Ah, Yes!

The Rector's Monday Message: February 12, 2012

2012-02-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

Holding Things Lightly

In the February issue of Poetry magazine, there is a collection of essays by contemporary poets on the connections between poetry and faith. One of the most interesting is a piece by Jane Hirschfield, a poet who is a longtime student of Zen Buddhism. Many things appealed to me about this essay, but I confess to a difficulty with its title: “Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.”

“Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.” As I stared at that sentence, I tried to make sense of it. What could she possibly mean? What is an “assailable” thought? What is the connection between “unassailable” thoughts and loneliness? And what does any of this have to do with poetry, let alone God?

When I was in high school, I regularly took part in speech and debate tournaments. One of the ways we train people to think is to ask them to develop an argument and then to support it with examples or evidence that will be convincing. The aim of rhetoric is to persuade people to your point of view. We do that by marshalling evidence that supports our argument, refuting examples that would go against it.

One of the interesting things about debating, though, is that when you are on a debate team you have to prepare both sides of an argument. If you do it right, you learn the strengths and weaknesses of each position. Usually you will side personally with one of the points of view. But you will also, in your secret heart, know that your position is “assailable”. It has weaknesses. It is open to correction.

In our culture we tend to admire people who know what they think and who hold tenaciously to a position. But Jane Hirschfield’s Zen insight suggests another way for us to be. We might hold on to our positions more lightly. We might admit to ourselves that the truth we hold to is our truth, that all truth is provisional.

The poet Robert Frost said that we tell ourselves stories as “momentary stays against confusion”. What he meant was that as people we try to make sense of reality by making up a working hypothesis of how things are. But the key to spiritual health seems to be an ability to revise the story as things change. In his essay, “Circles”, Ralph Waldo Emerson said that one must prefer truth to our “past apprehension of truth”. People, like institutions, become ossified in what they hold on to. They build fortresses and monuments around a living reality. In other words, their thoughts become unassailable. And life inside a fortress may feel safe, but it is very lonely.

By saying this I do not mean to imply that we should not have any firm convictions. (I still remember the topic of the first impromptu speech I gave in high school: “If you become too open minded, your brains will fall out.”) Every faith community and every person has certain core affirmations around which they organize their lives. But if I prefer truth, in Emerson’s words, to my past apprehension of truth, I will be willing to adjust my understanding of how those core affirmations manifest themselves over time. As James Russell Lowell said in the great Abolitionist hymn, “New occasions teach new duties.”

“Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.” The skills that we have all learned to articulate and support our arguments are the skills we use to help our point of view prevail. Even framing the practice that way suggests that life is some kind of contest, that what I want from our engagement with each other is victory rather than companionship. Living in community requires a different set of skills. As the philosopher Richard Rorty said, “Truth is made, not discovered.” Truth is something that emerges from our dialogue with and connection to each other. It is not a dead monument. It is a living stream.

As Lent approaches, I’m beginning to think about how I will organize my approach to it, and this year I’m thinking about how I learn to hold things more lightly. What I want is truth and community, not unassailable loneliness. To have the former, I’ll have to admit to much of what I affirm is a momentary stay against confusion, a provisional formation of how things look to me now. Seeing things this way I may win fewer arguments, but I hope I’ll have more companions along the way.

Gary Hall

Homily: The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany [february 12, 2012] Christ Church Cranbrook

2012-02-12T08:48:00.000-08:00

No matter how many times I read Mark’s Gospel, I always find it full of surprises. Last week’s passage told how Jesus healed Simon’s mother-in-law. Today’s shows Jesus healing a leper. Last Sunday, when I was leading a retreat at Camp Stevens in Julian, California, we discussed the first healing story as part of the closing Eucharist, and once again Mark’s Gospel told me something about Jesus I hadn’t known before. After hearing this passage read, one of our members noted that in these early Mark stories Jesus is suddenly coming to terms with his ability to heal people. It’s as if he hadn’t known he could heal people before. He goes to Simon’s house, touches his mother-in-law, and she recovers. In today’s Gospel, Mark underlines the newness of Jesus’s healing power when the leper has to remind Jesus that he has the power to make people well. He says to Jesus, "If you choose, you can make me clean,” meaning, if my friend is right, that news has spread of Jesus’s healing power but Jesus hasn’t entirely taken it in yet himself.

But Jesus is a fast learner. "I do choose. Be made clean!" He touches the man and heals him. And then he asks him to do something: "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." What interests me in today’s Gospel is how the recovered man disobeys Jesus on both counts. Jesus has done him an enormous service. He has healed him physically, and he has healed him socially. To say that he is “clean” means that he is both bodily clean and ritually clean. He is now free from physical and social suffering. You think he’d be grateful, and that he’d show his gratitude by doing what Jesus asked. Instead, he runs out and tells everybody how the new rabbi healed him. And there’s no record that he ever went to the priest to offer thanks.

So our Gospel reading for today pictures Jesus with a newfound healing power using it to cleanse a leper who, once he is healed, disregards everything that Jesus asked him to do. So much for gratitude. This reading is paired with an Old Testament story that tells us of another cleansing from leprosy, this one of the Assyrian General Naaman by the prophet Elisha. Part of the point of this first story revolves around Naaman’s and Assyria’s military power in relation to Elisha’s and Israel’s political weakness. When the Israelite king hears that Naaman is coming to town for healing, he panics. Will they hold it against him if the great man is not healed? And Naaman’s attitude doesn’t help things. When he is told he can be cleansed simply by bathing in the Jordan River, he complains to Elisha that this advice wasn’t worth the trip--they have much bigger, more impressive rivers back home where he comes from. It is only when a servant says to him, "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, `Wash, and be clean'?" that Naaman relents and does what the prophet had asked. And as the passage tells us, “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.”

These two stories are overtly linked by their subject: healings from leprosy. But they are covertly connected, too. Not only does each passage relate a miraculous healing. Each story also tells us how someone with authority tells a person to do something simple. In each story, that person refuses. There is something in us that balks at good advice, that wants to assert itself in a contrary way, that thinks it always knows best. Naaman and the unnamed man in the Gospel story share that characteristic. So do you and I.

There is a great scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall that illustrates this shared tendency. Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, has just been stopped by a Los Angeles police officer and is told to get out of the car and hand over his driver’s license. Alvy is so nervous that he drops the license and it falls to the ground. He starts explaining himself to the cop, who says,

OFFICER

Don't give me your life story

(Looking at the piece of paper

on the ground)

-just pick up the license.

ALVY

Pick up the license. You have to ask

nicely 'cause I've had an extremely

rough day. You know, my girl friend-

OFFICER

(Interrupting)

Just give me the license, please.

ALVY

Since you put it that way.

(He laughs)

It's hard for me to refuse.

(He leans over, picks up the

license, then proceeds to rip

it up. He lets the pieces go;

they float to the ground)

... have a, I have a terrific problem

with authority, you know. I'm... it's

not your fault. Don't take it personal.

[Woody Allen, Annie Hall]

I don’t know about you, but I recognize something of myself in Alvy Singer’s tearing up his driver’s license, just as I do in Naaman the Assyrian’s grumpy complaint about Israel’s two-bit river and the leper’s disregard of Jesus’s small demands. In all three examples the request is simple: go bathe in a river, keep quiet and go offer thanks, hand over your driver’s license. And in all three examples the response is an almost inexplicable refusal to cooperate. Three people told not to do something stupid, and then there they go doing something stupid. I think I know those people. I think I am those people. I think they’re a lot like me.

There is a willful, selfish, stubborn part of me at my core that wants what it wants despite all good advice to the contrary. No matter what your credentials to advise me, I think I know best. One of the revelations in today’s healing stories concerns that solidarity you and I share with the two cleansed lepers. At some level, each of us needs healing. At some deeper level, each of us resists it. Part of us would rather stay isolated in our sickness than be restored to wholeness in God’s health. The good news of the Epiphany season is that God will not let us stop there. God wills that we be made whole. And one of the ways God makes us whole is by allowing us to see fully into ourselves.

One of the great spiritual landmarks in our tradition is The Confessions of St. Augustine, probably the first real autobiography in Western literature. In The Confessions Augustine talks directly to God, telling his life story, looking for signs of God’s activity in his life. As he goes over the facts of his life—his early years in North Africa as a pagan, then his religious seeking in other traditions, his years as a successful teacher of rhetoric and of his time living with a concubine in Rome, finally his conversion to Christianity and his return to North Africa—as he recounts these he becomes aware, late in the book, of just how little he knew himself at the time of these events he recounted. The real story of Augustine’s Confessions becomes the way God progressively reveals Augustine to himself. He realizes that his ability to take in the fullness and depth of his selfishness and sin increases as he grows in an appreciation of the fullness and depth of God’s grace. Augustine couldn’t have taken the knowledge of his own iniquity earlier in his life. It is only as he ages and matures and becomes more secure in God’s love that God allows him to see himself exactly as he is.

Sometimes God loves us by showing us things. Sometimes God loves us by hiding them from us until we are ready to accept them. If you’ve ever been in therapy, you’ll know that you’re not ready to understand your problem until you’re ready. The therapist could probably tell you your diagnosis at the end of the first session. But even if she did, you wouldn’t be able to hear it. Something in us not only resists. Something in us hides from the knowledge that we resist. Part of God’s mercy and grace to us is that God shows us ourselves only as we are able to accept ourselves. In this sense, God is like a therapist, and the life of prayer is like a relationship with a trusted guide whom you come to know enough to open you up to God’s healing, revealing light.

