Theological Static

Already, and not yet...

2010-12-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

(Audio coming soon...)

It's getting colder these past few days. I'm sure you’ve already made the annual trip to the attic to pull out the winter coats. It’s colder, the nights are longer and now that we've had Thanksgiving and eaten quite a bit too much, there seems to be only a short sprint between now and Christmas and the depths of winter.

Living on the Pacific Coast we're quite sheltered from “real” seasons, which is in many ways a great joy. But just the other day I was thinking about those long dark winters back in New York state, where for weeks at a time you're lucky if the thermometer breaks twenty degrees during the middle of the day. The snow, which can be so beautiful for the first few weeks, eventually turns into a dark, muddy mess. It clings to the undersides of your car, it is pushed by snowplows into giant hills in nearly every parking lot or open space and long after the Christmas lights have come down, the trees left on the curb – long after the parties and revelry of New Year's have dimmed, long after the presents have been opened the pies and cookies have been eaten, people settle indoors to wait out the winter.

It can take awhile.

By the time Martin Luther King day rolls around in February, there's just nothing left to enjoy about the winter in the North East. It's here, it's been here and we all hole up by our steam heaters and hope it ends as quickly as possible. We wait. In the Bay Area it’s rain and not snow that keeps us indoors, but the effect is much the same. Cold, wet days of looking out a paned-glass window, waiting for a change in the weather. Some years, it seems to take forever.

It is this waiting, this expectation, this hope, that Christians remember during the season of Advent. The the candles on the advent wreath flicker in expectation of Christmas and the celebration of the birth of Christ. But as we celebrate the first coming of Christ we also wait for the second coming as Christians have done for more than 100 generations. Or maybe we don’t. Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t leave the Second Coming to the Fundamentalists -- it sounds like a lot of fire and brimstone, judgement and battle. It sounds like a mythology we’d do better without. It sounds like a fairy tale to those of us with even a cursory training in Physics, Chemistry, Biology.... But I celebrate Advent anyway, because whether I like it or not, I’m waiting for something.

The first Christians were people who did a lot of waiting. They had read Christ's words to his disciples – the very ones you heard today. “Two people would be working together in the fields,” Jesus had said, and it would be a day that dawned just like any other. But with the suddenness of Noah's flood, Christ would return and call one of the workers. “Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Scripture tells us to be prepared because it will be like a thief in the night -- not an event to be celebrated with trumpets and cymbals but something that happens quickly, in quiet, so that only those who are prepared will have eyes to see it.

The scriptures hammer this point home, and so the first Christians lived in hope of the coming of Christ. They yearned for it, hoped for it, lived for it. St. Paul instructs his followers not to bother getting married because the end would surely be there before they knew it. Why bother trying to set up catering, buying a large wedding cake, making invitations, if the whole thing would be gone before you knew it? Paul gets angry with some of the Christians at the church in Thessalonica because many of them have quit their jobs in expectation of the second coming. They were so certain that Christ would be back momentarily that they dropped everything else they were doing, including their own livelihood. And they began to wait.

Who can blame them really? Paul himself must have been stirring up the pot like he does today: “the night is far gone and the day is near.” Now is the moment, he says, to wake from sleep. Who can chastise those first Christians for living in expectation of that coming, but as the years went by and the persecutions began in earnest, the waiting seemed to take forever.

When I was a child, a cold winter morning always seemed like a good chance to make a pot of tea. And my mother would come into the kitchen and place a kettle of water on to boil and I would sit on the counter, my legs dangling in the air, and wait. And that kettle would never boil! It's the unknown of it, I think, that keeps us in expectation, that makes us watch that pot while the minutes tick away and yet we never hear the whistle that means it's ready to pour. Because we're expecting it, we stay ready, our nerves tensed, and the seconds seem to drag on forever. “A watched pot never boils” is what my mother would say when she caught me eyeing it. And it's true. But walk away to do something else – make a phone call or get the mail or take out the trash, and that water will be boiling before you know it. Watch it carefully and it takes forever, busy yourself and it's there in the blink of an eye.

I feel a little sorry for those first generations of Christians. The ones who were so convinced that Christ was about to arrive in power and glory and bring the Kingdom of God that they stopped their lives to wait for it. See, these people, I'm afraid, had made a terrible mistake. They were waiting for something that, in a sense, had already arrived.

Because scripture tells us that Kingdom of God is something which is already and is not yet. It is something we wait in expectation of, and something that is taking place around us. “Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.’”

That’s a phrase that makes me stop in my tracks. “The Kingdom of God is among you.” Because while Christians are told to wait for the coming of the Kingdom they are also instructed to be the very instruments of its creation. This is a paradox, but it hides a great spiritual truth. We are charged with living in expectation of the Kingdom but also of building it, creating it and seeking after it. Our task is not to sit in the kitchen and watch the pot hoping, but to go about our lives in a way that furthers the mission and ministry of Christ, knowing deep down in our bones, that the whole world can be changed by it.

This is advent, a time of waiting, a time of expectation. But we don't only wait for something that is far off, something that will happen long in the future. The Kingdom of God is here. The kingdom of God is in our midst. The Kingdom of God is found anyplace where the poor and needy and friendless are ministered to in God’s name. The Kingdom of God is found anywhere that God’s word is studied and meditated on and wrestled with. The Kingdom of God is found anyplace that people gather together to worship and pray and have fellowship with each other. “Wherever two or three are gathered together, I will be in the midst of you.”

And that means the Kingdom is found right here in this room.

Now, if you look around you might not see any halos. You’ll probably see people fidgeting and blowing their noses and doing anything other than taking up golden harps to sing the Hallelujah chorus. How can I stand here and tell you that the very people in this room form a part, a section, a small segment of the mystical Body of Christ, the triumphant Kingdom of God? Isn’t that an audacious, foolish claim to make?

But I don’t have to make that claim. Christ made it. And like everything about Jesus’ ministry it is foolishness when measured by the standards of the world. But Christ didn’t call the Angels into the Kingdom of God. Christ didn’t call the self-righteous or even the righteous. Christ called the sinners. He called together the lowest of the low and the weakest of the weak and he told them that they were strength and light and beauty itself, not because of anything they did, but because of what Christ was going to do through them.

Maybe it sounds like a fairy tale to you. Maybe it did to them too. But they didn’t just have to believe it, they began to live it -- began to let the Kingdom take hold of them and transform them and draw them into something new -- the Spirit of God at work in them.

Christ looked at the sinner, the outcast, the foolish among his followers and he called them the Kingdom of God, a nation of holy saints. Today we share in their fellowship and through baptism have become heirs to the Kingdom of God. Not because of anything we do of our own strength or own power -- but because of what the Grace of God is able to accomplish through us. We are told to wait for Christ but also to be Christ to one another. It is our hands, our heart, our mind that God can use to heal this hurting world. We are the conduit for God’s love if we allow ourselves to be, if we make up our mind to live out the reality of our Baptism with whatever skills and power God gives to equip us for the task.

