"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, January 26, 2013

Development Plans



        You have been hearing over and over from me and from our Vestry lately, that we at St. Thomas are going to develop our gifts and use them to meet the needs of the community, to find an empty niche in God’s Kingdom on Westport Road and to fill it--right? That is the dream behind the dense language of our “development plan.” It is that kind of outward focus that we have been told by experts and articles galore that churches need to have these days in order to survive, in order to appeal to the younger generations. I was not surprised, though, to have heard many of you express to me lately the same reservations that I have had myself in our meetings with Tom Ehrich, the consultant who has been working with our diocese:
Where is the Power of the Spirit in all of these plans to venture beyond our doors?
Yuck, do we really have to use all of this business language?! We are a Church and not just a social service agency. I am a priest, not a community organizer.
What about our own spiritual needs? How will St. Thomas meet those needs if weekend worship is no longer the measure of our success? Without an emphasis on worship, what will keep this Body from becoming just a pile of dried and fleshless bones?
Isn’t our job to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ, not just to advise people on elder care or babysit their children?
These are valid questions and valid concerns, for us and for every church that is trying to find new ways to survive in the wilderness of the 21st century religious landscape. After wrestling with today’s lessons, though, I find that, as always, Scripture provides us with a response to our concerns, if not always the answers that we expect.
          First of all, the easy and reassuring part: In our lesson from Nehemiah, the people of Israel have returned from long years of Exile to the hard, practical work of rebuilding a city, a nation, and a Temple in ruins. The Covenant with God that has defined them as a people seems to have been lost; the Law that has brought them in relationship to God has been scattered somewhere between Jerusalem and Babylon. I’m sure that Israel’s leaders were full of plans and schedules and timelines and priorities for the tremendous work that lay before them. I imagine that the people felt pretty discouraged. In our lesson, though, we hear that when they find their holy book of God’s Teaching in the rubble, they come together as an entire people, men and women of all ranks, to hear God’s Word and to affirm it together. The foundation of their “development plan” is nothing less than the book of the Covenant that God made with them so long ago. And they begin the implementation of their plan with grateful worship of God and with heart-felt communal celebration, finding their strength in the “joy of the Lord.” Joyful corporate worship is indeed our strength, too, as is our communal hearing, understanding, and affirming of God’s Word in Scripture. Nobody is suggesting that we forget this truth—or this joy—at St. Thomas.
          When Jesus starts reading Scripture, however, things get more complicated. Fresh from his own wilderness temptations, Luke’s Jesus returns to his “home church” to lay out his own “development plan,” his mission for ministry. Jesus, too, finds that plan in Scripture, yet he doesn’t just pick up the Isaiah scroll and read it, with a nice little commentary of “OK, here’s what you should do, people,” like I might do in a sermon. Worship and Scripture reading, when Jesus and the Holy Spirit are involved, are not about clever sermons that entertain, or about favorite music that soothes or energizes us. They are not just about seeing our friends or having fun at coffee hour … or any other of the things that we look forward to when we get in our cars to come to church on Sunday [Saturday night.] Jesus’ mission statement is instead about remaking the world: shattering the despair of the poor, opening the eyes of the blind, breaking the bonds of oppression, and inaugurating the Year of Jubilee, the time set aside by God for the forgiveness of debts, a time for everyone to start over with fairness and grace.
Jesus’ listeners, of course, don’t react well to his plan. How can the world change just like that? Joseph’s boy must have lost it. They decide to throw him off of the nearest cliff. “How are we supposed to do all that?!” we sigh with some annoyance, as well, when we hear Jesus’ plan. The model, for us, seems to be that we hear the good news in church—the good news that applies mainly to all of those other needy people out there--and then we worship, and then we say, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” and then we expect ourselves to go out and make something happen. It’s as if the closeness that we feel to God at the Eucharist gets put on the shelf during the week, when we are supposed to somehow rely on the resources of the secular world to get things done. And then of course those resources prove inadequate, and we shrug, and we feel guilty, and we wish that we could throw Jesus off the nearest cliff.