We’re nearing the end of the season of Epiphany, a word that literally means “manifestation”. In this season we talk of the ways in which God’s glory has been made manifest in Jesus, in the people who gather around him, in God’s world, and in us. Today our scriptures point us to another side of Epiphany, to one of the more subtle ways God is at work in the world. God wants to heal you. And God wants to heal you by showing you to yourself in all your fullness. God loves and blesses all of you—not just the public face you show to yourself and the world. God loves and blesses you in your shadow places, in the parts of yourself you certainly don’t love, probably don’t accept, and may not even acknowledge or know about. The journey of faith is a journey of progressive self-discovery. God shows you to yourself only as you are ready to take that knowledge in. But once you can acknowledge the fullness of who you are, the blessings extended are deep.

In our culture, we seem to think that being Christian is somehow about being “nice” or “warm” or “good”. Those are cultural values, but they’re not the deepest Gospel values. Jesus did not gather a group of nice, warm, good people around him. Instead, he gathered a group of broken, complicated, conflicted people around him whom he then loved into being authentic, compassionate, and whole. In a sense, those of us who gather around Jesus then and now are like the two lepers in today’s readings: broken people who need healing. The offer is not perfection (or goodness or niceness or warmth) but wholeness (and authenticity and health). And they’re offered to us even when we push back stubbornly against them.

Like Naaman and his Gospel counterpart, you and I have been given the opportunity to wash, be cleansed, and give thanks. The hope is that we, unlike them, will be able to live into our healing and its implications. God really does love you as you are. God really does call you into being who you are in all its complicated fullness. And God’s greatest mercy to you is God’s persistence in loving you into seeing and loving yourself as God sees and loves you. And if you can see and love yourself as God does, then you’re well on your way to seeing, loving, and healing others too. Amen.

The Rector's Monday Message: February 6, 2012

2012-02-09T16:53:00.000-08:00

On Waiting

Sign seen in a repair shop:

Speed, Quality, Price. Choose Any Two.

Last week I went to a bike shop and asked to have a flat tire repaired. I also wanted some other things tuned up on the bicycle. The proprietor told me that I could have the flat repaired in 5 minutes, but if I wanted the other work done I'd have to come back tomorrow. I didn't really need the bike today. Heck, I could have waited until April. But for some reason I told the man that I'd wait for the quick repair and come back for the rest of the work some other time.

As I drove away I began to reflect on my decision. Why had I gone for the quick fix that didn't quite meet my needs instead of waiting for a more complete repair that would have required more of my time?

The sign quoted above has always struck me as one of the most concise statements of a philosophical reality. We can have it fast and good, but it won't be cheap. We can have it good and cheap, but it won't be fast. We can have it cheap and fast, but it won't be good. Being human, of course, we want all three. But increasingly we seem, when given the choice, to opt for only for decisions where speed will be the result. That means we give up either quality or price as values. I got my bike back quickly, and the cost was minimal. But the machine itself is still not quite in top condition.

It is perhaps a commonplace to observe that we seem to be living in a culture that values speed over almost all other considerations. Even as our labor-saving devices multiply and the basic tasks of life take decreasing percentages of our days, we are becoming increasingly impatient and unwilling to let processes take the time they need to work themselves out. Part of our increasing prurience for speed must result from our growing dependence on the stimulation we get from the instant responses of computer screens and hand-held devices. Speed (hurry, not amphetamines!), like alcohol, tobacco, or opium, is habit-forming. We are all on the way to being speed addicts, if we aren't already.

This is not just a social problem. It is also a spiritual one. Time and its unfolding are central to the Christian understanding of how we discern what God is up to. As a historical people, Christians look back to the whole salvation history, beginning with the Exodus, continuing with the prophets, culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As a faithful people, we look forward to the fulfillment of God's promises and the completion of God's purposes. Life makes sense in our tradition only over time. We can't quite see what a given event means in the actual moment. We only see the significance as the larger pattern emerges as time passes.

More than I want things good or cheap, I want them fast. I had an English teacher colleague who used to say that reading is a moral act. What she meant was that to read a book, the reader has to learn to accept the pleasure of delayed gratification. Waiting for a story to work itself out over 400 pages is often a hard task for a child used to half-hour episodes of a sitcom. But one of the things teachers do is lead children into the kind of maturity that can live with things unresolved until they're fully finished.

If you're like me, then being the kind of person who has to relearn patience is similar to being a student learning the pleasures of reading after a lifetime of television, video games, text messages. All of us have become so dependent upon instant results that we have lost the ability to wait for the outcome most fitting to all of the considerations inherent in the situation. By moving peremptorily to get done and move on to the next irresistible stimulus we fail to honor each other, ourselves, and the God who we believe is at work in the world over time.

As we get ready to observe Lent, let's remember that one etymology for the season's name derives from the Latin lentus, or slow. Working out God's purposes from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day takes 40 days. There's no way to short-circuit the process. Lent will take the time it takes. In that respect, it's an epitome of the way God works in all things. This Lent, let's learn to take things slowly, to let go of our need for instant responses. Of course in order to do that we'll have to give up the illusion that we're in control. But that, dear readers, is a topic for another message.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: January 30, 2012

2012-01-29T06:40:00.001-08:00

Lying, Spinning, and our Common Life

They utter lies to each other;
with flattering lips and a double heart they speak. [Psalm 12:2]

This spring I’m teaching a class at Cranbrook for seniors called “Ethics: The Problem of Evil”. One of the pleasures of teaching this course, aside from daily engagement with high school students, is the opportunity to study Martin Buber’s book, Good and Evil. Buber was a great 20^th century Jewish philosopher most famous for his book I and Thou about the dialogical relationship between the human being and God. Good and Evil is not as famous, but it is an equally profound investigation into the problem of lying in personal and social life.

My predecessor in teaching the class, recently retired Cranbrook Chaplain Dave Tidwell, chose the book because most students of philosophy would agree that lying is the foundation of what we would call evil. Before one can proceed to “evil” actions, one needs to deceive others, and that deception often leads to a general corruption of social and personal relationships and values.

Martin Buber holds that there are two qualities necessary for human beings to live together. The first he calls “well-wishing or the good will”. The second he calls ”loyalty or reliability”. Good will is necessary because, for society to function, we all must intend that each other flourish. Lying undermines good will. If I lie to you, I clearly want to seize an advantage over you. Similarly, reliability is essential because if we are to help each other mutually flourish we must be counted on to do what we say we’ll do. If I promise something and don’t deliver, my behavior corrodes the fabric of our common life.

Writing in 1952—what many would consider the “good old days”—Buber says that well-wishing and reliability “have disappeared so completely that the basis of [our] common life has been removed. The lie has taken the place, as a form of life, of human truth.” If Buber could have written that before the exponential explosion of technological ways of communicating (and manipulating messages), I wonder what he would say about truth and our common life in the 21^st century.

As I have listened to the political rhetoric ramp up this winter—I’m speaking about speakers on both sides of the aisle—I have become increasingly concerned that most of what passes for political discourse today is in fact spin. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve stopped listening even to the people I agree with. I know when most political speakers open their mouths they are not going to say anything surprisingly truthful. They are going to use the occasion to achieve an advantage, largely by massaging the facts in their interest. In doing so, they undermine both underpinnings of our common life, good will and reliability.

Obviously mendacious and meretricious political rhetoric is not new. But what is new is our widespread unquestioning acceptance of it. We do not seem to want a serious conversation enough to demand it. We do not subject untrue speech to real criticism. We appear content to remain comfortably ensconced in our familiar and safe ideologies.

The contemporary ethicist, Sissela Bok, says, “A society whose members are unable to distinguish truthful messages from deceptive ones, would collapse. But before such a general collapse, individual choice and survival would be imperiled.”Bad political speech is as dangerous as bad personal speech. Clearly we cannot give up either personal or political speech. But we can, both as private people and as citizens, commit ourselves to truth-telling as a fundamental value of what it means to be human.

“The lie,” says Buber, “is the specific evil which man has introduced into nature.” I am not naïve. I know that, because we are human, we will always lie and be lied to. Human self-interest will always make lying a seemingly less costly choice when figuring moral equations. But real self-interest should also prompt each of us to realize the long-term, hidden costs inherent in lying. Every time we lie, we corrode the fabric of our common life. And if that fabric finally disintegrates, there is no safe hiding place left for anyone.

The truth is not always easy, but it is ultimately our friend. Jesus knew that. So did Martin Buber. Here’s hoping all of us can come to see that, too.

Gary Hall

Homily: The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany [January 29, 2012] Christ Church Cranbrook

2012-01-29T06:30:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I had a free evening and went to see Martin Scorsese’s new movie, “Hugo”. It’s a beautiful motion picture, a combination of children’s fantasy and loving history of the early days of movies. I’ve long admired Scorsese’s films: even though most of them deal with New York street people and gangsters, they always exhibit a surefooted cinematic style. No matter what the subject of a Scorsese movie, you always watch it with the awareness that you’re seeing a movie made by someone who really knows how to make movies.

It’s a mystery (at least to me) how some people have an innate grasp of what they’re doing and others don’t. That grasp or the lack of it has nothing to do with intelligence. It’s a question of inner orientation.

