"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, February 23, 2013

A Model for Life in a Violent World



         At the end of our time in Jerusalem, our seminary group stood in the church “Dominus Flevit” and looked out over the holy city. This little church, built in the shape of a tear drop and bearing the Latin name, “The Lord Wept,” marks the spot where Jesus is supposed to have uttered the lament that we just read in Luke’s Gospel. The altar sits in front of a clear glass window that is framed in black iron designs so that a large cross, and just above it, the dark outline of a chalice and priest’s host, are interposed right on top of a spectacular view of Jerusalem. I stood there and looked out at the domes and rooftops, glowing gold in the afternoon sun, and my heart twisted in guilty complicity with the city’s inhabitants, as the black cross loomed to the fore and Jesus’ words echoed in my own head, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
         In just a few days, I had visited many of the most holy places in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and I had met wonderful people on all sides of the present Middle East conflict who were negotiating life together in this complex city. But the constant signs of entrenched violence were what overwhelmed me:
the ever-present Israeli soldiers in full army gear on the street corners; 
barbed-wire spread around buildings like Christmas garlands;
the ancient stone gate where the apostle Stephen was stoned, now pock-marked with modern bullet holes;
the sophisticated and tense security barrage at the entrance to the Temple Mount;
the Palestinian kindergarteners lined up at armed check points to get to school on the other side of that horrifying concrete Wall;
Palestinian kids throwing stink bombs at me—at me—in the East Jerusalem market;
the curses raining down on a group of middle-aged Israeli women holding up signs promoting peace at a busy street corner;
and at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the ladder that has stood in one spot for 200 years because the various Christian groups come to physical blows over who has the right to move it.
Killing and stoning, guns and terrorist bombs, wars and curses. O Jerusalem,
Jerusalem. You are not alone in letting disparity and difference lead to destruction. You are but a symbol for the human violence that fills our world. Even today, you still reflect back to us Jesus’ painful longing—God’s deep and painful longing—to save us from ourselves.
         How do we, as Christians, show our willingness to change? How do we live loving lives in a violent world? So often, we choose the way of crafty, clever foxes like Herod Antipas, using power and a self-interested kind of politics to achieve our ends. Or we hunker down under God’s wings like baby birds, shut our eyes, and pretend not to see or influence what is going on outside our doors. How do we find a model for our lives? Are we really supposed to get out our “What would Jesus do?” bracelets and offer ourselves up as mother hens, to be mauled by the fox so that the other chicks can run for it? That doesn’t sound very practical. Don’t those bracelets, and the whole “imitation of Christ” theology, end up leading us astray, anyway? Don’t they, in the words of AKM Adam, “confuse the unique office of Jesus in the economy of salvation with a disciple’s more general charge … [and] produce clones or dilettantes in the name of discipleship?”[1] It is a dangerous game to decide where to place Jesus in modern dilemmas, because he usually ends up on whatever side we find ourselves.
        The barnyard metaphors in Jesus’ words remind me of my daughter Maren’s favorite book when she was in preschool. It was an old—and probably psychologically damaging—French storybook about a bouncy baby bunny and the evil weasel who liked to eat the rabbit’s family members for lunch. My daughter had a horrid fascination with this violent weasel and would beg to stare at length at the page with his picture. Long and almost snakelike, he had beady little eyes, a slobbering, hungry tongue, and a big, powerful mouth filled with very sharp teeth. After the bouncy bunny was orphaned, the bunny got together with his forest friends and decided to dress up like a monster to scare the weasel away. Using the weasel as their model, they fought fear with fear and made themselves into a dragon-like creature covered in tree bark, with a mouth even bigger than the weasel’s. The final page of the book showed the repentant weasel, who had fled too fast in fear from the disguised animals, covered in hospital bandages and on crutches, promising never to eat rabbit again.
