If I ruled the world...

Photo © Lee Jordan; used by permission

I have a confession to make.  Sometimes, on my day off, I watch Teen Nick. And today I watched a show that revolved around the need to write a new summer hit song. The plot seemed to have something to do with leather jackets, and cheese fries and band members finding girlfriends; the end result was a song called “If I ruled the world.”

I have no idea what the rest of the lyrics were, but it started me thinking, what would I do if I ruled the world?  My immediate thought was, get rid of poverty.  And wars. And maybe climate change.  And then get rid of heartbreak and loneliness and broken relationships. And sickness and sorrow and frustration.

Or, thinking more positively, I’d plant trees and flowers - create beauty - and I’d hug my nephews, and I’d eliminate paperwork so I had more time for people. If I ruled the world.  But I don’t.

Except that’s not entirely true. Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we pray, “Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.” And we do that with the confidence that it is really possible. We believe in God who is creator of all things and continues to give life to the world.  We believe in God who is active and involved in history.  We believe in God who can rule the world.

But we also believe in God who chooses not to use direct rule. Instead of overriding human free will, and running the world for us, God has entrusted the world and its workings to human beings, to us. That’s what it means in Genesis, when God says to humankind, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.”  God has delegated the job of ruling the world to us.

Most of us, however, are not in positions of great political power.  We don’t feel like we rule the world.  Sometimes it even feels like the world rules us.

Yet each of us does have power, albeit in small measure.  We exercise power every time we make a decision.  And in aggregate, we do, in many respects, rule the world.  We rule the world when we turn on the heat or drive our cars, so that energy security becomes a major focus of our country’s economics and foreign policy. We rule the world when we decide between buying local and buying from overseas, which means more jobs one place or the other.  We rule the world when we save money for our retirement and when we give to those in need.  There isn’t any easy right or wrong about these actions; all of them shape our world in different ways. But we do in fact, in effect, rule the world.

So what if, instead of abdicating responsibility because we don’t have all the power, we take God’s mandate seriously?  It’s New Year, and time for resolutions.  What if we dreamed what we could do if we ruled the world, and then began to do it? Piece by small piece?

As for me, I think that this year, I’m going to do three things.  Spend part of my gardening budget on planting something that will give the most pleasure to those who pass by. Make a loan through Kiva, to help someone living in poverty.  And try my best to reach out to someone who is lonely or struggling.  What about you?

Hushed waiting*

There’s something special about the first substantial snowfall of winter.  It begins almost like dandelion fluff, but rapidly clumps into something more like drifting petals of spring blossom.  Eventually it settles on the ground, and as it piles up the outlines of the world soften and the sound of traffic is muffled and we enter a time of waiting.

The snowfalls ends, and it’s time for snowmen and snow-fights and snow angels.  And a day or two later, life returns to normal: either the snow melts, or after the fun we shovel and plough our way back into motion.  A few snowfalls later, a dirty crust has built up, and melt has turned to ice, and we are ready for spring. But still the memory persists of the hush that accompanied the snowfall, the suspension of time when all we could do was wait.

Advent is like that time.  A time of hushed waiting.  God, God’s very self, is about to come to earth.  Advent is a time to stop, to catch our breath at the wonder of it all.

“Let all mortal flesh keep silence,

and with fear and trembling stand;

ponder nothing earthly minded,

for with blessing in his hand

Christ our God to earth descendeth,

our full homage to demand.” †

This is, perhaps, the most potent of all time. We wait, we wait in holy silence, for the gift that is God among us.  

It’s like pregnancy, necessary time to get ready for the change that new life will bring.  That’s why the ancient church set aside this time, four weeks (or in some traditions forty days) of solemn preparation, not only remembering the first coming of Jesus Christ as savior, but also awaiting his second coming as gracious judge.  It’s serious, hallowed time.

Of course, everything around us is saying the reverse. 

“Christmas is here
Bringing good cheer” ‡

Da da-da da, da da-da da,

beating its way insistently through the malls and into our brains.

We have to hurry: there is shopping to be done and cookies to be baked and cards to be sent.  And before we know it, Christmas will be here, the food and the gifts and the family gatherings.  And then trees to take down and bills to pay and a new financial year. Da da-da da, da da-da da, da da-da da, da da-da da.

But no. Christmas is not here. Not yet. It’s Advent, and there’s no point being so busy having a shower or painting the nursery that we miss the baby’s birth. As if the baby would really care.

So stop.  Take time. Listen for the hush. For Christ our God to earth descendeth, our full homage to demand.

* Thanks to members of the book group of St James, St James who named Advent as a time of  "hushed waiting.”

† Liturgy of Saint James (fifth century); trans. Gerald Moultrie (1829-1885), 1864.