Some people really know how to do what they do; others, not so much. When discussing visual art, the painter Frank Stella calls this quality “pictoriality”—in his words the sense that painting “can rise above the self-concerns that determine its own ends”. [Frank Stella, Working Space, p. 1] What Stella means is that a great painting uses the visual field with a kind of authority that renders the subject matter irrelevant. Caravaggio has it. Cezanne has it. De Kooning has it. Their paintings are totally dissimilar in style and subject matter, yet each one commands the space on its own terms. Frank Stella calls this quality “pictoriality”. And we might apply that idea to different forms of human endeavor.

Jesus had a kind of moral pictoriality. He preached and taught in a way that was surefooted and authentic. In our Gospel for this morning, we are told that the people at Capernaum “were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” [Mark 1.22] In the Judaism of Jesus’s day, the supreme religious authority was vested in the Torah, the law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible. The scribes were a class of Bible experts who would study the scriptures, render opinions, and resolve disputes about how to interpret Jewish law. When the crowd at Capernaum says that Jesus does not teach like the scribes, what they mean is that he does not ground his teaching in a claim of professional expertise or an appeal to someone else. He teaches as one who knows what he’s doing, with authority. In Frank Stella’s language, he is like an artist who paints with pictoriality. He is the Caravaggio, the Martin Scorsese of teaching. He knows how to tell you something in a way that you will be sure to take it in. And he tells you truth that he knows personally, not that he heard from another source.

What Jesus has, according both to Mark and the crowd, is “authority”. The Greek word that we translate “authority” is exousia, and exousia (authority) is always contrasted in the New Testament with another Greek word, dunamis, which means “power”. In the Gospel stories of Jesus, we are told that he has authority, meaning that he speaks and teaches with an inner sense of the right to do so. In the Bible’s understanding, authority comes from within. It is an orientation toward what one is doing, a sense that one is entitled and privileged to do it. Jesus teaches as one with authority, not like the scribes. He does not talk or sound like someone who has spent his entire life in the library. He talks about God not with textual evidence and citations but from a living inner experience.

So Jesus teaches with authority, with exousia. What he does not teach with is that other word, dunamis or power. Dunamis is the word from which we get the word “dynamite”, and it has less to do with inner confidence than it does with the ability to compel somebody to do something. If I teach with authority, you listen because I’ve convinced you I know what I’m talking about. If I teach with power, you listen because I’m holding a stick of dynamite to your head. Bad teachers teach holding the grade book in one hand, threatening students with their power. In the New Testament, power is a military word, authority a spiritual one. Caesar acts with dunamis, with power. Jesus acts with exousia, with authority.

At this point you are probably asking yourself why I have dragged you through this seemingly endless word study: “pictoriality”, “authority”, “power”. I’ve done so for a couple of reasons. One of them is that I love words and can’t help myself. The other, more serious reason, is that I believe this contrast between power and authority is important for each of us to grasp if we are to live in the world as followers of Jesus, children of God, and as brothers and sisters of those around us.

One of the problems with being a Christian is that we have received this authority teaching of Jesus all wrapped up in a system of ecclesiastical power. It is perhaps only one of the ironies of the Jesus movement that what began as a critique of power (the state power of Caesar, the religious power of the scribes) became, for centuries, embodied in a world-historical power projecting institution. When Christianity moved from an outsider movement to the official religion of Western culture, it became hopelessly enmeshed in questions of power. Look, for example, at the title I carry as the presiding priest of this parish. “Rector” comes from the Latin word, rex: king, ruler, power-wielder. And look around you at the building you’re sitting in. At least one of the purposes of Gothic architecture is to make you feel small, to emphasize the power of the institution that inhabits it. Want to think for yourself? Just look around and see how far you’ll get. The church, as a human institution, became obsessed, as all human institutions are, with the internal distribution and external wielding of power. But the Jesus we meet in the scriptures is not interested in power. He lets Caesar and Herod argue about that. The Jesus of Mark’s Gospel is interested in authority.

And it is the authority of Jesus—what I’ve called his moral and spiritual pictoriality—that causes the crowds to follow him. In today’s Gospel he casts out a demon. In other stories he heals people, curing lepers and paralytics and restoring sight to the blind. Jesus can do these things not because he has a certificate from an institution telling him he can. He does these things because of his own internal connection to and grounding in a relationship with God. He does not force or compel people to be well. He draws them toward wellness because of the depth and quality of his inner life made visible in his outward actions.

Last week I was trying to explain to some students at Cranbrook the difference between “moral” and “moralistic”. What I finally came up with was this: “moral” people say, “I ought”. “Moralistic” people say, “thou shalt”. A truly moral person is concerned with his or her ethical obligation in a particular situation. A moralistic person wants to tell you what you should do. It is Christianity’s tragedy that we have often confused the two: over time, we’ve behaved less as a moral movement and more as a moralistic institution. Jesus taught not as one with moralistic power—the ability to compel other people’s assent—but as one with moral authority. He openly lived the Gospel he proclaimed from within. He drew other people into the expanding circle of his enfolding love.

There are, for me, two implications for us in all this. One has to do with our shared, Christian community stance toward the world. The other has to do with how we, as individual people appropriate God’s authority in our lives.

As to the first: as a community, the church is called to be moral, not moralistic. We are called to exercise authority, exousia, not power, dunamis. If we think we are still a world-historical power-projecting institution, we are kidding ourselves. There is lots of bad news in the decline in church membership and attendance across the globe these days, but hidden in all that loss is at least one gleaming nugget of good news. We are no longer the official religion of the western world. Therefore, we are free to live again as the church lived before Constantine. We can become, again, the Jesus movement, a group of fragile, faithful women, children, and men called into new life in the fellowship of Jesus and his table. As a body, we are now free from the burden of telling other people what to think. We can turn to the much more energizing and illuminating task of standing for what we believe: justice, compassion, inclusivity, love.

Freedom from having to live from power is our greatest gift as a people. As individual people, there is also an implication in the shift from power to authority, and living into it starts with seizing an insight delivered late in Martin Scorsese’s movie, Hugo. Near the end of the film, Hugo says this to the girl Isabelle who has become his friend:

I'd imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason.

There are no extra people. We are each here because we matter, because we count. Live your life not with power but with authority, with pictoriality, with joy and generosity and compassion and hope. Live from your authentic self, out of what you know to be true. If we all did that, we’d be just like Jesus. And everyone around us would be astounded. Amen.

The Rector's Monday Message: January 23, 2012

2012-01-22T14:28:00.000-08:00

The Answers to All Life’s Big Questions

Well, not really—but I knew that nobody would read an essay titled “Thoughts on the Annual Meeting”. But now that I have your attention, I hope you’ll read on.

By canon law, parishes in the Episcopal Church have annual meetings, usually in the month of January. The purpose of these meetings is threefold: to hear reports on work and finances for the preceding year; to elect members to the church’s governing board, the Vestry; and to discuss important issues in the parish’s common life.

Some years, parish annual meetings can be quite contentious. Most years, they are quite routine. While I do not anticipate any major controversies this year, there are some important issues to come before us. Let’s take them by category.

When you come to the meeting, you’ll receive a hefty packet of Annual Meeting reports. Virtually every ministry area in the parish—from worship to pastoral care to education to outreach—is represented in these reports. The size of this packet might be daunting, but I hope it won’t deter its avid reading. Most of Christ Church Cranbrook’s ministry is carried out through the work of its people. The staff, while essential to the optimal functioning of the congregation, serves primarily to support, train, recruit, and supervise the baptismal ministry of the church’s members. So I ask that you read the work reports not as staff report cards but as reflections on what God is doing in and through the people who make up the congregation.

I’ve asked that the chairs of the four working groups designated by the Vestry and me as of high strategic importance (Stewardship, Outreach, Children and Youth, Communications) report on their ongoing work in 2011. By highlighting those areas, we’re NOT saying that their work is more important than that done by others. But we are saying that these areas are so vital to the vitality and future of the parish that they need our shared, constant attention.

Next comes the Vestry election. I am deeply grateful that eight dedicated and able parishioners have offered themselves to be considered for five slots. I hope that when you vote for those five people you take into account the deepest needs of Christ Church Cranbrook as it moves ahead. Most vitally, it’s good to remember that all Vestry members are “at large” members: each one is elected by the congregation as a whole. While the nominating committee tries to plan for diversity of age, interest, experience, and for gender balance in the slate, the priority for a governing board of a congregation as large as this one is less about the representation of constituencies than it is about the presence of vital competences. The Vestry is called to think, act, decide, and plan for the whole system. As you consider the nominees, think about what skills you believe should be present in the group that, above all others here, speaks and acts for you.

Finally, we’re considering some changes to the parish By-Laws. The proposed amendments attempt to align our standing committee structure both with our missional priorities and with the functional realities of the way things work. We’ve added Children and Youth and Outreach as standing committees of the Vestry. When surveying the committee structure, I noticed that there was no structural Vestry connection to church school and youth ministry and that Service and Outreach was only an ad hoc group. The proposed amendments give these priority areas a clear connection to the Vestry’s engagement. In two other areas we’ve proposed structural refinements that bring clarity to the current system. The Stewardship Committee is the only standing committee charged with developing parish financial resources. The new language gives the Stewardship Committee authority to create subcommittees that will carry on its work in three areas: annual giving, capital giving, and planned giving. And the language making the Columbarium Committee a subcommittee of the Building and Grounds committee merely confirms current practice.

