Paul's Posts

Some Thoughts on Title IV

2011-07-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend a couple of parishioners asked me about a letter to the editor they had seen in The Richmond Times-Dispatch. The letter was about changes to the canon law of the Episcopal Church which have taken effect as of the first of July. In the letter, the author makes claims that the new Title IV canons give “sweeping ‘Metropolitan’ powers” to the Presiding Bishop, that they “diminish the authority of bishops and clergy,” and that they create a situation where the Presiding Bishop can remove any bishop from any diocese if that bishop “doesn't go along with Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori's agenda.” These are disturbing statements, and the parishioners who asked me about them were understandably disturbed.

I can assure you that these statements are simply not true. While Title IV does mark a major shift in church practices regarding clergy discipline, they in no way concentrate power in the office of the Presiding Bishop, and certainly do not give the PB authority to enforce any particular “agenda.” Instead, the new Title IV sets out new procedures for assessing claims of clergy misconduct and their proper remedies.

The old Title IV was based on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and basically set up procedures for clergy discipline resembling courts martial. It was an adversarial process, in which charges were made, a “prosecution” and a “defense” argued the merits of those charges, and sentences were pronounced. The new Title IV is designed to be less adversarial and more pastoral, where the process is intended to reveal the truth, to make sure all parties to a situation are able to tell their stories, and to determine a pastoral response. Instead of a list of offenses for which clergy can be charged, as in the old Title IV, the new Title IV provides a code of conduct to which clergy are expected to adhere. When a complaint is made against a bishop, priest, or deacon, panels are convened to determine whether the cleric has indeed committed the act, and whether the act constitutes a breach of the code of conduct. If the panel determines that the cleric has failed to uphold the code of conduct, the bishop may direct the cleric regarding more appropriate behavior, the bishop may restrict the cleric’s ministry or put him or her on administrative leave, or the bishop may depose the cleric, depending on the severity of the failure of conduct. The new canons direct that every complaint be taken seriously and be investigated; but it has many safeguards built in to weed out frivolous or baseless complaints. It is not true, as the Times-Dispatch letter writer claimed, that “bishops will be able to remove parish leaders on the flimsiest of charges.” Instead, the process of clergy discipline has been made much more similar to codes of ethics and professional conduct used in other professions in American society.

The new Title IV has caused some consternation in the Church, largely because clergy discipline is an issue laden with emotions and often unpleasant to think about in even the best of circumstances. In some ways it does make clergy more vulnerable, since it is arguable that living up to a code is always more difficult than avoiding particular offenses; and clergy against whom complaints are made must always tell their sides of the story, effectively meaning that clergy cannot “plead the fifth” in church complaints. But overall the new Title IV is intended to make the process of clergy discipline more transparent, more open, and more pastoral -- not to concentrate power in the top levels of hierarchy.

While it will take the Church some time to live into these new canons, and to learn the best ways to bring pastoral outcomes out of misconduct situations, I think the new Title IV is in fact a step forward, and is a better reflection of the covenant of trust our Church wishes to build up between people and their leaders.

The Last Supper and the Seder

2011-04-19T08:52:00.000-07:00

A professor at Cambridge has published a new book in which he argues that Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples took place on the Wednesday before Easter, not the Thursday, as church tradition has long taught. He bases his arguments on astronomical calculations and an ancient variant calendar that seems to have originated in Egypt, concluding that Jesus held his seder one day earlier than the official Jerusalem calendar would have called for. Books of this sort of scholarly speculation appear fairly regularly. But in this case the secular press, with its typical taste for controversy, has seized on the book as a potential challenge to the observances of Holy Week, and is making hay of it as another example of how churches Get It Wrong.

This is, to my mind, an excellent example of the silliness of trying to take the Bible too literally. The four canonical gospel accounts of the Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Jesus' death and resurrection vary in many details. It has long been known that Matthew, Mark, and Luke present the Last Supper as a Passover seder and John does not. There's nothing new there. The Synoptics present it as a seder because they have a thematic and theological interest in showing how Jesus reinterprets the bread and cup of the seder meal to refer to the new covenant in his blood. John famously presents the meal as not a seder -- there is no institution of the Eucharist, no bread and cup at all, in John's Last Supper -- because he has a thematic and theological interest in narrating how Jesus dies on the cross at the very moment the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple. John's theological interest is not to show that Jesus reinterprets anew the Passover meal, but that Jesus is the new Passover meal (he earlier identified Jesus as the Bread of Life as well). It is directly connected to the verse in John 1:29 where John the Baptist identifies Jesus as the Lamb of God: Jesus as Lamb is a theme that runs through the entire gospel, and reaches its climax at his death on the cross. To John, the identification of Jesus as Lamb is far more important than the repurposing of the seder. The Synoptics, on the other hand, do not have John's theological focus on demonstrating that Jesus is the embodiment of the traditional symbols; to them, it is far more important to show how Jesus redirects the symbols to point to the reign of God rather than the Mosaic covenant. So for them it makes theological sense to stress that Communion is based on the seder, and they narrate accordingly. (It may also be significant that Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11:23-25, the oldest textual account of the institution of the Eucharist, makes no mention of it being a seder.) The point is that the identification of the Supper as seder or not is driven by theological, not historical, concerns. What all four (and Paul) agree on is the central point that Jesus died and was raised at Passover. That is enough.

So for a 21st century metallurgist to say that an Egyptian offshoot calendar can account for how Jesus could have had a seder on Wednesday rather than Thursday, so that all four gospels can be historically accurate, is, to my mind, simply missing the point. It is treating the gospels' carefully crafted theological symbolism with all the nuanced understanding of a baseball bat. I'd rather let the symbols be symbols, and the difference be a difference, and thank God for the richness of meaning in our communion with our Lord.

And don't even get me started on the conundrums hidden in the assumption that the date of Jesus' passion can be assigned confidently to 33 CE!

Monday in the Fifth Week of Lent

2011-04-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him." (John 9:1-3)

These verses are the beginning of an extended story about the healing of the man born blind, which gradually unfolds from the physical into a story about spiritual blindness and insight. At the very outset, however, there is this little exchange between Jesus and the disciples; it is almost a throwaway line in its context, but it poses an important question all by itself.

The disciples want to know what sin caused the man to be born blind. In their general way of thinking, illness and disability are the result of sin, they are the concrete forms taken by God's punishment for wrongdoing. But this man has been blind from birth. He could not have sinned in the womb, could he? So why then was he punished with blindness? Perhaps he is being punished for his parents' sins. Moses certainly talked about punishment for sin being visited on children and children's children. But then the prophet Ezekiel had changed that, specifically hearing God say that from then on "the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die" (Ezekiel 18:4). So, strictly speaking, it would go against the teachings of the prophets to assume this man was born blind because his parents had sinned. So the disciples are faced with a quandary: If this man's blindness is a punishment for sin, then what sin could possibly have warranted this punishment?

They can't figure this conundrum out. So they ask their teacher, "Rabbi, who sinned? Who's to blame for this man's blindness?"

Jesus' answer to them turns the whole query on its head. Instead of satisfying their curiosity about who to blame, Jesus tells them they are asking the wrong question in the first place. This man's blindness isn't the result of wrongdoing, but instead it is a preparation for glory. They want to know what thing in the past has caused this situation; Jesus tells them that what they should be looking for is what future God will bring from it. Instead of asking "What bad caused this?", Jesus makes the question "What good will God bring out of it?"

How often when we are confronted with disease and disaster are our first questions "What caused this?" and "Who is to blame?" It is as if we expect to find some emotional comfort from being able to assign responsibility, or we think we can control something and keep it from happening again if we can puzzle out the cause. And often that is true: knowing a certain drug causes birth defects, for instance, means we can know not to prescribe that drug, and further suffering can be prevented. But sometimes I think the urge to assign responsibility and figure out blame can become a red herring: we can spend so much energy trying to figure out why a bad thing happened that we become virtually blind to the good things that could and should be done to heal and cure the situation. Too often, I think, we can be like the disciples, asking "Who sinned?", when what God really wants for us is to be asking "What good will God bring forth from this?"

I think it can be a form of spiritual discipline to train our minds to ask the question "What good will God do here?" whenever we are faced with a situation of pain or grief or loss or disaster. Along with the necessary, practical questions about causes and effects, we can ask spiritual questions about purpose, about the end to be served, about the compassion and love and healing that can be revealed even in the worst of situations. And, asking that question, we can also ask "How can we be co-creators with God, to do God's work of revealing love and compassion even here?"

What insight into transforming loss into love will you be open to today?

Thursday in the Fourth Week of Lent

2011-04-07T04:53:00.000-07:00

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:22-23)

Living in the first-century Hellenistic world, Paul had no inkling of the Darwinian theory of evolution, nor of our contemporary scientific view that the universe began in a hot big bang and has been evolving into more complex and interesting forms ever since. But Paul did have something much of the Hellenistic world lacked, something that makes his thought closer to our own: a sense of the future, a sense that the universe is going somewhere, a sense that the universe is bringing forth something new and not just an eternal return of the same cycle of ages and epochs. Some historians suggest that one of the reasons Christianity caught on in the ancient world (along with its practice of radical hospitality) was that it gave people a hope for the future in place of an expectation of unending repetition. Paul says the creation is "groaning in labor pains," and that image of birth, even though it involves struggle and pain, that image of birth implies hope for something new in the world.

And Paul clearly ties that something new to the work of the Spirit. The Spirit, the immanent and active empowering and unifying power of God, is, Paul asserts, involved in the world now in a new way, and that new way has transformative potential for the whole universe. "We ourselves," Paul says, we followers of Jesus, "have the first fruits of the Spirit" — that is, we have in ourselves the beginnings of transformation in a new relational way of living that can change everything. Because of Jesus, because of the embodiment of divine Word and Wisdom in the human life of Jesus, because of Jesus’ faithful living-out of God’s purposes for him, because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, a new way has been opened up for the Spirit to enter into the very constitution of human life, a new way has been created for human spirit and Holy Spirit to synergize in enacting divine ideals of justice and peace and compassion and love in the very concrete and down-to-earth activities of human life. The Spirit empowers us to share with God the very same kind of relationship that Jesus has with God, so that, like Jesus, we can become agents and instruments of God’s love in the world.

This is not yet a fully accomplished transformation: we have just the “first fruits,” we are still “groaning” inwardly as we await the full new birth. But something new is already happening in us, and we can bring that newness to bear in the work of helping the universe itself in its labor of new birth. Relationships of justice and peace and compassion and love begun among us by the Spirit can and must be extended and enlarged, by the Spirit’s empowerment, to embrace all sorts and conditions of people and places and creatures and environments and ecosystems and even the most fundamental processes by which we exist in the world. We, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, are called to be midwives of the universe in labor to give birth to the New Creation.

