The 18th Sunday After Pentecost

The 18th Sunday After Pentecost

Proper 22B
Genesis 2:15 - 3:21
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16
Cardiosclerosis

Back in Judea, the people are waiting on the miracle man. There will be a great show today. Already they are lining up in long queues, listening to his teaching, waiting for the moment when he invites them forward, to say a little prayer with the lame, the sick, the demon-possessed. Mothers holding babies, hoping that his touch will impart heaven's own grace—to drive away the evil eye, or the fever or whatever devil it was that would put half their children in the ground before they could be bar mitzvahed. The toddlers squirmed, while the older ones ran squealing through the crowds, ignoring their mothers' orders to stop. Pushing through the line came a knot of men, long beards beneath stern faces, their eyes looking above the disgusting sight of women and children fraternizing with men. Their phylacteries gleamed golden in the sunlight.

They came to the front of the crowd, where he sat, talking with his men. They waited for him to acknowledge them. He finally looked their way.

“Well, well, well,” he smiled. “To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from the bar association?”

Their leader bowed, his forced smile becoming a grimace. “Rabbi, what a delight to have you back in Judea. We're honored, really, to have such an esteemed and powerful teacher in our midst. It was pity about your cousin John. We haven't seen you in these parts since then.”

A shadow crossed his face for a moment. He nodded.

“Well, you know he confronted the King about his—his personal affairs. And you know politicians and their affairs.” The crowd snickered. “But John did bring up the whole subject of divorce in that rather unfortunate incident. You and he were pretty close. So we were wondering what your thought was on that matter. Is divorce legal? Because if not, then John was actually a martyr of the faith. But if so, then maybe he had it coming.”

Jesus took them in. His eyes blazed. He nearly spat out his reply. “What no riddles? Only a simple matter of law? What did Moses command you about it?”

They had him. They would leave and report to Herod that John's cousin was back and stirring up the crowds over his divorce and his rather scandalous marriage to his former sister-in-law. It wouldn't be long before the Nazarene would finally separated from his head.

“Moses told us that we could give a woman a certificate of dismissal and be free of her,” They looked at each other in gleeful agreement. The Bible was on their side. Not to mention a despotic King with a very sharp sword.

The air around him crackled with anger. “Moses only told you that because of your hard-heartedness. That's not what God said. Didn't you ever read that from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' Don't you realize that the Bible says that this is why a man leaves his family and is united to his wife and that they are not two any more, but a single, united whole in God's eyes? So if God is the source of this unity, if God is the One who puts people together in marriage, who are you to cut that union apart?”

The little group of Pharisees was silent. “Gentlemen,” said Jesus, “please excuse me. I have work to do.” The Pharisees slipped away, whispering to each other, and the people crowded in again. Jesus touched them, one by one, power flowing out from him to them.

Back at the house where they were staying, the disciples were in a decidedly bad mood. Not only were they dangerously close to Jerusalem, but Jesus seemed intent on getting the government's goat, and in the process, they could all get killed. He would never overthrow the Empire dead. And this divorce thing? This was not even sensible. Half the people who were following him were divorced and remarried. The Bible said you could divorce your wife. Hadn't the great High Priest Ezra even ordered them to divorce their foreign wives.? This business could wreck everything. Besting the Pharisees at their little games used to be funny, but things were different now. People were on edge enough without rhetoric that bordered on treason.

They waited until he seemed relaxed. “Jesus, back there in the square, what you said about divorce. That was just your little tweak of the religious right, wasn't it? You weren't serious about that, were you?”

Jesus took another sip of wine and closed his eyes for a moment. His whole body sighed. His voice was calm, steady and firm. “Look, if a man divorces his wife and marries another woman, he's committing adultery. Same thing when a woman does it. Tough tilapia for Herod, Herodias or anybody else. That's the way is is.” There would be no argument with him. They chewed in stony silence.

They were not even finished with the meal, when the door of the house flew open and a group of squealing children burst in, followed by their mothers, a noisy gaggle of womanhood and childhood that was enough to make a man lose his appetite.

One of them grabbed a running child by his neck. “Stop it. Get these filthy little urchins out of here. Can't you see we're trying to eat?” The child's mother pulled him away, her face flushed red with anger and shame.

Jesus stood up and held the child to him gently. “Enough,” he said to the disciples. “I've had it to here with your foolishness today. These children and these women have come to me for a blessing and I intend to bless them.” He tousled the little boy's hair.

He turned to the women, his back to the pouting disciples. “Bring all your children to me, because they are the ones who own the Kingdom of God.” The children crowded around him pushing each other out of the way, pulling at his cloak, trying to grab his beard. He laughed, for the first time that day.

He turned around to the disciples. “Look at them. Anyone who doesn't receive the blessings like these children do, doesn't even get what the Kingdom is all about.” And he knelt down into a pile of tiny giggling people, hugging them tightly.

If this congregation has the demographics of most, nearly half of the married people here used to be married to someone else. If they were married in the Church the second time, they received an annulment or an episcopal dispensation allowing a blessing on their union. Grace has triumphed over sin in their lives and they are restored and forgiven. That blessing of the Church, that sacramental union the second time around, was received by them as eagerly as children unwrapping a gaily ribboned present. The wideness of God's mercy is a daily reality for them.

Though the blessing of God and His Church may be bestowed on those seeking grace for their second marriage, it does not undo the pain of their divorces. Some of those divorces came about because of infidelity, some because of abuse or addiction, some because the ember of love grew cold from neglect or boredom. Whatever the reason, the promises they once made were no longer kept, no matter how they once were sure that it wouldn't—couldn't—happen to them. No one enters the blessed union of souls with the intent of later tearing it asunder, but still it happens and God's people are not immune.

It is flesh ripped from flesh, bone broken from bone, a large gaping hole over their hearts that never completely heals. They may be resurrected to new lives, with new hope and new love, but they bear in their bodies the marks of the crucifixion of their old life. That is what Jesus is trying to tell his cranky disciples.

Those of us who are divorced can tell you, if we're honest, that it happened because of cardiosclerosis, hearts turned hard as stone. I know. I am one of them. The death of a thousand cuts is what separates the two made one. It is never a single slashing thrust of the blade. Gradually, day by day, the pain multiplies and the one become two again, severed without benefit of anesthesia.

Today's story from Genesis is the second of the two stories of Yahweh's creation of the first human beings. In the first story, which is actually the later of the two, humans are the crowning glory of earthly wonder, made on a Friday morning to romp on the new earth in the afternoon and rest with God on the Sabbath day. But the second story is not triumphant at all. It is the story of promise that ends in pain, of hope that ends in heartache. It's the story of divorce.

God has made a lump of mud into a human-shaped mass, lying on the ground. He bends over its mud mouth and blows the wind of life into it, and it stands on its feet, beautiful, naked and full of wonder. Adamah, says the Hebrew, dirt. The mud, the earth, come to life. Yahweh brings before Adam the animals, and Adam, watching them go by, names them one by one. Lions, elephants, ravens and racoons. Dogs, pigs and bears. Great blue herons and little field mice. Baboons and rabbits, opossums and giraffes. The whole of the animal kingdom, barking, mewing, bellowing and creeping. There is even one, as smooth as glass, slithering its way through the grass, that disappeared by a tree. But as delightful as they are, none of them are like the man.