Wait for Christ; but know that Christ is at work in you already. Changing you, transforming you, giving you the strength to be a living witness to God’s power -- a lamp that pushes back the shadows and a heart that burns with the love of God. This is our work, not to wait for Christ but to take part IN Christ, who will be with you, and in you, in the blink of an eye.

Make it so, Lord Christ. Amen.

A Good English Mystery

2010-09-29T15:44:00.000-07:00

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Do you remember the board-game Clue? As a child, Clue was one of the those guilty pleasures, along with Monopoly, Risk, Life and a host of other games, that kept my friends and I entertained for hours at a time. We would move our multi-colored pieces around the board -- which came in the form of an idealized English Tudor Mansion -- complete with a conservatory and a billiard room, while our alter-egos tried to solve the heinous murder that had taken place there. There were only so many potential suspects and murder weapons, and so eventually it would be discovered that Colonel Mustard had offed the hapless victim with candlestick in the Dining Room. We kids would giggle with glee and the process would begin again. Mystery solved.

Clue is terribly English, a fact you can discern that just from the setting, and it pays homage to a long literary tradition buoyed by names like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Like the game Clue, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot will always solve the case. There’s no question that the inspector’s powers of deduction will break-through the complex and overbearing motives of the murderer -- and usually, on a dark and stormy night the inspector will lock the potential suspects in room and reveal, step-by-step, the fruits of his investigation. Elementary My Dear Watson, case-closed, there’s no questions about the verdict and we’re all home in time for supper.

That’s one kind of mystery. It has a clear beginning, middle and end. It’s amendable to logic and deduction -- there’s never any question that a clever mind will discern the answer. And so by definition Christie and Doyle and Clue are logic problems and not real mysteries.

Real mysteries are made up of things that, by definition, do not have solutions or tidy answers. The further we probe into them the further they recede into shadow. A few months ago I met a man being released to hospice care and in his last days he wanted to do nothing but talk about death. What would happen, he asked, when the time finally came? Would he remain in some state of awareness? Would his conscious mind be annihilated forever as his pulse failed and his lungs finally gave up their last breath? What would happen to his soul, assuming that such a thing exists and we are not deluding ourselves with fairy tales about its immortality.

He asked me these questions in the shadow of hundreds of millions of dollars of state of the art medical equipment and doctors with decades of experience. But they could not answer his questions. Of course, I couldn't either, other than to offer him the hope of eternal life in Christ that our faith is grounded on. But Death, the reality of death, is a true mystery. It is a human universal and yet we know less about it than we know about the surface of the moon. In fact, “By all outward appearances, our life is a bright spark of light between one eternal darkness and another.”

This is one example of real mystery, one that we can relate to I think, but it is only a building block. We can say that death is a mystery, that the workings of our souls are a mystery, that the human condition itself is a mystery -- but all these things are merely component elements of a greater mystery still, the ineffable mystery of the transcendent divine, the mystery of God.

“How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways!” says Paul in Romans today. “For from him and through him and to him are all things.” Or, in Job’s mouth, the litany of God’s greatness ends with an appeal to God’s radical otherness: “These are indeed but the outskirts of his ways;” says Job “and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand.”

“How small a whisper to we hear of him?” How frustrating is that truth? How many nights have you lain in bed, wide-awake, sleep just out of reach because the biggest questions keep us fidgeting in anxiety: some of us wondering if this silly “ordination process” business is really the right thing to do with your life, others mourning the death of a loved one or fearful about a relationship or trying to decide if you really believe in God after all. And what does God give you in return? A resounding chorus of angels -- a mystical light of glory? Let’s be honest with one another, we receive whispers if we’re lucky, and even then they come faintly, as if lost in a chasm of silence.

And so you thought you came to seminary to learn about God? You’ll learn many things here, valuable and important and critical things for engaging in mission and ministry, but to be honest with you, coming to seminary to learn about God is a lot like going into psychiatry to learn about love. There are some overlapping concepts, but they’re not really the same thing. And you may not find the answers you’re looking for in the places that you expect.

And if its frustrating to us, just imagine how theologians feel! Richard Hooker, decades into his career, writing a tome of theology that can nearly break a shelf, and he would preface the whole thing with one sentence that still makes my hairs stand on end when I hear it. “Our safest eloquence concerning God,” he said, “is our silence.”

That one sentence sums up, in the most succinct possible way, why I’m an Anglican. We are a church that allows God to remain clothed in mystery, a church that remains always suspicious of strong dogmatism and fanaticism, a church that embraces and often even deliberately fosters ambiguity, such as during the Elizabethan Compromise. The great product of the English Reformation, born as much out of political pragmatism as deliberate theology, was to create a form of church that stressed the issue of how we pray far more intently than the substance of what we believe.

At first, this might sound a little wishy-washy. Like we don’t really know what we stand for and we have no principles to keep us grounded. If the Godhead is shrouded in eternal mystery, it can be tempting to throw up our hands in despair because we become frustrated with a God who it seems is more notable in absence than in presence. What I mean is that I have known and worked with Pentecostal colleagues who could pronounce healing in God’s name, who could tell me exactly what scripture said about some particular issue with a guarantee that God meant literally that, if He didn’t literally write it with His own divine hand when the prophets were looking the other way.

But in my life, I’ve become convinced that such total certainty, such radical conviction, such passionate orthodoxy, while admirable in some ways, actually leaves very little room for faith. By its very definition faith is not something that you can prove and measure and keep under a microscope. That’s a place for physicists, not mystics. “Blessed are those who have not seen,” says Jesus” and yet believe.” There’s something about the mystery of God that allows our faith to flourish in new and different ways -- to work out our salvation with “fear and trembling” as Paul advises, to handle our certainty with kid gloves.

In the 16th Century, while all the while the Reformed churches on the Continent and the re-energized Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation were cranking out ever lengthier creeds and heavier and more substantial dogmatic statements, the Church of England was held to a more moderate path. But in retrospect, that moderation and due-diligence have left us with an incredible legacy: humility in the stead of certainty and a firm conviction about the centrality of prayer and worship to Christian life. When asked “What does the Church believe” any Anglican worth their salt will grab the prayerbook, because it’s there, in the pages of that wonderful Common Prayer, where the church celebrates the lived theology of worship and penitence and reconciliation and sacrifice.

Anglicanism produces liturgists by the score but few theologians. In one sense this is a legacy of a church that is "neither hot nor cold," a church that sacrifices principle on the altar of pragmatism. Yet at the same time our emphasis on prayer and worship, our invitation to doubt instead of dogmatize, witnesses to the humility of the our hearts in the shadow of the awe-inspiring mystery of God. Our very comfort with ambiguity is what makes Anglicanism such a powerful witness in a post-modern world.

And that, my friends, is the real heart of the matter. Because this church, our church, has a great destiny in the 21st century. We have been stewards of a flame, long derided, often forgotten, that burns ever more brightly where the spiritual thirst of the people is greatest. Our forms of liturgy, our forms of prayer, our legacy of service to the least of this fallen world, provide an invitation to those searching for an authentic faith, grounded in the mystery of God and willing to engage humbly with the discipline of Christian discipleship.