That’s all very grand and cosmic — but it’s also very personal. We participate in the New Creation with every moment of our personal experience. When you speak to someone, that is a creative act. When you choose how to respond to someone’s emotions, with compassion or caring or anger or indifference or rejection or patience, that is a creative act. When you open your eyes and look at the scene in front of you, and your brain assembles thousands of nerve impulses into a visual image, and your preconscious mind connects the image to memories of other images and provides an identity and a context for what you’re seeing, and your emotional infrastructure provides feelings and responses and likes and dislikes and flights and fights and attractions and affections for what you’re seeing, and the whole thing comes to your consciousness as a world to be part of — that is a creative act. And the Spirit also enters into that creative act, lifting our perspectives beyond our own immediate horizons, and empowering us to respond with capacities for love beyond what we thought we were capable of. We midwife the New Creation in every moment, and out of those moments we, with the Spirit, build the transformation of personality, and community, and society, and ecology, and everything.

What new bit of the future, what first fruits of the New Creation will you birth today?

Tuesday in the Fourth Week of Lent

2011-04-05T12:19:00.000-07:00

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Romans 7:15, 19)

In these two verses, Paul captures the very heart of the Christian idea of sin. In its most genuine meaning, sin is more that just breaking the rules, more than just transgressing God's commandments, more than doing things we know we're not "supposed" to do even though we think they're fun. In its most genuine meaning, sin is the experience of not being able to do the good things we really do want to do. Sin is a kind of fracture within ourselves, an alienation from our own best selves, the inescapable sense that no matter how hard we try we just can't seem to act with the good motives and characteristics and outcomes we truly desire. Sin is not about some high-up, far-off, distant vengeful god watching to catch us when we trip over some arcane rule and punish us for every minor infraction. Sin is about our own bafflement that even our best intentions, even our wisest aspirations, even our most generous impulses, so often go awry, so often fail to live up to the love we mean them to be.

And that means, in turn, that repentance and forgiveness of sin is about more than just God letting us off the hook for the rules we've broken, more than just God deciding not to punish us even though we "deserve" it. The word "forgive" is built on the word "give": forgiveness of sin is an act of giving, a generosity to make up for the failings and inadequacies of our good intentions that miss their mark. God's forgiveness is a gift of wisdom to help us understand our own actions, a gift strength that is greater than our own to do the good we want. The repentance we practice in Lent is much more than beating ourselves up for the bad things we've done, but instead is a discipline of opening ourselves up and preparing to receive the gift of God's forgiveness, the strength and wisdom and love that makes life new.

How will you understand what you do -- and do what you truly want -- today?

Monday in the Fourth Week of Lent

2011-04-04T06:33:00.000-07:00

One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. (John 6:8-11)

Two thoughts:

First thought: The boy had five loaves of bread, about the size of a modern pita, not the size of a loaf of Wonder Bread, and there were five thousand people there. Offering his five loaves to Jesus to share with the people was a silly thing to do. There was no way it would be enough, no way it would be anywhere near enough. A more sophisticated, more rational, more grown-up person would have known better than to have made the offer. But this naive child doesn't think the matter through; he gives what he has to give, even though it's nowhere near enough; and Jesus, also not limited by conventional rationality, takes it, and blesses it, and makes it enough.

Second thought: The boy had five barley loaves. Barley bread was poor people's bread. It was what you baked when you couldn't get wheat. It was ordinary -- it was less than ordinary. A more sophisticated, more rational, more grown-up person would have known better than to have offered barley bread to someone as important as Jesus, someone who had the public recognition and growing reputation that Jesus had. It's embarrassing. But this naive child doesn't know enough to be embarrassed by the poverty of his gift; he gives what he has to give, even though it's not good enough; and Jesus takes it, and blesses it, and makes it good enough.

Lent is a time for repentance, a time to be aware that we are not all we could be, a time to be mindful of the faults and failings and frailties that hinder and undercut our better aspirations. But we cultivate that mindfulness in Lent not to feel bad about ourselves or beat our breasts for our inadequacy: we cultivate that mindfulness in Lent so that we can open up our inadequacies to the possibility of blessing. Like five barley loaves, too little and too poor, we bring ourselves to Jesus; and Jesus takes us, and blesses us, and makes us more than we could be on our own, makes us enough to do the work of love.

What barley loaves will you offer Jesus for the sake of love today?

Sunday in the Fourth Week of Lent

2011-04-03T05:16:00.000-07:00

The Pharisees came and began to argue with Jesus, asking him for a sign from heaven, to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.” (Mark 8:11-12)

Why do we ask for signs? For guidance. For reassurance. As markers that we’re on the right path. Signs can come in many forms. Sometimes they are as obvious as voices from heaven. Sometimes they are subtler: a thought, an intuition, a synchronicity, a word from a friend at just the right moment. Sometimes when I am trying to make a particularly important decision I look for the sign: after all the rational analysis and weighing of pros and cons and careful balancing of factors I wait for the intuitive “click,” or the significant coincidence, or the gut feeling that one option is just right — the suprarational sign of guidance for that moment.

But the Pharisees who come to Jesus are looking for a sign for a different reason. They seek a sign “to test him.” They want proof — irrefutable, incontestable, unquestionable proof — that Jesus is acting on behalf of God. They want something that will make them believe that Jesus is doing what God wants done in the things he does and the precepts he teaches and his (to them) radical notion that devotion to the reign of God made manifest in love of God and love of neighbor is more important than devotion to Torah. They want a sign to make them believe.

There’s just one problem: signs don’t work that way. Signs can’t force belief, but instead function within an already existing system of significant relationship. That’s true not only of religious signs, but of all kinds of signs. These words you’re reading, for instance: they are, on one level, nothing but glowing pixels, nothing but a series of shapes and squiggles against a background field. The shapes and squiggles on their own can’t communicate anything to you. But you are reading them and understanding them (I presume) because you and I share a relationship as speakers of English. It is the existing system of word-meanings, and the metaphorical power of meanings to connect with and point to deeper and wider and more suggestive meanings, and the presumption of trust that I am trying to say something and you are trying to understand it, that make all these shapes and squiggles come together to signify, to point to, a reality that is bigger than they are on their own. These word-signs can’t make you understand anything; but because you begin with a basic belief that they say something, they may have the power to point you to a new understanding that wasn’t in you before.

It is the same with religious signs. Miracles, healings, voices from heaven, intuitions, visions, feelings of transcendence, multiplications of loaves and fishes, rising from the dead — they can’t compel belief in anyone. They function as signs, they point to special meanings, because they function within an already existing system of relationships. The sign cannot prove the relationship, but the relationship is revealed in the sign. If you hold back from the relationship, if you’re not willing to attempt the relationship even provisionally, even experimentally — then you’ll never understand the sign. Jesus says no sign will be given to the Pharisees, not because he refuses to give it, but because they refuse to try to believe him, even to experiment with believing him, and so they refuse to receive it.

Christians believe that our primary relationship, the relationship in which all other relationships are comprehended and sustained, is our relationship with God, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” That fundamental relationship is what gives the potential of significance to everything else we say and do and feel and experience. In a sense, therefore, our lives are surrounded by signs, the very texture of every momentary experience is filled with factors that point beyond themselves to the love of God. That can’t be proven to someone who chooses not to experiment with experiencing life that way; these aren’t signs by which we test what we are willing to believe. But these are signs that reveal the reality of relationship in God that is always already there.

One of the purposes of the disciplines of Lent is to sharpen our ability to read the signs of everyday experience. Prayer, fasting, giving, reading and meditating on God’s holy Word — all of these build up our awareness of our foundational relationship with God, the ultimate context in which even the most ordinary things become signs that point beyond themselves to extraordinary love. That can be Lent’s gift of wonder and joy.

What signs will you seek today?

Sunday in the Third Week of Lent

2011-03-27T05:36:00.000-07:00

Jesus said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.” (Mark 5:19)

Almost every story of miraculous healing in Mark's gospel ends with Jesus sternly warning the healed person not to tell anyone what has happened. When the healing involves an exorcism, Jesus commands the unclean spirits not to say anything about him, because they recognize who he is on the spiritual plane. But not this story. This story of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac in the fifth chapter of Mark ends with this unusual note of Jesus telling the healed man to go home, to go to his friends, and to tell them all about how much the Lord has done for him, and the mercy he has received.

Many commentators on Mark say that this feature of Jesus telling people and spirits not to talk about him -- formally called "the Messianic secret" -- has to do with Mark the evangelist trying to tell his own community something important about their faith. Commentators theorize that Mark's community looked to Jesus as a wonderworker, a figure of power who could in turn save them by granting them power. Mark, however, understood Jesus' obedience to God's will, even to the point of crucifixion, as being the center of his saving work; and he wanted to turn his community's attention less toward deeds of power and more toward the work of obedience in their own lives. So he wrote his story of Jesus in such a way as to show Jesus caring less about power than about discipleship, so that his congregation, too, would care about their discipleship. That's why Mark's Jesus doesn't want people who've experienced his power to talk about his power.

Except for the Gerasene man who had been possessed by a "Legion" of demons. He is directed to go tell all his friends. Why?

Perhaps it is because this miracle of Jesus is less about power than it is about gentleness. Mark goes out of his way to say how strong the man with the legion is: the demons give him supernatural strength, so that no one can subdue him; his neighbors try to restrain him but he gets away; they try to chain him but he bursts the chains; the demons give him so much power that it has no place to go, but the man sits in the tombs and howls and bruises himself with stones. But when Jesus meets him, he doesn't try to overpower him or subdue him or restrain him. Jesus meets him with mercy, with assurance, with gentleness. When the neighbors come running up, they find the man sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, calm, gentle, intent, aware. (Jesus even shows gentleness and mercy with the legion of demons: when they state their fear that Jesus will torment them, he gives them permission to leave the man of their own accord, not to be driven out, and to go instead into a herd of pigs; unfortunately for the demons (and for the pigs) their addiction to abusive strength overpowers the pigs and turns them self-destructive, too; they rush down the steep bank in a frenzy and drown themselves in the lake.) Jesus meets power with gentleness, and his mercy draws forth an answering mercy, and the man is healed.

How often do we attempt to meet strength with strength? How often are we tempted to oppose power with power of our own? Could we instead learn from Jesus that strength will spend itself, and that we can respond with the gentleness that endures? That is a lesson that Mark could endorse for his congregation, and that needed no secret to redirect it. That is an invitation to us all to know -- and to tell -- the mercy God has shown us.