          Masterful preacher Barbara Brown Taylor writes about Jesus’ metaphor of God as mother hen, “If you are like me, it is fine in terms of comfort, but in terms of protection it leaves something to be desired. When the foxes of this world start prowling really close to home, when you can hear them snuffling right outside the door, then it would be nice to have a little bigger defense budget for the hen house.”([2]) My sweet little daughter, who used to beg me to read this rather violent weasel story at least 3 times a day, would have agreed with Taylor. To take power over what threatens us is universally appealing. Just ask Gayle Trotter, the D.C. lawyer who stole the show at the Senate Gun Hearings recently when she argued that a vulnerable woman needs firearms to defend "her babies in her home" against male attackers (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/07/gayle-trotter-the-woman-who-called-gun-control-sexist.html).
           In understanding our role in a violent world, I would urge us, perhaps surprisingly, seek a model for our actions, but neither in the sense of the WWJD bracelets... nor from the more comforting “join the foxes” philosophy. I would urge us to turn to Paul’s words in today’s lesson from Philippians. I know … the Apostle Paul sounds awfully full of himself in today’s Epistle. “If you want to live a good and holy Christian life, just imitate me! Form yourselves to my ways, conform to the ways of your leaders. Ignore my good-for-nothing opponents. I have this thing all figured out, and all you have to do is obey your leaders!” Isn’t obeying Paul even more dangerous than imitating Jesus? Passages like this one don’t help us to feel warm and fuzzy about Paul and his annoying admonitions. They make faith sound like nothing but conformism. They make the Christian life sound like bland and boring homogenization. What can all of Paul’s puffed up piety say to us in a violent postmodern world?
What we tend to forget in studying this passage is that pious-sounding Paul  is in truth the metaphorical evil weasel with sharp teeth who ate bouncy bunnies for lunch. Paul was literally one of the prophet-stoners who causes Jesus to weep in Luke’s Gospel. Paul stood at that now bullet-marked gate in Jerusalem and helped as the apostle Stephen was stoned to death in a pool of blood. No one is more complicit in the world’s violence than the apostle Paul. Paul himself confessed to the Galatians: “I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.” You might have learned in Sunday School that Paul’s conversion on the Damascus Road was a move from being a law-burdened Jewish Pharisee to a free and enlightened Christian. Instead, as Kathy Grieb points out, Paul’s conversion is rather from a life of violent zeal to a new kind of non-violent life. Writes Grieb, “it is not difficult to imagine Paul the persecutor flying a plane into the Pentagon or committing hate crimes against gays and lesbians for the sake of God’s holiness. But after the action of God that broke into his life … everything of which he had been so certain now had to be reconfigured in light of the crucified and risen Messiah, who had turned his world inside out.”[3] Paul, who killed for God, now writes for God.
           Paul, who knows the miracle of transformation first hand, is not merely asking that Christians follow him or their leaders in a few half-hearted actions or in a couple of righteous deeds. Paul wants Christians to follow him in the total conversion of life and being that Jesus proclaims in the Cross and Resurrection. To model oneself on Paul is not merely to give up wine for Lent or to “like” non-violent posts on Facebook. I’m afraid that he is asking us to turn our lives upside down. He is asking us to allow ourselves to be changed into Christ’s “new creation,” to become a community, a community at the mercy of the Holy Spirit, open to reconciliation when we feel like retaliation, expecting the unexpected, and ready, as Lucinda always says, to question ourselves just when we are most certain that we have the answers.
          How do we, vulnerable bunnies and fragile chicks that we are, dare to crawl out from under the predictable cloak of violence and fear-making that makes us look like leaders in this world? We cover ourselves instead with the wings of the loving Mother Hen, accepting risk, leading by serving, and practicing resurrection.