It will not be easy work. It never was. But I firmly believe that the accident of history and politics and custom that created this funny creature we call Anglicanism, beset on every side, dwindling in numbers and in spirit, divided and depressed, will be one of the greatest tools of evangelization and Christian renewal in the 21st century. Yes, you just heard me say that. Our churches and communities have preserved the very idea of God’s mystery with care and perseverance and are now willing to give witness to a shockingly Post-Modern way of being church -- being caught up in the life of Christ -- his way of love and service -- and at the same time offering up to a Transcendent and Mysterious God, ourselves, as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

Leaps of Faith

2010-09-23T21:24:00.000-07:00

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When I was about 12 years old, my parents took me to a summer camp deep in the mountains of Western North Carolina. On those hot summer days there were plenty of activities to keep even the most energy filled adolescent busy: camping and hiking and even sailing on the lake when the sun burned the clouds away. But that wasn’t all. I'll never forget one afternoon when our counselor announced that we’d be “building teamwork” today. He took us up into the hills and led us through a rigorous ropes course, as the Carolina sun caused sweat to pour down our brows and soak our cotton t-shirts.

When we finished the course, our counselor, with a gleeful grin, led our weary group towards one final exercise: an aluminum step-ladder that sat in the shady corner of a soccer field. He told us that we were about to engage in a “trust fall.” For those of you who never had the pleasure of being a scout or attending a rustic summer camp, I’ll let you in on a little secret. A “trust fall” is as silly an idea as a well-meaning Boy Scout leader could invent. The basic concept is that a few lucky souls step up to the top of the ladder while their comrades position themselves in rows facing inward on either side. The trusting, (or perhaps foolhardy) young person falls backwards blindly into the supportive embrace of his peers, and not, as luck would have it, past them or through them.

At the front of our little group were the Eagle Scout types -- the ones that volunteered for the three-day overnight hikes, the ones who could scale the climbing wall in record time and who took pride in their ability to build fires with one match and some damp kindling -- and of course, they were the first to volunteer for the trust fall, jumping up and down, “Ohhh! Pick me!” But the counselor looked right past them, looked back towards the fringes of the group, and made an attempt to meet my eyes, which were probably focused squarely on the ground. “Dominic,” he said, in a paternalistic bass, “why don’t you give it a try?”

Trust. It’s something that we talk quite a lot about. We talk about trusting our vocations, trusting our hearts, trusting our instincts but not, as come to think of it, much about trusting God. We place our trust in all kinds of entities, from political parties to auto insurance companies, but are quite stingy with our trust in the Divine. “God helps those who help themselves” was Ben Franklin’s cynical comment, born of a Diest cosmology in which God was present only as a dis-interested architect, a blind watchmaker who worked out the blueprints of the Universe and then left it to run without oversight -- a Creator too busy, perhaps, with other things. Not that Franklin trusted human beings any more: “three people can keep a secret” he said, “if two of them are dead.”

What do we make then, of today’s Psalm, so heavy with a yearning and trust in God’s deliverance: “Your steadfast love is higher than the heavens,” the Psalmist says, “and your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.” What do we make of Jesus command that his disciples “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money—not even an extra tunic.”

I don’t know about you, but last time I took a long trip, I joined AAA! Like many Christians I am often a person of two minds when it comes to the issue of trust in God. On one hand I trust fiercely in the Grace of God that blots out sin and death and the reality and revelation of the Cross. But when it comes to the concrete workings of our present day, to the nuts and bolts of life in this Earth I very rarely find room for that kind of trust. Which is tragic really, because it is exactly those kinds of nuts and bolts: clothing and luggage and bread and staff that Jesus tells his disciples they can do without if they place their trust in God.

Which is why I think we really are charged to have faith and trust in God in concrete and practical ways. Not just trust in theologies or doctrines or liturgical movements but trust in daily bread and daily work. Trust that God will provide for us as we seek to be instruments of God’s will, faithful in worship, prayer and service to those whom Christ loves.

Jesus doesn’t say, “Place your trust in a theology of Justification by Faith, but if you’re smart you’ll get homeowners insurance with a low deductible!” No, Jesus says things like “Consider the lilies of the field,” and more ominously, “those who try to save their life will lose it.” I can’t even imagine what opinion Jesus would have held about the Church Pension Fund.

Now, I’m not telling you to cancel your medical insurance and rely on faith healing, but what I am saying is that our attitude towards God’s promises to us, our understanding of the New and Living Covenant is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. We should take this seriously. If we talk about God’s blessings and God’s promises but act as if they don’t exist, haven’t I, haven’t we, been hypocrites? What would it mean to work and live and act as if the blessing of God and the indwelling of the Spirit were present in us and as near to us as our theologies and prayers claim. What would it mean to fearlessly engage with the world -- to preach Christ crucified and the totality of God’s grace with a conviction born of embodied truth?

I’ve often found in my own life, in the times of trial, when I feared most and knew that there was absolutely nothing I could do to help myself, when I had no other option but to call out to God and trust, however feebly and brokenly, in God’s promises, that a kind of peaceful determination sprung up in place of my turmoil of spirit. A quiet confidence took hold in direct proportion to my fear. I had just such an experience in CPE this summer, terrified of my own weakness and inexperience and clinging to whatever shards of hope I could grasp.

Now in retrospect, I can say that the seeds I had planted in a weak and half-hearted way sprung to life -- because it was not my timid planting or watering that mattered, but it was God who gave the increase. Right now, sitting in these pews, I imagine that there are dozens of great ideas, sitting on the back-burner of your mind, smothered by a litany of “if onlys.” If only I had the funding. If only I had the support of the Bishop. If only I had the academic credentials. If only I had the time. If only... They write themselves don’t they? Imagine what would happen if you replaced that endless stream of “if onlys” with an equally endless stream of blessings on the seeds of ministry waiting to be sown and the notes of Gospel waiting to be sounded.

Imagine what you could accomplish if you knew in your heart that you could not fail. What outreach project, what work of scholarship, what ministry to the poor, what evangelization of the Gospel would you begin if success was assured? And how do you know it isn’t a sure thing, if only we could find the grace and courage to take that leap of faith? What if you knew that the funding will come in time, that the Bishop would come around eventually, that it was never about our trembling hands to begin with, but about God’s steady arms, “a rock besides which there is no other.”

Back at that summer camp, I walked to the top of the ladder, I took a deep breath, I crossed my arms over my chest, closed my eyes -- and I fell. Today I invite you to fall together in ministry, to keep taking chances for a Gospel that has always been, and God willing will always remain, a risky proposition.

CPE Closing Remarks

2010-08-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

Given at the graduation from Clinical Pastoral Education at UC Davis Medical Center, August 20th, 2010. -DM

Good Morning. So, I have to be honest with you, the graduation, at least for some of us, has been a long time in coming.