The Vestry and I think of these By-Law changes as non-controversial. Their intent is to conform our structure to our practice. Please read and reflect on the changes (they’re posted on the website) and bring your responses and ideas to the meeting.

So much for the answers to all life’s big questions. In a sense, though, that’s what we get by living together in the community that gathers in response to the life and ministry of Jesus. The answers to all life’s big questions come finally not in ideas but in relationships. Living out our baptismal covenant with each other, in the context of the Eucharist, is the real meaning of what life is all about. I’m grateful for everyone here and their companionship in this community.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: January 16, 2012

2012-01-15T05:53:00.000-08:00

Chaos, the Multiverse, and God

In an article in December’s issue of Harper’s magazine, the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman describes what he calls a “crisis of faith” among theoretical physicists. In the history of Western thought, he says, scientists and philosophers have largely held that certain phenomena (the sky’s color, the temperature of boiling water, the patterns of snowflakes, and so on) were “necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature”—laws fixed at the beginning of time and subsequently discovered by human beings. But this belief in fundamental underlying natural laws is giving way to a new understanding, and that view is producing some anxiety among scientists. As Lightman (a professor at MIT) explains,

Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

[Alan Lightman, “The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith”, Harper’s, December, 2011]

In other words: the idea of a “universe” (a unified cosmos comprising the total of everything there is) has given way to the idea of a “multiverse”—a collection of universes each governed by its own rules and characterized by its particular features. Objects may fall at 32 feet per second/per second in our universe, but who’s to say how fast they might plummet in another one?

Order is important to us humans, and so the idea that we inhabit a cosmos made up of a bewildering number of chaotic universes sounds, at first, like a challenge to all we hold dear and believe in. But before we despair, we should remember that even order has its limitations. As Lightman suggests,

The multiverse idea does explain one aspect of our universe that has unsettled some scientists for years: according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen.

The idea of an orderly cosmos appeals to our desire for order; but on its own, order has no generative power. It is the very chaos of our universe that allows it to sustain conditions that give rise to life.

As a Biblical scholar friend of mine suggests, the first verses of Genesis are often mistranslated in English. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”[Genesis 1.1] The word we translate “void” (in Hebrew, bohu) really means something more like “lifeless”, “confused”, or “chaotic”. So Genesis 1 never precisely says that God created the world ex nihilo, “out of nothing”. What it does say is that God made the living, abundant world we know out of the formless, lifeless, confused chaos that was there to start with.

Why does any of this matter? I think it’s important for two reasons. First, it’s important because as in the world of theoretical physics, so in the world of the scriptures, God is better understood as an artist than as a magician. God does not produce the world the way a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat. Instead, God makes the world out of the materials at hand. And the materials God works with are the very fragments of chaos. The world is like a sculpture made out of found objects. It is beautiful, and it is also random. In fact, its beauty emerges from its randomness. Only the asymmetrical can be really beautiful and alive. If the world were perfect ly symmetrical, it would be perfectly ordered and therefore totally dead.

The relation of chaos to God and creation matters, second, because it suggests that our own chaos (personal and internal, corporate and shared) is a condition of being alive. Our lives are chaotic because the world is chaotic. Our world is chaotic because God used the stuff of chaos out of which to make it. The point is not that we need to be orderly, perfect, and dead. The point is that we are called to be chaotic, random, and alive. As is God, so are we artists. We spend our lives making our lives out of the random hands we have been dealt. God is both in that chaos and in our working with it. We find God not by trying to be perfect but by making life out of what we have.

So: theoretical physicists and control freaks: take heart! As we move more deeply into the season of Epiphany, we join Jesus in the manifestation of God’s glory in our lives and work and relationships in the world. That glory is made manifest in personal and shared asymmetry and chaos. Say no to perfection and death. Say yes to chaos and life. Help God continue to create a beautiful and random world into an ever more hospitable, gracious, compassionate, and joyful place.

Gary Hall

Homily: The Second Sunday after the Epiphany [January 15, 2012] Christ Church Cranbrook

2012-01-14T15:38:00.000-08:00

I had a sobering experience earlier this week. On January 1, Christ Church Cranbrook changed insurance providers to take advantage of the savings offered by participating in the national church’s denominational health plan. I needed to refill a prescription, so I called it in to CVS in Birmingham and went to pick it up. When I got there, I was charged not be the usual $6 co-pay but the full $88 cost of the prescription. The higher cost was due to our not having received our insurance cards yet. I was a little grumpy about this—it’s since been resolved—but at the time the young pharmacy assistant was trying to help me out. She looked at me and said, “Pardon me, sir, but can’t you get Medicare to pay for this?”

Now this was not the first time a young person has thought me older than I actually am. I routinely get senior tickets at movies even without asking for them. And this perception problem extends beyond the obviously text addicted and smart-phone distracted young. When people hear how old Kathy and I are, they always say to Kathy, “What? You couldn’t possibly be that age!” Then they turn to me and say, “You know, for your age you don’t look too bad.”

All this thinking about age this week helped me remember, with a shock, that today, January 15, is the 35^th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. Along with five other young deacons, I was ordained a priest on Saturday, January 15, 1977 at St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles. It was a beautiful 80-degree winter day in Southern California. The cathedral was packed because one of our number, Victoria Hatch, would be the one of the first women regularly ordained to the priesthood after the canonical change approved by the General Convention of 1976. There were protesters and bomb threats. The church was filled with plain-clothes policemen and FBI agents. Just another typical day in the Episcopal Church.

Now I bring up my ordination anniversary not because I’m fishing for gifts. (But just for your information, I’m a 44 long.) I bring it up because the memory of that event connects with two issues in our common life this weekend. One is the Gospel for today. The other is the holiday we observe tomorrow, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

I’ve always admired the way Jesus operates in today’s Gospel reading. He demonstrates a marked ability to read people and to treat them in ways appropriate to their personality. This passage shows the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. He wants to gather a group of companions around him, the group we will come to call his disciples. He spots Philip and simply says, “Follow me.” It seems Philip doesn’t need much persuasion, so Jesus doesn’t offer any.

Then Philip gets Nathanael to come and see Jesus, and this is where Jesus really goes into operation. He spots Nathanael and says, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Clearly he’s referring to Nathanael’s smart-alecky remarks about his home town (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”), but he also plays up to Nathanael’s vanity. As when someone who’s trying to butter you up tells you, “You are naturally smart, perceptive, good-natured, and generous. Everybody likes you.” How can you respond except to say, “Yes, that’s right, you’ve described me perfectly?”

And then as if this strategic flattery isn’t enough, Jesus trots out his superhuman abilities. Nathanael says, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answers, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nathanael relents. “Rabbi,” he says, “you are the Son of God! You are the king of Israel!” Jesus, of course, gets the last word. "Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these." [John 1: 43-51]

What’s wonderful about this encounter, I think, is the way Jesus gets two very different people to follow him. One, Philip, responds simply by invitation. Another, Nathanael, takes a little bit of asking. But the point is that they both follow. As the prophet Samuel, in the first reading, says, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Something about God’s offer to come and follow is irresistible to those who are called.

And yet we live in a world where God’s call seems to many eminently resistible. One of the big mysteries to me is why some people follow God’s call to come into faith communities like this and why others seem perfectly content to live their lives without any visible reference to the divine. I don’t say that to be judgmental. I could not have lived my life without the church, and yet I know many folks for whom religion is simply a tiresome bother. This is a real mystery to me.

Some of us hear God’s call and follow. Others don’t. Answering that calling brings some burdens, but doing so is mostly a privilege and a gift. Philip got it right away. Nathanael took some persuading. They both spent their lives traveling with Jesus and then leading the community that gathered in his name. What kind of life could be better than that?

So one thought this morning is about the Gospel story and about its mysterious, gracious implication that God has called each and all of us into fellowship with Jesus and each other. The other thought has to do with Martin Luther King, Jr. whose birthday is today and whose holiday we celebrate tomorrow. The six of us priestly ordinands chose January 15, 1977 as the day on which we wanted to be ordained precisely because it was King’s birthday. You may remember that there was a rather ugly debate going on then about whether or not it should be a holiday. In the intervening 35 years that debate has subsided, and King has become an American icon, but we should remember that there were those even in the late 1970s who thought King a dangerous subversive.

I love King’s writing, and I’ve taught several of his pieces in high school and college. As great as the “I Have a Dream” speech is, though, its over-use tends to obscure the sharpness of King’s intelligence and make him sound like a greeting card. The great Cornell West refers to this process as the “Santa Clausification of Martin Luther King”. Sentimentalizing King blunts some of his force; he had, after all, one of the great, prophetic minds of all time, especially in the Christian tradition. If one point this morning is God’s call to us to follow, the other point is that God is always calling us to follow toward some place specific. And Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and witness give us a good image of that specific place toward which Jesus asked Philip and Nathanael to go then and you and me to journey today.

One of King’s greatest achievements was the letter he wrote to the Birmingham, Alabama clergy when he was imprisoned in the Birmingham jail in April of 1963. The white clergy had criticized his methods, calling him that favorite phrase of the 1960s, an “outside agitator”, and he replied with a defense of civil disobedience grounded in a profound analysis of Christian history. The letter is usually referred to as “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Here is one bit of what he says near its end:

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. . . . We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. . . . If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. [Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, April 16, 1963]

Like Jesus, like Philip and Nathanael, like the prophet Samuel, Martin Luther King, Jr. answered God’s call to follow. Like them, King understood that the call was not only to follow but to go with God toward a specific place—the place Jesus called the “Kingdom of God”, a zone of blessedness, peace, compassion, and health, a place where we experience the world on God’s terms, a place where the blind see, the lame walk, the prisoners go free, and the poor have good news preached to them. King knew that the Kingdom of God was less about his own personal salvation than it was about building a world where wrongs are set right and all of God’s precious children can share in the abundant blessings God holds out to everyone.

