spreading like wildfire among clergy last week on the Internet called “A Growing Church is a Dying Church.” Even with all that we know about the power of giving, its description of the giving, growing church is not a comfortable one. Let me paraphrase the author’s description of what a growing church might look like these days:
A growing church will not have the old, inactive members in the pews again, the ones with whom you remember such good times. A growing church won’t guarantee that the parking lot will need expanding. There will be a few new faces in the pews but not many. The new people will want to make changes, too. They will have new ideas that make members uncomfortable. A growing church will feel like a different place all of a sudden. You might have longer vestry meetings that include prayer and Bible Study. A growing church might move furniture around and play with new liturgy. It might do a kind of music that you don’t much care for. The priest will tell you that you need to come to church more often and might ignore your phone calls because she’s too busy praying or studying Scripture. Putting more money toward mission and outreach might cause a negative budget. You will be asked to give away precious time and money. Your weekends might be filled with exhausting volunteer projects that serve people who will never worship with you. The “ugliest and meanest freaks in town will be invited onto church property at odd hours, and they will beg for handouts, track muddy snow into the building, leave their cigarette butts in the parking lot, and spill their coffee on the carpet.” They might even put trash into your recycling bins. (OK, I added that one!) [1]  
A growing church these days might feel like a dying church. Like those churches in France that sent me scurrying away for cover, it’s going to look as if it is asking for more than it gives. A growing church will not say, “Give yourselves to us because we are successful.” It will say, “Give yourselves to us so that we can pour ourselves out into the hurting world.”A growing church is going to ask us to love more than we can love; to hope in the face of hopelessness; and to believe that a Lord who is hanging on a Cross will live again and will return for us in some limitless future time.
          Big churches and small churches, conservative churches and liberal churches, they can all be growing, life-giving churches. But a church who chooses to follow Peter in rebuking Jesus’ strange and upside-down version of life and growth, living instead by the values of the power-hungry, consumer-driven world, will eventually succumb to death, although that church may look successful now. Church shopping and church hopping for success or ease or perfection is not the same as following Jesus. To be ashamed of dying is to be ashamed of the One who died for us. To be ashamed of dying is to deny the power of Resurrection.


[1] J. Barrett Lee, “A Growing Church is a Dying Church.” http://streetpastor.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/a-growing-church-is-a-dying-church.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Barbed Wire


          A parishioner gave St. Thomas a book of icons last week called Christ in the Margins. On the front cover, there is a picture of Jesus as a young Middle Eastern man with curly hair and a slight beard, standing behind a barbed-wire fence. The strands of sharp, twisted wire cut across the whole portrait, slicing even through the halo behind his head. He peers out from behind the fence with eyes full of yearning, and he pulls one strand of wire down so that he can see us better. The author calls this icon, “the Christ of Maryknoll,” in honor of the Maryknoll communities, Roman Catholic missions to the poor and destitute throughout the world.[1] I first started looking at the icon this week because of our readings, from James and from Proverbs, that urge us, in no uncertain terms, to serve the poor, as the Maryknoll brothers and sisters do. I thought that I would find in it an illustration of our Christian duty to the poor. The icon took me, though, as icons do, on a journey to a deeper place, beyond our reading from James. Is Jesus the one who is imprisoned behind the barbed wire fence, I wondered, or is he just looking in on us in our human cage? In the icon, it is impossible to tell for sure. Could it be that Jesus and I are both locked behind such fearsome fences? Surely, God is stronger than barbed wire?

          To me, there is no barrier more frightening than a barbed wire fence, recalling war zones and concentration camps and the crumbling infrastructures of inner city chaos. No one can pass beyond barbed wire without pain and injury. Its sharp, irregular spikes are like tiny explosions of anger, ready to wound anyone who touches them. How often our words carry the barbs of our unloving, unwelcoming thoughts, encircling us and ripping through anyone who ventures too close. Barbed wire is the ultimate excluder, crying “Keep Out!” in a loud and scary voice. How often our set beliefs and narrow opinions surround us and isolate us, as though we were woven round with barbed wire. In this season of political ads and speeches, barbed wire menaces from all sides of the political spectrum, as words serve to wound and tear down. In this season of fear and mistrust, we seem to build more and more barbed wire fences, and we eye each other—rich and poor, foreign and native born, conservative and liberal, creationist and evolutionist, black and white, believer and atheist, Christian and Muslim—from behind the thousands of painfully sharp and rigid barriers that divide us.