‡ Peter J. Wilhousky, 1936.

Whose church is it, anyway?

Every December, members of our parish visit assisted living and nursing homes to sing Christmas carols to the residents.  And every time we sing, one resident always declares loudly to anyone within hearing range, “They’re from my church.”  

Her declaration is usually met with tolerant smiles from the other residents, and quizzical looks from parishioners.  And sooner or later someone will whisper in my ear, “Am I supposed to know her?”  No.  This is not some dearly-beloved pillar of the church, forced from her usual pew by circumstance.  This is someone who rarely, if ever, went to church, someone whose closest connection was through a relative. But now, cut off from the wider life she once enjoyed, she now claims us: as far as she is concerned, we are her church.

At the heart of many of the squabbles we Christians have is the question, whose church is it, anyway?  Who does it belong to?  Sometimes we’re referring to the building; sometimes, the community.  When congregations leave our denomination, we have lawsuits over who owns the building and sometimes dueling claims to the parish’s name.  When a church shrinks to the point where it is no longer viable and closing looks like the only option, questions are asked about who gets the building, and the silver, and is there’s any left, the bank accounts; local parishes vie for any remaining members.  When we’re trying to raise money to preserve a historic building, we reach out to the local community.  When you’re talking with clergy, they’ll often call their parish, “my church.” Sometimes people refer to a church by the When an old-time member returns after many years away, and sees different people and different traditions, they ask, “What happened to my church?”  If you were to ask my two-year-old goddaughter what the building is at the end of my street, she would likely say, “my church!” And if you turn to the New Testament, you find the church described as the church of God, and Christ's own body.

So whose church is it, anyway?

Is it God’s?

Is it Christ’s?

Is it the diocese’s?

Is it the priest’s?

Is it the parishioners’?

Is it the community’s?

Is it mine?

Is it yours?

And of course the answer is, yes.  It’s all of these.

It’s the paradox of the church.  Whether you’re talking about the building, or the community called by its name, the church belongs to everyone.  To God, Christ, the nursing home resident, the diocese, the child, the pillar of the church...all of us!

All of us - albeit in different ways - share the responsibility; all of us share the blessing.  And the key is to hold all these in balance, so that no one stakeholder’s interest excludes others.   Any time we forget that the church - the building and the community - belongs to everyone, we forget the far-reaching spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Whose church is it? All of ours!

Unfailing curiosity and a large measure of faith.

They are the words every parent fears.  “Your child has a brain tumor.”  The child in question was my four-year-old nephew, and the words were spoken just a few weeks ago.  The summer of 2011 has passed in a whirl of MRIs, surgery, radiation and chemo, along with learning the new vocabulary of medulloblastoma, Hickman lines, and posterior fossa.

And we are learning a new vocabulary of faith.  The classic question you are expected to ask at time like this is “Why, God? Why do you allow suffering?”   And the classic answer of Christian theology is that suffering comes of living in a fallen world.  It is inevitable in a world tainted by evil.  It’s a simple matter of consequences.

But when it’s you who are suffering, or perhaps even harder, someone close to you, the questions are personalized, and we ask them not only of God, but of ourselves.  “Why this child?”  “Why did he get a tumor?”  And “Why is his treatable, but other children in the hospital are dying?”

The generic answer doesn’t help: it doesn’t deal with the specific. Nor does scripture help a great deal.  In John 9, Jesus’ disciples asked him whose fault was it that a man was born blind.  He said, “No-one’s.”  And then he healed the man. 

We don’t have answers to the questions we want to ask, or at least, not answers we like.  But what we do have is a lifetime of faith.  And it is my nephew who has led us in drawing on that faith.  He is the one who wrote a prayer “Dear God, please make me better. Amen” on a piece of paper, rolled it up tightly, and pushed it into a crack in the wall of a 1400 year old church (he also wrote a prayer asking for the big Lego pyramid!).  He is the one who each day at the park, runs up to a large Victorian drinking fountain, puts his hands in the bowl of water, and prays “Thank you God for making me better, and thank you for making all the other sick children better too..”  He greets every new experience with unfailing curiosity, and a large measure of faith.

His thick hair might be almost gone, his bones beginning to show, but his faith in God is strong and secure. Even when nothing makes sense, my nephew reminds me that God can be trusted.

God is generous

“The Lord...is generous.”  The words jumped out at me as I read the epistle one Sunday last month.  Not so much because it was new, as because it was something I hadn’t really thought much about.

God’s generosity is something that it’s all too easy to take for granted.  Sometimes - at least on the good days - we remember to thank God for the gifts of material things: the glory of creation, the food on our tables, the breath of life in a newborn baby.  All good things.  But when Paul writes in Romans about the generosity of God, he’s talking about something far less tangible.  He’s talking about the gift of life with God.

