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.