In Luke’s Gospel, however, Jesus says that all of these earth-shattering things happen with him and in him. In him, the blind can already see; the oppressed are already free; the poor already have hope. Perhaps we are called not so much to harness our gifts in order to do all of these things on our own, but to put ourselves in a position, and in a mind-set, to see them being done, and to open ourselves and our lives to the powerful changes that God will make in us, as well as in the world.
I heard recently about a church in Indianapolis, Broadway United Methodist, that is growing like wildfire. Their members are indeed involved in their community—but not just to offer handouts or to “help the needy.” Christians from this parish are learning to recognize blessings in the community. The church sexton, for example, came to the pastor one day and said that, while he was at the school bus stop in the church’s inner city neighborhood, he noticed that many young African American dads from his community were faithfully and lovingly walking their young children to the bus every morning. In a time when sociologists lament the lack of involvement by fathers in parts of the African American community, this sexton thought that these involved fathers needed to be recognized. So the church created certificates of appreciation, signed by the pastor, and distributed them to the dads at the bus stop, with words of encouragement, acknowledgement, and praise. The sexton’s attentive and loving presence allowed the Church to see Jesus at work among their neighbors and to bless what they saw.
          The other story that I heard this week is from a prison chaplain, Chris Hoke, who works with incarcerated gang members.[1] Hoke has learned in his ministry how even those men bound by gang membership and hidden behind thick prison walls are free in Jesus Christ. Hoke told me how the prisoners in solitary confinement succeed, with great determination, in sharing a kind of Eucharist with one another. Using Red Hot candies from the vending machine in the prison, they flatten the hard, round balls of candy until they are thin enough to pass under the door of the cells. Then they harvest the elastic from their socks and underwear and fashion loops that can pull the candy into their cell, from underneath the door. This is their Eucharist. “What do those squashed candies taste like?” the pastor wondered aloud to one of the men in solitary confinement. “They taste like love,” answered the prisoner, with softness in his voice.
Hoke’s story expanded for me Paul’s words about the Body of Christ that we hear today in I Corinthians, as well. When I start talking with you about your gifts and passions, thanking you for offering your gifts to the work of St. Thomas, that is all fine and dandy and rather obvious. But Paul is not just talking to us as parishioners at St. Thomas when he teaches us that the gifts of the weak and the less honorable and the less able are just as valuable and indispensable to the whole body as the strong and visible leaders. Paul is talking to us about the Body of baptized Christians, churched and unchurched, throughout the world. Paul is urging us to accept the gifts offered by those in other denominations whose theology annoys us. Paul is urging us to empower the gifts in those who are so different from us that they would never think to join us on a Sunday morning. In his prison ministry, Hoke learned that God had given his prison friends gifts, gifts forged in hard lives of violence and deprivation, gifts transformed in encounters with the Holy Spirit, gifts that those of us here on Sunday morning don’t have, gifts that the Church desperately needs, if only we can be open to them. Chaplain Hoke sees himself, with us, as Ananias, the reluctant church insider in the Book of Acts who is sent to bring Saul, the violent persecutor of Christians, into the Christian community after his blinding epiphany on the Damascus Road. Saul, of course, is to become none other than St. Paul, the author of today’s Epistle, the saint whose conversion we celebrate today in the Church calendar. It is Paul, not Ananias, who brings Christ to the Gentiles and who shapes the very essence of our religion; yet, if Ananias had not been sent to pray with him, Paul might have forever remained outside the embrace of the church, his gifts wasted.[2]
Our call, then, to open ourselves to our community, is far from a business plan, far from a calculated move to increase attendance numbers. It is a call led by the power of the Spirit, inspired by Holy Scripture, nourished in worship and spiritual practice. It is a call to enter the full Body of Christ, to expand the gifts needed to build up that Body in our time, and to bless the miraculous transformations that only Jesus can make happen among us. Amen.