Paul is overwhelmed with the enormity of that gift. He grew up in a world where the gift was far more limited, bounded by the Jewish law.  It’s as if the law drew a circle, with God at the center. Inside the circle were those who kept the law; outside were those who didn’t. The line that marked the circumference of the circle also divided those who belonged to God from those who did not. He, and others like him, were in; everyone else was out.

But then he met Jesus on the Damascus Road, and discovered that the circle had been erased. God was still there in the center, but there was no circle defining who belonged to God and who didn’t.  Instead, there was something like a web, lines radiating out from God to each individual, and then stretching sideways from person to person.

Sometimes the lines reached barely an inch; others, the reached as far as the horizon.  But always they connected people to God, not because those people had been especially obedient or fulfilled some preordained role, but because they had reached out, and God had reached out, and their hands had connected.

We can talk a lot about what it means to be a Christian, about living faithfully, and spending time with God, and putting our trust in Jesus Christ. But in the end, it’s as simple as this. God is generous.  Reach out to God, and God will reach out to you.  And
and you will be firmly and tightly connected to God.

And a byproduct is that you will also be connected to other people, companions in this thing we call faith. Although that’s not always comfortable - because God is generous.  God is generous to everyone, everyone and anyone who reaches out to catch hold of God’s outstretched hands.  That includes sullen adolescents and joyous toddlers, socialists and tea partiers, overtired parents and relaxed retirees, and everyone in between, people of every race and nation and age and social standing.  All of us, recipients of the generosity of God, inviting us to hope beyond fear and life beyond measure.

God is generous.

Who are the ministers of the church?

Who are the ministers of the Church?
The ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons.

We were sitting in a meeting room some time ago, when I asked the question of our teenage confirmation candidates and heard that response.  I still remember it, not because the teenagers had come up with some radical answer - after all, it came directly from page 855 our Book of Common Prayer, in the section of the Catechism about “The Ministry” - but because when I was a teenager, I would have answered differently.  When I was growing up, the minister was the man up the front who talked and prayed and read from scripture. The Catechism in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer didn’t mention ministry or ministers at all, and I suspect its writers would have been someone confused by our inclusion of lay persons as ministers of the Church.

Things have changed.  The Church used to be a place with clearly defined roles: the clergy did “ministry”, and lay people did what the priest couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.  Men (and the clergy were men) typically didn’t arrange flowers, and that task fell to the women, along with cleaning and caring for the silver and vestments.  In the mid twentieth century, bulletins became popular, and if the priest wasn’t particularly adept with the typewriter, his wife or one of the ladies of the parish might help out. Visiting was officially done by the priest, although an often almost invisible network of parishioners carried information and provided practical help to those in need. Lay people dealt with practicalities like maintenance and finance. And the priest preached sermons and celebrated sacraments and was the religious expert.

Then along came the new prayer book, and suddenly we were all ministers, charged with representing Christ and his Church, and, among other things, with taking our places in the life, worship, and governance of the Church.  We became partners, working alongside one another, in the work of God.

And the boundaries blurred.  Lay people started leading bible studies, and visiting people who were sick, bringing them communion, and even preaching.  Clergy started talking about theories of leadership and financial stewardship. The lines between the spiritual and the temporal - and who was responsible for which - blurred. We began to pay greater attention to the gifts people had been given by God, and less to the traditional roles and expectations.

Of course, what was happening was in fact not new at all.  It was simply a reshaping of our corporate life to better reflect the call of the New Testament, where it’s made clear that God gives gifts to every Christian for the good of the church.  So we read in Ephesians 4:, “But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift...The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” The lists of gifts are expanded elsewhere, to include administration, and healing, and interpreting, and generosity, and encouragement.  There are no clear lines between clergy and laity; all of us are given gifts; all of us are called to use them.

And who does what is not so much a matter of tradition and role, but of giftedness and willingness.  Of course, there are certain things - absolution, blessing, consecration - that are reserved for the ordained, and in our tradition, they are responsible for overseeing the ministry of the church as a whole.  But most of who does what is up for grabs.    It just might be that a child has a gift for reading, or a man for flower arranging, or a priest for singing, or a woman for preaching.  And so they are trained and commissioned and set free to do the work that God has called them to. Not because the priest can’t or won’t, but because the gifts of God are spilling out everywhere, activated by the Spirit, and we’d be foolish to ignore them!

Who are the ministers of the church?
WE ARE!