Friday in the Second Week of Lent

2011-03-25T07:25:00.000-07:00

Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look around and take note! Search its squares and see if you can find one person who acts justly and seeks truth— so that I may pardon Jerusalem. (Jeremiah 5:1)

The prophet Jeremiah hears God calling him, begging him, to run through the streets of the city looking for one person, just one person, who is just and truthful, so that God can pardon the entire city and save it from the destruction that is to come. It is a picture of a God who wants desperately to save the people, who seeks in the people even the smallest opening of justice and truth through which to enter their hearts and their actions and transform them.

So often we picture God as strict and vengeful -- sometimes downright mean! -- sitting up in heaven and watching our every action, waiting to see if we infringe the commandments, implacably punishing for the merest of sins. So often opponents of Christianity picture Christians as joyless, fun-hating control freaks who use the threat of divine punishment to enforce rules and regulations that stifle freedom and creativity. Somehow we get in our minds the picture of God as eager to punish, and ourselves as fearful of that punishment.

But how different is Jeremiah's picture here! It's as if this God is looking for the barest excuse to avert punishment, the merest pretext for pardon. One just and truthful person could rescue the entire population! Even more importantly, the thing that deserves punishment here is not just "breaking the rules," not just an infringement of a juridical code. It is lack of justice, lack of right relationships, failure to be truthful, dishonesty, illusion, hypocrisy. God doesn't look for obedience to rules so much as integrity of heart. And the destruction that lurks is not so much punishment for infraction as it is self-destruction, disintegration from within of the person and the people who will not seek right relationship and who refuse to acknowledge reality. God sends Jeremiah to look for one instance of right relationship and true compassion, so that through that opening God can enter to inspire and transform the entire people. That is how eager God is to save.

What openings of justice and truth can we give God to enter our lives and transform us this day?

Wednesday in the Second Week of Lent

2011-03-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:5-6)

On the face of it, this seems like an absurd question from Jesus -- "Do you want to be made well?" Of course he does! He's been ill for 38 years, and he is sitting at the edge of a pool in the streets of Jerusalem that has a reputation for curative powers in its water. Why else would he be there, than wanting to be made well? Why would Jesus even ask the question?

Because what we think we want what we say we want and what we really want aren't always the same thing. There is a silly scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian which, for all its silliness, makes a point: a man who has been ill and has been a beggar for years is healed; but once he's not ill anymore, neither can he beg anymore; and in the aftermath he resents his healing because now he's going to have to work. Somewhat more seriously, there is that famous (or infamous) prayer of St Augustine in his youth: "Lord, make me chaste -- but not yet." Both reveal a gap between the wellness and healing and integrity they say they want, and the less healthful, less salutory and salvific, aspects of what they really want.

Do we want to be made well? Wholeness and integrity and commitment to mutual well-being don't just happen. Inspired by God, assisted by God's grace, these are things we must yet work out in our own selves -- and the work can get hard. It can be so easy to let our weaknesses, our failures, our shortcomings become excuses for not working for wholeness and integrity and unity of intention and action in our lives, so that we find it more attractive to stay ill than to be made well. But Jesus continues to ask "Do you want to be made well?", and he continues to offer the healing grace that opens us up to a process of growing more whole, more actualized, more loving.

Lent is a good time to ask yourself "Do I want to be made well?", and to be honest about the answer.

Tuesday in the Second Week of Lent

2011-03-22T14:43:00.000-07:00

"Thus says the Lord: What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?" (Jeremiah 2:5)

"... they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator." (Romans 1:25)

These lines from Jeremiah and from Romans come from very different historical periods, speak of very different social situations, and address themselves to very different audiences. But they both point to one psychospiritual truth: We become like what we worship. Our English word "worship" is actually a contraction of the older word "worth-ship"; it points to what we experience as valuable, what is truly important to us, that toward which we would orient our actions and our emotions. The act of worship is an expression of what we value, and at the same time is a dynamic experience of that value. The act of worship takes what we value and raises it up to a level where we can be conscious and intentional about it, so that we can in turn replicate its core value in our own acts and works and lives. In that way we become like what we worship.

What Jeremiah and Paul warn about is what happens when we worship that which is not worthy of worship. When we "go after worthless things," when we "exchange truth for a lie," then we become like those things. We spend our time and energy chasing after possessions or power or prestige that, in the end, cannot satisfy our real longings. We build personas and social masks that dissemble our true selves, and end up living a lie. We lose touch with the core of creativity which our Creator shares with us, and become something less than the full selves our Lover wants us to be.

The Lenten discipline of repentance is about turning away from worthless things and lies, recognizing how our going after them diminishes us, and turning again to the true worship that helps us become like the One who creates us. Prayer expresses the core value of Love -- God's love for us, our love for God, our godly love for each other -- and in expressing it gives us also a living experience of Love. As we worship Love, we grow more loving ourselves. We become like what we worship.

How have you turned from what is worthless and worshiped Love today?

Monday in the Second Week of Lent

2011-03-21T06:35:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile the disciples were urging Jesus, "Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about." So the disciples said to one another, "Surely no one has brought him something to eat?" Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work." (John 4:31-34)

The Gospel of John is full of little invitations (and many big invitations, too) to see things with "binocular vision" -- that is, to perceive very ordinary, everyday things in their material presence and also simultaneously in their spiritual relationships. In these verses -- almost a throwaway exchange between Jesus and his disciples in the middle of the extended story of the Samaritan woman at the well -- the material/spiritual nexus is around the offer of food. Jesus has been traveling; he hasn't eaten for some time; he is tired from his journey; and while Jesus rests by the well the disciples go into town to buy food. That's all established in the narrative at the beginning of the chapter. But when the disciples return in verse 27, after Jesus has been talking with the woman about well water and running water and water of life -- another "binocular" conversation -- Jesus, instead of taking the food right away, speaks to them of the nourishment that comes from doing the work God has sent him to do. Jesus is here inviting the disciples to see their food with binocular vision: to see it not only as body-fuel, but also as an access of energy to do God's creative work in their material environment; to perceive the flavor not only as an aesthetic experience of taste, but also as an occasion for gratitude; to enjoy the companionship (literally, "bread-togetherness") of the meal not only as a social exchange, but also as a moment of communion in right relationship with each other and with God. Jesus encourages the disciples to perceive their material food as embedded in a whole web of relationships that carries deep spiritual meaning, and so to be nourished in both body and spirit.

One of the purposes of the Lenten discipline of fasting and abstaining from certain foods is to help us be more mindful of what and how we do eat. Perhaps that discipline can also help us see our food with binocular vision, and be nourished in doing God's work in our lives.

Friday in the First Week of Lent

2011-03-18T05:14:00.000-07:00

Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16)

When I think of someone approaching to ask for mercy, what I usually picture is that person bent down, with head bowed, approaching tentatively, in a classic "humble suppliant" posture. Asking for mercy, for compassion, for forgiveness, is hard, it requires of us that we admit that we're wrong -- something a lot of us don't like to do -- and it requires of us that we admit we have no control over whether the other will forgive or not -- something a lot of us like even less. Admitting our own weakness and the other's strength is a dicey thing for a lot of us; and it's something we feel, perhaps, we can best accomplish if we pose the part, adopting a humble tentativeness. And the pose is all the more genuine when we feel an actual fear that the other may not forgive, may not answer our approach with mercy -- and there's nothing we can do about that.

But the Letter to the Hebrews says we should approach God's throne of grace with boldness. Not with heads bowed and backs bent, not like abject suppliants, but with boldness. In the verses preceding, the author has pointed out that Jesus, our high priest in the rite of forgiveness, has been tempted in every way as we are, so he knows how hard it is to be human, and he therefore feels with us as we feel the need for mercy and grace. We do not need to beg from Christ something Christ is unwilling to give; therefore, when we approach his throne of grace, we do not need to come as fearful, tentative suppliants; we come as sisters and brothers. We can be unafraid to approach, because the mercy we seek is already evident in the invitation to come. We can approach with boldness.

Self-examination and repentance -- really looking at our own weaknesses and failures -- is one of the traditional spiritual disciplines of Lent. Psychologically, it's easy to expect that such an uncompromising look at our darker sides could make us cringe a little, bow our heads, draw into ourselves to make sure no one else sees that weakness. But the counsel of Hebrews is to stand up straight, to admit the truth without fear, to be bold in accepting who and what we really are, good and bad -- because in that acceptance is also revealed the acceptance of the one who has gone through what we go through, and who offers grace to help in time of need. The grace to transcend our failures and take them up into new possibilities for greater good can only come to those who are bold enough to ask with confidence.

This Lent, be bold.

Thursday in the First Week of Lent

2011-03-17T05:02:00.000-07:00

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16)

This is it: the Gospel in one sentence, the Summary Statement, the one that people quote via chapter and verse reference on license plates and tee shirts and signs held up on camera at football games. Everything you need to know about the Christian message is here.

Which of course means that there is far more going on here than first meets the eye. The sentence seems direct and self-evident enough. But there are words here that have depths and nuances and extended clouds of meanings that defy too-easy definition: love, gave, believe, perish, eternal, life. Or, for that matter, God and Son. Each of these words points to relationships and relationships of relationships that can link up in different ways.

For instance, many people interpret this verse to mean that God "gave" his Son Jesus to die for us, to be the substitutionary atonement for our sins, to pay the price that we ourselves are too weak or too sinful to pay, so that God's wrath could be appeased; and that by "believing" that this substitution has been made, Christians are now freed from the death-sentence of sin so that we will not "perish" but have "eternal life" in heaven.

Others interpret this verse to mean that God "gave" his Son to live for us, to be the incarnation of the divine Wisdom and Word, to demonstrate in his own body and activity what a human life lived with divine love looks like. We in our turn "believe" in that divinely lived human life, not simply by accepting assertions about it as true even if we can't prove them, which is what we often mean by the word "believe," but by doing our best to live that way ourselves, by "believing in" the example of Jesus' life to the degree that we let its core values become our core values too. Living our lives with Christly core values puts us in touch with "eternal" realities in the heart of God, God's own love and generosity and creativity that are always and everywhere at work, through all the changes of time and space and temporal process, always expressed in ways appropriate to just that moment and just that experience. To live in touch with eternal divine activity means that we become self-transcending: in each and every moment of our experience there is something that transcends the moment, something not simply limited to the moment, something that enters into the world around us and God around everything and carries on the divinely inspired love and creativity of the moment. That self-transcendence saves us from "perishing," as the moments of our lives enter more and more into God. "Eternal life" in this sense is not just something for heaven after we die, but a quality of God-presence we enjoy and share in thick of this life.