[1] Chris Hoke, “Inmates as Apostles: Jesus’ Barrio,” Christian Century, November 28, 2012: 32.
[2] Ibid., 33.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Breaking Baptism Open



I’ll never forget the new mother who came up to me hesitantly before the first “baptismal prep” class for her baby girl. She was excited that her friends from college had come to town to serve as godparents and that her daughter was going to wear her grandmother’s gorgeous baptismal gown. But as the mother approached me, her cheerful face grew somber. “How could God send my sweet little baby to Hell?” she asked with a tremble in her voice. I cringed as I pictured her adorable daughter somehow shut out from God’s loving presence just because I had not yet baptized her. I told this young mother emphatically that this baptism was not just to save her baby from Hell. “Then why do we baptize babies?” she asked, confused. “Isn’t that why we hurry it up, in case they die first?”
          Most of us have so many questions about baptism, as well as concerns about its meaning and purpose, that we find it safer to rejoice over form rather than content. Christianity embraces a variety of theologies and practices surrounding baptism, and we could spend hours examining the history and merits of those beliefs. Today’s Gospel, however, sheds its own light on that young mother’s question. As we examine Jesus’ baptism, we see how our own baptism as Christians contains layers of meaning that make it about so much more than “where we go after we die.” Our Gospel lesson shows us that our baptism is more about God’s desire to come to us, than it is about the destination of our souls.
Aware of our own shortcomings, we human beings look for ways to remove the gritty film of sin and death and chaos that clings so persistently to our humanity. “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin … Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow,” pleads the Psalmist in Psalm 51. Traditions of washing with water for purification existed early on in Judaism, as well as in other religions of the ancient world. It makes sense: if we wash the dirt from our hands with water, we would naturally symbolically cleanse our hearts in the same way. On a tour of the Holy Land today, one can still see an abundance of mikvah’s or deep stone cisterns, in which Jews would perform the ritual washings demanded by the Law. These baths were a daily personal practice, a kind of preparation for the cleansing that God would do someday, at the Day of Judgment. There is nothing wrong with this practice, yet it is not all there is to Christian baptism. If this ritual cleansing were the only meaning of Christian baptism, that young mother’s little girl would indeed need washing from the stains of the world, over and over again, from birth on, each time the purity of her body or heart was compromised, each time chaos touched her life.
When John the Baptist comes on the scene, however, this kind of ritual washing is already transformed by the prophet, as he bends and shifts the meaning of the ritual.[1] In coming to John at the Jordan River, people are no longer washing themselves in private, but they are coming together as a group to watch one another go under the waters. As God’s prophet, John stands in for God, who is now the one doing the cleansing, rather than the individual himself. And the people are now being bathed in the Jordan River, the holy place where the Israelites first entered into the Promised Land. As we sing in the old Spiritual, to enter the waters of the Jordan is to come home, to enter into the promises of God. Gordon Lathrop tells the story of another 1st century Jew who led a crowd of people into the Jordan in order to walk through the waters and reclaim the Promised Land for the Jews. This symbolic action was enough of a threat to Rome that it brought out Roman soldiers to imprison the crowd and carry the leader’s severed head to Jerusalem.[2] John, of course, meets a similar fate in the verses that are left out of our lectionary passage today. John’s baptizing in the Jordan is more than ritual cleansing; it is a rehearsal for the triumph of the God of Israel, orchestrated by the Lord and coming soon. The people who wait on the banks of the Jordan with bated breath in today’s Gospel, wondering whether or not John is the Messiah, are wondering if the Day of the Lord has come and the promises to the righteous are about to be fulfilled. If John’s baptism were the only meaning of Christian baptism, that young mother’s little girl would indeed receive the holy water as a sign of the coming Day of Judgment, to mark her as part of God’s righteous people, as one who, with others, is safe from the unquenchable fire.
But there is more. Jesus arrives at the waters. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus joins with the crowds, waiting for his turn in the Jordan. He stands among the people, among those who are suffering, among those who are seeking freedom from oppression, among those who are weighed down with sin and grief. Why must Jesus be baptized, we ask? If he is God, if he has no sins, why does he even need to enter the river? Jesus is baptized because he stands with us. Jesus’ baptism is the second unveiling—the second epiphany—of incarnation, of God made flesh. On the banks of the Jordan, Jesus is no longer God as a vulnerable little baby, but God as a grown man, a Jewish man standing among the people of Israel.
 Right after today’s passage, Luke inserts what seems on first glance to be a boring and pointless genealogy: it traces Jesus, son of Joseph, son of Heli, son of Matthat … all the way back to Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God. Luke juxtaposes Adam, the symbolic first man, the fallible first son of the Creator, with Jesus, who, after he comes out of the waters of the Jordan, prays and receives God’s Spirit, God’s creating breath of life, that announces that he is the beloved Son of God. Suddenly, our lives, as children of Adam and Eve, are bound to God’s life in Jesus as he rises from the Jordan. With Jesus, and in Jesus, we too are called beloved children of God. To be baptized in Christ is to become the Beloved, to be uplifted by God’s most holy Spirit, just as Jesus was. It is to turn our lives to his purposes, to live in him and to allow him to live in us. As Christians, in baptizing that young mother’s baby girl, we are not saving her from Hell but welcoming her into a world that is saved by the light of God’s great mercy, of God’s undying love that even the Cross cannot kill, of God’s constant presence among us, the Body of Jesus Christ.
In a wonderful sermon, the Rt. Rev. Robert Wright invites us into this life that Jesus’ baptism gives us: “Slip into a holiness that can envelope you, even the defects.  A holiness not made of human hands. More buoyant than Moses’ baby basket…Walk around in this love.  Stand in front of the mirror, see how it fits.  You have been changed.  Test it out. It’s durable. Stains wipe right off… Slip into this holiness that is made of God’s love for you.”[3]
That is the glorious invitation of Christian baptism. So, as you leave today, headed out into the chaotic and unclean world, headed into the sticky business of a church meeting, dip your fingers into the waters of baptism in our font in the center of the back aisle. Bring your fingers to your heart in the sign of the Cross and let the Holy Spirit tie any rigid preconceptions that you have about baptism into knots. Feel only the water of mercy and join in prayer with Jesus—with Jesus, whose prayers open the heavens above us all.