God called Samuel and he answered. Jesus called Philip and Nathanael and they followed. God called Martin Luther King, Jr., and he gave himself up to a vision of America and humanity that continues to inspire and bless us today. A vision of justice, equality, compassion, and love. This vision is more than a dream. It’s a picture of how the world really, finally is. God calls you and me into this church and out into the world. Not everybody hears that call. But we do. Hearing it has brought us here. Living in response to it will bring us forward with God into God’s future. For that future, and for people like Martin Luther King, Jr. who see it and lead us toward it, we now proceed to give thanks. Amen.

The Rector's Monday Message: January 9, 2012

2012-01-13T06:07:00.001-08:00

Epiphany and Resurrection

Last Friday, Kathy and I went to Chicago for the final service in the chapel at the old Evanston campus of Seabury (the seminary I served before coming to Christ Church) and for the blessing of the school’s new site near O’Hare airport in Chicago. As part of the liturgy in the new space, Bishop Jeffrey Lee of Chicago led us in a renewal of our Baptismal Covenant.

Normally I tend to space out when clergy make extemporaneous asides during the liturgy. (I’m enough of a traditional Episcopalian to want them just to read what it says in the prayer book without adding creative special material.) But Bishop Lee introduced the baptismal vow renewal in words that touched me then and that I’ve carried with me since. His words went something like this: “Since we have died with Christ and have risen to new life with him in Baptism, let us renew our Baptismal Covenant.”

Now on some level I have known what Jeff Lee said then on an intellectual level for years. After all, the prayer book Baptismal liturgy speaks of water in these words:

In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit. (Book of Common Prayer, p. 306)

Clearly, you can hear and even say aloud words many times without actually taking them in. The early Christians saw in the Jewish rite of washing in Baptism an analogy with the death and resurrection of Jesus. Just as Jesus died on the cross and was raised at the empty tomb, so the baptized person goes down into the water in a death to their old story and rises into a new risen life with Jesus in the here and now.

When we Christians talk about resurrection, we usually use the term to refer to life after death. But, as Bishop Lee’s words suggested, the primary meaning of resurrection for Christians has always assumed a present reality first: we have died and been reborn in this life. For you and me followers of Jesus, before resurrection suggests life beyond death it is first about new life before death. We have died with Jesus in his death. We have been raised with Jesus in his resurrection. We shall be like him. We are offered new life now.

Yesterday was the first Sunday after the Epiphany, also known as the Baptism of our Lord. On that day we remember Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist, and we reaffirm our own baptismal covenant. If Baptism is about our dying with Jesus and rising to new life now, what might the outlines of that new life look like?

The Baptismal Covenant gives us some clues about the qualities of risen life. It poses five questions to help us frame and describe it:

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?

Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

Resurrected life in the here and now bears the characteristics implied by the questions above. Resurrected life is grounded and faithful. It is marked by continual repentance and forgiveness. Resurrected life is open about its commitments. It sees God in all people. Resurrected life respects the dignity of every person.

We talk about resurrection at Easter and at funerals, and it is appropriate that we do so. A part of the Christian hope is the proclamation that Jesus’s resurrection means ongoing life in God for him and us. But resurrection talk is important at Epiphany, too, because the season enacts the manifestation, the “epiphany”, of God’s glory in the human community and world. God’s glory has been manifested in Jesus and in us. And we manifest God’s glory whenever we step into and enact resurrected living in the here and now.

Christ is risen. We shall be too. We already are. Let’s live that way.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: January 2, 2012

2012-01-02T06:35:00.000-08:00

Thoughts at the Turn of the Year

I have ambivalent feelings about New Year’s. On the one hand, it is kind of exciting to see the ball drop, the clock and calendar turn over, and to start a year all over again. On the other, the whole event seems artificial. The whole idea of the calendar itself seems so arbitrary. The world we greet on January 1 always looks very much like the world we as we left it on December 31.

New Year’s Day is set aside as a holiday in our culture principally because the 17^th century Calvinist Presbyterian Scots made it one. Calvinist, “Reformed” Christians were suspicious of Anglican holidays, especially Christmas. Therefore, the Scots Presbyterians (along with the New England Puritans) refused to celebrate the holiday. But they knew they needed some sort of winter festival to replace it, and so they developed New Year’s Day as a Protestant alternative to what they considered the “Papist” festivities of Christmas.

In our culture, New Year’s has developed principally into an occasion for thinking about change. Just as the year changes, we think, so might our lives. And somehow in our culture “change” seems to center on ideas of self-improvement. We might, of course, use New Year’s to think about social, cultural change. But in our world, New Year’s resolutions almost always focus on a change in personal habits. Beginning January 1, I’ll exercise and pray more; eat, drink, and smoke less. Gyms are always really crowded the first week in January. They tend to clear out by Martin Luther Jr. King Day.

So I’m a bit skeptical about New Year’s in many respects. Still, there is an important aspect to the holiday I think we can all appreciate. While it may not always be an occasion for life-changing resolution, New Year’s is an opportunity to reflect on what the poet A.R. Ammons called the “ongoing flux” that makes up our lives.

In 1965, A. R. Ammons published a book-length poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year. The lines in the poem are quite short. That’s because Ammons wrote the poem by typing it on a roll of adding-machine tape. Tape for the Turn of the Year is a verse journal that reflects on the change occurring between one year and another. For Ammons, human life is lived in the tension between freedom and constraint. (Hence the short lines enforced by the use of a narrow tape. Hence also the free verse written without the fetters of meter or rhyme.) For us, the calendar is a conventional way to impose order (days, weeks, months, hours) on something which is essentially fluid: time itself. By marking off time in the rigid arbitrary way we do, we’re essentially trying to channel a river or bottle lightning. In some sense trying to control and contain time is a fool’s errand. Time will relentlessly flow no matter how we try to constrain it. But we can’t help ourselves. Year after year, even though we know better, still we try to get the better of time.

In Tape for the Turn of the Year, A. R. Ammons asks us to think about how each of us finds a way to live in the now, perched as we are between the future (January, change) and the past (December, tradition). So New Year’s is also about the tension between change and tradition. As Ammons says,

we must keep the
tradition &
modify it
so we stay resilient to
change:
too traditional is a loss of
change: too changing is
loss of meaning & memory:

This is an important insight not only for the life of faith communities and bodies politic (we need to be both open to the future and mindful of the past). It is also vital guidance for us as individual people trying to navigate the flow of time. We each have histories, families, communities to which we are accountable. But we are also each individually free and unique. So our lives need both to respect tradition and to celebrate our unique selves. The desires for changelessness and total freedom are illusions. We stand with one foot on each shore as the river of time flows by.

Ammons wrote only a few book-length poems. Most of his output consisted of very short verses. Near the end of Tape for the Turn of the Year he compares himself to both forms and decides in favor of the latter:

Ideally

I’d be like a short poem:

that’s a fine way

to be: a poem at a

time: but all day

life itself is bending,

weaving, changing,

adapting, failing,

succeeding.

Instead of making New Year’s resolutions, we might follow A. R. Ammons’ lead and use this time of year to think about the “ongoing flux” of time and how we each navigate it. Christianity takes time seriously. And while contemplating the long sweep of God’s time perhaps shows the futility of our arbitrary markings off of years and months, it is still important for each of us to stay mindful of how precious our own allotted time really is. This ongoing flux of time may be abundant, but for each of us it is finite. As the Evening Gatha of Buddhism admonishes us, “Do Not Squander Your Life.”

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: December 26, 2011

2011-12-25T17:06:00.000-08:00

The Week after Christmas

One thing that really irks me about holidays is the way our culture marks them. We have an obsessive run-up and then they seem to disappear almost before they’re over. When I was working at churches in Los Angeles, I always noticed how the music stations would play Christmas music beginning around Halloween and then, as I was driving home from the Christmas Day service (at about noon), poof! Christmas would be declared over and they would start singing about New Year’s.

In our prevailing culture, the phrase “Christmas Season” usually describes the period between Black Friday morning and Christmas Day at noon. The church’s liturgical calendar, though, has a different way of understanding the time between late November and early January. The four weeks leading up to Christmas are called “Advent”, a time of hopeful, watchful preparation for the birth of Jesus. The Christmas season properly lasts from December 25 through January 5—otherwise known as the “Twelve Days of Christmas”. On January 6 we celebrate the Epiphany, the manifestation of Jesus’s glory to the three magi. Taken together, the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany trimester gives us a time not only to prepare for the holiday but also time to enjoy it.

Once at a church meeting, a colleague of mine proposed that we establish a “rapid response” team so that our parish could quickly enlist in the service of whatever hot issue seemed important that day. Another colleague countered that what we really needed was a “pause and reflect” team instead. The suggestion was not well-received.

Somehow, perversely, we have turned Advent from a time of watchful waiting into a time of anxious preparation. And then we’ve taken the holiday we’re waiting and preparing for and cut it short before it even begins. In so doing, our culture has given us a perfect epitome of how it fretfully does things. Rather than bask in the beauty and wonder of Christmas for a full twelve days, we’re off to the next thing (New Year’s Eve, the parades and bowl games, resolutions) without ever pausing to take in what it is we’re experiencing in the first place.