And the root of it all is love: "God so loved the world that he gave his Son." Love is that which transcends the perishing of the moment and opens the way to living in eternal divine reality. The Gospel in one sentence comes down, I think, even to one word, noun, verb, and imperative all at once: Love.

Wednesday in the First Week of Lent

2011-03-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

"For we have become partners of Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end. As it is said, 'Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.'" (Hebrews 3:14-15)

I'm struck by the phrase "partners of Christ." I think sometimes Christians regard Jesus as being superhuman, as having powers and abilities far beyond our own, as perfect before God in a way we could never be. Jesus plays a unique role in God's work of salvation, to be sure. But I think that regarding Jesus as superhuman in the long run does a disservice to the Good News. It puts Christ on a pedestal, as it were, so that our notion of him becomes so high and mighty that we can see no real connection between him and us. At the same time, it encourages us to regard ourselves as completely passive, as sinful and unable to do any good, as mere recipients of the good that Jesus does on our behalf before God -- and again we can see no real connection between him and us. But creating a living connection between him and us is the reason Christ became incarnate: bridging the gap between human and divine is the reason Jesus lives. So thinking of Jesus as exclusive Savior and ourselves as passive recipients of salvation ends up actually undercutting the purpose of Jesus' life and ministry and death and resurrection.

But the picture is very different if we think of ourselves as "partners of Christ." By the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we actually and actively take part in the work of Christ, we are empowered and enabled to do as Jesus does and love as Jesus loves and live as Jesus lives. Provided that we do not harden our hearts, provided that we open ourselves to the deep and uncompromising love Jesus reveals, then by participating in that love we also become workers of divine works.

How will you be a partner of Christ in what you do today?

Monday in the First Week of Lent

2011-03-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

"Do not say to yourself, 'My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.' But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth." (Deuteronomy 8:17-18)

This passage for today intrigues me because it doesn't speak just about wealth, stuff, money, possessions -- but it speaks of the power to get wealth. It is not just about the material objects, but about the activity that produces the material objects. The things we count as valuable don't just have their value in a vacuum: they have value because we assign meaning to them, or we put effort into them, or we recognize that they are useful for meeting needs and sustaining life. A dollar bill is just a slip of paper; but it is invested with a powerful instrumental symbolism for conducting transactions in our economic system, so we count it as wealth -- or a little bit of wealth, at least. We can get so caught up in the attaining, trading, keeping, and increasing of our objects of wealth that we forget these objects have value in the first place because of a psychosociospiritual act that creates their value. And that spiritual act is rooted in God: it is God the Creator who creates us as creative beings, who in our turn can create meaning and value in the things of our material culture. Creating value is something God does first, and then God does in us, so that we can do it with things. Deuteronomy warns us that we forget that at our peril. A Lenten discipline of simplicity and self-denial can help us refocus our attention less on the things themselves and more on the spiritual act of creativity, grounded in God, that is the source of value.

First Saturday in Lent

2011-03-12T07:31:00.000-08:00

"Philip found Nathanael and said to him, 'We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.' Nathanael said to him, 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' Philip said to him, 'Come and see.'" (John 1:45-46)

When Nathanael questioned Philip's religious belief and commitment, Philip did not argue or explain or attempt to persuade him. He just invited him to come and try for himself the experience that meant something to Philip. Too much time and energy is spent these days, I think, arguing and explaining and persuading about Christianity, when what matters is the quality of the experience. Churches and creeds and ceremonies are intended to help us to love God and to love our neighbors -- that's it. Because our notion of "love" is often superficial, and because we are often overly selective about who we will consider a "neighbor," and because we can adopt some very silly notions about God, it is often the role of churches and creeds and ceremonies to call us out of ourselves, to set goals before us that are greater than those we'd choose for ourselves -- and that can often be less than comfortable. So the Christian experience can be demanding, and sometimes that comes off to people as being authoritarian or guilt-inducing or controlling, especially to people who do not "come and see," who do not enter into the experience but only observe it from the outside. And sometimes churches and creeds and ceremonies forget their own central purpose of love, and become actually controlling and repressive, and then they need to be reformed. But things like the fasting and self-denial and discipline of Lent, which can look so negative from the outside, are at root only about learning to love, clearing away the distractions so that we can love God and love our neighbors more genuinely. And that is something best understood by experience, not by arguing or explaining or persuading. That's why the great invitation of Lent is to "come and see."

First Friday in Lent

2011-03-11T04:21:00.000-08:00

Andrew son of John was a disciple of John the Baptist. One day Andrew was standing near John when Jesus walked by, and John said "There is the Lamb of God." Andrew and another disciple went after Jesus; and when Jesus saw them he turned and said "What are you looking for?" (John 1:35-38). That is the question, isn't it? What are we looking for? What do we want? What ambitions drive us, what fears do we want to avoid, what imaginations shape us, what aspirations lift us higher than we thought we were capable of? What are we looking for? The purpose of fasting and self-denial in Lent is to set aside some of the things with which we habitually satisfy our desires, so that the desires themselves can come more clearly into view, so that we know more consciously what it is that we want. Fasting and self-denial is a way to hear Jesus ask us "What are you looking for?" If we take that question seriously, we may be better able to tell if what we are looking for in life is also what God is looking for in us.

First Thursday of Lent

2011-03-10T04:14:00.000-08:00

Titus 1:15, "To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure." Through Lenten discipline we work to purify our own hearts, to let go of addictions and illusions and compulsions, to see ourselves as we are and as we are in God. The more we can see ourselves in truth, the more we can see the things around us in truth, the more we see things as they are and not just as our desires color them. Then we see all things as pure -- neither temptations nor threats nor fears -- but facts to be engaged as we do the work God gives us to do.

Ash Wednesday

2011-03-09T06:41:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 57:16, "I will not continually accuse, nor will I always be angry; for then the spirits would grow faint before me, even the souls that I have made." Remember that the purpose of Lent is not to feel bad about ourselves or our sins, but to come closer to the God who does not want our spirits to grow faint.

Home. Again.

2011-01-22T11:20:00.000-08:00

A journey isn't really over until you're home again. And if you've taken a real journey, "home" isn't the same as when you left it, because you aren't the same as when you left. The final step of a true journey is not just getting home but being home, the step of integrating what you've experienced with where you live day-by-day.

So what's the final step of this journey?

Before I left, I said that I wanted to make this trip about being at prayer. I failed. That's not to say I didn't pray -- I said plenty of prayers, aloud when asked, silently when not. But I'd written before we left about prayer being a disposition of the soul, an opening of the spirit to a sacramental, "binocular" vision of outward and visible things radiant with inward and spiritual lights. I'd wanted to dispose myself to such prayer as much as I could on this trip. I couldn't do it -- or at least I couldn't do it as consistently as I had hoped. Sometimes the shovelful of dirt was just a shovelful of dirt, not a finite echo of the infinite creating Word; sometimes the good meal was just body fuel, not a gift of God; sometimes the work team was just a bunch of gabby, crabby people, not a gracefully functioning limb of the Body of Christ. There were sacramental moments, to be sure: listening to Oakley and Olman conversing in Spanish as we drove to Agua Caliente, not understanding a word they said (well, maybe one or two words) but hearing so very clearly the friendship and affection and genuine joy that passed between them; watching a large rock crack under my iron bar and having the sudden feeling that I could see the whole crystal geometry of the stone revealed in a single moment; even the feeling of some genuine hunger, some real appetite, after having been sick, and recognizing it as a touch of healing grace. The trip was not without its epiphanies. But they were fewer than I'd hoped for, my vision was more occluded than I'd imagined, my soul was not so well disposed as I'd intended.

I suppose that should be no surprise. Sacramental awareness is something saints strive for years to awaken. Like Zen mindfulness or yoga suppleness, sacramental awareness is the fruit of long and regular practice; it can't just be turned on and off like a switch. And even with years of practice, as I've had in the church, sacramental awareness must still be cultivated, awakened, invited, as a matter of intention -- it's not just automatic, like a reflex, but is something to which the mind and soul and spirit must be intentionally attuned. And that attunement happens more readily -- not automatically, but more readily -- when you take time for the practices that cultivate it.

For me, one of those practices is taking time alone with my thoughts. I am very introverted, as psychologists measure these things, and I know that if I don't get a certain amount of alone-time each day I begin to get twitchy. Alone-time is not easy to find on a worksite or a bus or a double-occupancy hotel room (even when the other occupant is one's own best beloved), and when the wee hours of morning and nighttime are blanked out by exhaustion. Without quiet time just to attend to the texture of my experience, that experience tends to get away from me, I tend to become too submerged in the rapid flux of feeling, and flashes of impatience, interest, irritation, humor, annoyance, wonder, fatigue, tend to drive me more than me integrating them. I'm sure there were times on this trip when the other mission trippers felt I was being antisocial or distant or just plain ornery, when really all I was was doing was trying to get a little quiet in my soul. And for me, getting submerged in the flux of feeling is a sure way to lose sight of the sacramental dimension of things: the inward and spiritual grace can only shine through if the mind and will and appetites are not too consumed by and attached to the outward and visible things. I am reminded (again, always again) that part of my prayer practice must always be getting time alone just to rise up a bit from the flux of experience and attend to it as it flows by.

And when I can, as it were, sit on the riverbank like Hesse's Siddhartha and observe my experience flow by, something else reveals itself as well. It's that even though the surface features of experience may be jangling or discordant or mismatched -- even painful -- down deeper there is a steadiness, a coordination, a harmony, that comprehends the elements and guides them toward some wholeness. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in "God's Grandeur" -- that sacramental sonnet par excellence -- "there is the dearest freshness deep down things"; Alfred North Whitehead speaks of religion originating in the experience of "a character of permanent rightness inherent in the nature of things"; even Hamlet says "There is a power that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." I believe that to be true, and I believe that to be God. Process theology teaches that every moment of reality begins and ends with God: God initiates each moment with an aim, a hope, a call, for what that moment can become; and when each moment becomes all it can and experiences itself in full, that fullness passes back into God as an element in God's ongoing and everlasting experience of the world. From this experience of the world-as-it-is, God shapes new aims and hopes and calls for the next generation of moments for the world-as-it-can-be. In this way the moments of the world and the outpouring of God are in a kind of constant dialogue, a perpetual exchange that constitutes Creation. It's all very cosmological; but it's very personal as well. The moments of my experience, disjointed as I might find them, form a thread -- a tiny thread perhaps, but a constitutive thread nonetheless -- in God's experience of the world. God is constantly looking at the world through my eyes, feeling the world through my feelings -- and everybody and everything else's too -- and pulling it all together into one whole harmonious reality. God makes me a partner in Creation, whether I know it or not; but I can be a much better partner when I know it, when I pay attention to the quality of the thoughts and feelings and experiences that flow through me, when I am aware of the ongoing dialogue of aims and fulfillments God is having with me, and when I intentionally do what I can to hold up my part of the conversation. Some of my most vivid prayer experiences have come under the image, not of me facing God and speaking, but of me beside God, both of us looking at the outward and visible things of the world, people and oceans and rocks and churches and mountains, and God guiding me to see and respond to the inward and spiritual grace. We sometimes describe Christian service as being God's hands and feet for acting in the world; we might equally well describe Christian prayer as being God's eyes and ears for feeling the world. That is also what it means to be God's witnesses. We can either grieve or delight the Holy Spirit of God with the quality of experience we pass on; we can be inspired and empowered by the experience of God within, shaping the thread of our moments toward compassion and love and beauty and peace and right relationship. That is, for me, the essence of prayer.