My name is Dominic Moore, I’m a student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Now, If you’re a seminary student like myself, you hear stories about Clinical Pastoral Education long before you ever encounter it for yourself. From time to time, you run into these upper class students in the hallways and you ask them about CPE and a far-off look comes over them, as if they’re recalling some distant and yet powerful memory. “Good luck,” they’ll tell you with a mischievous grin, “you’ll just have to find out for yourself.”

And I did find out for myself. CPE is everything that I had heard and more.

Now some of you are here because you know one of us, and others, well.... “Free Breakfast” right? So what exactly is CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education, you might ask, and why is it such a target of both love and animosity from seminarians and pastors around the country? Why do my classmates talk about it as if it was one of the most difficult experiences of their lives, “the hardest thing I ever loved,” in one case?

Let me give you a little bit of context. A little less than a century ago some of the best theological schools in the country realized that they had a problem. They were turning out hundreds of graduates who had an utter mastery of academic material -- lengthy papers on the difference between Oriental Orthodoxy and Eastern Orthodoxy, reams of research on the historical development of the doctrine of Predestination; they could name drop Schliermacher and Turtullian with ease while balancing an armful of Karl Barth.

If you’re confused at this point, GOOD! You should be, because while these graduates were coming out of the best schools in the country they didn’t know anything about real life. They were helpless, it turned out, to make use of all that book knowledge when the rubber finally met the road -- when they were confronted by real people with real, often agonizing problems. Who cares about the Athenasian Creed when your child is sick with a terminal illness?

And so these young, naive seminary students were rounded up and sent out into that real world, the world of mental health institutions and VA hospitals and places like UC Davis Medical Center, to make sense of their theology in the places that really mattered: With real people in real crises. I imagine that those first chaplains had experiences much like mine the first time I walked into a hospital room. They fumbled foolishly with whatever materials they had brought, they mumbled something about faith and they finally found an excuse to say a prayer and run out the door. After all, what really can we offer to the suffering, the lonely, the hopeless that the doctors and nurses and talented medical staff cannot already provide and provide better? Who are we to presume to help?

Hold that thought for a moment and let me tell you a story. In Zen Buddhism, a koan is a short illustration that a disciple will reflect on, puzzle out, try and interpret. It tells a kind of mysterious truth.

As it happens, there's a wonderful Zen koan about a monk who achieves enlightenment. He is a member of a small monastery, high up on a secluded mountain. And the news spreads through all the other monks in the monastery that one of their brothers has achieved nirvana. They run down the hallways to go and see him and knock nervously on the door of his room. "Is it true that you are enlightened?" they ask, voices hushed in awe. "Yes, it is" he answers. "How do you feel?" "As miserable as ever," says the monk.

It’s ok to laugh... For me, like all koans, there are multiple levels of meaning here, but think about just this one. What does it mean to be both an enlightened monk and have more or less the same problems that you always did? Is it possible that we can be both spiritually rich and physically or emotionally miserable at the same time? The answer of course, is yes and It is the chaplain’s job to meet that person wherever they are, in whatever state of misery or bliss they happen to find themselves in.

What I learned in those hospital rooms, not in the first one I promise you, nor in the tenth, but in the hundredth, is that being a good chaplain is often about doing nothing at all, at least, nothing that can be packaged and labeled and sold in a box or in the pages of a book. Often, the best work of chaplains is about simply being present. It is doing the quiet and often invisible work of extending love, offering comfort, sharing suffering. In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul says that to love is to “weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.” I have had occasion here to do both.

The role of CPE then, is to take people trained in theology and philosophy, trained in the best book-learning available, and place them into the rough edges of the world, place them into contact with people in desperate situations of loss, grief and sadness. It challenged them, and challenges us, to make sense of pain, of death, of illness, or even to hold onto faith when all evidence screams that our persistence is a waste of time and our prayers will never be answered. That’s lived theology - it’s everything we know about the spiritual taken out of the world of books and illuminated by the bright fluorescent lights of a hospital unit.

Unlike a doctor or a nurse, the tools of the chaplain do not cut skin or heal it. They do not bind up wounds or bandage them. A chaplain simply gives what she can where she can, and while she may have shaking hands and a trembling heart, in our good moments, a chaplain find whatever tools are available to be present with empathy, listen with love and share suffering with compassion.

The work of a chaplain is human work, it is weeping with the losses of others and rejoicing at their gain, it is offering an arm of friendship to CEOs and the homeless alike, to children and grandparents, to Muslims and Christians and atheists and everyone in-between. Often it is simply being there, present, to the darkest valleys and terrifying nightmares of our shared humanity. Another human soul, caught up in the drama of this mystery we call life. Another walker on the road, willing to share a mile when the going gets tough.

So here I am now, on the other side of CPE, with all battle scars, and war stories to prove it. I can now look at my younger classmates in seminary with that thousand-yard stare and make cryptic comments about the life-changing experience that they’re in for. But if truth be told, under the surface I feel more like that monk in the monastery, not any better off than I was before, not any smarter, just more aware. Because life is a wonderful and terrible thing, a painful struggle and a powerful joy -- and all those colors that make up our days, the deep tones of sadness and loss, the hues of celebration and success, are all the richer, all the more profound, when we share them together.

Thank you, and God Bless.

Weeping for Joy

2010-08-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

An essay written during Clinical Pastoral Education at UC Davis Medical Center. -DM

The call finally came. It was a call I dreaded, had feared – had hoped would never come. But it came and there was nothing to do but answer it.

The nurse's hushed voice spoke volumes. “Fetal Demise” she whispered over the telephone, using euphemism like a dam to hold back a river of tears. But in truth I already knew the reason: "Birthing and Delivery" the pager read, knowing too little.

Inside the room, a bright July afternoon dulled to twilight gray, filtered through drawn window blinds. The young woman, just into her twenties, sat in silence and I entered like a trespasser, to proffer my badge – and do what? I didn't know. What was there to say in that dark room, muffled in mourning and fearful expectation? For the moment I let silence envelope us.

“Did I sin?” she asked, from behind hollow eyes. “No!,” I was moved to answer, “It wasn't you, you didn't do anything wrong...” Assurance without hope – the “why” of it hanging limply overhead, unspoken. “Does she have a name?” I asked, but quickly wished I hadn't.

“Joy,” she whispered.

And then I wept, and wept, and could not stem the weeping. Our hands clasped in anguish, her sorrow welling up from the pit and the terrible death she bore bearing down on us both, burrowing into the spirit. And there was nothing to do but pray for Joy, and weep for Joy and beg that God would carry this Joy, whose own mother would never hold her, into the arms of silence.

Mourning

2010-07-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

"The First Mourning." William-Adolphe Bouguereau. 1888.

What I learned...

2010-07-18T10:50:00.001-07:00

I wrote this piece for the Fall issue of "Crossings," the CDSP newsletter. -DM

    I can't remember his name, afterward there would be too many others; but every other detail of that night is fixed in my mind, outlined in fluorescent. The pager buzzing me awake at three in the morning, the cool darkness of the CPE on-call room, the worry in the eyes of the night-shift nurse, the family weeping in fear and exhaustion from their vigil, and finally, him, the one whose name I can't recall. They had just decided to place him on comfort care, they told me, the morphine drip opened wide to cancel out the pains that ravaged his body, to apply a final panacea to the AIDS that stole the life of this twenty-two year old man, dying in front of me. The rasping, shallow gasps from behind the oxygen mask told the story plainly, and each time he skipped a beat, each mind in the crowded room thought, but never said, that it might have been his last.