[1] A.K.M. ADAM, “Walk This Way: Repetition, Difference, and the Imitation of Christ,” in Interpretation, January 1, 2001.
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels,  (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1997), 128.
[3] A. Katherine Grieb, “’The One Who Called You…’ Vocation and Leadership in Pauline Literature,” Interpretation, 2005, 137.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Did the angels push away the asteroid?



“A space rock even bigger than the meteor that exploded like an atomic bomb over Russia could drop out of the sky unannounced at any time and wreak havoc on a city.”[1] Oh my. That is the first line of the newspaper article about the recent meteor disturbance in Russia on Friday, the same day that a large asteroid passed a mere 17,000 miles from the earth. Such “cosmic coincidences” can’t help but shake us up a bit, as we remember that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor a rock that cannot be moved. The line from Eucharistic Prayer C is what comes to my mind, the one about “this fragile earth, our island home.”
         When I read these lines, I couldn’t help but think of the seeming certitudes expressed by today’s Psalm, as it seems to assure us that, if we behave, God will save us from all such harm. The psalm pours out an abundance of images that are typical signs of divine protection in the Hebrew scriptures: being covered by the span of God’s wings, like baby birds are protected underneath their parents’ wings; God’s faithfulness as a shield and as a buckler, protection for the soldier in battle; the image of being held in safety by night as well as by day. God even promises that “Those who love me, I will deliver; I will protect those who know my name.”  
  “Really?” we scoff when we read this psalm. Aren’t these images an embarrassment to modern, enlightened religion? We all know that bad things happen to good people. We all know the science behind astronomy and geology and physics. Do we really think that God sent angels to push the asteroid away from our planet? My son once showed me a humorous poster with flowcharts tracing the different ways that “science” and “faith” know things. The science chart was very complex, with arrows leading in several directions, and included the well-known steps of experimentation, gathering and weighing evidence, creating a theory, and eventually using the theory to better understand the universe. The “faith” chart, on the other hand, moved in a short, straight line from “get an idea” to “ignore contradicting evidence” to “keep idea forever.”[2] Is that really all that we believers are doing?
 Psalm 91, I believe, can indeed still speak to us today, the first Sunday in Lent, the weekend that the asteroid missed us. Like all of scripture, the value of today’s psalm is that it speaks the language of relationship, rather than the language of science. It brings to life for us who God is and who we are in relationship to God. Today’s psalm, if we will but “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it,” works on our imaginations just as Jesus’ parables do. This psalm pulls out all the stops. It uses crazy images that can’t possibly be taken literally, except perhaps, by Satan in today’s Gospel. For example: The psalmist is told that he will have the power to fell, not one, but ten thousand enemies at his right hand. He is told that he will be given hosts of angels to prevent him, not merely from falling, but from stubbing even his little toe on a rock. Seriously? An angel is going to keep us from stubbing our toe? God’s beloved will even be able to walk over vipers and among ferocious lions without harm. These images are not supposed to be taken literally. All of these images are purposeful exaggerations, meant to cause disorientation; they shock us and burst the protective bubble of our everyday logic. Like poetry, they take us out of the world where everything has to add up, where everything has to make sense. As our imaginations enter into the strange world of these fantastic claims, we find ourselves face to face with a God whose extraordinary power shatters all of our expectations. These claims tell us that the extent of the refuge provided by God is beyond our comprehension, unquantifiable, and supremely generous. The dream-like images and emotions engendered by these verses bring the reader of the psalm into a world of extravagance, into a world that is beyond our wildest hopes. Is this psalm a magic formula that will protect us from harm? Of course not! Is it a scientific explanation of the natural world? Of course not! But if we read it often enough to imprint its language on our minds, then it will remind us that there is an unseen strength offered to us by God, an unimaginable, unstoppable love that will strengthen us to live righteous and courageous lives.
The Israelites gathered at the edge of the Promised Land in our reading from Deuteronomy also learn how to live righteous and courageous lives by remembering who they are and who God is. They name themselves children of “a wandering (or even “a perishing”) Aramean,” a people who have known all kinds of impermanence, hardship, suffering, and bondage. But they also name their God as a saving God, a God of hope and freedom, a generous God to whom they owe their very lives. It is this story, the story told over and over in their scriptures, the story that has become our story in Christ, that gives them the courage to live lives of joy and meaning. It is this story that shows them how to act toward the poor and the stranger among them. It is this story that gives them the strength to share, not what is left over from their crops, after they have eaten their fill, but the first fruits of their labors.
Paul, too, urges Christians to share the Christian story, in today’s verses from his letter to the Romans. “The word of faith is near you,” he enjoins, “on your lips and in your heart.” Tell the story of how Christ has defeated death. Name God in the face of Jesus of Nazareth. This is a story that the whole world is literally dying to hear. This is the story of salvation, of healing, of meaning, of grace, of love. It is up to you to tell it!
We Christians, and the world around us, are losing our story. Those of us who come to church hear bits and pieces of it, but we often can’t fit the pieces together. We don’t know how to share it with the world, a world that so often lends more credence to the language of science than the language of poetry. The whole “ashes to go” adventure this week was a powerful proof of this for me. First of all, I was surprised at the interest that the simple act of giving out ashes outside of the church provoked in the media. “Wow, these folks at St. Thomas actually think that they have something that the world wants,” was the bemused reaction of the reporters who talked with us. Have we made the Good News of salvation really such a well-kept secret? The other amazing reaction was the relief and joy expressed by the brave souls who accepted our invitation for “Ash Wednesday ashes.” “Really, can I really do this?” many of them said with barely suppressed amazement, as if we were giving out gold bars, rather than last year’s burned-up palms. “Thank you, thank you,” they all said with emotion, looking as if they had just had a huge weight removed from their shoulders, smiling with the same relief that I saw in the paper on the faces of the people who had just gotten off of that broken cruise boat in Mobile. How strange, when I had just called them sinners and told them that they are going to die, smudging an ugly black mark on their foreheads. Why was I so surprised that almost all of them glowed with joy, and their eyes, and ours, filled with tears? That cross of ashes is, after all, a symbol of the story of salvation, short-hand for the Good News that God’s grace and love conquers death and disaster. It is a cross that does not deny the truth of death; but it claims that the truth of life is stronger.
I imagine that, for awhile, the news is going to be full of commentaries and fear-mongering stories about asteroids destroying the earth, until some other threat absorbs our attention. That is too bad. Fear of our own deaths or the deaths of loved ones, fear of the end of our literal or metaphorical worlds, is a poison that spreads so easily these days in the barrage of news that fills all of our waking hours. Unlike our stories in scripture, these poison stories do not move us to live better lives or to protect the earth in the face of our own technologies that endanger it. They just paralyze us with fear and bend us over with burdens. Let’s remember that God has entrusted us with the antidote to the poison, counting on us to spread it with our hearts and lips. Let us remember who we are. Let us remember who our God is. Let us read our Bibles this Lent. Take the challenge with me to read the whole Bible in a year. Not so that we can take verses out of context to prove our points, not even so that we can figure out answers in there to all of our faith questions. But let us read our Bibles so that the story will become a part of us, living in our imaginations, empowering us to care for the vulnerable, to give first to God, and to live lives in which we name Christ’s generous, abundant, saving love for all.