Christmas is not really Jesus’s birthday. Nobody knows the date of his actual birth. It is something much bigger: an observance of his birth as a celebration of the wonder of the incarnation, Christianity’s proclamation and belief that God has come into human flesh and experience. The incarnation is a big idea, and it has gigantic consequences. It means that our life and experience matter because God participates in them. It means that the God we pray to is a God who knows what it is to be us. It means that every human person is precious because each one bears, uniquely, the human face of God.

One of the things I tried to do this Advent was actually to experience Advent, to listen to what its readings said about being in exile, (lost, alienated) and then to hear the slow dawning of the promise that some One was on the way to be with us in a new and hopeful way. One of the things I’m going to try to do this Christmas is actually to experience Christmas—not for a few hours on December 24 and 25, but all the way up to and including the Epiphany on January 6. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” says John’s Gospel, “full of grace and truth”. That’s a big, empowering, liberating fact to try to take in. I can only attempt to get it by making the space and time for it, giving myself over to it, and attending to what I hear and see and feel as I do so.

Now that the holiday frenzy is over, the time to pause and reflect has come. Take advantage of these twelve days to reflect on what Christmas can mean in your life and world. God has come into and blessed our experience. Who we are and what we do has meaning and purpose. The Word has become flesh and now lives among and within us. Merry Christmas, indeed!

Gary Hall

Homily: December 24, 2011 [Christmas Eve]

2011-12-24T15:38:00.000-08:00

December has been a busy time for us, so Kathy and I have not had a chance to see the new Muppet movie yet. But one night last week a cable channel showed the 1984 classic, The Muppets Take Manhattan, and we decided that we’d watch that to prepare ourselves for the newest film. It you remember The Muppets Take Manhattan you’ll recall that it ends with Kermit marrying Miss Piggy in a festive church wedding service. As the camera panned around at all the guest Muppets filling the church, you couldn’t help noticing the big gathering of Sesame Street characters at the back of the room. Suddenly, surprising even myself, I cried out to Kathy, “Look! Everybody’s there! Even Ernie and Bert!”
Kathy took my hand. “It’s only a movie, dear,” she said. I tell this story as an example of what this season does to people, even to bookish clerics like me. I am of course too old to have grown up with Sesame Street; Howdy Doody, Kookla Fran and Ollie, and Miss Frances were more my early childhood style. But Ernie, Bert, the Count, Oscar, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird were prominent in our house when our son was little, and seeing them again made me feel as if I was in the presence of old, loved friends. I might not have cried out in joy had this been the Fourth of July. But because I saw it in the days preceding Christmas, some childlike part of me felt free to express itself.
So Christmas brings out our childlike qualities. It shows what a real intellectual I am that, whenever I think of Christmas, the first image that comes to mind is Snoopy’s doghouse. If you remember another great cinematic classic, A Charlie Brown Christmas, you’ll recall that in that story Snoopy wins the neighborhood lights and display competition by decorating his doghouse with flashing lights, colorful ornaments, and a big red star. To Charlie Brown, Snoopy’s doghouse seems like a garish sell-out of the holiday. To me, that decorated doghouse has always served as a vibrant image of home—especially when Snoopy and Woodstock are asleep on the roof.
Home, in a sense, is what Christmas is really about. In Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas, our scripture readings have been not about home but about its opposite. They’ve been about the absence of home, also known as exile. For the past few weeks in church we’ve heard stories of ancient Jews and early Christians expelled and adrift from all they love and hold sacred. Now tonight in the Gospel reading from Luke, Christmas arrives with the timeless, familiar story of Mary and Joseph, going themselves in a kind of exile from their home village of Nazareth in the north to their ancestral town of Bethlehem in the south to be enrolled in the Roman census. As Luke’s Gospel puts it,

All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. [Luke 2.3-7]

There are many reasons this story always speaks so directly to us, but chief among them, I believe, is the way it plays on our notions of home. Mary and Joseph are on the road. When the time comes for Mary to give birth, she and Joseph go first to an inn and then to the inn’s outbuildings where she gives birth and lays the child Jesus in a manger. The beauty of the scene, of course, comes from the way Mary and Joseph manage to make a home in the barn with the new baby and the attending shepherds. We respond year after year to this story because it figures for us the picture of what we all really long for: we all long for home, for the security of the mother, the father, the infant together under one (even if modest) roof. The manger scene figures for us the perfect picture of human security. It is our shared ideal image of what it means to belong. It is our epitome of home.
If Christmas is about anything, it is about home. And by “home” I mean neither our houses nor our nuclear families—though they too can give us authentic intimations of home. Instead, by “home” I mean where we all deeply, finally belong. And if there are any people who need a home, it is those of us who live in the consumerist, materialist, individualistic world of the 21st century. The values that drive this world are not the values of the manger scene. So to the extent we respond to the values of the stable in Bethlehem, we are aliens in our own world. We are all in exile, whether we admit it or not. Exile is a biblical metaphor that speaks to people of faith in every moment. We, like the ancient Israelites and early Christians, live in rocky, uncertain, hard-hearted times. We, like the ancient Israelites and early Christians, respond to and long for God’s values of peace and justice and humility and compassion—values that are honored in public discourse but seem to be missing from our actual experience of life.
But if the image of exile speaks to us, so do God’s promises of restoration and renewal. As did the ancient Israelites and early Christians, so have we also felt the touch of the miraculous vision of life’s possibilities that God offers us in the Christmas story. To be a person of faith or a seeker is, in the 21st century, to be an exile in one’s own native territory. But it’s also to claim the hope for dimensions and possibilities to our life more joyous and hopeful than anything our culture has to offer. To come to church on Christmas Eve is to declare that each of us here deeply longs to connect with the source of our being, to return home. To come to church tonight is also to proclaim that we see something in the manger scene which tells us that life can give us more than the “wearisome possibilities” [Walter Brueggemann’s phrase in Cadences of Home] the world usually has to offer.
Christmas is about home, and it’s about the new possibilities for living that God tonight holds out to us. Frederick Buechner says, “We carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us. “[Fredrick Buechner, The Longing for Home, p. 110] That wholeness is most perfectly shown in the life and ministry of Jesus. The child whose birth we celebrate tonight will become the man, Jesus of Nazareth, a healer, preacher, and teacher whose life will be dedicated to proclaiming the Kingdom of God. He makes that proclamation to his fellow exiles: to the poor, the sick, the lonely, the mourners, the oppressed, the outcast. Jesus heals people. He gathers them around his table. He opposes the killing structures of his day by saying that everybody, regardless of social distinction, has a place in his community. Jesus builds around him a disparate group of people who, together, can be at home with each other in the new world of possibility that Jesus’s presence creates. The things that Jesus does look to the world outside his presence like impossibilities, and so they are called miracles: healing the sick, feeding the 5,000, raising Lazarus from the dead, casting out demons, restoring the sight of a man born blind. To those inside this new home of his presence, what Jesus does is make God’s “impossibilities” for life, joy, and wholeness possible and available. When you step into the Kingdom of God, you step into a new world of hope and freedom and joy, and you step out of dependence on the bad ideas or false allegiances our culture usually wraps in tinsel expecting our grateful thanks.
I believe that all of us here tonight have come because this picture of a woman, a child, a man gathered around a manger says something true to our shared deep, exilic longing for home. At bottom, each of us knows that what we want for Christmas is not yet another thing. At bottom, each of us knows that what we really want for Christmas is a sense of being at home, a sense that we are living life in alignment with that “vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us”. The home we see realized in the Bethlehem stable is the true home that will abide.
Time passes: not even Kermit’s and Miss Piggy’s marriage could last. We are all mortal and fragile, so even Snoopy’s doghouse will finally fall silent and Woodstock will fly away. For Christians home is never, finally, about preserving an ideal moment or recovering the past. Our true home lies not behind but ahead of us. Our true home is the place we are going with God, each other and Jesus, and we experience our true home now whenever we refuse the “wearisome possibilities” on offer around us and say yes to the life-changing blessings made real in the ministry and resurrection of Jesus then and now in the community that gathers in his name.
Whoever you are, wherever you are in your life and faith; whatever losses you have experienced; whatever longings you feel: tonight, in this place, you and I are here, together, home. What makes this our home is not that it's an institutional church or a beautiful building. What makes this our home is the story of Mary and Joseph and the infant Jesus gathered together, brought out of exile and into the warmth of a sheltering stable. We, with them, are open and alive to the miraculous possibilities for love and blessing and life and hope that God offers us always, and especially tonight. This Eucharistic meal we share together is the sign that what we long for is within our reach, that we can experience it as we gather around this table in God’s loving embrace and are fed with the bread and wine of thanksgiving and hope. Exile is over. You really can come home. In fact, you’re already here. Amen.

The Rector's Monday Message: December 19, 2011

2011-12-17T07:34:00.000-08:00

Mary: Exemplary Christian

One of the pleasures of the Advent season is its use of the Fourth Sunday of Advent to turn our shared attention to the Virgin Mary. When the season began in late November, it emphasized the Second Coming of Jesus at the end of time. For the intervening two Sundays we heard the proclamations of John the Baptist. Now, in this fourth week before Christmas, we have moved closer to the moment of Jesus’s actual, historical birth. The person at the center of the action is his mother, Mary.