[1] Gordon Lathrop, Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology, 168f. Lathrop develops this whole historical unfolding of the sacrament of baptism.
[2] Ibid., 174, note.
[3] Sermon by Robert Wright, Bishop of Atlanta, found at: http://preachingfoundation.org/?page_id=303.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

I am Hannah, Herod's Spy


         My name is Hannah, and I was King Herod’s spy. I wasn’t trained as a spy, of course. A woman would never be trained as a spy. And I hate King Herod. Everyone does. He’s cruel and paranoid and can turn on anyone at a whim. I was just looking for a way out. You see, I’m a Parthian Jew. Not everyone trooped back from Exile in Babylon all those hundreds of years ago when King Cyrus let us go. Some Jews chose to stay in the East where everything was settled and civilized, instead of returning to the desolate ruins of Jerusalem. So my ancestors stayed put—until my crazy father brought his rug trade back here last year. I have spent the last 6 months determined to get back home to the East, away from this dark land, a land where loutish Roman soldiers leer at women in the streets; where tiresome Roman matriarchs talk only about their household finances and their teething babies; and where cowering Judeans hide in the shadows from the wrath of  King and soldier alike, and dream that God is going to save them. Before I became a spy, I didn’t see God doing squat for anybody. I figured that we have to do for ourselves.

          I wasn’t afraid. I was determined to do what it takes to get away from here before my father married me off to some old merchant. I heard that caravans from the East often stopped by Herod’s palace to interpret dreams for the king—or to sell poisons and potions, more likely! So I hid away in an order of carpets from my father’s shop that was bound for the palace. You can imagine my delight when I saw a whole Parthian caravan milling around inside the palace gates. There must have been at least 12 magi with their camels and servants, goats and carts of food and supplies. (Magi, by the way, are not kings. If you think that they are kings, you are getting confused with Isaiah’s old prophecy from Scripture. Isaiah was writing way back during the Exile, trying to convince people like my ancestors to come back to Jerusalem and start over. “The Glory of God” indeed. “Nations shall come to your light and kings to your dawning….”

“We’re still waiting for that, Isaiah,” I used to think. “It’s still pretty dark around here. The only nation that came to us is Rome, and the only King we got is Herod.”

Anyway, magi are wise students of both the stars in the heavens and the deep dreams within. They know things—cool, spooky things. Of course, good Jews aren’t supposed to believe in such idolatrous star-gazing and magic-making, but I’ve always found the claims of magi intriguing—and of course our hypocritical King Herod sure seemed eager to talk with them.

          I heard these magi asking Herod about a new Jewish king, a child, that their star-studies had revealed to them. In Parthia, they had seen a special star in the heavens and had taken off in search of it. Imagine—to have the freedom and the resources and the fierce curiosity to set off on a journey like that, just to figure out some heavenly message. That’s exactly the kind of freedom that I longed for. The wise magi must have been traveling for months in the wilderness to get here, though.  

Since Herod had no new sons, he sure paled when he heard their news. You could have heard a pin drop in the throne room. When the scribes sent the magi off to Bethlehem, I leaped at my chance. Sidling up to one of the King’s ministers, I suggested to him that, with my knowledge of Hebrew and Parthian, that I could join the magi’s caravan as translator and find this dangerous child-king for Herod. Of course, I didn’t plan to come back; I figured that I could hide away and sneak back East with the magi.

When we got to Bethlehem, the star, which had beckoned us forward since nightfall--glittering like a jewel that you would want to grab if you could just get close enough to it--seemed to glow more brilliantly. It seemed to drop in the sky, too, sending streams of light right into the middle of town. The magi, who had been chasing this thing for months, of course, began to talk excitedly among themselves, waving their hands and acting like little boys who had won a game. They were as joyful over that starlight as if it had been real gold that was streaming down into their pockets.