And that was the focus I could not consistently maintain on this trip. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. As T.S. Eliot said, "human kind cannot bear very much reality." And I can hardly be surprised that depth of experience doesn't come when I don't do the things that allow my experience to go deep. But God works in us for compassion and justice and peace, even when we're not aware of it; and we are carried on the prayers of others, even when our own prayers aren't as consistent as we'd like them to be. God was at work on this trip, in breaking rock to build a church, in bearing witness to the contrasts between beauty and poverty and strength and weakness, in doing manual labor that the local folks could have done faster and better but couldn't do because they had jobs and lives and survival of their own to attend to, in celebrating Eucharist in a half-finished church. God was there, in my hands and eyes and heart, and in everyone else's too -- and now that we're home, God is inviting me to learn from this trip how to be more attentive to God's calling, rejoicing, always-already-there presence. God is, again, calling me to pray.

Wrapping Up

2011-01-19T19:26:00.001-08:00

Today was our last day of work on this trip, and possibly our last day of work at this site. Oakley and Ted and Concepción and Olman have already discussed a new site we may well work on next year (these things can be somewhat fluid), in a barrio called San Pedrito up the hill from Copan. The youth will probably do some work at Santa Cruz when they come in June; but for the adult mission trippers, this was our last day on this site.

As workdays go it was much like the previous workdays: some people mixing cement, some flinging it on the walls as stucco, some breaking rocks on the back hillside. Can you guess which group I went with? We got a lot done, all the way around. The interior of the church is not entirely stuccoed, and it still has to be finished and polished before it can be painted; but when I looked inside at the midday break today, I was amazed how little of the wall was still bare cinderblock.

Meanwhile, out back, we picked and poked and chipped and levered and made big rocks into littler rocks and basically reshaped the hillside. The local congregation members will eventually build a retaining wall out back, to make sure the reshaped hillside stays in place; but from the perspective of one week's work, it's pretty surprising how much we dug out of that back section. Someone showed me a picture they'd taken on the first day; comparing that to how it looked this afternoon was quite a contrast! I'll post before and after pictures when I get a more reliable internet connection.

But we did more than work today — we also ate. Breaking bread together is an important human and religious ritual, and we engaged in it in several different ways. At fruit break in mid-morning there was fresh pineapple, a special treat of this climate. For lunch we had chilaquiles, shredded stewed chicken served over tortilla chips, one of my top favorite local dishes. And in the middle of the afternoon we broke from work entirely to break bread in a different way, by celebrating the Holy Eucharist together in the church.

We've had a concluding Eucharist with the people of Santa Cruz every time we've come here; but the previous two years it was held on a nearby porch. It really meant something that today the service was held in the church. Yes, the floor is still bare cement, not tiled. Yes, the walls are rough stucco, not yet complete. Yes, the dais for the altar is filled with bags of cement and boxes of tile, not with the altar, and, yes the altar is a little wooden table on the floor and the pews are boards on cinderblocks and plastic lawn chairs. It didn't matter: this was their church, their own house of worship, and they were happy to have it and happy to share it with guests. The Christian mariachi band that is part of this congregation, led by Cruz, the congregation's lay leader, has new outfits, black with great gold trim, and they were in their element this afternoon. I read the Gospel in English, and was invited to give the final blessing, which of course I can only do in English (I vow to learn some liturgical Spanish by this time next year!), and I did my best to follow the rest in Spanish. It's a little easier when you already know what it all means, from long familiarity with the liturgy in English. But knowing what it means is not the same as knowing how to pronounce or speak it, nor does it confer the ability to keep up with a roomful of native speakers. But the liturgy is the liturgy, however it's spoken, and the actions of gathering, blessing, breaking, and sharing are the signs of communion in Christ no matter what language us being used. It's another kind of experience of being carried along on the prayers of others.

And so we finished our work for this trip. We got back to the hotel, divvied out the bags of San Rafael coffee — some for personal use, some for Trinity — that each of us must carry, had dinner together as one big group — our only such dinner this trip — and retired to make our preparations for the morrow. We must leave very early in the morning, so bags need to be packed and coffee stowed and sleeping done fairly early tonight. And that is what I must attend to now.

Down Day

2011-01-17T19:26:00.001-08:00

I have very little to report today, mostly because I spent the day resting and recuperating and making sure my stomach would behave itself. I read, I wrote, I kept myself hydrated, I prayed for the team at the worksite. I ate lunch and was pleased that I had a genuine appetite for it. And I looked forward to getting back to work tomorrow.

When the team got back, they filled me in on the day. It was sunnier and hotter onsite today, which meant everyone was more tired and dragging than at the ends of previous workdays. There was breaking of rocks (again) and mixing of cement (again). Lee was Superwoman of the Pickaxe they tell me; this makes me proud.

But the big news is that they started cementing the walls. By all accounts this is a very special talent that requires flinging wet cement at the cinderblock wall at just the right angle with just the right force to make it stick. This this is apparently far harder than it sounds. I already have an admiration for those who can do it, without even having yet seen it in action. I'm sure my admiration will only increase tomorrow. I'll probably be outside, breaking rocks. With Lee.

Another neat report the team brought me is that we've bought a high-efficiency wood stove for the church's neighbor. The house next door to the church belongs to a member of the congregation, and for three years they've been letting us use their water, their electricity, their outhouse, and, at times, their porch (which in the local houses is an integral part of the living space) for the construction work. We wanted to give something back, and what we gave was a new wood-burning cookstove that burns 80% more efficiently — and even burns well enough to use corncobs as fuel, since wood can get scarce and expensive here — and will make cooking a much easier task for the household. I'm told that the woman was so happy to receive the stove that she fired it up right away (she knows someone who has the same kind of stove, so she understood how to use it) and made fresh tortillas for the whole team. It sounds like a good gift to me.

So that's a brief report for a down day. Well, down for me; the team was up, and did good work and good ministry. And so we'll do again tomorrow.

Study in Contrasts

2011-01-16T06:39:00.001-08:00

Well, yesterday was a strange day — a kind of study in opposites.

In the morning, Lee and I went with Oakley and Ted and Concepción and Olman and Olman's young son on a drive up into the mountains to see three of the other churches that our team has worked on in the years we've been coming here. The mountaintops and high valleys are incredibly beautiful: lush and green, forested in some places, cleared and farmed in others, with clouds scudding along the peaks, alternating mist and sunshine. The communities in these mountains, however, are generally poor. Some coffee plantations make money — it's not hard to notice the bigger, finer houses along the road — and when coffee prices are up, as they are now, the communities where coffee workers live do a little better than most. But I was chiefly struck by the poverty, the rough condition of the road, the pickup trucks stuffed with people in the back because there is no public or commercial transport, the men carrying 100-pound bags of coffee on their shoulders down the hillside, the skinny horses and burros on the road — all in the midst of stunning natural beauty. It was its own study in contrast.

The first church we stopped at is the farthest out, San Nicolas in the town of Agua Caliente. Our mission group worked there on two trips, including one youth trip. The church sits just above a river flowing down the mountain valley, and there are flowering trees and shrubs and vines everywhere, even in January, and it is very beautiful. The congregation there has grown fourfold since the church was first built — from about ten to about forty — and they are thinking of expanding. Two years ago we brought them a cross made by Richard, one of our regular missioners, made of Honduran mahogany and Virginia cherry as a sign of our partnership, and today that cross is mounted just above the main door of the church, as a welcome to everyone who comes in.

The second church we visited was St John the Evangelist (I'm not sure I could properly remember the Spanish name) in Sesemil Segundo. Our team had not done a lot of construction work there — just a retaining wall, and lots of painting — but the lay leader of the congregation remembered Ted and Oakley and welcomed us warmly. The church has lovely tile work on the floor and altar platform, and is clearly lovingly cared for. The musicians' instruments had been left on the platform — two guitars, a gitarron, and two vihuelas — and an impromptu jam session broke out. We weren't all exactly in tune, but the noise was joyful.

After a stop in a mountainside cafe for home-grown coffee with cardamom, we visited the church of San Antonio in Quebracho. The church is built on a plot that was literally carved out of the hillside; there is a huge retaining wall on one side — I think I was told it was thirty feet high — and on the adjacent side another retaining wall running the length of the property. It's a real piece of mountain engineering. The church itself is poorer; the tile on the floor was not as nice, and one side of the church was still taken up with stored rebar cages the team had made some years ago. But the altar table had a nice green hanging, on which someone had painstakingly appliqued a figure of the Lamb of God in Triumph. It was a small touch, but to me it spoke volumes about the devotion of the folks who worship there.

We got back into town around 2pm, and Lee and I decided to just hang out for a little while, rather than make a very active afternoon of it. All my rock-breaking of the previous day had left my back and wrist (the right one, with all the metal in it) rather sore, and bouncing along rough mountain roads in the jump seat of a pickup truck had kind of worn me out.

So after a nice little rest we went out for a bit of wine and cheese before dinner. I must have had something that didn't agree with me, though, because as we wandered through a few shops on the way back, I was feeling progressively odder, until by the time we got back to our room I knew something was not right within. I ended up being quite sick, through a long and fitful night. And now, in the morning, I find I'm in no shape to go to church at Espiritu Santo in Santa Rita. I feel bad about that, since Sunday worship at the first church we worked in is always a major event in the trip, and one I enjoy very much. But I think the rocks and the cheese and the bouncy roads are sending me a message about not overdoing things; so, much as I'll miss it, I'm not going to church. Sigh.

And there you have the contrast: beauty and poverty, devotion and struggle, strength and weakness. I saw remarkable signs of people strengthened by the grace of God to strive for compassion and mutual well-being in difficult places, and I felt pointed reminders of my own weakness and need for compassion and grace daily. And as the mission team gets on the bus for church at Santa Rita, I will take some time for my own spiritual communion in gratitude for God's creating love in all the contrasting places.