          When Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman meet in Mark’s Gospel, they too are looking at one another through barbed wire. The Syrophoenician woman and her daughter are not languishing behind a barrier of their own making; they are instead imprisoned behind the isolation and exclusion caused by the barbed wire of disease. The power of evil and death has encircled them, placing the barbs of an unclean spirit between them and their world. God, present in Jesus, could save them … yet Jesus, when he first meets the woman, is also stuck behind the barbed-wire fence of the culture into which he has become human flesh.

Jesus, the good Jewish teacher, knows that Scripture says that the Children of Israel are God’s chosen people. It is through them that God will save the world. It is first and foremost to them that he has come to bring Good News. Of course, God also cares for the Gentiles: the Greeks, the foreigners, the poor misguided souls who do not know the Law. But the Jews must be saved first, and then, through them, the rest of the world will be fed with the bread of life.

Resting in the strange Gentile house, in the strange Gentile country, surrounded by foreign ways, Jesus can only peer at the Greek woman through the barbed wire of his worldview, and her tender flesh catches on the barb of his insulting word: “Gentile Dog!” For Jesus, the good Jewish teacher, dogs are unclean animals, better than pigs of course, but still … Dogs are not pets, and they do not belong in the kitchen. With their snarling, aggressive ways, they belong outside, scavenging for unclean scraps, roaming at the margins, scratching their disease-ridden hides.

We are shocked at our sweet Jesus, meek and mild, who would allow such a barb to come from his mouth. But the Syrophoenician woman does not seem to get hooked by it. For her, coming from a wealthy, educated Greek background, the Jews are nobody special, and Jesus’ references are lost on her. Her culture has taught her that there are all kinds of teachings in the world, and an educated person has only to open one’s mind and sample them, picking truth from here and there like a bouquet of flowers. If there is a God who can set her daughter free, then he must do it; she must bow down at his feet and convince him to do it. On the other side of the fence, in this suffering mother’s world, dogs are pets who join their families in the kitchen at mealtime, scrounging for bits of food that fall to the floor, waiting for scraps and a friendly pat on the head. The suffering mother, at the feet of the new healer in town, looks at Jesus through the barbed wire of sickness and death, and she doesn’t hear the insult in his barb. She sees a man whom she calls “Lord,” a man filled with a divine power that can heal right now. In her mind, to be a dog is not such a bad thing, if it means that she can snatch a share of foreign healing for her daughter.

          In Mark’s version of this scene, the barbed wire is replaced by healing not because the woman is so clever or even so faithful, but because Jesus changes his mind. Jesus lifts the taut wires with which he was born and puts loving action above human teaching. Should we be surprised? We know that God changes God’s mind all the time, replacing judgment with mercy, sickness with health, death with life, responding to human need, ripping away the world’s carefully-laid barbed wire.[2] As God, the true Jesus changes his mind, as well, able to sweep away prickly cultural worldviews, as easily as he chases away demons.

This healing story found its way into Mark’s Gospel in a time in which the Jewish worldview and the Greek worldview were at odds within the Christian community. Jewish Christians and Greek Christians were eyeing each other through layers of barbs and wire barriers, struggling to become one Church. Mark wanted to be sure that the all of the Christians in his community knew that Jesus had learned long ago that God’s grace can tear down well-entrenched fences and heal stubborn divisions. I wonder if we can allow this Jesus to tear down the fences and heal the divisions in our world, as well? What we all tend to do, instinctively, is to imagine a Jesus who stands unconditionally with us, behind our own worldviews. We imagine a Jesus who is liberal or conservative, like we are. We imagine a Jesus who is American, who believes what we were taught to believe. We imagine a Jesus who holds fast to those points of view on which we are just certain that we will never change our minds. And in our certain and stubborn rigidity, we imprison Jesus himself behind a barbed-wire fence. With Jesus behind a fence, we limit God’s abundant mercy, even though, as James points out, “mercy triumphs over judgment.”

On Friday, Episcopalians celebrated one of my favorite saints: Elie Naud. Naud was a French Huguenot, a Reformed Calvinist who lived at the turn of the 18th century, during the ferocious persecution of Protestants in France. Calvinists are not known for the suppleness of their belief systems, and years spent in prison for his beliefs must not have helped soften Naud’s rigidity. After all, all that he had to do to leave the barbed wire of prison for his comfortable home and place in society was to renounce his Protestant beliefs. But firm, steadfast Naud did not renounce them, and when he escaped from prison, he had to flee his country, ending up in the Colonies, in New York City.