Difficult questions

Late last night, I was about to go to sleep when I heard my iPad ding.  That’s the signal from the New York Times that there is breaking news.  I went online, and discovered that the President was to make a statement on national security.  It was on Facebook that I first heard that Osama Bin Laden was dead.  I found myself breathing out, as if I’d been holding my breath, without even being aware of it, and feeling an immense sadness, as his death brought home all the deaths these last ten years that one way or another have been related to the 9/11 attacks - here in the US, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

And I thought of those who lost family and friends on 9/11, and especially our junior warden, whose brother-in-law was killed that day.  As we waited for the President’s announcement, the Junior Warden and I began to chat online, as we struggled with how we should respond as followers of the Jesus who said we should love our enemies and forgive seventy times seven.

The reality is that it would be simplistic to say that we should have just forgiven Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.  Yes, we are called to forgive.  But true forgiveness is not something easily done.  It can take a lifetime, or longer, of intentional work, just as it can take a lifetime, or longer, to heal.   

But there is another question that as Christians, we have to address.  How do we deal with evil? Is it ever right to kill someone? What's the difference between revenge and doing something to prevent someone from committing more evil? Does the technological capacity to do mass murder make a difference?

Those are questions that have exercised Christian theologians ever since Jesus was crucified and resurrected. There is consensus that we should always resist evil - but there is less agreement on how we do that. Some concluded that it is right - or at least justifiable - to participate in a small evil to prevent a greater one.  Others concluded that it is never right to participate in evil, and that non-violence is the only option for us as Christians.  And there is a whole range of opinion in between.

We live in a fallen world.  There are no easy answers or perfect solutions.  There is no doubt that Bin Laden was the leader of an organization that was committed to bringing death and destruction, and was the perpetrator of evil.  We are called to resist that evil.

But I do not rejoice in his death.  I wish - and yes, I know it’s not particularly realistic - but I wish that he had repented.  I wish he had been brought to justice.  And I pray that his death will not fuel a further cycle of violence and fear.  It is time to stop.

As we wrestle with these difficult questions, perhaps the best thing we can do is pray.  And so we turn to our prayer book:

"O God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth: deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you, through Jesus Christ our Lord." “A prayer for our enemies,” Book of Common Prayer, p. 816

Called to the Dance

Here is the church

Here is the steeple

Open the doors

And see all the people.

The childhood finger game is one of my earliest images of the church.  It takes some manual dexterity to push your index fingers into the form of the steeple, and to interlock the remaining ones so that the people are hidden under the church roof, ready to be revealed when we open our thumb doors, rather than dancing on it.

"Church" is possibly the most common word that we Christians use, second only - perhaps - to "God." We use it of the buildings where we meet to worship God. We use it for the things we do on Sundays, "going to church."  We use it as a shorthand for our parishes and congregations. And we talk about the church at large, meaning Christians everywhere, or at least Episcopalians.

But in the New Testament, the main word that we translate as "church" is ecclesia.  It doesn't mean the buildings, or what we do.  It means literally "called out." We are the people who are called out, who are gathered together by God.  We are bound together by our faith in Christ, through baptism, and we are bound together with the people with whom we gather to worship and pray and serve.  We belong to one another, just as we belong to God.

And it's that belonging to God that shapes our relationship with one another as the church.  Just as God as Trinity is in an eternal dance of relationship of mutual interdependence, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we as Christians are caught up into that dance with God, and in turn mirror that interdependence with one another as the church.

One of the places to which we Episcopalians turn to explain what it means to live as Christians is the baptismal covenant.   But one of the things I've noticed recently is that the baptismal covenant doesn't do too well in expressing that interdependence.  It's implied earlier in the Baptism service, where the congregation is asked if they will support the baptismal candidate in their life in Christ.  But in the covenant itself, references are scarce.  We say we believe in the church - whatever it is - in the Creed.  But then we focus on our individual actions, in how we live our lives and in how we respond to the world around us.  It's as if we've forgotten that in baptism we are not only joined to Christ, but are joined to those called by his name.  We have a new identity in the household of God. And I wonder if we need to add a sixth question, "Will you use your God given gifts for the glory of God and the upbuilding of the church?"

And perhaps next time I play the church finger game with my nephew, I'll lock my fingers together the "wrong" way.  Maybe dancing on the roof is exactly where the church, where we, need to be.

Making space for God

Traveling through the Holy Land on the clergy pilgrimage with our Bishop, the thing that struck me most, and has stayed with me these last few weeks, is the desert.  When I think of desert, I remember the backgrounds of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons, with sand and rocks, but also cactuses, or the Simpson Desert in Australia, with its endless red dunes stubbled with canegrass and spinifex.  I didn’t expect to find desert with huge rocky cliffs, stone strewn slopes, and almost no visible vegetation.

Deserts are usually harsh places, and the Judean desert harsher than most.  But what I remember is not just the dry, rocky terrain, but the incredible spaciousness.  The endless sky seemed full of possibility; the stony ground demanded closer inspection; the cliffs invited me to go deeper.  I saw an orange wing-tipped black grackle, a nut-brown field mouse, and a diligent trail of ants.