So Yahweh has the man lie down and puts him in a deep slumber. He opens up his side and takes out a rib, and shapes it and stretches it and forms it into something very much like the man, only softer, rounder and even more beautiful. And when the man awakes, he discovers the woman at his side, his literal other half, to be his companion forever. But the perfection of their love does not last. Into their lives comes covetousness and lies, the pain of rejection, the death of true love. A divorce from the One who desired them to live forever in perfect union with each other and with Him.

First, Eve spends an afternoon, with her new friend, a talking reptile, who informs her that she's missing out on the best thing going—only a bite of the fruit she finds herself increasingly infatuated with will make her freer and wiser than she can imagine. She will be just like Yahweh, endowed with the wisdom of the heavenly court. Oh, and it is so delicious, so perfectly sweet and firm and ripe. She can't wait to share it Adam, who, if he had any doubts about it all, swallows them in a gush of juice pulp. Then it hits them, something is wrong, terribly wrong. They slink off into the bushes, hoping that Yahweh will just miss them on his afternoon walk through the garden. They can hear his voice, gentle, calm, earnest, coming along the path, just like it did every day.

“Where are you? I have been looking all over for you.”

Adam had a twig sticking painfully in his thigh. When he moved the branches rustled. "Adam. Come out of there. Why are you hiding?”

Adam crawled out onto the path, blinking in the sunlight. “I was ashamed.”

The wind stirred in reply. “Why? Whatever do you have to be ashamed of?”

Adam, his hands crossed below his waist, “Because I'm naked.”

A cloud passed over, darkening the sun. “Naked? Have you eaten the fruit I warned you not to eat?”

Adam is in tears. “The woman,” he can't even bring himself to say her name, “She gave it to me.”

Eve shreiked in terror, doubled over to cover herself. “I didn't mean to, I just didn't know. The serpent made me eat it.”

The reason that divorce is so painful, is that it destroys relationships that were once so full of hope. Divorce is not two people choosing to live apart from each other, it is one couple broken from the God who yoked them together. It's why Jesus is so uncharacteristically hard in his words. He is not saying that divorce is unforgiveable, but that it is unforgettable. You don't get over divorce. You can only get through it. You can start a new life, filled with grace, love and hope. You can forgive and be forgiven, you can heal, you can live in joy and delight. But you cannot uncreate what once was created.

Marriage is a sacramental act that is different from the other sacraments of the Church. In the others, someone—a bishop, priest or deacon—administers communion, or washes with water, or rubs oil onto your head. But in marriage, two people sacramentalize each other, they co-create a new person, made from each other into one. When a marriage ends, it can only end in pain.

So why do we consider today's lesson from Mark a “gospel,” a “good news?” It sounds like horrible news. Because, says the writer to the Hebrews, in spite of our sinfulness, we have the Son, who is not ashamed to call us his brothers and sisters. Because we don't have Moses, making law to accommodate our hardened hearts, we have the One who is the very reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, who sustains all things by his powerful word. When he went to the cross, he took with him every divorce, and every other human act of sin and purified them. And then he sat down, at the right hand of God, and held out his arms to us, to pull us close to his breast, to welcome us, wounded, broken, sliced in two, into the Kingdom, to be one again with God.

That's why we call it the Gospel. That's why we call it the Good News.

"So Are They All, All Honourable Men"--the Left Turns on Obama

You knew it had it to happen.  

Moses didn't get the Red Sea mud off his sandals before the Children of Israel were clamoring for water, and watermelon. David may have routed the Philistines, but he never quite got the unity thing down pat, and within a generation of his death, Israel was locked in a bitter civil war that destroyed forever the hope of a united Israel (Netanyahu, please take note.) Jesus gets escorted into Jerusalem with shouts of "Hosanna!" on Sunday, and executed as an enemy of the state on Friday. 

President Obama, whose ascendancy to the White House was accompanied by a hope that was not merely audacious, but imbued with Messianic fervor, is suffering some of the same. He promised change and then, when he got into office, he found out that, well, you have to govern. And governing means compromise. (Governor Sanford, please take note.)

The problem with compromise is that it is an attempt to reach out to those with whom you disagree. The reason you disagree with them is that you think they are wrong. Trying to find common ground with them means that the people who support you are going to think you've sold out. 

Huffington Post, once a reliable proponent of all things Obama, features Bill Maher telling his audience, "This isn't what I voted for." The July issue of Harper's Magazine has Obama as "Barack Hoover Obama," presiding over the disintegration of the American dream.  The Left is apoplectic over the expansion of the war in Afghanistan, the continuation of warrantless wiretaps, the closing of Guantanamo, extraordinary renditions of terrorism suspects, the reversals on lobbying and ethics reforms, the appointment of pro-business lobbyists to sensitive environmental watchdog posts, the prominence of insurance industry representatives in health care debates, and on and on, ad absurdum.... 

Meantime, there is real work to do. Obama has crises to solve in Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan. The economy, while showing some recent signs of life, has yet to emerge from deep recession, and the ice caps melt with alarming speed. To make progress on any of these things, Obama must continue to steer a course firmly down the ideological middle. He has to be tough, but he has to make progress, and soon. He's standing on the free throw line, but he has to make a shot, and make one quickly, for the Left sharpens its daggers. And unlike the Right, they fear not to use them.

"O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason." --Marc Antony, Julius Caesar, Act III

God bless Cal Thomas, too

In the midst of the season of poison, when the former first woman President hints darkly that a vote for her is a vote to save her opponent's life, and the Republican scream machine keeps cranking out e-mails stating that Barak Obama is a radical Muslim who will not recite the Pledge of Allegiance, it is a joy to read something as simple and pure as Cal Thomas' column in today's edition of The State.

In his column, entitled "God Bless Ted Kennedy" he writes about his long friendship with an idealogical opponent that is almost inconcievable in the current atmosphere. He says: "I came to see Sen. Kennedy not as a symbol, but as a fellow human being who does not get up in the morning seeking ways to harm the country. I know of things he has done for the poor and homeless on his own time and in his own way without a press release or a desire for public approval. I know of other hurts and concerns about which I would never speak."

Imagine. Our political adversaries are human. They have lives that are as full of joy and disappointment as our own. They are not possessed of some resident evil, but believe things with which we disagree. When we listen to each other, we just might find our ideas closer than we originally thought. Even when we can't resolve our differences, following Cal Thomas' genuine, human view of Teddy Kennedy, we can at least come to respect them for their efforts to make the world better.

I'm praying for Senator Kennedy, ashamed that I had to be reminded to do so by a writer who is neither my idealogical ally nor my friend. I'm saying a little prayer of thanks for Cal Thomas, too. And waiting for his next column.