TGIF

2011-01-14T19:30:00.001-08:00

Today was all about the floor.

We arrived at the work site in gray weather, looking like it was threatening to drizzle. But there was no real rain, and we got right to it. We'd stopped at the hardware store — a pretty big one, at that — to pick up two more shovels, another wheelbarrow, and a rake. We put them to use right away, hauling soil and stones into the church to level out the floor before pouring the cement. It took a lot of soil and stones to do it, but the floor took shape as load after load was placed and tamped down, and began to look more like a floor and not just ground that happened to have four walls built around it.

And then came the cement. Five and a half batches of it, hand mixed and bucketed into place, by a rotating crew of shovel wizards. I salute them. Oakley and Ted, who understand building, and Hector, the local contractor, received the cement bucket by bucket and smoothed it into place. It was a lot of work, but it went very fast — it kind of had to, to make the floor even — and the cement crews were kept at a lively pace. And at the end of the day there was a remarkable 3/4-finished floor that hadn't been there before.

Meanwhile, there was a little non-floor work that got done. Some of the fill for the floor came from the hillside beside the church on which I'd been working yesterday — and there was, really, a great deal more rock that needed to be broken up. So I spent some of the day with my trusty iron bar, prying rocks from the hillside, breaking bigger ones into littler ones (except the ones that wouldn't break, and had to be carried out in all their largeness), and in some cases just chipping away at solid stone one flake at a time. They need to dig down to the foundation level — where we built three years ago but some of which has gotten covered up again in the meantime — on order to relieve some moisture problems. And some of that digging will be close to solid rock. So, the solid rock has to go. I never knew I could derive so much satisfaction from the single moment when a rock, chipped at length, finally separates from the hillside. So many personal discoveries one makes on mission trips!

Tomorrow, being Saturday, is not a work day. This is a good thing: it will give the floor time to set, and my hands time to recover.

Day One on the Job

2011-01-13T19:15:00.001-08:00

Today was our first day of work, and it's telling in my muscles and my stamina!

We are working this year at Santa Cruz church in the community of Nueva Esperanza, where we've worked the previous two years as well. It was a nice feeling to have the bus pull up to the site today — kind of like returning to an old friend. There'd been some work done on the building since the last time we were here: the roof is on, and the interior dirt floor had been leveled some (I think). But it's still not much more than a shell. I understand that there hasn't been much money available — the Honduran branch of Episcopal Relief and Development, which helped provide funding for Santa Cruz, has had to shut down — and without that support the local community was not able to keep on working on the church much between our visits. When we arrived there were bags of cement and boxes of tile sitting inside, waiting for us, purchased, as I believe, with the money we sent on ahead. And that means our main goal this trip will be to fill, level, cement, and tile the floor. Big job!

In order to get that job started, though, some of us were detailed in the morning to go to the side of the church, where the flat place for the building had initially been dug out of the hillside, and to dig out some more to get extra fill for leveling the floor. We actually took down a good bit of the hillside, trying to square it from the surface all the way down to the floor level, and then transporting the rubble we'd made to the altar end of the church. At one point in the day I conceived a real admiration for my Cornish ancestors, who dug in deep rock for tin since the dawn of recorded history, as I was breaking large rocks into smaller rocks with an iron bar, in order to dislodge them from the hillside and add to the rubble pile beneath.

We broke for lunch, and this year, for the first time, we sat down to eat right in the shell of the church rather than moving up to the porch of a nearby house, as we had the two years before. There was something particularly satisfying about breaking bread together in the place we were building for the breaking of bread.

After lunch it was cement time. I am still not entirely used to making cement on the ground using nothing but shovels and lots of muscle. Seven wheelbarrows of sand, two sacks of cement, seven buckets of water, and a definite rhythm of shoveling the dry into the wet, turning it over and mixing it up, each shovelful getting heavier as more water soaks in. We made enough to cover the altar area at the front off the church — and that still leaves the entire nave for later in the week! I can see that we have our work well cut out for us.

So tonight I'm sitting here with aching forearms — for some reason those muscles reacted worst to the digging bar and the shovel — and rapidly encroaching sleepiness, but also with a real sense of joy to be here in Copan again, seeing friends from before, enjoying the beauty of this valley in the mountains, and doing good work for a church we've known from the ground up.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring...

We are here! We are here!

2011-01-12T18:31:00.001-08:00

We have arrived in Copan Ruinas all safe and sound and glad to be here. Our trip was uneventful, which is really a good thing to be able to say about travel like this. The TACA desk at Dulles was actually open when we arrived on Tuesday night — the first time I've seen that happen since I joined this trip — so we were able to check our luggage right off the bat, and not sit around the airport floor with our bags all around us, camping out like vagabonds. It's amazing how hospitable an airport can seem when you're not lugging pounds of luggage around. And so we got to our gate and got on our plane and got in the air in good order. Changing planes in San Salvador was without hitch, and so was our arrival in San Pedro Sula.

About the only thing that was problematic in the journey was the bus ride from San Pedro Sula to Copan. The roads are bad this year — apparently it has rained a lot — and the bus was bouncier, jouncier, and more headache-inducing than in years past. There were some prodigious washouts on some mountainsides, which earned stares of admiration, and not a few gasps, from our crew as we drove by. But our driver Antonio is very skilled, and he handled the damaged roads and the consequently disorganized traffic with style and grace. And so we arrived.

Tomorrow morning we'll go to the worksite. Same church we've been working on the last couple of years. We're told that the roof is finished now, so we'll be working on inside stuff: floors and walls and tile work and things like that. It will be a new adventure for me, at least, since my previous trips have focused on outside work, digging and hauling rocks and making foundations. This will literally be seeing a new phase in working for the growth of this church. Maybe there's a metaphor there I can use in talking about our mission to build the church at home...

Pray for us in our work with our brothers and sisters in the church here in Honduras, and for the good mission of Christ being made manifest here.

Getting Ready for Honduras

2011-01-08T08:21:00.001-08:00

Getting Ready for Honduras

Our parish mission group will be leaving for Copan, Honduras on Tuesday evening, and I'm trying to get ready for the trip.

There are the practicalities, of course: getting a new pair of workboots, finding my passport, cutting my packing list down to a minimum, notifying my bank that I'll be using my card in another country. Tasks like these tend to get me antsy. I joke with Lee sometimes that I enjoy being in other places, it's the getting-there that bothers me. It's the kind of joke that's only funny because it's so true. She's being very patient with me these days.

But the preparations are not all tasky and practical: some are inner and spiritual as well. The first time I went on the Honduras mission I was really nervous, and I found myself praying a lot, asking for courage, asking to be kept safe, asking not to feel overwhelmed. For my third trip I'm not so nervous — but I find that prayer is still important. I'm praying for safe travel still — I always do that when going from Point A to Point B — but I'm also praying this year to be more attentive throughout the whole mission experience.

Prayer is about more than asking God for things, and it's about more than reciting time-honored forms of words (though it is about them, too). Prayer at its core is a disposition of the soul, a focusing of mind and heart and will, an opening of the spirit to be witness to the creative work of God in and around us in the present moment. Prayer is allowing the outward and visible details of life to become luminous with the inward and spiritual light of God. I want to cultivate that disposition of the soul on this Honduras trip. It's not always easy. Physical labor in the hot sun can be, for me at least, kind of mind-numbing; it doesn't always occur to me to look for God in the next shovelful of sand or bucket of wet concrete. Working in close quarters with a bunch of other people can lead to lessened patience and shortened tempers; I have to be intentional about remembering that we are all children of God and all beloved. After a hard work day, kicking back with a cold beer and a good meal, which we do, is a lot of fun, and I want to be mindful that these are not just creature comforts, but are gifts of God, who gives us each day our daily bread and gives us our meat in due season.

While we're on our mission trip in Honduras, I want to be attentive to these things, and so I'm preparing myself for prayer.

And, finally, I have one preparation to make that is strictly technological: I need to make sure that I can post to my blog using only my handy-dandy smartphone and not a whole computer. This year, like last year, I intend to blog from Copan, and I'm hoping all the gadgets and connections and apps line up to do so. I'm posting this very message from my phone, and if you're reading it now, that means the system works. I invite you to keep reading over the next two weeks: following us in your thoughts and prayers makes you part of the mission, too.

On Tuesday I'm leaving for Honduras, and by the grace of God may the spirit of prayer be always present on the trip.

Simplicity and Abundance

2010-11-12T09:02:00.000-08:00

In our Sunday School this month, we are going through a rotation of lessons on the Parable of the Mustard Seed, pondering how great faith can grow from small beginnings. In a session for the adult group, parishioners Kristin and Aaron Reichert led a discussion on simplicity of material lifestyle, and how it can lead to greater abundance of emotional and spiritual well-being. They offered, among other resources, this extended quote from Duane Elgin, describing varieties of simplicity we might move toward in our lives:

Uncluttered Simplicity: Simplicity means taking charge of lives that are too busy, too stressed, and too fragmented. Simplicity means cutting back on clutter, complications, and trivial distractions, both material and nonmaterial, and focusing on the essentials – whatever those may be fore each of our unique lives. As Thoreau said, “Our life is frittered away by detail . . . Simplify, simplify.” Or, as Plato wrote, “In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.”

Ecological Simplicity: Simplicity means choosing ways of living that touch the Earth more lightly and that reduce our ecological impact on the web of life. This life-path remembers our deep roots with the soil, air and water. It encourages us to connect with nature, the seasons, and the cosmos. An ecological simplicity feels a deep reverence for the community of life on Earth and accepts that the nonhuman realms of plants and animals have their dignity and rights as well.

Family Simplicity: Simplicity means placing the well-being of one’s family ahead of materialism and the acquisition of things. This expression of green living puts and emphasis on providing children with healthy role models living balanced lives that are not distorted by consumerism. Family simplicity affirms that what matters most in life is often invisible – the quality and integrity of our relationships with one another. Family simplicity is also intergenerational – it looks ahead and seeks to life with restraint so as to leave a healthy Earth for future generations.

Soulful simplicity: Simplicity means approaching life as a meditation and cultivating our experience of direct connection with all that exists. By living simply, we can more easily awaken to the living universe that surrounds and sustains us, moment by moment. Soulful simplicity is more concerned with consciously tasting life in its unadorned richness than with a particular standard or manner of material living. In cultivating a soulful connection with life, we tend to look beyond surface appearances and bring our interior aliveness into relationships of all kinds.

Frugal simplicity: Simplicity means that, by cutting back on spending that is not truly serving our lives, and by practicing skillful management of our personal finances, we can achieve greater financial independence. Frugality and careful financial management bring increased financial freedom and the opportunity to more consciously choose our path through life. Living with less also decreases the impact of our consumption upon the Earth and frees resources for others.

From Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin

Do these distinctions of simplicity connect with your own experience? How might you see yourself and your family making use of these notions of simplicity in your life ways?

Discourse and Respect

2010-11-10T06:15:00.000-08:00

In my sermon for All Saints Sunday, I spoke about how the celebration of the Feast of All Saints calls us to recognize that we are part of something larger than ourselves. I contrasted that view with a tendency in modern Western culture to make the single solitary self the primary value, and to measure all (or most) other things in terms of how well they serve the self. I included this observation about our socio-political scene:

"Our national culture seems to get more polarized every year, encouraging us to think of our country as a series of entrenched ideologies, each hunkering down around its own base and lobbing slogans at each other from its preferred cable network; but the invitation to the communion of saints reminds us that we are part of something larger than ourselves, and as Christians we carry into public discourse our religious commitment to respect the dignity of every human being, and to treat those with whom we disagree as real persons with whom we want to build up the common good."

Do you think this is true? Is entrenched ideology a problem for us today, or simply the way we frame our discourse? Is there room today for more substantive conversation than exchanging sound bites and slogans? Do different constituencies have enough in common to really speak about the "common good"?

And do Christians have a religious commitment to engage in secular discourse in a particular way? I personally think the legal separation of church and state is a good thing. I don't want the state establishing an official church, any more than I want a single church dictating terms to the state. But I don't think that means religious values and commitments can never be a part of public discourse and secular governance. In the Episcopal baptismal service, we make a promise as part of our Baptismal Covenant to "strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being," as I quoted in my sermon. I think this constitutes a commitment to engage in public discourse in a civil manner, quite independently of any specific religious content. That is, I don't need to say that my Christian values should be imposed on everyone as universal legally enacted values; but I do need to be true to my Christian values myself, by treating those with whom I disagree with respect.

What do you think? Is there a Christian commitment to civility that should be part of the manner in which we engage in secular discourse?

Let Go and Let God with Money

2010-10-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

It’s pledge drive time, and that’s got me thinking about the theology of giving. Pledge drives by their nature are detail-oriented, focused on nuts and bolts — budgets, needs, targets, goals. I find sometimes I need to come up for air, look around the larger landscape a bit, and remind myself of the spiritual reasons for doing what we do. How do we think of church giving as a matter of the spirit?

One thought I’ve been working on is that giving is a way to “let go and let God” with money. The phrase comes from AA; but the idea of letting go as a spiritual imperative has deep, deep roots in Christian spirituality. Many prayer practices, many spiritual disciplines, include some form of giving up conscious control — or, more accurately, the illusion of control — in order to be more open to the experience of God. We believe that God is always everywhere already at work in the world around us; if we often fail to recognize that divine prevenience, it is largely because we are so full of ourselves, so intent on our own plans and projects and being-in-charge, that we have no room in our consciousness to take in the larger-scale action of the God in whom we live and move and have our being. Sometimes we just need to let go of our intentions, we need to “intend not to intend” as one spiritual writer puts it, we need to give up some control, in order to let ourselves become aware of what God is doing that’s bigger and better than we ourselves.

For instance, in the practice of meditative prayer, it is important to give up the illusion of control over our own rational, discursive thought-processes in order to open up to a deeper awareness of God. By repeating a simple prayer-phrase, or by attending to our breathing, or by inhabiting a scripture story in our imagination, we still the constant background chatter of our internal monologue to the point where we become attentive to the love and grace and presence of God — and our own prayerful response to God — that run too deep for words. The letting-go is essential to the experience of God.

The same is true in the practice of pastoral care. In having a pastoral conversation with someone, for instance, one technique I was taught and now try to teach others is “active listening.” In active listening, it is important to give up our own desire to control the conversation, it is important to let go of our own agenda and allow the other person to speak what is truly in their mind and heart. So often care-givers want to “make everything better” or cure the situation or bring comfort; but sometimes the other person is not ready to be comforted; sometimes there is pain and grief and anger to be acknowledged and borne and worked through; and a true care-giver must give up the desire to control and instead provide the safe place where such pain can be laid before God, from whom alone real healing can come. The letting-go is essential to the experience of God.

What if the same thing is true in the spirituality of giving? What if a central part of giving as a spiritual discipline is letting go of the illusion of control over our material well-being? In our culture money is a powerful symbol — perhaps the powerful symbol — of our ability to control life; money is the measure of the capacity we have to secure our food, our shelter, our clothing, our basic needs and our greatest luxuries; spending power is the effective form of the power we have to shape the world around us the way we want it. But, as Jesus’ parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:16-21) tells us, as our own experience time and again tells us, such control is an illusion. Part of the spiritual practice of giving is to give up that illusion, to give up control over some of our money as a reminder of the fleetingness of all of our money. Part of the reason the biblical standard of giving emphasizes giving a proportion of the first-fruits — rather than, say, a carefully calculated amount based on a rational analysis of needs after all our important personal expenses have been paid — is the very fact that a tithe-off-the-top symbolizes that over which we have no control, it is the sign of our willingness to let go of something that matters to us, so that we can be more open to see what God will do in that space.

That’s not easy for us to hear. Our American culture is very conscious of the responsibility of money. When we give philanthropically — say to charitable organizations or schools or foundations or symphonies — we want to know that the money we give is being used wisely and well and for the purpose for which we gave it. When we give, we want to exercise due diligence about the recipient of the gift, and we want the recipient to exercise due diligence with our gift. When we give philanthropically, we give with strings of expectation and oversight and control attached. That is only prudent.

But in church giving, there is that extra added component of the spiritual practice of letting go. We give partly to remind ourselves that the flow of energy and activity and resource in God’s world is bigger than we are, that it is ultimately beyond our control. Part of church giving is to give with no strings attached, not even the strings of making sure the money goes where we want it to go. That’s a bitter pill for our contemporary consumer culture to swallow. But the letting-go is essential to the experience of God.

And if stewardship is about letting go of (some of) our money, then it is also about “letting God” with money. We are called to give to the church free and clear, off the top, no strings attached. But we are equally called to participate in the life of the church, to take our places in the councils of the church (as the Prayer Book puts it), and part of that calling is to use the monies committed to the church in the active work of ministry. Vestries and Finance Committees are charged with the specific duty of administering monies committed the church through budgets; but every member of the church has some share in the ministry that is funded through monies received. The practice of stewardship is about good administration as much as it is about generous giving. Sharing in the work of the church is the space in which we discern together what God is doing in our midst and how we can join in that doing — and that space is opened up by the letting-go of our first-fruits as free-and-clear gifts.

So that’s the thought I’m working on. What if the spiritual side of the practice of stewardship is letting go and letting God with our money? How might we approach church pledging if we had this spiritual practice in mind?

Forgive Us Our Sins

2010-10-05T11:34:00.001-07:00

One of the things I truly love about Trinity is the variety of liturgies with which we worship. The early, middle, and late services on Sunday all have their particular characters, and weekday services like Taize and Healing and Morning and Evening Prayer add extra dimensions of liturgical richness as well. The use of Rite I and Rite II gives us a variety of traditional and contemporary expressions for prayers that have been shared by Christians in many centuries and many languages. One of the best examples of this constructive variety is the Lord’s Prayer.

The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples was recorded first in the Greek language, of course, in which the Gospels were written. In the Western Church, where Latin was the dominant language, the prayer was for centuries best known in that form. During the Reformation prayers and liturgies were translated into local languages, including English. English has changed quite a lot from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century, and the Lord’s Prayer has been translated and re-translated into different versions in that time. At Trinity, we use an older translation at the early and late Sunday services; the current translation is always used at the middle service and sometimes at weekday services too.

In the newer translation of the Lord’s Prayer we pray “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” For a number of people, this is one of the more noteworthy changes in the translation. Some of us grew up praying “Forgive us our trespasses.” Others of us grew up in churches where the Lord’s Prayer was traditionally said “Forgive us our debts”; that wording is also used, for instance, in the famous Malotte vocal setting of the Lord’s Prayer which is sung both in concert and in church. We might, understandably, wonder why there are so many ways of translating this basic petition of a basic Christian prayer.

But the difference in wording reflects more than just a difference in translation: it also represents a difference in gospel tradition. Both the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke record Jesus’ teaching the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples, and there are some major variations in the two texts. In the verse about sins, Matthew uses the Greek word opheilemata, while Luke uses hamartia. Opheilemata comes from a root meaning “obligation” or “something that is due,” and we usually translate it into English as “debt.” Harmartia comes from a root meaning “to miss the mark,” as in archery, and it carries further connotations of going out of bounds or straying from the path; it finds a good equivalent in the English words “transgression” or “trespass.” The versions of the Lord’s Prayer used in worship draw from both the Gospel accounts: the version that says “Forgive us our debts” reflects Matthew, the version that says “Forgive us our trespasses” reflects Luke, and the current version that says “Forgive us our sins” uses a more general word to reflect both.

These are not just differences in terminology, however; the different terms express different understandings of just what sin is and how sin affects us. Sin as “debt” indicates something we lack, something we ought to have but don’t, something that is missing from us and makes us less than we could be. That is a profound understanding of sin, drawing attention to the many ways in our lives in which we genuinely want to be good but find ourselves unable to do it. St Paul gives poignant voice to this reality of human experience in Romans 7 when he writes “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” Sin is not just “doing bad things,” but is the tragic situation of desiring the good and being unable to accomplish it.

But sin is also the experience of trying to do the good and having it go wrong. That is expressed more in the notion of sin as “trespass,” of going out of bounds, of starting out in a good direction but then veering off into unintended consequences. “Trespass” indicates being too full of ourselves, stepping out where we really know we shouldn’t go, making decisions that go beyond the pale of our real time and place and responsibility to the realities around us. It is classically represented in the Genesis story of the fruit of the tree of knowledge: the woman desires the fruit because it is a delight to the eyes, and good for food, and will make one wise — all of which are good things in themselves! — but taking the fruit before God gives it is a terrible breaking of trust in her relationship with God. Sin is not just our inability to do good, but is also our overreaching.

And if sin has these two aspects, then forgiveness must have these two aspects as well. When I pray “forgive us our debts,” I think of God making up what is lacking in me, like the parable Jesus tells in Matthew 18 where the king cancels the debt of the slave, simply making up the loss out of his own royal treasury. I think of God forgiving the debt of my sin as God empowering me through the Holy Spirit to do the good I am not able in myself to do. And when I pray “forgive us our trespasses,” I think of God bringing me back to the path, like the parable Jesus tells of the shepherd who goes out into the wilderness to find the one sheep that has strayed. I think of God forgiving the trespass of my sins as God working in me through the Holy Spirit to regather my overreaching and guide me into right pathways and lead me in the way that is best for me to go — even if I myself might think another road looks more attractive. When I pray “forgive us our sins,” I try to keep both those meanings in mind, and I find great comfort and strength in the double image of God making up what is lacking in me and leading me to the next good possibility.