But the spaciousness was not only physical.  As I stood in the desert, I felt as if my soul were opening wide in that space, opening up to God.  And I began to understand why it was that immediately after his baptism, Jesus went into the desert - possibly that same Judean desert - for forty days. During Lent, we remember those forty days that Jesus spent in the desert.  For him, it was a time of preparation for his ministry.  But I also suspect it was a time when, in the spaciousness of that place, the three-personed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, was able to commune.

We often wish that we could have an intense and visceral experience of God. Saint Augustine talks about our hearts being restless until they find their rest in God. My heart  and soul are often restless because there is so much stuff in my life.  It’s no wonder that Jesus told one man that as well as following the commandments, he had to sell what he had and give the money to the poor.  Not because there was anything intrinsically wrong with possessions - after all, Jesus didn’t give the same command to all the wealthier people he met - but because, I suspect, Jesus knew that all that stuff was crowding out God. There was simply no room left in that man’s life.

Deserts offer that space for God. But the problem with deserts is that they are lonely places.  There are usually not very many people there.  And while some are called to a life of solitude and contemplation, the vast majority of us are called to live in this world as the light of Christ, so that others might be drawn to him.  That mission is really hard to accomplish if we are in the desert and everyone else is elsewhere.  We need to be where people are, to share with them the love of God.

But we also need to know God.  So perhaps we need to carry the desert with us, creating desert-like spaces within our lives, where there is room to commune with God.

This year, my Lenten discipline this year has been to make space for God.  I have cleaned house, sorting through the food in my cupboards and the clothes in my closet, and giving things away.  I have given up some of the TV programs I used to need to watch, and removed some games from my iPhone.  I have spent time in meditation and prayer.  And I have met God, often unexpectedly.

The desert still calls, but underneath I know that what - or who - is really calling, is my Savior.  If only I will save the space.

Of Diversions and Arrivals

You can't get there from here. No one actually ever said it, but one of the things bout traveling through the Holy Land is that you rarely travel in a straight line. Sometimes it's geography that gets in the way. Visiting the places that Jesus knew around the Sea of Galilee involves driving around the lake, unless you have access to a boat. The drive from Ein Gedi on the Dead Sea to Bethlehem looks like a straight shot, until you realize that the rock hewn mountains and stone strewn wadis of the Judean Desert are in the way. And even in Jerusalem itself, you find yourself traveling round in circles, circumnavigating the Old City time and time again, even though it would be almost quicker to travel through on foot.
One of the things that you realize when you read the Gospel according to St Mark, is that Jesus rarely travels in straight lines either. But it's not just because of the geography. From the time that he goes into the wilderness after his baptism, right to the time he is arrested, Jesus is driven by the Holy Spirit to do the work of God (Thanks to the Rev Dr Christopher King for this insight, in one of the many conversations among the pilgrims this last week). Deep down, most of us, I suspect, think that life should go in straight lines. But the reality is that life rarely works out like that. There are innumerable twists and turns and diversions. Often it is incredibly frustrating, as we look at where we want to go, but somehow can't get there from where we are. Yet looking back at our lives, we often find that what we thought were detours in fact took us places we needed to go, without which we would not be the people we have become. And sometimes we can even see the hand of God in them.
The pilgrimage to the Holy Land is over. I began this blog entry in the bus traveling through Jerusalem; I'm finishing it in an office on Long Island. I have a suspicion that the pilgrimage will, in time, prove to be one of those detours that will shape my life in unexpected ways. If nothing else, the process of pilgrimage teaches you to let go of your own illusion of control and receive the unexpected as a gift, trusting that God will lead you in straight paths and detours alike.

Experiencing unity and division

Church this morning was at  the Anglican (Episcopal) Cathedral of St George in East Jerusalem, on the Arab side of the city.  Just a couple of blocks away, the wall marks the boundary with the Palestinian West Bank.  Walking towards the Old city from the Cathedral, you travel along a busy street, lined with Arab shops and market stalls, and after passing into the Old City through the Damascus Gate, you find yourself on the boundary between the Muslim Quarter on the left and the Christian Quarter on the right, though there is no visible difference between the two.

Mostly at home, when we hear about Israel, we hear about Jewish Israelis on the one hand and Muslim Palestinians on the other.  But rarely do we hear about the people caught in between: the 170,000 or so Palestinian or Arab Christians, like Isaac, who owns a shop near the Cathedral.   Isaac is Israeli; he also happens to be Arab and Christian.  His parents' home was in West Jerusalem, now a Jewish area; after the 1948 war they were forced to move east. When the wall dividing the West Bank from Israel proper was built, Isaac's home ended up on the wrong side.  It's only two blocks from his shop, but is behind the wall.  He has had to make a choice - live in his home, and forgo his Israeli identity and his livelihood, or keep his shop and live with his wife and children in one room in the Old City.  He has chosen the latter, and so his home lies empty and may eventually be bulldozed.  