For Good Friday: A Rare Perfume

I saw my father’s green Mercury Cougar pull into the parking lot a block or so ahead of me. I had been out of town at a conference and hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks, so I slid across three lanes of traffic and whipped into the space next to him. He got out of the car and looked at me as if to say “Where have you been? You’re late.” The afternoon sun angled through the trees giving everything that hint of summer gold. The golden light caught his face and for the very first time, I looked into the eyes of my father and saw an old man looking back.

We hugged and he stepped back for a moment. I noticed that he had missed a large patch of whiskers under his chin. His eyes dropped. “I went to the doctor today.”

I had forgotten his appointment, but I never let on. “How did it go?”

Suddenly, the air was sucked out of the universe and we stood, face to face, grasping for the words that neither of us wanted to speak or to hear. “It’s bad, real bad.”

I had already lost one parent to cancer, and I knew the road ahead. A cancer death happens a little at a time. First there is the hope that there is somehow a cure, that some medical miracle can be summoned to wash it all away. Then, there is the gradual realization that all of our scientific knowledge counts for very little when this disease begins to devour a life one cell at a time. For people of faith, there are the daily prayers for healing, for acceptance, for endurance.
Finally, the air around us is filled with the scent of sweet perfume, as we anoint our lovers, our parents, our children with our tears, and wipe them dry with our hair. Like Mary of Bethany.

It had only been days before that she and Martha had summoned Jesus to come to pray for her brother. Yet he had not come, at least not in time, and Lazarus was lost to the fever. Then, when there was no more hope, when there was only the pain of accepted death, he came and Lazarus rose. It was life out of death.

Now Mary finds Jesus, his face set towards Jerusalem, where the smell of death fills the air, an anti-perfume, hanging over a city occupied with the daily tasks of life. So she breaks open an alabaster case, and lovingly massages the ointment into his feet. She that knows she is losing him, she that knows this quest for the Kingdom they have been on for three years is about to end. She feels her prayers for his protection swirling downward into the blackness, and her tears fall like spring rain. It is the time of the festival of new life, Passover, when her heart should be soaring, but all she feels is dread. Her brother lives; his friend—her mentor, her teacher—is about to die. It is death out of life.

Right in the midst of the new life of Spring, death crushes us still. Even for those whose lives are filled with the perfume of Jesus’ love, those who believe in healing, in resurrection, in hoping against all hope, the enemy finds its prey. We believe in life, yet we die. We pray for healing and sometimes, the healing comes, the stone is rolled away and we live. But we live in this world filled still with pain, with tears, with sickness, with death. To live is Christ; to die, gain.

It's the great paradox of faith. What is it we are about? Life or death? In Holy Week, walking through Jerusalem, death wrapped around us like a mantle, can we possibly live? And how do we stay faithful? How do we care for the poor, the sick, the dying, when we can hardly see them through our tears? We break open the perfume, we cry, and we listen for the reassurance in his gentle voice.

Eliot Spitzer and the Deacon's Rule

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? (Matthew 7:3)

Let's call it the Deacon's Rule: No matter who it is, no matter how holier-than-thou, no matter how beloved, no matter how high the hopes nor deep the passion, none of us is uncompromised. And the louder one's cries of "Sinner!" the more likely to be found in one's own heart sin.

It should have come as no surprise that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was a sinner. (Who isn't?) But he had so carefully crafted his image as the reformer, un-moved by the special interests, focused only on the greater good, that his constituents and even his enemies, considerable in number as they are, were stunned at the news of his moral breakdown. Even Jesus said to the (good) rich young politician "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God." (Mark 10:17-18)

It is simply an impossibility for humans, whether political reformer or Bible-thumping preacher to remain unsullied by sin. That's why the message of Christianity is not that one becomes righteous by cutting out all the sin in one's life, but by accepting the grace of God who loves us in spite of that sin in our life.

It's a pity that Spitzer suffered such a public and painful meltdown. But when he was looking at the specks in the eyes of his enemies, he was ignoring the reflection of the beam in his own.

That beam will get you every time.

Blessed Are the Schismatics, For They Shall Inherit the Property

It's nearly and, blessedly, over. The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburg, rejecting Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori's plea for reconciliation, has voted to leave the Episcopal Church. Joining the Diocese of San Jaoquin, and likely to be followed by the Diocese of Ft. Worth and the Diocese of Quincy, Pittsburg will have to wait a year for its action to be final (and take one more vote), but, as in any divorce, once it's gone this far, it's not likely to be undone.

Over the next couple of years, the most conservative Dioceses of the Episcopal Church (perhaps including the "lower" Diocese of South Carolina headquatered in Charleston) will affiliate with African or Asian conservatives and create an alternative Anglican Communion. Individual congregations will vote to leave their dioceses, the canon lawyers will wring their hands, saying it's all illegal; the legal fur will fly and the money and property will, eventually all be sorted out.

If I had the power, I would just tell them to go in peace, to love and serve the Lord. But, alas, I'm just a Deacon, not a Pope. In fact, Anglicanism doesn't have one of those, so we're pretty much stuck with the five century-old tradition that the Diocesan Bishop trumps all. And, if I recall my church history, that's what made us Anglicans in the first place.

To call this action "illegal" is to name it in a technical sense. To call it "inevitable" is to name it in reality. To call it "blessed" is to name it in grace.

The whole reason that we've got various denominations (all of whom claim to represent most closely the apostolic tradition) is that people understand the Gospel and the Bible differently. We tend to affiliate with people whose views connect with ours. It's not a new problem. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church : "Some from Chloe's family brought a most disturbing report to my attention—that you're fighting among yourselves! I'll tell you exactly what I was told: You're all picking sides, going around saying, 'I'm on Paul's side,' or 'I'm for Apollos,' or 'Peter is my man,' or 'I'm in the Messiah group.'" (1 Cor. 1:11-12)

While it distressed Paul that divisions among Christians existed, he did very little to try to heal them, later on calling his opponents " a sorry bunch—pseudo-apostles, lying preachers, crooked workers—posing as Christ's agents but sham to the core. " (2 Cor. 11:13) Theologically agreeing to disagree usually means agreeing to fellowship apart from each other.

That's actually not a bad thing: because it leaves Christians to focus on living the Gospel rather than wrangling over Jesus' view of the issue du jour. I'd like to suggest that anyone who needs to leave the Episcopal Church just get on with it, so we can all go back to caring for the poor, doing justice, making peace and living out the call to follow Jesus in a world that so badly needs his message. We in the Episcopal Church will miss arguing with you, but let's all admit that we're pretty bored with that routine anyway.

Blessed are the schismatics, for they shall inherit the property. The Church still belongs to Jesus.

Of Nooses, Swings and Butterfly Rings

To paraphrase Art Linkletter, "Kids do the darndest things." And adults often assume the worst. I got this e-mail a little while ago from one of the other clergy at St. Martin's.

I saw A---- just now, and she reported that, in fact, the teacher of the after school program reported the girls had made a “swing” into which they could stick a foot and swing in the tree in the front yard. She was embarrassed about the misunderstanding, but of course we can simply be relieved that this was innocent play and not hateful message-sending along the lines of what happened at AC Flora the other week. A----- wanted you to know this was not what she and B----- had feared.