Those churchgoers who grew up in a Catholic form of Christianity—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglo-Catholic—are quite familiar with Mary, usually referred to in those traditions as the “Blessed Virgin” Mary. For several centuries, Catholic expressions of Christianity have venerated Mary both in her role as Jesus’s mother and as a feminine aspect of the divine. Those who grew up in a more Protestant form of Christianity—Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, low church Episcopalian—have not had much opportunity to consider Mary on her own terms. Because most Protestants have been skeptical of what theologians call “Maryolatry”, they have tended not to think about her very much at all.

One of the great achievements of the 20th century ecumenical and liturgical movements has been the opportunity for every sort of Christian—Catholic and Protestant—to reevaluate their understanding of Mary and the meaning of her life and witness. For Catholics, this has meant looking at her in more historically human terms. For Protestants it has occasioned serious, sustained reflection about Mary as an exemplary follower of Jesus.

Two excerpts from yesterday’s readings help us see and hear Mary as a Christian witness and prophet. In the Gospel (Luke 1.26-38) the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will conceive and bear a son and name him Jesus. This is a startling announcement: Mary is not married, and bearing a son who will reclaim the throne of David is a daunting task. Mary is being asked to bear two burdens—social opprobrium as a single mother (see Matthew’s version of the story [Matthew 1.18-25] where Joseph has to be convinced that his betrothed’s pregnancy is of divine origin) and the added weight of raising a child possessed of an immense public and religious destiny. Many would shrink from this task, unwilling to bear these burdens. Mary does not. She faces directly and faithfully into them. “Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’" [Luke 1.38a]

So Mary shows herself to be a willing, faithful servant of God and God’s purposes, however strange or frightening that service might appear. But when she has some time to settle into the consequences of carrying out this role as Jesus’s mother, she discovers her own special vocation as one who proclaims God’s purposes—that is, as a prophet. On her visit to her cousin Elizabeth, herself pregnant with John the Baptist, Mary proclaims the prophetic canticle we call “The Song of Mary” (in Latin, Magnificat) (Luke 1.46-55), familiar to many from the service for Evening Prayer. Mary says,

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; *for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.From this day all generations will call me blessed: *the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.He has mercy on those who fear him *in every generation.He has shown the strength of his arm, *he has scattered the proud in their conceit.He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *and has lifted up the lowly.He has filled the hungry with good things, *and the rich he has sent away empty.He has come to the help of his servant Israel, *for he has remembered his promise of mercy,The promise he made to our fathers, *to Abraham and his children for ever.

In this stirring and powerful song, Mary aligns herself with the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others who proclaimed God’s vision for peace and justice among human beings. She announces that what God is doing through her is consistent with what God was doing in the Old Testament—casting down the mighty, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry, calling into question the self-satisfaction of those who have perhaps too much. The coming Messiah to whom she will give birth will be God’s agent of this prophetic challenge and blessing. As the prophet who announces Jesus’s mission, Mary claims her role as Jesus’s first and most consistently faithful disciple. And she will live out this vocation all the way to the cross, the empty tomb, and the birth of the Christian movement.

As we move toward Christmas this week, let’s give thanks for Mary and the way she points us toward what Jesus’s birth really signifies. God is doing a new thing that will bring about health and wholeness, peace and justice, for the whole human community. God calls us into that wonderful noble effort as colleagues and companions with both Mary and Jesus. May we have grace to say “Yes”, as Mary did. And may we have vision to see with her and Jesus the world God is asking that we help create.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: December 12, 2011

2011-12-11T08:33:00.000-08:00

Looking and Living in Hope

Advent—the four weeks before Christmas--is a time of expectation. But it is not a time of just any kind of expectation. It is a time of hopeful expectation. As the season draws on toward Christmas, that hope gets its primary focus in the expectation of the birth of the child Jesus in Bethlehem. But the season is also more broadly focused on what God will do beyond Christmas, especially now and in the future. Our waiting for Christmas is a paradigm of our waiting for God to act on the near- and long-term desires we have for redemption, reconciliation, and new life.

The best biblical text I know about hope appeared in our Sunday lectionary yesterday. It is Psalm 126, a text that comes from the period of the Exile, the fifty years when Israel’s leadership was led in captivity to Babylon from about 587 B.C.E. to 537 B.C.E. The Babylonian Captivity lasted two generations, and it destroyed Israel as a political and a religious community. Those who were led into exile tried to maintain their religious and cultural identity in Babylon, but lacking both a Temple and a political community they found it difficult to do so. As another psalm, Psalm 137, says,

1 By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, *
when we remembered you, O Zion.

4 How shall we sing the Lord’s song *
upon an alien soil?

The Psalm we read on Advent 3 comes from that exilic moment of loss and alienation. And yet it does not despair. It is, instead, wildly, extravagantly hopeful.

Psalm 126 In convertendo

1 When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, *
then were we like those who dream.

2 Then was our mouth filled with laughter, *
and our tongue with shouts of joy.

3 Then they said among the nations, *
“The Lord has done great things for them.”

4 The Lord has done great things for us, *
and we are glad indeed.

5 Restore our fortunes, O Lord, *
like the watercourses of the Negev.

6 Those who sowed with tears *
will reap with songs of joy.

7 Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, *
will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.

Think, as you read it, about the time line projected by this psalm. The singers of it are speaking in the present moment of Babylonian captivity. And they sing exuberantly about God’s liberation. Yet they talk about it not in the future tense (as a wished event) but in the past tense (as a completed event). “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, “they announce, “then were we like those who dream.” They go on to describe mouths filled with laughter and tongues with shouts of joy. The hoped-for fulfillment has been proclaimed as an achieved fact. The exiled Israelites will dare to live as if their liberation has already happened. Even though they are imprisoned now, they will choose to live in that captivity as free people. And living as free people will help bring about their ultimate liberation.

Whenever we say this psalm in our liturgy I find my heart and imagination stirred. What would it mean for me, for you, for all of us to live as if what we most deeply long for were already a reality? Think of all the forces of life that oppress us—from political and social forces beyond our control to our own bad habits to the physical illnesses and inevitable losses we suffer and grieve. What would it mean for our lives if we were to choose to act as if God’s promises had already been fulfilled? I don’t mean that in some fairy tale way—I mean it in the way the early Christians meant it when they chose to live not in the oppressive control of Rome but in the freeing light of the resurrection. Caesar was not their king; Jesus was. They lived as citizens of his reign and enacted God’s abundant blessing even in times of privation. They were free even in captivity.

The Advent season is our opportunity to reclaim and orient our lives around the promises at the center of the Gospel. Our hope is one proclaimed in the midst of pain as the place where God’s promises become real. All religions face the danger, in Walter Brueggemann’s words, of moving “upstairs away from the realities of life.” [Israel’s Praise, p. 132] As he says, “It is the reality of concrete pain known in the specificity of a person or a community which is the locus of serious faith.” Christmas is not a nostalgic celebration of bygone happiness. It is the coming of God into the realities of life, the concrete pains and longings that mark each one of us as people living in the real world. Like the exiled Israelites and the early Christians, you and I can choose to be free even as we are captive to the pains and losses and limitations of life. Living that way is where serious faith begins.

“Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy”, said the singers of Psalm 126. They knew that because they hoped it. And because they hoped it, they could live it. May this Advent season give you the grace to trust what you expect, to live what you hope for.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: December 5, 2011

2011-12-04T09:13:00.001-08:00

Language and Worship

On the First Sunday in Advent this year, November 27, many Roman Catholics experienced the new English language version of their liturgy. There was a lot of press coverage about this change, so briefly: under the leadership of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the Roman Catholic Church has worked to revise the English language service that emerged after Vatican II in the 1960s. That earlier English service, like our own Rite II in the Book of Common Prayer, was based on a return to early church liturgical texts. It was not a revision of the Latin Mass in use at the time. It was a new version of something old.

The current Roman Catholic hierarchy has been quite public in its desire to roll back some of the changes (we would call them reforms) ushered in by Popes John XXIII and Paul VI in the 1960s and 1970s. The “new” version of the English Mass unveiled last week is actually a translation of the Counter Reformation Latin Mass used before Vatican II, and as such it’s an attempt to restore the theology of that era. An analogue for Episcopalians would be to imagine a new English language liturgy that would be a mere modernization of the 1928 Prayer Book’s language—the “thees” and “thous” would be changed to “yous”, but the underlying theology would be the same. The churches revised their liturgies in the 1960s and 70s as a way of giving expression to an experience of church very different from the one that preceded it. The “new” English Mass for the Roman Catholic Church thus represents a return, however subtle, to a pre-Vatican II way of thinking. It may sound more stately than its predecessor did , but it also tends to validate an antiquated and hierarchical vision of the church and world.

Surprise at changes to liturgical language on Advent 1 was not limited to the Roman Catholic Church. Some Christ Church Cranbrook parishioners seemed caught off guard by the revised version of the Nicene Creed we began using at the 10:00 a.m. service that day. This text, approved by the General Convention in 1994 and widely in use throughout the Episcopal Church since then, makes three changes to the Creed’s language. It refers to God becoming “truly human” (not “man”) in Jesus. It refers to the Holy Spirit in more neutral (“who” instead of “he”) language, and it omits the phrase “and the Son” when it talks about the procession of the Spirit from the Father.