   In my own weariness and exhaustion I fumbled foolishly with the prayerbook, praying silently that two years of seminary, systematic theology, church history, field education, would somehow prepare me for this terrible space of suffering, grief and death. I placed my hand on his forehead and I began to pray, the words feebly filling the space between our two bodies: “...a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock...” Words that sounded more confident than their speaker, bursting with the promise of life everlasting: “Receive him into the arms of your mercy...”

   Fredrick Buechner says that all religion is “wishful thinking.” I think that's another way of saying “faith.” It's faith that bread and wine are Body and Blood. It's faith that words printed on tissue paper can change the world, it's faith that what is unseen is more important than what is seen, and finally, it's faith that my shaking hands and bleary eyes and quivering voice can find service in the Kingdom of God. Seminary helped me find the faith, hard-won and wavering though it sometimes is, to get out of the way and let the Spirit do its work.

Portraits of Jesus

2010-05-17T15:40:00.000-07:00

A Sermon on the Eve of Pentecost
Given 5/16/2010

(Audio .mp3)

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17:
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates. “It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.”

John 17:25-26
"Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."

What do you think Jesus looks like?

When I was a child, my parents did a lot of church-shopping. We moved from Pentecostal to Baptist to Presbyterian to everything in between. These churches all had their differences -- major differences of opinion about theology and worship and politics -- but they had their similarities too. I saw the insides of lots of different Sunday school classrooms, and it was funny, because no matter where you went, in nearly every single classroom you'd see a portrait of Jesus hanging on the wall.

I think you know the portrait I'm talking about. Jesus' face is serene, peaceful, he has long, flowing auburn hair and a full beard. He's looking off into the distance at some far-off landscape with cool, gray eyes. He seems thoughtful but non-threatening, like a beloved uncle or a brother you wish you could see more of. This is a very human God. Someone who might listen to your problems and hear about your hard day at the office. A personal, relatable God.

There aren't usually any halos or choruses of angels in these portraits. Jesus looks like a normal guy. A man who gets hungry, who thirsts, who needs to sleep, who is completely and utterly human. For some reason Sunday schools like to feature the Jesus from the Gospel of Mark. In the earliest of the Gospels, we see a man with a full range of human emotions: he feels pity, anger, sadness, wonder, compassion, love and anguish.

There is a strain within Christian scholarship that gets very excited about this "historical" Jesus -- a man born in first century Palestine, a carpenter, a peasant -- although a seemingly well-educated one, a wandering revivalist preacher and prophet who got on the bad side of the wrong group of people in one of backwaters of the Roman Empire.

It seems like a very modern way to think about Jesus, and we like that human face because it seems very close to us. The reality of the Incarnation is a God who knows and understands the human condition. This is someone we can relate to, the Jesus we meet on Good Friday.

That's one kind of Jesus but not the only one. Because if you read some parts of the Bible you'll run into a second Jesus. A quite different kind of person. The image of Jesus we get in scripture today is a far cry from simply human. I was in Venice, Italy one day some years ago, at St. Mark's Basilica, and like many Byzantine churches I took a step through the doorway and my eyes were filled with an enormous mosaic depicting the Christ Pantokrator, Christ the Almighty, Christ the Ruler of All, his head surrounded by a halo, throngs of angels sitting at his feet, arms outstretched in blessing or judgment. It's a rare Sunday school that hangs a scene from the book of Revelation on the wall!

The reading from Revelation today is more like that mosaic: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end...I am the root and descendant of David, the bright morning star." Stunny poetry to describe a Jesus who existed before the beginning of the world, the Word made flesh, the Christ who reigns as God in Imperial splendor -- at least in poetry and in art. This is not a suffering God but a triumphant one, an object of worship. It's this exalted Christ that we meet sometimes in the liturgy on High Holy Days like Easter or the Day of Ascension.

These are the two great Jesus images of art and literature, suffering savior and conquering king -- a tension which has produced a great deal of fierce debate and equally impassioned artwork over the years. It was a paradox that really annoyed St. Paul, because he spilled a lot of first century ink over the problem of worshiping a Messiah who was also crucified and cursed.

These are two completely opposite images, but they coexist. The ancient tradition of the church has accepted both, learned to look to one for solace and to worship the other, but knowing that they are both one and the same Jesus Christ. Christians believe that these two sides of Jesus are united into one whole, inseparable, human and divine, God and man.

If these two images can coexist, expressing different truths about the same savior, can we have more? I think so, because I think there is a third image of Jesus, just as important, but one we rarely see depicted in art, at least, not directly. There is a third image of Jesus who doesn't sit still for portraits very often, and if it did it wouldn't look like much.

Do you remember what happens after the resurrection? The disciples don't always recognize Jesus as the same man they saw crucified. Sometimes Jesus appears to them in new ways, looks at them with new eyes and speaks to them with an unfamiliar voice. There are times, such as when they eat with the stranger at Emmaus, that they only come to that knowledge later, that they had seen Christ in front of their eyes, but not in the same form as he once had. What is this post-Easter story trying to tell us?

I'd like you to consider that perhaps the most important and profound form that Christ takes is not something we are very well trained to recognize. Consider what we mean when we say that the Church is the Body of Christ. What does that mean? What do we mean, in our Eucharistic prayer when we ask to be "made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him." What does Jesus mean, when he prays, as he does today in the Gospel, that "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they, [the disciples] also be in us...."

Is there another image of Jesus, one that consists, at least partly, of us? Of the people who are united to him in his work, of the people called to serve on his behalf, of the people who make up the church? It gives me shivers to say these words because they almost feel blasphemous, that we can somehow participate in Christ, BE Christ. But I'm beginning to understand that sometimes our most orthodox theology is also our most radical.

The sixteenth century nun and mystic St. Teresa of Avila put it like this:

Christ has no body now on earth but ours;
ours are the only hands with which he can do his work,
ours are the only feet with which he can go about the world,
ours are the only eyes through which his compassion can shine forth upon a troubled world;
Christ has no body on earth now but ours.

This is what we celebrate here at the end of Easter season, the transitional space between Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus the King of Kings. The world we live in exists somewhere between those two pieces of art, the human Jesus and the Christ on the Throne of Judgment.

I think we are familiar -- too familiar -- with the images of Jesus in art. And we recognize those forms of Christ well. But that is not the Christ we are charged to see in the season of Pentecost. Our Christ is the homeless man without options, the homebound widow without family, the prisoner without hope, the whole hurting body of humanity who Christ loved so well. Those caught up in the sorrow and muck of this world, just like he was: "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these," Jesus says in Matthew, "you did for me."