No hate crime after all. Not even a good Halloween prank. Just girls wanting to have fun and adults assuming that they are up to no good.

Trick or treat, anyone?

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?—Isaiah 43:19.

Whatever you may think of the Episcopal House of Bishops’ “Mind of the House” resolutions passed today at Camp Allen Texas, they have spoken clearly and forcefully.

When the Anglican Primates met last month in Tanzania, they issued an extraordinary communiqué to the American Episcopal Church: comply with our directives by the end of 2007 or face expulsion from the Anglican Communion. The Bishops said, “well, thanks for the advice; here we stand: we can do no other.” They rejected the Dar Es Salaam Communiqué for five reasons:

• “First, it violates our church law in that it would call for a delegation of primatial authority not permissible under our Canons and a compromise of our autonomy as a Church not permissible under our Constitution.
• “Second, it fundamentally changes the character of the Windsor process and the covenant design process in which we thought all the Anglican Churches were participating together.
• “Third, it violates our founding principles as The Episcopal Church following our own liberation from colonialism and the beginning of a life independent of the Church of England.
• “Fourth, it is a very serious departure from our English Reformation heritage. It abandons the generous orthodoxy of our Prayer Book tradition. It sacrifices the emancipation of the laity for the exclusive leadership of high-ranking Bishops. And, for the first time since our separation from the papacy in the 16th century, it replaces the local governance of the Church by its own people with the decisions of a distant and unaccountable group of prelates.
• “Most important of all it is spiritually unsound. The pastoral scheme encourages one of the worst tendencies of our Western culture, which is to break relationships when we find them difficult instead of doing the hard work necessary to repair them and be instruments of reconciliation. The real cultural phenomenon that threatens the spiritual life of our people, including marriage and family life, is the ease with which we choose to break our relationships and the vows that established them rather than seek the transformative power of the Gospel in them. We cannot accept what would be injurious to this Church and could well lead to its permanent division.” Read it all here.

The American branch of Anglicanism is governed by a polity that is similar to that of the United States, with a bi-cameral legislative and governing body that has served well for more than two centuries. Accepting the Communiqué would have meant that only one of those Houses has any real meaning, the House of Bishops. That’s like the U.S. Senate declaring itself the only legitimate law-making body in the U.S. Congress. There’s a Constitution which prevents that. The same is true in the Episcopal Church. Without the laity, the whole people of God, the House of Bishops is just a magesterium comprising “a distant and unaccountable group of prelates.” That may be the way the Roman Church functions, but it’s not the way the Episcopal Church works.

The Bishops are right to take such an extraordinary stand in response to the crisis. The violations of diocesan boundaries, the imposition of a magisterial order, the desire to create an “Anglican Covenant” which supersedes the ecumenical Creeds are all actions that could not be accepted in good conscience of the House of Bishops.

So what happens next? The Bishops asked for a face-to-face meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams and members of the Primates' Standing Committee to explain their point of view. It may or may not be granted, but it will not change things. The American Church, for better or worse, and to no one’s actual surprise, has decided that to bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, liberation of the oppressed, and proclamation the year of the Lord's favor are more important than trying to pacify those in Anglicanism who consider them heretics.

There’s a new thing coming to be here on the broken foundation of the old, if only we can perceive it.

The Prodigal God

Today I have rolled away the shame of your slavery in Egypt. —Joshua 5:9

Way back in the sixties, The Who sang about it, and they hoped they’d die, before they got old. When Green Day re-mixed it, they threw in a keg of Heineken to ease the pain. And when Limp Bizkit rapped about it, they turned it into a hip-hop ode to apathy.

My Generation. The pure Zen Now-ness of it. A present that just springs into existence, an all-day pass, a great long wooden roller-coaster of a ride that takes you, wild and free, into a world where, as Limp Bizkit sang, the sun don’t even shine through a window pane.

But living un-rooted in the present may not be all it’s cracked up to be. After all, the Sixties generation now looks like me, balding and pudgy, worried about our portfolios and our beach houses, railing as our parents did, against the nihilism of youth. And those pierced nihilists with their I-Pods and their My Space pages look back at us with a mixture of disdain and fear: “Will I really look like that someday? Will I forget my dreams, will I lose the words to my story like they did?”

Standing on the banks of the Jordan River, General Joshua looks at the people he is charged with defending, and he’s worried about what he sees: the children of the people who knew what it meant to be slaves and yearn for freedom had only known a generation of the kind of aimlessness that freedom can become. They’d wandered in circles around the Sinai Peninsula, looking to the east, to the land they knew was theirs, but unable to enter in. They were a generation who had lost its story. They forgot what it was like to make bricks from the mud of the Nile. They forgot what it was like to feel a whip across your back. They forgot what it was like to have people curse you for existing, for breathing their air, eating their food, sharing their space. He could tell them the story, but he knew the sun wasn’t shining through the window pane. They needed an Iron Age version of YouTube, so they could play the story over and over. So they wouldn’t forget.

They are standing on the west bank of the Jordan, and Joshua and the priests plunge into the cold, muddy waters, still swollen with the rains of the new spring. Then, tribe by tribe, family by family, with their sheep and cattle, their belongings held high above their head, the people start across, timidly. And just like that, as if there were a dam suddenly erected upstream, the water slows to a trickle. The people slosh joyfully through the muddy river bed.

Finally, the last one is across, and standing in the Jordan’s mud, Joshua orders the priests to roll twelve huge boulders up onto the bank, and set them in a circle, the ancient way of remembering, a monument to what happened first, before the Now got here. It’s their record of freedom, this circle of stones, the gravestones of the generations who came before, the birthstones of the generations that would came after. “And when your children ask you someday,” says Joshua, “‘What do these stones mean?’ then let them know, ‘This is the very spot that it happened, where the whole nation crossed over the Jordan on dry ground. This is where God dried up the Jordan for our generation just like God dried up the Red Sea for our parents’ generation. Tell the story of freedom, of redemption, of the God who gives bountifully to the least deserving. The story of the rolling stones, that rolled away the shame of slavery in Egypt.”

It’s the story that Jesus tells in today’s Gospel as well. You’ve heard it all your life as the story of the Prodigal Son. You heard it in Sunday school. You heard it in pop culture: Dorothy coming home from Oz, Han Solo receiving the mantle from Princess Leia, Frodo sailing off at last to Valinor, the undying land of peace. The only problem is, you heard it wrong. This is not the story of the Prodigal Son at all.

It’s the Pharisees, who, as usual, are Jesus’ straight men to set up the story. They are the religious people muttering into their beards about Jesus, who hangs out with the drunks and whores and tax collectors. Jesus tells them a story about a man with two sons.

The younger son is like so many young people, arriving in today with a thought neither of yesterday nor tomorrow. He knows that someday he will have his inheritance, but he can’t wait. Defying the rules of honor, he goes to his father and asks for his inheritance. He tells the old man, “Look, I know what you want me to be, but I’m not like my brother. I need my freedom. I want to see the world, I want more than this lousy little town, and life on this boring farm.” He might just as well have told the old man he wished he were dead, because under the law, that’s the only way he could claim his inheritance.