The streets of Bethlehem are pretty narrow, though, so as we entered the town, it became clear that the carts and camels couldn’t come with us. Without a second thought, the magi paid an innkeeper handsomely to take care of them; they didn’t even haggle over the price, they were in such a hurry to find this child. They only took out a few sacks from their supply chest and gave them to a servant to carry. “Presents for the new king,” I thought. “You can’t visit royalty without gifts.”

After walking a few minutes, the whole group of magi began to look worried for the first time, though, as the beams of light seemed to be carrying us into the center of the old town, and the streets began to narrow into alleys, and the stench of human waste became over-powering, and the ramshackle buildings began to lean into one another, and ragged men were seen peering around corners at our finery or lurching drunk through the puddles on the street. The magi whispered to one another, and I began to wonder if we weren’t involved in some kind of bad magic. What if God had caught me in a trap, a trap of punishment for a disobedient daughter who runs away from her father? What if the rabbis were right, and astrology calls forth only fallen angels? “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is One,” I heard from inside my thumping heart. I hadn’t said earnest prayers in a long time, I realized. Despite my hasty prayer, fear and doom and disappointment crept up from the dark alleys like a fog until the starlight was almost invisible. I was covered in shame.

Suddenly, one of the wise men grabbed my arm and pointed. A thin beam of light fell on the flat roof of a tiny house, cutting clearly through the thick darkness like the finger of God. We heard a baby cry inside. “Well, if it’s not a king, at least it is a child,” was all that I could think. Nothing about this was making sense anymore. Before I knew it, we were in the house, all squeezed into one tiny, low-ceilinged room. The Parthians had to bend over just to come in. On the bed by a small window, a young woman just my own age was holding a pale, sleeping child. Her tired eyes looked up at us expectantly, as if she had already seen so many strange things in her life that nothing could surprise her anymore, even a bunch of Parthian magi showing up in her house in the middle of the night. I felt sorry for her. This was no great king, no messiah. This was a poor young mother with a pale, sickly baby; I remember thinking that she was exactly what I was trying to avoid becoming. I didn’t even see her husband, but perhaps he was still out on the town somewhere.

I didn’t have much time to think about him, because as we stood awkwardly in the little room, even before I could translate anything for the magi, a beam of light from that crazy star fell through the window and onto the sleeping baby. “Is he dead?” I wondered. He was so still and limp. “Poverty and death,” I shuddered. “What are we doing here following poverty and death as if they were precious jewels?!”

Suddenly, as the light slanted in upon the child, he awoke, looking at us with beautiful, yet piercing, eyes. His gaze made me warm inside, like a glass of strong wine, and my fear melted away. All of a sudden, I saw something moving in the light, angels perhaps, angels walking from the child up into heaven on the beam of starlight? No, they weren’t angels, but human beings. I saw Roman soldiers hand in hand with Jews, Parthians and Medes and many from Asia, black people and strange-looking people with yellow hair, poor people, and crippled beggars, prostitutes even, in their gaudy robes, people (criminals, surely) carrying what looked like golden crosses, although they couldn’t be crosses—no one would make a hideous Roman cross out of gold. This mix of people were all singing and rejoicing and glowing, almost as if they were on fire with the light.[1] I started to burn, too, as the light grew to take me in. “You are the light of the world,” I heard. Did the voice come from the baby? “Let your light shine before others, so that they may… give glory to your father in heaven.” All of my resentment, my hatred, my shame, my drive to flee … they all caught fire and burned, and I fell on my face before the light. The magi must have seen the Glory, too, for there they were like me, noses pressed to the earthen floor, foreheads in the dust, prostrate as before the Lord himself. Somehow, we rose, lifted by the sad, wise gaze of the mother and the loving, burning gaze of the child. The magi pushed their sacks of gifts toward the bed and backed out, bowing low.

We stood in the street as dawn began to break and people began to stir. The ordinariness of daylight was soothing yet somewhat dim, compared to our nighttime epiphany. I smelled the stale urine in the streets, and I heard the wail of a mourner, crying for someone who must have just died. “Poverty and death are still with us,” I sighed.

And yet, everything is different now. What I saw last night--in what must have been just a few seconds--has made the world a different place. But me, Herod’s spy, what do I do now? A spy cannot survive in the Light. That baby even said that I was the light of the world. How can that be? Well, I won’t tell Herod. Yet who do I tell? Where do I go? How can you tell about something that you don’t even understand? I’m free now, yet not free at all. I belong to that baby’s eyes.

“Go get your camels and head back East,” I warned the Parthians. “Go home and figure out what we have seen here today. Don’t return to Herod—he must not know about this.” I watched them turn and head toward the sun.



[1] Inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Revelation.”