We are united to Christ in Baptism, renewed in Eucharist, preserved in prayer, to be both the one in need of salvation and the one who stands to give it. The hands of Christ that give comfort and the heart of Christ that gives thanks. That is our role, our task, our destiny -- to leave this building with the grace and peace both to deliver and be delivered, to love the world as Christ does. To love it in all its sinfulness and cruelty, to love it with both pain and passion.

The third image of Christ is the image we live into through his grace. The third image of Christ is the one that looks like the suffering world around us, the Christ in the eyes of Haiti, in the face of Indonesia, in the visage of New Orleans, in the hands and hearts of our neighbors and friends.

And that is where the most orthodox of Christian teaching, the most fundamental part of our doctrine, can also be the most radical, because to be the Body of Christ is the most holy thing in this world, but it is also the free gift of our Baptism. And so before he leaves them for the last time, Jesus prays for his disciples, that the love that the Father had shown him would be in us so that He could also be in us. And that is a portrait far too priceless to hang on a classroom wall.

Amen.

Riding Towards Iona

2010-05-04T16:24:00.000-07:00

A Sermon for a Scottish Episcopal Church Liturgy

(Audio .MP3)

Then Jesus cried aloud: ‘Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness. I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.’

It was George Bernard Shaw who once said that "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." It's said that at one meeting of the Allied leaders during the Second World War, negotiations were brought to a standstill by differing meanings of the verb "to table." In the U.S. Senate, to table a bill means to take it off the agenda, while in the Parliament, to table means to open it up for discussion. Roosevelt and Churchill found that they were speaking past each other because the words they heard the other using meant the opposite of what they thought.

Misunderstandings aside, I have to tell you honestly that Shaw was wrong about England. We have trouble understanding each other from time to time, but England doesn't hold a candle to a certain other country. A country with accents so thick you can cut them with a knife, a country with the most inexplicable cuisine imaginable, a country that thinks tossing logs around or rolling stones on a frozen lake -- while someone else runs ahead with a broom -- can be called "sport," a country called Scotland.

I was on a bus in Scotland once, trundling over the heath northwest of Glasgow. It was a local affair, tired and covered in dust and aside from a couple of us tourists the packed compartment was entirely made up of locals. Now the driver of this bus spent literally hours chatting to us over the loudspeaker and he would talk and talk and every so often the people on the bus would erupt into laughter. I think I understood one word in five. The stories and jokes kept coming, the riders kept laughing and I stayed thoroughly in the dark. The punchlines flew right by, dressed up in a Scottish cant that I cannot even begin to describe. The driver was speaking English, but it might have been Norwegian for all I understood it.

Sometimes when I read the Gospels, I feel like I'm back on that bus again. "I am the light coming into the world Jesus says," and yet the accent is too thick, the cadence too unfamiliar, the words so changed in their meanings from what I expect, that I miss the punchline. What do you mean Lord? What light, what resurrection, what life, what salvation, what gate? What do you really mean? How many times do I have to hear the "I am's" the parables, the signs, how many times do I have to receive the sacraments, pray, meditate, how many books do I have to read and theologies do I have to understand before I will get it?

There's a wonderful Zen koan about a monk who achieves enlightenment. It is a small monastery, high up on a secluded mountain. And the news spreads through all the other monks in the monastery that one of their brothers has achieved nirvana. They run down the hallways to go and see him and knock nervously on the door of his room. "Is it true that you are enlightened?" they ask, voices hushed in awe. "Yes, it is" he answers. "How do you feel?" "As miserable as ever," says the monk.

I've studied theology for a few years now and the anthropology of religion for years before that. And I still have no idea what Jesus is saying half the time. I think that's the point of the koan, that enlightenment or salvation or eternal life are never quite what we expect them to be. That we work and toil and slave to achieve knowledge or wealth or status and that these things are "vanities, and chasing after wind."

Jesus says that he is the "light of the world," and that everyone who believes in him "will not live in darkness." But I'm not sure that this light gets any clearer as we get closer to it -- that it gets any better defined, that it gets any stronger. It's more like something you seek after, over and over again because you can't help yourself not to. It's like standing at the door and knocking, Jesus said, over and over again until you wake up the person on the other side. But one knock won't cut it -- you have to really keep pounding on that door, because the grumpy judge inside is asleep and not thrilled about your case anyway. But you keep knocking with the hope that someone will wake up, and see you as you really are, and have mercy on you for Christ's sake.

At some point I have to take comfort in the fact that I don't really get it -- that I'll never be able to convince myself with any degree of finality. I'll never forget how, one day in class, Louis Weil dismissed the controversy over children receiving communion. "The argument is that children don't understand it," he said to me "well I've been studying it for my entire life and I still don't understand it either!"

It's hard to argue with that logic. And yet I can't stop trying to understand it either, trying to understand what happened with this crucified peasant that got people so flustered, so overcome with passion that they suffered unbelievable cruelties to proclaim it. That a light had come into the world and banished the darkness.

At the end of that long, bumpy bus ride over the Isle of Mull I got off the bus and stepped onto a ferry. And when I stepped off onto solid ground again it was onto the soil of Iona. A small group of monks setup shop here in the 6th century. They tended their crops and flocks, did a whole lot of praying and meditating, and among other things, illuminated the Book of Kells. Iona is a funny place, a bit like the island in Lost actually, a place where time and space don't quite have the same meaning. A quick glance around the abbey might lead you to believe you'd wandered into a vortex and reappeared in the Middle Ages. The walls of the abbey itself are a mottled gray-brown stone, weathered and unspeakably ancient. The fields surrounding it are emerald green, studded from time to time with little off-white sheep, like a quietly grazing flock of clouds.

Iona is also a thin place. A place with spiritual power welling up like a spring. A shiver ran down my spine the first time I placed a foot on that holy ground. Mind you, I don't believe in "thin places" really, if you asked me straight I'd say that most of that talk is superstitious mumbo-jumbo. Except that I've been to one, and all I can say is that I felt the spirit with my toes.

That may be a strange analogy -- but we're all friends here -- so what the heck. My own spiritual journey is looking a lot like that bus ride to Iona. Along the way I miss a lot of what's being said. I struggle a lot with the day-to-day of praying to a God who is both light and shadow, who is both known and unknown, who speaks to me in a language I do not and cannot fully understand -- a call without words but full of spirit. I don't really get it Lord, except that I can do nothing otherwise. "Lord I believe, help my unbelief."

I stay on the bus because of my hope that one day it will stop, and we'll all file off, tourist and pilgrim, local and foreigner, seeker, skeptic and saint. And whether we got the jokes along the way, whether we heard the call in the light of day or the small-hours of the night, whether we knocked with trembling hands or beat on the door with passion, the only punchline that really matters, the only one that really counts in the end, is the one you understand in your toes. The light of God that speaks without words, and shatters the darkness of our yearning hearts.

A Sermon for Passion Sunday

2010-04-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

(Audio MP3)

(Scripture reading is the Passion Sunday narrative from St. Matthew)

I'll tell you upfront that I don't like suffering very much. I've got a strange fear of needles for one, and when I visited the doctor down in Oakland a few weeks ago a kindly, middle-aged woman took one look at the pasty, white-faced expression on my face and offered to hold my hand as the nurse drew my blood. As a general rule I don't like seeing the red stuff -- could admittedly never be a doctor -- and avoid these pin-pricks whenever possible.