The old man nods, for he understands the young man’s desire for something more than this simple, farmer’s life. He orders it done, and the son sets off to see the world. But the world is crueler than he thought it would be, and he makes one bad decision after another, and soon—sooner than he would have thought possible—all his money is gone.

But he’s young, and strong and capable. He can work. Anything would be better than living on the old, dull farm. First come the jobs, one dead-end after another. And then comes the famine, and there’s no work, no food, no money. He’s desperate when he finally lands a job, on of all places, a farm. Well, at least he knows the routine. But this isn’t just any farm, it’s a pig farm, and nobody much pays attention to the dirty young man whose job it is to slop the hogs. He’s tired. He’s hungry. He’s a Jewish kid in a Gentile hellhole, stuck in a mud-filled pen with the one farm animal that makes his skin crawl. At least the pigs have plenty to eat, which is more than he can say for himself. The days pass and finally he can stand it no more.

“One more day in this place and I’m going to die. I’ve got to go back. Even the servants back on Dad’s farm have good jobs and enough to eat. I reek like a pig, I’m hungry all the time, I can’t sleep anymore. I’m tired.”

He slips away into the night, and begins the long, sad trip back home. All the way back, he’s rehearsing what he’s going to say. “Dad, I’m not even good enough to be called your son. Just give me a job. I’ll live with the servants. I won’t bother you. I’ll just do what I’m told and shut up.”

The sun is hot on his neck, when he makes out the first house in his village. He’s got his lines down, if he can only get them out before the old man sends him away. As he walks slowly toward the village, he can see someone running towards him. An old man, his robes flying in the afternoon breeze, his black kaffia flopping loose around his head. The young man stops, staring in disbelief. It’s his father, and the old man’s running towards him, arms stretched out wide in welcome.

They fall together and the son doesn’t even get his apologies out. The father wraps in him a new robe and places a ring on his finger, and calls for a feast to celebrate his son’s return. The farm is alive with music and dancing, and the smell of barbecue wafting on the breeze.

That’s when the older brother shows up. He’s been working hard all day, out in the fields, taking care of the family business. He’s a tough man, firm and fair, dedicated to the family business. He’s not much for parties. They take away from his work. “What is going on here?” he demands of one of the servants, who’s gulping down some of the old man’s wine.

“Can’t you see? It’s a party, sir. Your brother has come home and your father has declared today a feast day! Come on in and celebrate!”

He will, of course, do nothing of the sort. Imagine. That good-for-nothing drunk has the audacity to come back, in the middle of the work day, and his father, the old, stupid geezer, has thrown him a party. He goes off to the stable and slumps in the hay, the hate and resentment covering him like black cloud. He feels the old man’s hand on his shoulder, and shakes it off.

“Son, won’t you come in and celebrate with us?”

He refuses to even look at his father. “Are you crazy? This—this son of yours took all your money, and wasted it on hookers and whiskey while I worked like a dog here everyday. I never asked you for anything, not even a little party for me and my friends. And now, you’re wasting my inheritance on him!”

The old man smiles. “My child, your brother was dead, but he’s back now, alive, and I’m happy. Everything I have is yours, and now I have your brother back too.”

Jesus looks at the Pharisees, their faces twisted with hate, unable to join the party. Because they forgot the story. The story of the Prodigal Father, who spends lavishly on the son who doesn’t deserve it, and throws a party when he comes home in disgrace. They were once the most unlikely of people, just a tribe of slaves in a foreign land. Now, they are tough men, firm and fair, dedicated to the tradition of purity and true religion. And these people that Jesus hangs around with, these people who are immoral, profligate and thankless, these people deserve only their scorn.

Jesus leaves the story hanging there, as he often does, for us to choose its ending. Are we, as Paul says, going to continue to see Jesus’ work from the human point of view, where the good guys win, where the religious, faithful, orthodox people are welcomed, and where the sinful, pagan, pig-feeders are shut out? Or are we going to see that, in Christ God was spending our inheritance by reconciling the world to back to God—the great Prodigal, making the sinless one sin so that we might become the righteousness of God?

When Paul says that we are God’s ambassadors, he’s calling us to story telling, to remembrance. For we did not just arrive here in the un-rooted present. He wants us to remember the twelve stones, the Red Sea, the wandering, the Jordan, the beginning. He wants this generation to be connected to that generation, and in that connection to find our connection back to God. During Lent, we’ve made a special effort to remember by retelling the great Ten Commandments and confessing about how we’ve broken them. In a few minutes, we are going to re-enact the last meal that Jesus shared with his friends before he died, so we can share that meal with all the hurting, hungry, lost and lonely people who don’t deserve it.

It might seem a great waste, this freeing of the slaves, this stopping of rivers, all this partying for the undeserving, who don’t even say “I’m sorry.” But our God is a Prodigal, who spends it all so we can share in the divine story. So we can remember the rolling stones and the sun can shine once again through the window pane.

Welcome to Screwedville

I was sitting in a diner on a Saturday morning in early 2003 with my best friend Doug, the best damn reporter in the South. Even though the AJC has sent him to some godforsaken bureau east of Neptune to cover city council meetings, Doug is still the one I turn to for the wisdom on national issues. He’s a Texan, through and through, and he’s calls it like he’s sees it. I went to a party for him once years ago, and I heard one political leader after another say that he was what reporters should be—somebody who covered the news, not somebody who imposed his own views on the news. That morning, grits dribbling from his beard, he was arguing with me passionately about the impending invasion of Iraq: “Look, I don't like George Bush, but I support this mission.”

My inner commie-pinko-fairy-liberal made me spit out the putrid coffee. (I don’t know why Doug likes these places. Why can’t he eat bagels and drink Starbuck’s like a normal person?) “But, what if they don’t find anything?”

He was quiet for minute. “Of course they’ll find something. We gave all that stuff to him. He used it, he’ll use it again. Look at the guys from the Gulf War who are sick with something that looks suspiciously like nerve gas poisoning.”

“But what if they don’t?”

He stared at something over my shoulder. “Then we’re screwed. Not just now, but forever. America will never recover. We’re just screwed.”

Welcome to Screwedville. Where the Nuclear Club just keeps growing. Where Latin America slides inexorably into the arms of charlatans and dictators. Where the victories are too brief to even be pyrrhic. Where we haplessly foment civil war and call it “together forward.” Where we watch African genocide and beg somebody to stop it, somebody other than us, somebody with the moral authority we once had.

Our leaders are lost, on either side of the aisle. John Kerry, apparently unaware that college draft deferments no long exist, tells college students to study hard or they might get stuck in Iraq. John Boehner, the number 2 House Republican says that the Generals in Iraq are to blame for the mess. And the President, who sits at the desk in the cheerful yellow office where the buck once stopped, says, "I'm pleased with the progress we're making." The Vice-President says that “it’s a no-brainer” that we should torture suspected terrorists and continue to dismantle the Bill of Rights.