[1] Marcia Dunn, “Extremely Close Encounters,” in the Courier Journal, February 16, 2013.
[2] Wellington Grey, “Science and Faith,” [on-line]; available from www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/store/store.html; Internet; accessed 5/18/07.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Ashes--to go?


I hold the damp head of the little baby, whose silky forehead is still free from worry-lines, and I trace with my thumb the sign of the cross right there in the center, in slippery, fragrant oil: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever,” I announce at the end of the baptism. My heart always swells on the word, “forever,” knowing that no matter what will befall this treasured child, no matter what sufferings or joys will be her lot in life, no matter how far she will go astray, she is the beloved child of God, joined to Christ and to all of us in Christ’s Body, with an unbreakable bond.

I lean over the young child at the altar rail as he crosses his arms obediently across his chest and waits expectantly for the blessing. With my thumb, this time without oil, I trace the same cross on that same spot on his forehead, asking that God’s blessing be with him and “remain with him always.” It might be my imagination, but it feels like the word “always” brings out a smile or the twinkle of an eye in even the youngest and shyest children.

I look down at the lifeless body in the hospital bed and touch a tired and weathered forehead, and my thumb makes the familiar cross right in the center as I say the difficult farewell: “Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world; in the Name of the Father Almighty who created you; in the name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you; in the Name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you.”