This morning the Eucharist was celebrated in two languages.  At times it alternated between English and Arabic.  The sermon was preached twice, once in each language.  We sang the hymns and said the responses in our own languages, English and Arabic simultaneously.  And at for end, we went into the parish hall for cake and Turkish coffee.   It was truly a taste of the time to come when, as Isaiah says, "On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wines..." (Isaiah 25:6).   Pray for our brothers and sisters in the Middle East, and for the peace of Jerusalem. 

Humbly I adore thee...

One of the first things that strikes you as you enter the city of Jerusalem through the Lion Gate is the golden glow that emanates from the buidlings.  It's simply light falling on the sand-gold limestone that the buildngs are made of, but it almost seems as if the city itself has a halo, inviting you to reverence and worship.

As we walked the Via Dolorosa today, I was struck by the multiple forms of reverence shown throughout the ages and even today.  In the Crusader church of St Ann, our voices resounded long after we stopped singing, the echoes revoicing our praise.  A jumbled pile of large crosses by the ninth station bears testimony to the Friday tradition of carrying a cross while following in the footsteps of our Savior.  In a small church, an Ethiopian priest kept vigil, wrapped in a traditional shawl of black with maroon stripes. And in the church of the Holy Sepulcher, women in headscarfs chatted loudly to one another, black-clad Orthodox priests lined the route of a procession, people knelt and kissed the holy places, others lit candles and offered them in prayer, and still others stood in reverent silence.

Reverence lies in the act of worshipping or paying homage to Christ.  We do it when we sing and when we pray, when we genuflect or make the sign of the cross, even when we dress in our Sunday best.   And yet each of these can become perfunctory, habitual actions that have lost their essential connection with our Savior.  It's at times like these that being exposed to other, less familiar forms of reverence invites us to a new experience of worship and awe.

Shabbat Shalom in Jerusalem

Today, when we returned to the hotel in Jerusalem after a busy day visiting Masada and the Dead Sea, the lobby was full of little girls in black party dresses, white tights, and black Mary Janes, brothers in black trousers and white shirts, and their parents, preparing to celebrate the Sabbath.  Extended families gathered in the downstairs dining room, while upstairs, a rabbi with long curls and white robe and cap taught a group of young adults the Sabbath rituals. And at another table in the lobby, three preteen boys in khakis and sneakers seem to be arguing with an older sister about what card game to play, while a younger kid in a plaid shirt begs to be allowed to join in. If the babble of voices and laughter is any indication, this is a joyous time to be savored, in which family and faith are inextricably entwined.

As Christians, our the closest thing to the Sabbath is Sunday.  For most of us, the days of roast dinner - or pasta and meatballs - for Sunday lunch - are long gone.  And I don't think I'd want to go back to the days of blue laws and enforced churchgoing three times each Sunday. But I wonder if we have lost something in the process. Sundays are busy, filled with soccer or shopping or the incessant demands of chores.  Family and faith so easily become relegated to the time left over, or perhaps even displaced altogether.  And even when we make them a priority, they are often marked by sullen teenagers and harassed parents and overtired toddlers.  And I wonder, what can we take home for our own weekly celebration of the resurrection?

Boundaries and Identity

One of the things you notice as you travel throughout Israel is the closeness of the borders.  On Tuesday, we travelled up into the Golan Heights to the Valley of Tears, where  a major battle in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 was fought.  Less than an hour's drive from the Sea of Galilee, you stand and look past three abandoned tanks into Syria.  Earlier in the day, we had looked north-west to Lebanon.  Today we traveled down the Jordan Valley.  To our left, sometimes within 30 feet, was a double fence, electrified, with land mines in between.  Along it runs a sandy track, which is checked several times each day for the footprints of border-crossers from Jordan.  

On our way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, we crossed the border - and the wall - into Palestinian territory.  Neither our guide nor our driver, who are Israeli, could enter; we had to pick up a new guide and driver for our time there. As we waited at the border to cross back into Israel, with machine gun toting soldiers passing through the bus, I was aware that for those residents of Bethlehem, who work in Jerusalem, just a couple of miles away, this is an everyday occurrence, and for Israeli Jew and Palestinian alike, it is a restriction and ofttimes indignity.