Doug and I have often argued about politics. Sometimes one of us has been right, and sometimes the other. Like all passionate debaters, we relish the sweetness of being right. But this time, I wish I had been wrong. Dear Jesus, I wish I had been wrong.

The 22nd Sunday After Pentecost Year B

Genesis 2:18-24
Psalm 8
Hebrews 2: 9-18
Mark 10:2-9

It was in a garden, says the storyteller, a garden at the headwaters of the four great rivers of the world. The trees were lush, the afternoon air soft with the smell of new earth. The Garden, says the storyteller, had just recently been a desert, watered only by a mist, sent by God to dance and whirl and pirouette above the barren land. And from the mist sprang forth the Garden. And in that Garden, says the storyteller, sits a man, a very sad man.

He is not sad because he has nothing to eat. It’s a Garden after all, its trees pregnant with sweet fruit, its vegetables sprawling across the moist ground. And it teems with all manner of life. The man spends the afternoon naming the creatures around him. “Anteater, beaver, camel, donkey, elephant, firefly.” Right before he nods off to sleep, he names one “yak” then adds one last, “zebra.” And he sleeps.

And in his sleep he dreams—dreams, not of animals, nor even of God, but of someone like him, someone he can share this place with, someone he can share his fruit with, someone he can laugh with, dance with, hold tightly to his breast as if he could hold nothing more dearly. And when he awakes, a sudden pain in his side, he opens eyes to the most beautiful of all God’s creatures, the one like himself. He holds her tightly, just as in his dream, and sings the first love song: “At last, at last, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” For the man knew that he and the woman were not two, but one, eternally one.

What is it about love that causes us to proclaim that it should last forever? What is it about being called to share this most precious of journeys with another human that sends our hearts to dancing, that makes us forget the pain of past broken relationships, that makes us yearn and pine and ache for the bone of our bone and the flesh of our flesh? It is not the easiness of it, for nearly half of all marriages end, not in the death of one partner, but in the death of love itself.

Those who are not gifted with the charismata of singleness yearn and pine and ache for unity with another soul because, like Adam, alone in the Garden, we are aching to be complete. And completeness for humans is living in relationship. “It is not good,” said God, musing on his solitary human creature, “for man to be alone.” We are driven, by our nature, to be in community, in relationship. So, like Adam, we look for love in all the wrong places, until finally weary, we sleep—perchance to dream of the perfect mate.

Only most of us, I dare say all of us, have never found the perfect human relationship. Those called to the vocation of marriage find themselves trying to put two lives into one house, one bank account, one shared future, and we find that it’s harder than our dreams told us it would be. There are little things that get us, like the way he wants his eggs, all runny in the center, or the way she sings off key to Barry Manilow. The way he never picks up his underwear in the bathroom, and forgets to take the garbage out. The way she compares him to her father, and never seems to notice the nice things he does. The way he comes in late, too late, smelling of bourbon and cigarettes. The way she turns away after a kiss. And then, one day, the bone is snapped, the flesh is torn, and the dreams fade into sepia-toned sadness. The lawyers called, the treasure divided, the house sold, the pictures thrown away. The Humpty-Dumpty detritus of a broken relationship extends beyond the couple whose vows of love turned out not to be eternal after all. If they have children, the children are broken by it as well. Their parents and their friends are forced to choose sides. And in the Church, the pain of two members no longer in communion causes us all to writhe with their pain.

It’s not supposed to be this way. That’s what Jesus was saying when the Pharisees, plying their usual game of entrapment, approach Jesus with a test. "Is it legal for a man to divorce his wife?” So Jesus looks them in the eye, “Well, what does the Bible say?” Now the Pharisees knew the answer and Jesus knew they knew. They were not trying to find out what the law said; they were trying to get Jesus to take sides in a moral debate that was raging around them.

The two main rabbinical schools of the day, those of Rabbis Hillel and Shammai, differed stridently on this point of Torah. The school of Rabbi Shammai held that adultery was the only justifiable grounds for divorce. But the school of Hillel was far more permissive, and believed that if a woman no longer pleased her husband, then he could send her away.

And so the Pharisees answer, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her."

One more time, Jesus contradicts the plain words of Scripture. He snorts, “Moses only wrote that because he knew how hard your hearts were. Relationships are not meant to be thrown out on the trash heap. The very fact that you have to ask that question reveals just how broken you are.”

There’s a whole lot going on in those words of Jesus. As usual, he’s contradicting one part of Scripture by quoting another. He’s asserting that women are not just property, to be bought from their fathers and cast off when their husbands tire of them. He’s saying that just because something’s legal doesn’t mean it’s the way of justice. For the law often perverts justice.

Still, those words make me squirm, and I bet that they make a lot of you squirm as well. This is not the sweet baby Jesus cooing in the manger. This is the real Jesus, looking deep within me and saying, you were created for a better way, a way dedicated to living for others. It’s your own internal hardness that breaks your relationships wide open.

I squirm because, even though I stand before you as one ordained, I also stand before you as someone who has failed at a marriage. It doesn’t matter that the Church declared me forgiven. It doesn’t matter that a Bishop issued permission for me to remarry. Jesus reminds me of my own role in the tragedy of a divorce, reminding me that my own heart was hard, that my divorce broke not just two hearts, but the fellowship of two people who had been baptized into the unity of the Spirit.

That’s why divorce is such a tragedy. We are created to be in relationships with others. Every sin-fueled breaking of those relationships, especially those formed in the unity of water and Spirit, diminishes us all. It’s why, when those who are trying to get Jesus to take sides in the modern debate around sexuality, and are ready to divorce their sisters and brothers over it, are missing the whole point of our creation. And mark my words, beloved: if the Anglican Communion is rent by divorce, it is not be cause there is a legal loophole in Title IV or some other obscure tenet of canon law. It will be because their hearts have become as hard as a cold, grey stone.

Forgiveness is hard. Understanding the pain and hope and failings of the ones we love is hard. Harder than walking away.

Thomas Merton, in his book of essays riffing off a John Donne poem, No Man is an Island, wrote: “There is something in the very nature of my freedom that inclines me to love, to do good, to dedicate myself to others. I have an instinct that tells me that I am less free when I am living for myself alone …. My freedom is not fully free when left to itself. It becomes so when it is brought into the right relation with the freedom of another.”

The writer to the Hebrews does not leave us adrift in the wreckage of our hard hearts. Jesus, he writes, is a “merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.” Jesus knew the pain of broken relationships, and he gives us the grace of a brand new dance.

In an interview with my favorite writer, Anne Lamott, Linda Buturian asked her what she most wanted to convey to her son Sam about God. "I want to convey that we get to be human," Annie said. "We get to make awful mistakes and fall short of who we hope we're going to turn out to be. That we don't have to be what anybody else tries to get us to be, so they could feel better about who they were. We get to screw up right and left. We get to keep finding our way back home to goodness and kindness and compassion. . . I want him to know that no matter what happens, he's never going to have to walk alone. . . That's what I'm trying to convey to Sam."