And then today, on Ash Wednesday, I look in your eyes as you come forward with awkward courage, and my thumb makes the familiar gesture in the sign of the cross: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Ash Wednesday is indeed about sin and penitence, dust and death, but not entirely. I don’t pour ashes over your heads, as observant Jews did in the time of Jesus and of the prophets, and you don’t rub them into your body like soap, trying to scrub yourself clean. We receive our ashes in the form of a cross, a cross right in that place of blessing, in that place where we are marked as Christ’s own forever in baptism. Ash Wednesday is a time to remember the brevity of our lives, the fragility of our flesh, the weakness of our will … but it is also a time to remember the patient love of the God who created us and who holds us still, the God who is waiting for us to turn around and acknowledge the One to whom we truly belong.

 “The imposition of ashes at St. Comfy by the Chocolate Sundae,” one blogger wrote about our adventure to give out ashes in front of the Comfy Cow ice cream shop in a nearby shopping center today.  “Has it really come to this -- that we can't pause, even briefly, to consider the meaning of the day and the season. This is not a pop culture event.”[1]

Another blogger writes: “Can you imagine anything more consumeristic and individualistic than Ashes to Go? There is no need to repent, or be a part of something bigger than yourself, or give to anything or to anyone; just receive ashes on your forehead so you can proudly declare you are spiritual but not religious.”[2]

And an Associated Press headline calls out in a mocking tone: “If pondering penance and mortality with ashes crossed on your forehead seems a daunting event this Ash Wednesday, try it with a bowl of ice cream.”[3]

These biting critiques are addressed to us, little St. Thomas Episcopal Church, this Ash Wednesday. They should give us food for thought, and for me, our experiment at venturing out with our liturgy has brought the blessing of urging me to reflect more deeply than in previous years on what our ashes really mean. There is no greater encouragement to think through the reasons for one’s actions than the prospect of a reporter’s microphone in front of one’s face. As I have examined my own heart, what surprises me about the criticisms is that they all seem addressed not directly to us, the Christians who are offering the ashes, but they come at us indirectly, by doubting the motives of the people who would receive the ashes. Those who receive ashes outside of church are accused in these comments of “getting off easy,” of not having to do penance, of not spending enough time on their faith, of doing something half-way. And we, by going outside of the worship service with our ashes, are accused of aiding and abetting their laziness.

It’s funny, but the critiques that I would have expected would have been more in line with the words of Jesus that we hear in today’s Gospel: Are we practicing our piety on the street corners in order to get attention, in order to be on the news, in order gain church members, in order to receive praise for being inclusive and “cool?” Jesus’ warning is one that I take seriously, and one that we should take into account, as we examine our motives and the reactions of our hearts this Lent.

After some reflection, however, the accusations of aiding and abetting spiritual laziness don’t bother me. In fact, they sound a bit to me like the protestations of the older brother in Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son, indignant that his Father welcomes his good-for-nothing younger brother with open arms and a feast. I look at myself, my friends and my neighbors, going about our busy lives, with God often much too far from our minds and hearts. We are rushing into Kroger for something to throw on the table for dinner; we are rushing into the Comfy Cow for some ice cream for a child with strep throat; we are trudging to work too early and coming home too late. We are trying to fit Christian service and time for prayer into days and hours in which we really just want to rest. Lent is not about more obligation, more rushing around, more things to do at church. We need something to break into the oblivion of our daily busyness, something to remind us that God is in charge. We need something to touch us, right in the middle of our foreheads, to remind us of the “always” that was pronounced at our baptism. If a cross of ashes can do that, then aren’t we called to offer it as widely as possible—to ourselves and to the strangers whom we have never met? The prophet Joel calls out: “Sanctify the congregation; assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy… Why should it be said among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’ Why, indeed, when God is waiting, waiting to welcome us all home.



[1] Drexel Rankin, comment to article in the Courier Journal, found at http://www.courier-journal.com/comments/article/20130211/ZONE04/302110043/thomas-ashes-comfy
[2] Found at the8thday’s Space, http://the8thday.posterous.com/ashes-to-where53805
[3] Found at http://www.whas11.com/news/national/190766261.html