And of course there is more to this clause of the Lord’s Prayer than just the petition for forgiveness: Jesus also tells us to pray that we be forgiven “as we forgive those who are indebted to us, those who trespass against us, those who sin against us.” That same making-up-what-is-lacking and regathering-of-overreaching that God gives to us is what we are called to give to each other. The forgiveness with which God empowers us also empowers our forgiving those around us. We live this out in everyday life as we bear one another’s burdens, as we use our strengths to help others’ shortcomings, as we allow our shortcomings to be helped by others’ strengths, as we keep our boundaries healthy and respect the boundaries of others and gently but firmly restore boundaries when they have been crossed. We are forgiven precisely in the act of forgiving, as we and God work together to make up what is lacking and regather what is overreached and grow the next potentiality for justice and peace and love.

All that meaning in so few words! Debt and trespass and sin and forgive — words that resonate with worlds of significance in our lives in the Spirit. As is so often the case in prayer, we need many words to reflect all the aspects of meaning we seek to express in our relationship with God. As we pray together the different versions of the Lord’s Prayer in our liturgies, I invite you to be mindful of all these meanings, and pray for the joy of forgiveness with all your hearts.

Consumers, Benefactors, and Ministers: Three Models of Church

2010-10-05T11:22:00.000-07:00

Over the past several months, in newsletter articles and sermons and Vestry retreats and Parish Hall meetings, I’ve been talking about how the American religious scene has been shifting, how people are participating and attending and giving to churches in different ways and with different expectations. How people interact with their congregations, and how congregations give their people something to interact with, can be a bewildering maze of feelings and programs and habits and patterns. Sometimes it is a helpful mental tool to bundle that variety into manageable packages or extended metaphors called models. Different models of the church can highlight different bits of church reality, so that we can see and understand them more clearly. Three models of church that I find useful are models of the congregation as a market for Consumers, as an organization of Benefactors, and as a community of Ministers.

In the Consumer model, people think of the congregation as a provider of religious goods and services, and the congregants as consumers of those goods and services. The church is likened to a business, where branding and marketing are of paramount importance. The clergy and staff of the congregation are responsible for being entrepreneurial, up-to-date, and creative in crafting the sorts of liturgies, music, and activities that will attract, engage, and retain the highest number of attendees. Congregants, for their part, are expected to be savvy spiritual shoppers: they give generously in exchange for the goods and services they consume, they provide customer feedback that clergy and staff can use to improve their offerings, and, if they don’t find the goods and services they want at a given congregation, they go elsewhere, leading to a healthy competition in the religious marketplace. Congregants are often eager to assist their church in providing the goods and services they consume, by volunteering to help out with tasks usually performed by clergy and staff — not unlike the way customers of a co-op grocery, for instance, will volunteer to stock shelves or ring checkout, jobs usually given to employees, to keep their store in business.

Turning to the Benefactor model, we find that the principal metaphor here is not business, but philanthropy. In the Benefactor model, people think of the congregation as a benevolent society, and the congregants as the benefactors who give to the society to support its good works. The congregation is seen as one of many institutions that support and improve community life, along with things like libraries, museums, symphonies, service clubs, arts centers, and non-profit agencies which benefit causes close to their supporters’ hearts. Clergy and staff are expected to be community leaders, who are in touch with community needs, able to identify opportunities for benevolence, and skilled at major fundraising. Congregants come to worship services in order to maintain social ties with like-minded benefactors, and to be encouraged in their good works for the world. Parishioners may serve their church by sitting on vestries, committees, and ad-hoc projects, in the same way many of them also sit on boards of other civic institutions in the community. Generous giving is encouraged, both to maintain the congregation as an institution respectable among other institutions, and to work through the congregation to benefit the wider community.

Finally, in the Minister model, people think of the congregation as an assembly of disciples, all of whom are called and empowered for ministry by their baptism. Clergy and staff are not the sole providers of ministry to recipient congregants, but are regarded as organizers, trainers, coaches, and encouragers of the congregants’ own ministries. Clergy especially are expected to be trained (or re-trained) as ministry developers for their congregations. Congregants are expected to identify their own gifts and passions for ministry, with the help of clergy and other congregant-ministers, and to actively seek opportunities to do their ministry both within and outside of the institutional church. The congregational programs focus on worship, prayer, and Christian education, but may actually include few “social service” programs, preferring instead to encourage members to engage their social ministries through already existing secular organizations. Leadership in a Minister-model congregation is often grassroots, “bottom-up,” networked rather than hierarchical, and sometimes a little chaotic. Financial giving is seen as only one part — and perhaps not the most important part — of one’s giving of time and talent and body and soul for the work of ministry.

Of course, the real world is always more complex and interesting than our models of it; and real congregations and real congregants cannot be reduced to simple models. The Consumer, the Benefactor, and the Minister models each have their pros and cons. The Consumer model points to an important dynamic of contemporary religious life in America, but it tends to turn religion into nothing but one more market transaction; the Benefactor model leads to real good works in communities, but it tends to reflect and reinforce prevailing patterns of social privilege; the Minister model empowers many people to do Christ’s mission, but it can also fracture a congregation if different individuals and groups follow their ministerial passions with little regard for the overall shared mission of the church. All three models have some truth to them, they each point to some important traits, and they each leave out some significant facts. In practice the models overlap, and churchgoers can go from being benefactors to ministers to consumers and back again, depending on the program or situation or ministry in which they find themselves.

But looking at our congregation through the lenses of the Consumer, Benefactor, and Minister models can help us see some important things about ourselves. Which model seems most attractive to you? Where do you see yourself, and your reasons for coming to church, reflected in the models? Which model seems closest to your own experience of Trinity? Are there parts of the models that seem to clash or conflict with each other? Are there elements of different models you think we should try to develop at Trinity?

As we begin a new program year at Trinity, it is helpful to consider the models we use to understand and motivate our actions. Whether we’re here to receive religious goods and services, or to benefit the community, or to develop our ministries, or any combination thereof, what matters most is that we model the creating and sustaining love of Christ.

Seeing the Oil Spill in Context

2010-10-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

From July 2010

The other day I overheard a snippet of conversation about the oil spill in the Gulf, and got just enough of it to hear one person say “If this had happened on land, it wouldn’t even be a problem.” That got me to thinking. In the first place, I’m not entirely sure I agree — I think any oil spill, anywhere, anytime, is a problem. But that comment did lead me to two further reflections.

On the one hand, it reminded me of the simple but inescapable truth that context matters. Nothing we do ever happens in a vacuum, but everything is connected, and every action has a context, and the context affects the action and the action affects the context. In this case the context is deep in the Gulf of Mexico, and that context makes a huge difference. A blown-out oil pipe would be relatively easy to fix on land; there are tools and techniques and technology that oil riggers know well for such problems. But the fact that this pipe is blown out under 5000 feet of water makes all those tools and techniques and technology nearly useless. In fact, there is no technology competent to handle this, and so the leak goes on out of control for days and weeks and months, while BP and the Coast Guard try to invent new ways to deal with it. The context magnifies the problem.

But the problem is also damaging the context. Oil behaves differently in water than it does on land, and it behaves differently on the surface of the water than it does in underwater plumes, and it behaves differently when it comes ashore than it does when it’s afloat. As the oil spreads, it reveals that the real context of this disaster is wider and broader and deeper than we’d thought: the offshore drilling affects not just the drill site, but the surrounding ocean, and the surrounding shores, and the beaches and the marshes and the lands adjacent to the shores. The context is not just the physical elements like water and sand and mud, but the context includes living things, plankton and fish and pelicans and dolphins and sea turtles, and as they are poisoned and damaged and killed by the oil, that sends ripple effects throughout the entire Gulf ecosystem, effects that may take decades to heal. And the context is not just the natural system, but includes all the human systems as well, the fishermen and shrimpers whose fishing grounds are curtailed and whose livelihoods are threatened, the families who have worked on the Gulf for generations and know no other way of life, even the tourists who are staying away from Gulf beaches in droves and are thereby crippling the local economies. The threads of connection keep reaching out and out and out from that blown-out pipe, until uncounted numbers of places and creatures and people are caught up in its context of destruction.

Theologically speaking, the largest context of all is God, the one to whom belong the earth and all that is in it (Psalm 24:1), the one in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), the one in whose Word, incarnate among us in Jesus, all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). The loss and sadness and tragedy streaming out through water and creatures and people comes at last even to God, whose Holy Spirit is grieved at our waste and pollution.

One thing this oil spill is teaching us, painfully but truthfully, is that context matters, that everything is connected, and that the context affects what we do and what we do affects the context.

But I hope this disaster is teaching us something else, as well. And that is the second thought I had after hearing someone opine that this wouldn’t be so bad if it had happened on land: that this is such a mess because we took it to such an extreme. What we see now so clearly in hindsight is that we don’t know what we’re doing when we drill for oil at 5000 feet. Technically, to be sure, it is BP and Transocean and Halliburton — the companies who employed the engineers who designed and oversaw the work — who had the know-how to drill but didn’t have the know-how to stop when the drilling went wrong. There is a tremendous amount of anger out there, directed at those companies, and understandably so. But it is important for us to remember that those companies would not be drilling at such extremes if we, the consumers, did not demand and crave and consume such vast quantities of oil. Our profligate habits of energy use and consumption of plastics and other petrochemicals have made it necessary to go looking for oil in more and more unlikely — and evidently more and more dangerous — places, places where even relatively simple incidents rapidly escalate into major problems, whether they be political problems in oil-producing countries or environmental problems in oil-producing waters. Our thirst for oil — what some people have called our national addiction to oil — has driven us, acting through our corporations, to engage in risky, ill-prepared, not-well-understood oil extraction behaviors. And our extreme behaviors have led to extreme consequences.

Perhaps we can learn from this disaster that some extremes simply aren’t worth it, and that rather than risk more and worse conflicts and spills and poisonings we should look for another way. Perhaps we can learn a greater respect for the Creator who is made manifest in all the creatures and who dwells in all the contexts. Perhaps we can increase our efforts to develop alternative energies, to reduce and reuse and recycle, to promote a greener economy, to live materially simpler and spiritually richer lives. Perhaps even our horror at how we have fouled this particular context may lead us to care more about all the contexts in which we act, up to and including our ultimate context in God.

May God grant us the wisdom and the will to live within our context, with humility and service, for the flourishing of all creatures.