Marriage is a school in which we learn about self-giving love and practice the steps required by the dance of mutual submission. The great dancer Rudolf Nureyev once said of his dance partner, the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, that they danced with "one body, one soul." That is the metaphor that Jesus uses for marriage. The dance of one body, one soul, one flesh, one bone, one heart. Like the Garden mist in the creation story, when we are in that relationship, we swirl around each other, creating and forming something new, something we rightly call a sacrament. Now the catechism tells us that a sacrament is an outward expression of an inward and spiritual grace. What looks like bread and wine is really Christ’s own body and blood. What looks like a bath is the washing away of our sins. And what looks for all the world like a smiling groom and radiant bride is one flesh, one spirit.

And they are not dancing alone. The priest, after hearing the promises of the couple kneeling on the chancel steps, ask us: “Will you who have witnessed these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?” Because they are now one new person in our midst, we proclaim, “We will!” And the priest answers “Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.” Thus begins the dance.

Our dance is not just a dance of married people. For among us are those called to a single life, or left by a partner in death or divorce. There are our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, struggling to be faithful to each other, to God and to us, in relationships that the Church merits unworthy of blessing. We are all called to dance with each other, in a never ending dance of one body, one Lord, one baptism. We may step on each other’s toes, we may miss the rhythm entirely. But dance we must.

Mark Foley's Brokenness and Ours

The truth is, I’m really saddened by this. Saddened by another scandal. Saddened by another career ruined by hubris, ego and lust. Saddened by the public humiliation of another popular leader that believed himself invulnerable to the brokenness that all of us share.

I don’t know what was in Mark Foley’s heart. It clearly wasn’t good or upright or pure. Most of the time, I don’t even know what is in my own heart, black as it usually is.

"It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction." Mark Foley said that, when the news of Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern broke. And he was right. It was sad. And it’s just as sad when it turns out that Foley had his own sexual demons to wrestle.

That’s the way it is with human brokenness: it creates a culture of corruption that acts with impunity, seeking only its own interest, and consequences be damned. Foley is not a stand-in for a Republican party, smashed as it is on the shoals of the Bush presidency. Foley is a stand-in for all of us, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, who confuse our own selfish desires with the greater good.

If House leaders, as it is being alleged, knew about Foley’s pedophilia and refused to do anything about it, they should justly suffer the people’s wrath and the law’s justice. But to assume that merely installing the opposition will create a utopia of goodness is to forget the sordid story that belongs to us all. The Democrats, returned to power, will do some good things. But they, too, will lose power eventually, when their own hubris drives them to acts of foolishness or worse. It’s why we have elections, regularly. It is our nation’s only tool to for a constant renewal of our common life together.

It’s why the American ideal is just that, an ideal—a goal, a hope, a prayer, desire to build a society with justice and liberty for all. We are not very good at it, and our present political realities reflect our failures with a starkness at once dizzying and crystalline. We are failing in war, as we failed in peace. But we get back up and try again to build the country that we only dream of.

Today, let’s remember that Mark Foley, driven as he was by the Legion that drove him to madness, did some good things. He is damned before us, a prisoner of a self-created hell that seperates him from God and us. Before we rise up to condemn, perhaps we should look deep into the darkness of our own hell, to see ourselves writhing in pain alongside him.

The Hammer is Dead.

The Hammer is dead. The other Hammer, the real one, not the Texas make-believe bug exterminator. Mickey Spillane, Mike Hammer’s, creator, died the other day down in Murrell’s Inlet. He went quietly to meet his own creator, with whom he had an intimate relationship.

Mickey and I go way, way back. Not that I ever met him. But I knew him, Lord I knew him. You see, for thirty years we were brothers. Brother Spillane and me, knocking on doors, preaching the end of the world. I quit one day, disillusioned by the false promises, the fake scholarship, the hypocrisy and double standards. Mickey was one of the reasons I quit.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, the apocalyptic, fundamentalist fringe Christian sect we both belonged to, prided itself outwardly on “keeping unspotted from the world.” But Mick was spotted. He was married three times, each time to a woman more beautiful than the last, each time proclaiming his loyalty to the religion which would have cast me out for just looking at the nude pictures of his wife on the cover of The Erection Set.

Mickey knew his God better than I did, I suppose. I thought God should be a lover, a reconciler, a healer. He thought God was an avenger, a judge, a killer. His books spread bodies from the first page to the last, thrown about with all the reckless abandon of Jehovah Himself.

His books were full of sex, too, or the promise of it at least. Strippers and seductresses, along with the cool and casual men who bedded friend and fiend alike. Oh, could he tell a story, that kept you turning page after breathless page until bang! The bad guy or girl is dead, and Hammer makes the world right again.

The critics thought his work was garbage, all but Ayn Rand, no mean cultist herself, whose gushy letters to Mickey seemed to hint of a mysterium tremendum in sepia-shadowed bedrooms. She dug Mickey because Hammer hated Commies, liberals and weak-kneed thugs. He dug her because she was rich and exotic. The atheist and the theist, they were not as opposite as their stories pretended.

The guy who defined cool, even more than Chandler and Hammett, who got sexy better than Fleming or Le Carre', put down his glass of Miller Lite, grabbed his hat and walked away. He wrote the very best ending in all of American fiction, maybe all of fiction in I, The Jury:

"How c-could you?" she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.

It wasn’t that easy, Mickey. I know—I was there. But thanks for the broads, the dicks, the guns, the flashing fluorescents, the crooked cops, the lipstick coated whiskey glasses and the hapless hookers. The night’s still dark. Your gun’s still quick.

Ken Lay is dead. Ann Coulter is a plagiarist. What's new with you?

Ken Lay is dead. Ann Coulter is a plagiarist. Rush Limbaugh is still able to have chemically-induced right-wing sex, but won’t say with whom. Kim Jong Il is mad. Soldiers kill innocent people, sometimes after raping them. The space shuttle still flies, though those pesky foam tiles still keep falling off. Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee in 2008, just like in the past six elections. The lunatics still rule the asylum that is South Carolina politics and their Bull Street haunts will soon be expensive condominiums. (Unlike mine.)

I go on vacation and nothing changes.

Sorry for the lack of posts around here. I was gone. I’m back. My readers (both of them) have probably gone on to blogs that are actually interesting and whose authors actually write on a somewhat predictable schedule. Let’s start again.

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The past month or so, I gave up politics and got religion. Of course, while this blog has always been about religion, it seemed to me that the battles that were being fought in my church were bigger than a single denomination and were part of a greater struggle to bring religious faith into the post-modern age. That’s why I spent so much time on the General Convention and its absurd attempt to legislate theological purity. I know I bored you. Hell, I bored me. That’s why, after it was over, I sat at the beach, sans internet, and read, without writing. I needed filling. And, evidently, copious amounts of the distilled juices of various plants.

Theology happens in the space between holy writ and the editorial page, between the diner and the altar. It crosses the gulf between the human condition and the divine mind. It shows us the path towards authentic humanity and authentic divinity. It’s hard work and too often left to people who are more interested in clever aphorisms or bedside “devotionals” that yank little pieces of scripture out of context and build publishing empires out of them. (Prayed the “Prayer of Jabez” lately?)