As modern day people, we are rather turned off by suffering. Pain is something that should be remedied quickly; not something to linger over, certainly not something to celebrate. We still put people to death in some parts of this country but we long ago gave up on public execution. We'll take our violence suffering-free thank you very much, on the big screen, in 3D IMAX, the way Hollywood intended! Real physical suffering means you take two Vicoden and call the doctor in the morning.

And yet this is Passion Sunday. Passion not in the romance novel kind but from the Latin "passio" suffering. We heard today about the Jesus who was humiliated, tortured, flogged and crucified. It all ends on the Cross -- a likely place given the powers involved, but one you'd think the followers of Jesus would as soon forget. Even a resurrected Christ is better off without the Cross right? It's just about the worst imaginable way to die. In those old black-and-white war movies a firing squad can at least look a bit glamorous -- a cross never is. What power is there in a cross other than the power to torture and mutilate and kill? Wouldn't we all be a bit better off without dwelling on it so much?

But the earliest Christians adopted that terrible device as an emblem of their Lord – a God who suffered like they did. Jesus was not the first person to die on the cross and certainly not the last. The cross was a reality of life for those who opposed the power of the Empire. History is populated by other people who died just as painfully. A century before the time of Christ 6,000 followers of the gladiator Spartacus were crucified along the Appian highway – they were left without even the dignity of burial. A few decades after the death of Christ, the vengeful Roman army would sweep into Jerusalem and perform similar mass crucifixions and would level the city so well that, in the words of one ancient historian, “there was left nothing to make visitors believe the site had ever been inhabited.”

In the Imperial provinces of Spain and in Italy and in North Africa, in the Greek Diaspora and in Asian Minor, everywhere that the Empire spread its reach and everywhere people opposed it came the Cross. Make no mistake of how the Early Church felt about the Cross. This was not an abstraction or a point of theology. It was a cross on which their friends and neighbors died, it was a cross that greeted them when the left a city, the body of some criminal or ideologue or traitor hanging limply in the sun. It was the cross that stood on the walls of the Holy City, a symbol of nothing but death.

By my count there are two fundamental and unchangeable elements in the Gospel accounts. They are the prophecy of the coming of the Messiah by John the Baptist and the Crucifixion. Like bookends, one holds up the beginning of the story and the other cements its final act. We don't think on this much – Jesus' words of social justice make much better crowd-pleasers from the pulpit. But the substance of the parables and sayings changes dramatically from Gospel to Gospel – the Cross is the same. Jesus' miracles are secrets in Mark and public signs in John, the cross is the same. Jesus' preaching on the social order of the “Kingdom of God” morphs and develops from one narrative to the other, and is totally omitted in some. The Cross remains.
We can ask many questions about this truth. We can turn up our nose in disgust at it, as Paul knew many would, but there is power here. But what kind of power is it? What is the power of the Cross that Paul extolled until he was blue in the face?

It had been Cross that first felt the blood of Christ. And in some difficult and hard to comprehend way, it was the Cross that saved them. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” Those are the words of Paul to the Christians in Colossae, expressing a theology that fills every page of the New Testament. That somehow, through being born like one of us, suffering and dying like one of us – like the rebel slaves who fought with Spartacus, like the Zealots who bled out at Masada, like the petty thieves who went desperate for a loaf of bread – our God has saved us. Through being like them, through hurting in the way that they hurt, through dwelling in the muck of history -- our God saved us and redeemed us.

Through the mystery of this death, our God has saved us. Know that for the early Jewish Christians this was a radical realignment of belief and action. The temple which represented the Covenant with God and the removal of sin, the temple, which had been destroyed and rebuilt more than once, was destroyed finally and rebuilt eternally on the Cross. To the Gentiles, this was something unheard of, a God who dwelt in the trash-heap of the world, the lowest of the low, and thereby overcame the world and all it stands for. Through the cross, Paul says to the Galatians, “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

As I said, we are not very good at suffering. We live in a world of 40-hour work weeks and high-tech medical care and dozens of brands of over the counter pain-killers. We are good at filing down the jagged edges of life and cushioning ourselves against the pain of absence and emptiness and loss.

The power of the Cross it the power to remember suffering, it is the power to acknowledge and embody it. We may be troubled by the Cross. That's fine. It is and has always has been troubling. And it is exactly because of this that the Crucifixion of Jesus still retains its power. The powerful and the mighty may grow easy with the outward forms of Christian religion, they may attend Sunday services and give a mite to the collection plate, but they will never accept the Cross. The world of flat-screen TVs and Porsche roadsters does not accept the cross. The world of drive-thru Happy Meals and your-way-right-away does not accept the Cross. Cannot and will not and thus cannot understand, cannot empathize with a suffering world. The Cross is the eye of the needle, the sacrifice of the world's arrogance that the rich young man cannot accept -- that's why Paul says that when we preach Christ crucified it is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." There are parts of our world that will always reject it.

And we live in that world. If the thorn of drive-thru happiness didn't pierce my flesh as much as anyone I wouldn't be searching for a way to pull it free. The Cross is just such a remedy.

We must continue to look to the Cross, not turn away from it or cover our eyes to its sorrow because we need to see it, now more than ever. It is a suffering God that helps us to suffer with the millions, billions in fact, who go hungry each night and who long-ago lost hope. It is in the Cross that we are bound to their anguish and fulfill the commandment of our Lord to "weep with those who weep."

But the Cross does not end in sorrow and anguish -- although our Early Christian fore-bearers understood the significance of a suffering Messiah -- they saw something else as well. They looked to the Cross as a point of revelation. "He humbled himself...even to death on a Cross." God's suffering, God's free choice of death -- a fate he shared with thousands of others -- provided a witness to the Love which God embodies and the Love God reveals to the world. Jesus himself foreshadows this revelation long before he is shackled and led off to judgment. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." Christ's offering of himself is the greatest love -- the love of God for a sinful people who "know not what they do." They are a people who do evil to themselves and to each other, a people who starve hundreds so that dozens can revel in plenty, a people who find countless reasons to hate each other and few reasons to love, a people who stone their prophets. A people just like us.

Into that broken world came a God who took on that human nature in order to redeem it, who accepted the cruelest of fates in order to underline the point -- that even in the darkest valleys of our sinfulness the love of God can still shine. "Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man," says St. Paul again in Romans "...But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" says the author of 1 John. "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son..."

Today is a day for passions of all kinds. For the Passion of Christ who suffered as one of us, who binds us to our neighbor in suffering and leads us toward solidarity with all the people of God who journey through this sorrowful, tragic but wonderful life. And It is also passion of another kind. A passion for US. A passionate love for a broken people, an incarnate God loves us whether we ask for it or not, who cherishes us whether we fight against it or run for the hills. A God who seeks us without resting, without ceasing, a God who loves us in death and through death, to the day of Resurrection.
Amen.