As early as 1703, Naud, horrified by what he saw of the conditions of the African slaves in his new home, began to fight for permission to begin a school for slaves, to teach them to read and to introduce them to Jesus Christ. Since the power for such a decision resided in the Church of England, Naud, who was French and Calvinist, became an Anglican—not because the beliefs of the Church of England fit in his worldview (I imagine that they were rather contrary to it)—but because he understood that mercy triumphs over judgment. As an Anglican, he continued, for the rest of his life, to fight the authorities, the slave-owners, the ignorance, the poverty, and the despair and anger of the slaves themselves, and he established his school, and he taught the slaves, and he loved his neighbor as himself. He could have shrugged at their plight and kept to his old belief system. But love brought change, and it was out of love that he chose to live his life.

          How do we keep the barbed wire that imprisons us from locking up Jesus, as well? We reach across it, says James, pulling it away and reaching for the hands held up to us in need. In the Maryknoll icon, Jesus’ palms bear the bloody mark of the nails from his crucifixion... or does the blood come from the barbs that he crushes as he pulls away the wire from our hearts?



[1] Robert Lentz and Edwina Gateley, Christ in the Margins (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2003), 11.
[2] M. Eugene Boring, Mark (New Testament Library), 214. My interpretation of this periscope is based on Boring’s analysis.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