Whether you are Jewish, Palestinian, or non-religious living in Israel, you cannot avoid the understanding that you live among your traditional enemies.  And that has been the case for thousands of years.   Set at the crossroads between Europe, Asia and Africa, this land has often been fought over.  Abraham entered a land that had been long  settled by Canaanites; Moses led the people of God back to a promised land settled by Jebusites and Hittites and Hivites; David and Solomon had to defeat the Philistines; the prophets spoke to those who had experienced the land-hunger of the Babylonians and Persians and Assyrians.  And Jesus lived in a country occupied by the Romans.

Against all that opposition, identity has always been something for which it was necessary to fight. Clear boundaries have been necessary - of language, law, and culture.  As you travel this land you begin to understand why law and covenant were so important, setting a people apart for God.  Here, identity has always been inexorably entwined with religion.  And the faith that has grown in this soil is passionate and fiercely loyal to the God who calls it forth.

Which makes me wonder, what of our faith?  For most of us, it has not been born in the context of enmity.  Being Christian in America, we don't need such rigorous boundaries to maintain our faith.  Most of our neighbors really don't care who or what we believe in.  And the danger is that we too may cease to care.

Accretions...

Today we visited Tel Megiddo, an archaeological site where there are 26 or thereabouts (depending on which archaeologist you believe) layers of civilization.  Inhabited from about 7000 BC to 586 BC, it is a mound created by fortress built upon fortress.  The remains include an early Canaanite settlement with its large circular altar, a circular communal grain pit from its time as an Israelite fortress, and stables with stone drinking troughs from the reigns of Solomon and Ahab.

Later in the day, as I was walking through the town of Tiberias, I realized that most of the Christian sites that we have seen are layered like Tel Megiddo.  The top layer is almost always a church, sometimes Roman Catholic, sometimes Greek Orthodox.  Down a layer maybe a Crusader church, or perhaps a Byzantine one.  Finally, perhaps down another couple of layers, are remains that date to the time of Christ.  Sometimes it's a village, or a rock, or a well; sometimes accessible, sometimes hidden behind a gate or under the floor.  Somewhere down there is a place that Jesus might actually have lived or visited.

Sometimes our faith is like Tel Megiddo.  Way down at the bottom is the heart of our faith, our relationship with Jesus Christ himself.  Sometimes that dates to our childhood; sometimes it is much more recent.  But since then, layers have built up over that initial experience.  The liturgical traditions that have become meaningful to us, the hymns that we love, the architecture that speaks to us, and the people who have shared our journey all shape our experience of faith.  But there are times when those accretions threaten to overwhelm our core relationship; it is at those times that we need to stop and take time to simply talk with our Savior.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to Bethlehem, where apparently we will go down a long flight of stairs and see the exact place where Jesus was born.  Maybe.

Fierce Landscapes

I'd always heard that Israel was a land of contrasts. But I'd always thought that was the classic cliched hyperbole that you expect from tourist advertising.  Of course there are contrasts - few countries are geographically uniform.  But what is striking is the sheer magnitude of the differences within a few miles.  From the shores of the Sea of Galilee to the fertile headwaters of the Jordan to the abandoned Syrian tanks of the Golan Heights takes little more than an hour to drive.

Somehow - I imagine thanks to my Children's Illustrated Bible - I had imagined this to be a more pastoral land, echoing the gentler contours of New England rather than the harsher reality of a land formed of volcanic eruption, earthquake, and erosion.

Imagine Jesus sailing on a lake that one moment is mirror still, and the next whipped by winds tearing past a hill that looks like it has been attacked with a meat cleaver, walking northwards through green fields spattered with stone, along a marshy stream that eventually becomes the Jordan River, and towards the cliff face in whose shadow the city of Caesarea Philippi was built, and where Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ.  His own understanding of himself and his mission must have been shaped by these places.  No wonder that the Jesus of the gospels is not so much "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild"  as a man of passion and grace in equal measure, one who healed a synagogue leader's beloved daughter and spoke woe on the scribes and the pharisees.

About ten years ago I read a book called "The Solace of Fierce Landscapes" by Belden Lane.  In it, he speaks of the relationship between spirituality and landscape: the ways in which the way we experience God is shaped by our environment.  The extremes of the land echo the extremes of our lives, birth and death, and their reverberations in between.  And so often, it is in those extreme and liminal places that we not only meet God, but find our faith reshaped and renewed. 

Blisters and blessings

Recently, I received a gift.  It was a small paper crown, with one word written inside it - longanimity. It was the Sunday after the Epiphany.  The priest in the church I visited invited each member of the congregation to take one of these crowns from a basket, and to receive the word written therein as a gift from God, to be lived with all year.  I had to look up my word in the dictionary.  It means "A disposition to bear injuries patiently" or "calmness in the face of suffering and adversity."  I don't like my word.

But in the weeks since I received it, I've learned to live with it.  And I've realized that it has a lot to do with the way you deal with the way you travel through life.