Asking the Right Questions

2010-03-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

(Audio MP3)

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”

But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” But the word of the Lord came to him, “This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

Then he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.

When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates,

In 1964, two brilliant young radio astronomers at Bell Laboratories began working on a grand and ambitious project. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were their names, the first was a German Jew who fled from Europe at age six to escape the Nazi regime, the second was an all-American kid from Texas with a knack for mathematics. The pair had began to experiment with the latest in high-tech radio astronomy equipment that they hoped would allow them to map the universe. With high hopes, they patched up a old radio telescope in suburban New Jersey, modified it with an innovate cocktail of signal amplification and calibration hardware, and turned the machine on.

And what they heard was a persistent, irritating static that constantly blocked and interfered with their observations. The telescope, it appeared, had a bug. Annoyed, the two young scientists began to test and re-test their equipment without success. They taped aluminum foil over the metal joints, they replaced every possible faulty part, they waited for the seasons and weather to change. Always, the static would return. Taking measurements one day they even evicted a pair of pigeons that had nested in the machinery and spent hours scrubbing pigeon guano off the receiver. Still, they heard the static.

They had one of the most innovative, high-tech and powerful radio telescopes in the world and it was acting like a Blue Light Special with some wires loose. The sense of failure and frustration became unbearable. With the problems unable to be resolved, two of the brightest and most talented astronomers in the world were looking at stalled careers and years of hard work down the drain.

And then, they began asking the right questions. What if the static wasn't a problem with the equipment at all. What if, is there any chance, that it was supposed to be there, and they were supposed to hear it. You see, what Penzias and Wilson has found was not a faulty radio telescope with a screw loose, what they had found was the background radiation present everywhere in the universe, in every corner of every galaxy, what they had found was the first hard evidence of the Big Bang and the creation of everything that exists.

They had been staring at the answer for years. Staring at one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century without knowing how to ask the right questions. When they discovered the question, the breakthrough came with it.

The great failure of Penzias and Wilson would later earn them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In some ways, I think astronomers are lucky. After all, they are scientists, and in our thoroughly materialistic culture scientists are just about the only people allowed to ask the big questions or attempt to answer them. We spend most of our lives asking and answering small questions. "What time is dinner ready?" or "Where should we go for vacation?" How do I get from here to my meeting in Walnut Creek?" We ask these questions all the time and these questions have the benefit of having concrete answers -- at least, we think they do. But we are often afraid or discouraged from asking the bigger questions. The ones that creep into the backs of our minds unbidden while we're doing something completely mindless and therefore allow the mind to be free. These are frequently questions we don't want to ask or attempt to answer. The ones we cry to God late in the night, in the small and painful hours before sleep. "What am I doing here?" "Why did I make that choice?" What is my purpose in life?" "Why" and "Why and "Why?"

The great falsehood of the Enlightenment age was that reason and science alone can find the "Whys" of life and not merely the "How's." It was another great Nobel Prize winning astronomer, Steven Weinberg, who remarked that "The more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless." An observation about the utility, but also the great limits, of the scientific enterprise.

What do you see when you look up into the heavens? It was towards the same infinity of the galaxy that Abram turns, a vast expanse of stars that dwarfs him, dwarfs us, into insignificance. Abram stares at the gulf of space and asks God the question of his life. The years have past, the seasons have come and gone and while Abram is richly blessed in some ways there are other things that are not in any human being's power to give or to take. "Where are my children?" is Abram's question. I imagine he and Sarah, awake long hours in the night, worrying that their lives would lead to nothing -- that no one would remember their time on this Earth and without heirs to carry on their legacy and their traditions.

But Abram asks the question anyway, asks the hard question despite the fact that the universe appears to be dark and empty and perhaps he doesn't really expect an answer anyway. But when the answer comes it is almost too ridiculous to be believed. God's blessing and promise is to make Abram into Abraham, "Father of Nations." The emptiness of the night sky suddenly becomes populated with countless generations of the chosen people. But the promise is impossible. Any sane person would think it mad. Abraham nearly knocks himself out with laughter. "Fell on his face and laughed" the book of Genesis says in another version of the story. Likewise, when his wife Sarah is told she will have a son, long after retirement and ages after most of us would be collecting Social Security, she laughs at God for even telling her such a ludicrous thing. Laughs because what else can she do except laugh at the Divine Comedy of God's will. And when their child is born they named him "Isaac," or in Hebrew, "Laughter."

It's said that while she lay dying, Gertrude Stein asked "What is the answer?" and then after a long silence "What is the question?" Perhaps it is helpful to approach scripture not so much looking for its answers as listening for its questions.

Anyone who reads the Bible will hear those questions in it. The ones that speak to you and make you pause to listen to your own heartbeat. There are deep questions that are there for you to find if you look. "For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?" or "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" or "Who is my neighbor?" Are a few from the Gospels -- giant inescapable questions that challenge us in our lives of faith.

Some are even harder. I have always been haunted by the one Pilate asks of Jesus before his Crucifixion: "What is truth?" That Pilate asks this question, "What is truth?" reveals much about his own uncertainty, his own weakness and his own fear. Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea, adorned in royal colors, his finest ceremonial armor polished to a shine, adorned as he is will all the marks of rank and power and prestige. But the question reveals Pilate as the one standing naked and broken. The situation is tragic because we see a bit of ourselves in Pilate, in his lack of faith. The situation is ironic because Pilate asks for Truth, and it is Truth that is literally standing in front of him. But because this Truth is poor and dirty and speaks a cryptic foreign tongue, Pilate cannot see it for what it is.

I believe that Jesus answers Pilate's question, but not in His words. What the laughter of Abraham and Sarah and the storry of Pilate witness to is that God himself IS the answer, the one in whom we live and move and have our being, the one who offers a peace which passes all understanding. "Lord, our hearts are restless," said St. Augustine "till they rest in you."

I do not want to give you the illusion, this morning, that God will give you an answer in some kind of divine instant message. Some questions have no answers, at least, not ones that can be expressed in words or expounded on in sermons. What I am trying to say, in-eloquently perhaps, is that Jesus' life itself is a kind of answer. And if you find the questions I'm talking about in Scripture, the ones that speak to your heart, and you read Jesus' responses, you'll begin to see the ways in which being caught up in His life and learning from His wisdom can satisfy, can answer without words, all the deepest longing of our hearts. St. John calls Jesus the Logos, the "Word" in Greek -- a Word Made flesh and living with us. It is this word that is the final and ultimate answer to all that we seek.

In the Psalm this morning, we have one final question: "One thing have I asked of the Lord;" the song says, "one thing I seek; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life; To behold the fair beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple." The process of asking, of seeking, of knocking, brings us, in our own halting and half-blind ways, deeper into the way of Life that Christ offers us. It moves us, in slow and fitful steps, toward that Peace which the world cannot give.

In Christ's name, Amen.

Resurrection

2010-03-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

I'm bringing this blog (and this domain) back from the dead to post my occasional homily. More soon.