But theology is important, too important to be left to the Kendall Harmons and Peter Akinolas of world, or of the Church, for that matter. It’s too important to be left to people who have it all figured out, or believe that they are President or Pope or Archbishop because they are spokesmen (they are nearly always men) of God.

One thing the conservatives have right: we are in a theological crisis, a crisis which threatens the very meaning of what it is to be a person of faith. Is faith the sum total of the accumulated thought of the “fathers”? Is it simply a catechetical response to questions which can have only one correct answer? Is it some doctrinal system, revealed to wiser, holier, Godlier people than us? Or is faith something more, something less analytical, something less sure of itself?

The theological crisis of the early 21st century is a political crisis as well, for politics, says the Wikipedia, “is the process and method of making decisions for groups. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions including corporate, academic, and religious.” Political orthodoxy is as rigorous as any religious one. If you want justice for the poor, you have to be a liberal Democrat. If you want relief from ever increasing taxes, you have to be a conservative Republican. The deep thought required to navigate the uncharted waters of reality is too hard. Better let smarter people do it. People who know better. People who have read the book. Be it Left Behind or The World is Flat.

Because it’s too hard to think. Because when you think, it occurs to you “that you just may wind up being wrong.” (Penned by the great theologian and fallen away Catholic, Jimmy Buffett.) Because thinking means giving up on sureness, on certainty, on always knowing. Because thinking requires faith.

And nobody needs faith who already knows the answers.

A Cyclone of God: Episcopalians and Presbyterians Blowing in the Wind

I have just finished reading Bruce Chilton’s remarkable “intellectual biography” of Paul of Tarsus, Rabbi Paul. Chilton’s wonderful book lays out the evolution of Paul’s thought, in both his letters and the New Testament book Acts of the Apostles. He shows how Paul, convinced that Jesus was not just a Jewish Messiah, but was the Cosmic Christ who redeemed all humanity, became ever more radical in his views, in spite of the cost in lost friendships and ostracism from the leaders of the fledgling Jesus movement.

Paul decided, based on his vision of the Risen Jesus, and his experience with Gentile believers that he had come to know, that the Bible’s clear prohibition against accepting non-Jews as religious equals, was simply wrong and that Jesus was “Lord of all.” (Acts 10:36) That phrase was coined, not by Paul, but by Peter, but as the New Testament illustrates, Peter didn’t quite believe it. Paul, however, did.

And that belief, radical and “unscriptural” as it was, caused Paul untold problems: “Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:24-28)

Now the spiritual heirs of Pauline “salvation by grace alone” have made another theological leap: homosexual people, in loving, faithful, committed relationships are as much a part of the divine purpose to create a redeemed humanity as are heterosexual people who are married to each other. It’s unscriptural. It challenges every notion of traditional morality. It’s utterly inconceivable to anyone who believes that the Bible’s sexual ethics are the norm for Christians (I dare say, even Paul). It’s going to cause those who accept it untold problems. But like Paul struggling against those he called “false apostles,” (2 Corinthians 11:13) the Episcopal and the Presbyterian Church in the USA have decided to be true to the Gospel and not the traditions of men.

In Columbus, today, the Episcopal House of Deputies (made up of lay and clergy delegates) voted not to impose a moratorium on the election of gay or lesbian people to the office of Bishop. At nearly the same moment in Birmingham, the Presbyterians voted to allow clergy to be ordained who are gay and otherwise qualified.

Each of these decisions will get lots of attention by those who would impose Levitical law upon a system of grace. Each of them, like Paul’s decision to welcome uncircumcised Gentiles into the full fellowship of the Church, will hasten the looming schism in each of these denominations. We may as well get it over with.

The Episcopal Church is now led by a woman, even though traditionalists point out that Jesus and his 12 apostles were all men. The traditionalists want to set limits on grace. The radical reformers want grace to abound. It’s going to hurt. Families and congregations will be broken up. Great and historic denominations may well founder on the shoals of legal machinations. The Anglican Communion, that great relic of the British Empire, will emerge as something entirely different than it is today. The Presbyterians will create yet another Reformed body.

But the Church will eventually accept this, as surely as it accepted the notion of unclean pagans in its midst. As Eugene Peterson puts in The Message:

"We, of course, have plenty of wisdom to pass on to you once you get your feet on firm spiritual ground, but it's not popular wisdom, the fashionable wisdom of high-priced experts that will be out-of-date in a year or so. God's wisdom is something mysterious that goes deep into the interior of his purposes. You don't find it lying around on the surface. It's not the latest message, but more like the oldest—what God determined as the way to bring out his best in us, long before we ever arrived on the scene. The experts of our day haven't a clue about what this eternal plan is. If they had, they wouldn't have killed the Master of the God-designed life on a cross. That's why we have this Scripture text:
No one's ever seen or heard anything like this,
Never so much as imagined anything quite like it—
What God has arranged for those who love him.
But you've seen and heard it because God by his Spirit has brought it all out into the open before you.” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

And the Spirit of God, said Jesus, blows where it will. Creating, renewing, and life-giving, still it blows like a cyclone. That’s not the latest message, but more like the oldest.

¡Sí, Se Puede!

In my study, along with dozens of family photos, there is my personal favorite. It was taken somewhere around World War I, but I don't know the date exact date. In it, there stands a dashingly handsome Italian man, his muscles bulging from his undershirt, one arm around a pretty and petite bella regaza. They are standing before a run down building which may have been a garage apartment. Over their heads flies an American flag. The young Italian couple are poor, olive-skinned immigrants. They are proud to be in this country. You can see it in their smile, their hope for the future, their belief in what that flag stands for. They are Anthony and Theresa, my grandparents.

I am, like most Americans, a descendant of immigrants: Italian on my father's side and Irish on my mother's. By the time my generation came along, my family was thoroughly middle-class, thoroughly American, and a bit embarrassed about all those Old Country words and accents that peppered my grandparents' speech. But we did not forget where we came from, the hardships our family endured on its way to the American dream. We did not forget what our flag meant: a nation of immigrants that was forever absorbing into itself the richness of old cultures and languages, of old flavors and aromas, of old sounds and colors and photographs.

Yesterday, on the grounds of the South Carolina State House, a new generation of immigrants waved the flag that my grandparents loved. They chanted "¡Sí, Se Puede!" "Yes we can!" According to The State, there were 3,000 people there (it looked like a lot more to me, but then I am mathematically challenged). They are not just content any more to just put our roofs on, to clean our chicken carcasses, or serve our guacamole salad. They don't want to be invisible any more. They want the right to stand in front of a beat up old building, under an American flag and make a portrait that somebody will have in their study in 2096. They want to be like you and me. They want to be Americans.

Can't we, the greatest nation of immigrants ever, figure out how to welcome them into our country? Can't we acknowledge the debt we owe them, and all the millions like them, who have made our country what it is? Can't we, once and for all, end the senseless xenophobia that mars the American soul? ¡Sí, Se Puede!