The moose at the window and the aurochs in the street


My friend Lucinda owns a lovely, historic wooden farmhouse on Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia. It stands alone on an isolated strip of land overlooking a beautiful bay. The first night that I stayed there, on my first visit several years ago, I awoke in the middle of the night to a loud rattling sound. Now, I was in the guest room way back by the garage, alone on the first floor of the house, and the room in those wee hours was pitch-black. The only light came from the moon outside, positioned so that it vaguely outlined a tall silhouette outside one of my partially-open windows. As I saw the silhouette move, I heard whoever was out there jiggle the mosquito half-screen that was propped in the window, as if they were trying to open it, and my teeth started clattering along with the screen. My heart thumped and my mind raced: Should I play dead and hope that the murdering rapist at my window would go away? Or should I try to scream for Lucinda upstairs, hoping that would scare him off? I decided not to move, praying that he just wanted to rob us and go away. After what seemed an eternity but was likely only a few minutes, I heard the gravel crunching as the intruder moved back away from the house. Needless to say, I spent the rest of the night listening in fear for him to return, the door of my room creaking open, as he made his way into the house for some evil intent.
          The next morning, I told Lucinda about the nighttime intruder, and obviously concerned, she called a knowledgeable friend to come look around outside. Lo and behold, he found only hoof prints in the gravel outside my window, either from a deer or even a young moose.  The terrible, bloodthirsty man at my window was nothing more than a curious or hungry animal, checking out the new arrivals in town. When I read the words from today’s reading in the Song of Solomon, I couldn’t help but chuckle, thinking of my love-sick Canadian moose: “Look, he comes … bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”
          The Song of Solomon is love poetry, pure and simple. I invite you to read the whole book sometime … Believe me, you will wonder what on earth it is doing in the Bible. But in the Bible it is, and its descriptions of passionate, longing love have for centuries represented for Jews the love between humanity and God, and represented for Christians the love between Christ and the Church. I sometimes squirm when this erotic language is used for God, wondering cynically if many of our Christian mystics are perhaps suffering from too much celibacy. And yet, what better metaphor do we have for divine love, than human love? As embodied creatures, what better language do we have for spiritual longing, than powerful physical longing? Why can’t the lover at the window, impatiently rattling the screen, inviting us to come away, inviting us to be transformed from winter into spring, be our ever-loving God?
Up there in Cape Breton, I was afraid of the lover at my window because I could not see his face. If I had known that it was a moose or a deer, I would have perhaps quietly tiptoed to the window, offering him a bit of apple from the soft palm of my hand, rather than hiding under the covers. If my human beloved calls at my window, then I will recognize his voice and throw open the shutters. But with God, it is so difficult. When God calls in Scripture, how do I know that I am understanding those ancient words correctly? When God calls to me through my religion, how do I know that it is not a man-made tradition imitating God’s voice? How do I know that I am not confusing God’s presence with a bunch of stuff that, to use Jesus’ earthy language, is destined for the sewer? Before I risk my life getting up out of my nice warm bed to open the window, I want to know that it is really God out there in the dark. And yet, if I don’t get up, what good is the invitation?
My favorite C.S. Lewis book is Till We Have Faces, a Christian retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, a myth as full of erotic imagery and human love as the Song of Solomon. The title comes from the end of the book, when the narrator, placed in a kind of trial before the gods, realizes that all of the self-justifying words with which she has covered herself during her lifetime, are meaningless. In a moment of revelation, she says, “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”[1]
How do we get a face? Just as we cannot love another human being without a face, without a self, we cannot love God until we know who we are. We cannot see God until we have a face to see with. We cannot speak to God until we have a voice to speak with. It is not God who must become visible, but ourselves.
Theologians often accuse James, today’s epistle, with preaching works righteousness, with forgetting that we are saved by God’s grace and not by what we do on our own. But I believe that, in today’s reading at least, James is pointing out what the old woman in C.S. Lewis’ novel is making clear: Acting upon God’s invitation is not a matter of being a good, educated listener, accepting some teaching that is read aloud. It is not a matter of nodding one’s head solemnly at the truth of the Gospel or of speaking flowery words. Acting on God's invitation is to love as Jesus did, to love in the passionate, outpouring way that God loves each of us. It is, of course, Christ’s face that we are to adopt as our own. It is Christ’s voice with which we must learn to speak. What we are waiting for in our dark world is for some real honest-to-goodness loving and suffering and following of Christ to have marked us with Christ’s image.
In today’s epistle reading, James describes God’s inviting Word not as a lover at the window, but similarly, as a mirror, a mirror in which one sees oneself as the Beloved of God. Imagine a mirror that surprises you, not with your latest wrinkles and gray hairs, as my mirror does me, but a mirror that allows you to see yourself as the treasure that you are in God’s eyes. A mirror that reflects the light of God’s Son into your human soul. A mirror like the all-forgiving eyes of someone who is madly in love with you.
  If we merely peek into this extraordinary mirror from time to time, turning back into the darkness and living as if there had been no reflection, as if the gray hairs and frowns and wrinkles are all that there is, then Christ’s image will not take hold in our flesh. Imagine lovers who say, “I love you,” and then just sit there without touching or elaborating on what is in their hearts. Such a love would not last long. Religion can be all talk and no action. God calls longingly at our windows, and we religious people fight over liturgy or the wording of Creeds. We are the scribes and Pharisees, the good religious people cowering in our beds afraid of a new rattling at the window. “Religion” alone is no guarantee that we are acting on God’s invitation.
On the other hand, says James, if we turn away from the mirror determined to recreate the love that we have seen there, to reproduce it in the world around us, then we are blessed and transformed. It is by caring for the poor and outcast in their distress, says James ever so plainly, by avoiding the corruption of the world, that we make what we see in the mirror real.
With Hurricane Isaac wreaking destruction again on the Gulf Coast, I was reminded this week of a movie that is perhaps the antithesis of the imagery of the gazelle at the window. The Beasts of the Southern Wild is a movie full of the darkness of our world. A little girl lives in abject poverty on the Gulf Coast, forgotten by the society that lives on the other side of the levy that condemns her home to flood waters. Her mother is a prostitute who has abandoned her. At age 6, she fixes cat food for her own supper. Her alcoholic father drinks and hits her. A hurricane is on its way to wipe away the only community that she knows. The evils confronting her from within and without are represented by beasts in this movie: big, boar-like prehistoric animals called aurochs. Frozen in the ice-age, the aurochs have been freed by the melting of the polar ice caps, and they are slowly closing in on her Louisiana home. These beasts are not like gazelles leaping joyously over the hills. They lumber slowly and relentlessly toward the girl throughout the movie, like the hurricane itself, menacing her with death and destruction, instead of offering love. At the end of the movie, as the six-year-old is going to the bedside of her dying father, the enormous beasts arrive, huffing and puffing as she turns to face them on the road. What will she do? Surely they will devour her. I was surprised at her response.  “Go away,” she says simply. “I have to take care of my own.” And they turn back. For all that was lacking in this little girl’s family, her father had indeed impressed upon her that she belonged to him, that together, they were strong. Her father and her community were engrained in her soul. “One day,” she kept saying, “future scientists will find evidence that a girl named Hushpuppy lived with her father in the Bathtub,” their small, endangered community. In spite of everything, she had some kind of face with which to face the evil in her world.
Can we say as much? Will future scientists look at the evidence that we Christians leave behind and see the face of Jesus Christ? It’s interesting, isn’t it, how welcoming the divine gazelle at the window and resisting the evil aurochs on the road are both accomplished by one and the same action—by caring for the least of God’s beloved creatures, by performing the healing, loving action that gives us the face of the Beloved, the face that can turn even winter into spring.


[1] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (New York: Harvest Books, 1980), 294.