We Christians often talk about that journey through life as being a pilgrimage.   However, I sometimes think that we use the word metaphorically, without thinking what pilgrimage is really like. When I think of pilgrimages, I think of richly colored medieval paintings, red and blue and green with gold leaf, people walking sturdily towards a golden-roofed city.

But in the last couple of years, I've walked two pilgrimage trails: St Cuthbert's Way in Scotland and north-eastern England, and Two Saints Way from Chester to Litchfield, also in England.  They have not been like the medieval pictures in my head.  My clothing is not rich red and blue and green with gold leaf.  I have well-worn gray boots, gray shorts, a washed out blue T-shirt, and a gray hat.  They're chosen for their practicality - they're quick to dry and don't show the dirt.

And my walking is not so sturdy, certainly not by the time I'm within sight of my destination.  Limping would be a better word for it.  No matter how good my preparations, walking 15 or so miles a day means that I get blisters.  You learn to live with them, but you can't forget them.

But that's not the whole story of pilgrimage.  When I crested the last hill before the sea, and saw Holy Island, when I received the Eucharist in a church where my ancestors were married and buried, when I stood on the windswept moors where St Cuthbert visited his parishioners, when I received unexpected hospitality - a short car ride, a cup of tea, a pint of beer - I knew the tangible blessing of God.


The pilgrimage we are on as Christians is one characterized by both blisters and blessings.  Jesus never promised us that it would be easy.  In fact, he has invited us to take on his yoke, to bear the cross, to rejoice in suffering - not as some sort of masochistic hazing ritual, but as full participation in the often strenuous and sometimes costly work of God that, in the words of Romans 8:1-5, produces endurance and character and hope, and in the end, a share in the glory of God.  Or, in the words of the well known hymn,
Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure,
By the cross are sanctified;
Peace is there that knows no measure,
Joys that through all time abide.
John Bowring, 1825

Longanimity is about the blisters.  And it seems that as soon as one heals, my shoes begin to rub again.    But every time I crest another hill, I know the even greater blessings of the glorious grace of God.

Mission: Jesus' and ours

Today my youngest nephew and godson turned one. He's a sweet boy with big blue 

eyes, sticky-up brown hair, and incredibly long eyelashes.  He was baptized last May,  

and, I pray, will develop his own relationship with God as he grows up, and will in time 

serve God in whatever way God calls him to. 

In many periods over the last two thousand years,  the main way that the church - and 

the Christian faith - grew, was through procreation. Christian people had children, and 

those children took on both their parents' faith and their place in the church.  When birth 

rates were high (and infant mortality rates low), the church grew.    But when birth rates 

dropped, the church struggled. 

If you've seen recent statistics on church membership, you'll know that most  

denominations are losing members.  Birthrates aren't keeping up - we can't rely on 

babies to keep our numbers up.  And so we've been forced to begin to think once again 

about mission, about reaching out beyond our own immediate families with the good 

news of God in Christ. 

Not that this is anything new.  When Jesus began his incarnate ministry here on earth, 

to be Jewish was a birthright. But as he preached and taught his way around the 

countryside, it became clear that by contrast, to be Christian was a choice. Jesus began 

not with families, but with twelve men, commissioned to go and preach the gospel and 

to make disciples, baptizing all those who believed in the name of the Father, the Son, 

and the Holy Spirit.  That became the model for the growth of the early church, with 

followers of Christ taking any and every opportunity to share the good news with others, 

whether it was to a government official trailing inna coach, a prison warder, or crowds 

gathered in a marketplace. 

In the twenty first century in urban, suburban and rural Long Island, our experience is 

more like that of Jesus than that of those intervening centuries.  Now matter how much 

we cling to the idea that retaining our children and grandchildren will assure the future of 

the church, the reality is that what we need to do is what Jesus asked of us - mission.  

Mission is about going out into the wider community with the good news of God in 

Christ. 

Our baptismal covenant makes this explicit.  "Will you proclaim by word and example 

the good news of God in Christ?" We are invited, even commanded, to share the good 

news in what we say and in what we do. Both at the same time. 

God is relying on us to do the work of mission. If we don't share the good news, who 

will?  And so it is incumbent on us to look around us and see who might need to hear 

that good news. To offer to pray for them when they are struggling, to give practical help 

when they are in need, and above all, to invite them, as the apostle Andrew did with his 

brother Simon Peter, to come see the Savior.

Meanwhile, my nephew continues to grow.  His parents take him to church; in time, his 

father will read him bible stories at bedtime; his grandparents will pray for him; I'll talk 

with him about faith; and he'll experience the love of the body of Christ.  And he will 

make his own decision about whether to follow Jesus. God willing, his answer will be 

yes.