The two changes to gender language are an attempt to translate the Creed in a more expansive manner, consonant with the inclusive language used in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Many Greek, Hebrew, and Latin words that are inclusive in the original have been rendered in English in male language (e.g. “humanity” becomes “mankind”). These new translations attempt to render the Latin text o the Nicene Creed in a more accessible way that is also faithful to the original.

The third change—the removal of the clause “and the Son” (in Latin, filioque) is actually a theologically important attempt to right an old wrong. The original text of the Nicene Creed (dating from the fourth century Council of Ephesus) read, simply “I believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.” The original text, adopted by the whole church, did not have the word filioque (“and the Son”). It was added by the Western Church two hundred years later in an attempt to respond to local heresies. The Eastern (now Orthodox) Church never agreed to add the phrase, and the Anglican reformers of the 16^th century mistakenly thought that filioque had been there from the beginning and edited out by the Orthodox later on. One longstanding principle of Anglican theology is that only scripture and the teachings of the undivided (East and West) church can be truly normative. In restoring the original text to the Nicene Creed, the Episcopal Church is attempting to be faithful to the spirit of its origins.

All of us who go to church regularly become habituated to familiar ways of speaking in worship. Language is important, and our task as Christians is always to balance what we mean with the comfortable (or disquieting) associations of how we say it. I am skeptical of the “new” English Roman Catholic Mass. I believe that the new translation of the Nicene Creed in our church will be a great aid to each of us seeking to understand not only who God is but how God acts in the world. As we settle into it this Advent and beyond, my hope is that this language will open up the Creed, and the liturgy itself, as windows into the mysteries we investigate as we gather together around God’s table.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: November 28, 2011

2011-11-29T08:48:00.001-08:00

Advent: What Are We Waiting For?

When Thanksgiving is over, it isn’t only Black Friday (or, this year, Black Thursday) that tells us Christmas is coming. Our culture labels the days between late November and late December “the holiday season”. In the Christian liturgical calendar, though, this time of year is called the season of Advent, a word we take from the Latin root meaning “coming”. These four Sundays before Christmas together make the time we prepare for the coming of Christ at Christmas.

As in all seasons of the church year, each Sunday of Advent has its own special prayer, called a collect. Here is the collect for the first week of the Advent season:

First Sunday of Advent

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

As a season, Advent is organized around the mystery of time. It begins at the end and ends at the beginning. Waiting in expectation for the coming of God into our lives, we begin the season by thinking about the end of time. You’d think that Advent would be an orderly progression from past to future, but it’s actually the other way around. We start with the future and, over four weeks, work our way back to the past. We do that because we understand that God’s self-revelation happens in three ongoing moments: the last day (the end of time), the present day (the here and now), and the first day (the birth of Jesus in first century Palestine). The Sundays of this season work both backward and forward at once. The Fourth Sunday features the archangel Gabriel’s annunciation to the expectant mother Mary. The Third and Second Sundays focus on the warnings and predictions of John the Baptist. The First Sunday starts with us, as we are, today and then jumps forward to “the last day”, when Jesus Christ will “judge both the living and the dead”.

By initially directing our focus to the last day rather than the first day, the Prayer Book asks that we use this season as a time not only to prepare for Christmas but also to pose some larger questions to ourselves. Specifically: what are we waiting for? What is our hope? What would God’s authentic presence in our lives look and feel like?

The Advent season’s simultaneous focus on past and future gives us a way into considering these questions. We get our image of what redeemed, transformed, liberated life will look like by looking back to what we have already seen of that life in the ministry of Jesus and the community he gathered around him. The Christian hope is not vague and gaseous. It is specific and particular. We hope, when all is said and done, to experience God’s love as those gathered around Jesus did. We look back to the first Christmas so that we can look forward to the final one.

So when the collect for the First Sunday of Advent says that Jesus will come at the end of time “to judge both the living and the dead” we should hear that not as a harsh final exam on life given by a divine monarch—but rather as a loving summation made by one who has already loved, healed, taught, touched, and blessed us. We “rise to the life immortal”, in the prayer’s words, through sharing the love, compassion, and forgiveness that continually marked Jesus’s ministry. If we only looked forward, we would do so in fear. If we only looked backward, we would do so with grief. That we can look both ways at once allows us to see the past as the pattern for the future and the future as the completion of a process begun in the past.

The phrase that always arrests me in this collect for the First Sunday of Advent is the one that prays we may receive “grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light”. The vision of future judgment informed by a gracious past and dynamic present gives us a way to organize our preparation for this season. Christmas will come in its own time. It already has. God has been, is, and will be with us. What are we waiting for? We move, in these four weeks, toward the present and future coming of Christ, one that will reprise an ongoing love we already know. This time of waiting is the season’s proper gift. To make ourselves ready, let us remember that what we really hope for at Christmas is what we have already seen in the life of Jesus and in the expressions of human compassion and mercy we know in the fabric of our lives. Let us cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light. Jesus is coming toward us. And even in this holiday season we are moving toward him and the One who sent him.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: November 21, 2011

2011-11-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

Spiritual, Religious, or What?

The longer I work in the church, the more I realize how important and challenging good communications are. Last week we had a great visit with Jim Naughton and Rebecca Wilson, two friends and colleagues of mine who do consulting through their company, Canticle Communications, for parishes, dioceses, and institutions in the Episcopal Church. Over two days, they worked with parish leaders and staff members to explore Christ Church Cranbrook’s core values and practices. They had made an initial visit here in June to evaluate our parish communications; they returned in November to help us do some message development for both internal and external audiences. Jim is a newspaper person and the editor of Episcopal Café, the best website around offering Episcopal Church news, commentary, and opinion. [Check it out at www.episcopalcafe.com.] Rebecca has done a lot of work for and with nonprofit organizations and churches. Together they bring a great deal of insight, skill and experience to their work.

Jim and Rebecca are also faithful, engaged Christian people, so their consulting is informed by more than mere expertise. They have a theological vision for what they do. They care deeply about the vitality and the future of the church, and they have a deep understanding of what churches need to do to be effective places of worship and centers of mission in the world.

One thing they helped us all see over the course of the weekend was the gap between what current parishioners value about a church (any church) and what prospective members might be looking for. Essentially, those of us who attend church value the traditional things that institutional Christianity has offered: worship. pastoral care, opportunities to serve, staying connected to friends. But the things we value are not necessarily what non-attenders are looking for. When asked, increasing numbers of people say they are not particularly attracted to the traditional menu of established church practices. They describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. They care deeply about discovering what God is doing in the world and in their lives. They are less interested in the traditional institutional expressions of Christian faith.

As you can imagine, this new perspective on why more people don’t come to church provoked a lot of thought and discussion. It got me to thinking about how we Christians “read” the culture we’re in. I think we have tended, in mainline churches, to under-read the spiritual interest of our culture and to over-interpret the decline of church attendance as a call to provide more (secular) services. Megachurches offer coffee bars, exercise facilities, teen dances, child care. We tend to think that if we had only more amenities like these we would be more popular. We tend to think our friends and neighbors don’t come here because they’re not interested. It doesn’t occur to us that they stay away because they don’t think we’ll help them attend to the big questions they have to ask. From the outside, we look more interested in organizing taffy pulls than prayer groups. The people who avoid us do so not because we are too spiritual but because they see us as not spiritual enough.

I must admit that I have always detested the phrase, “spiritual but not religious” because I have seen it as shorthand for a kind of laziness. I have (rather judgmentally) concluded that they wanted the consolations of a religion without the attendant obligations. But as I’ve thought about last weekend’s conversations, and as I’ve reflected on them with others, I am beginning to see that what I believe to be true about churchgoers is also true about those who spend Sunday with the newspaper. People no longer have to go to church for any reason save an inner compulsion to go there. Those who do show up on Sunday are responding to something God is prompting in them. The corollary is this: those who stay home on Sunday are no less subject to God’s nudgings. They simply don’t believe that we in organized churches have anything deep or compelling to tell them anymore.

Knowing and loving the church (and this church) as I do, I believe we do have something deep and compelling to tell those who live and work and study and play around us. We have to do a better job of letting them know that a liturgically serious, intellectually open, socially committed, pastorally engaged faith community like ours will provide a place to root themselves in the life of faith. I also know that we have to go deeper, together, on the journey of faith so that we can offer what we know with some credibility. It is my job to offer the language, the framework, the skills, and the trustworthy community in which we all can reflect on what God is doing within us and through us. It is your job to bring the depth of what God is doing within you to the conversation. Together we can find a way to be both spiritual and religious.

Gary Hall

Homily Earth Sunday/The Last Sunday after Pentecost [November 20, 2011] Christ Church Cranbrook

2011-11-19T15:23:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 2004, Kathy and I and a group of parishioners from the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania spent several weeks in the African nation of Malawi. We were there to evaluate agencies working with AIDS orphans for a parish outreach project that is, I’m happy to say, still going strong. Eight of us traveled by van around the entire country for three weeks, visiting a dozen AIDS agencies and choosing to work ultimately with five. It was hard, disturbing, and inspiring work.

Near the end of our trip we wanted to take a break, so we arranged to spend a weekend at a wilderness camp in a national park there. The camp, Mvuu (Chichewa for “Hippo”) Wilderness Camp, sits on the shore of the Shire River in Liwonde National Park. To get there you cross the river in a rickety boat dodging hippopotami and crocodiles as you go. Once there, you lodge in quite luxurious tent chalets, each with a deck that looks out over the river.

The first afternoon we were there, Kathy Hall made some tea and sat out on the deck, hoping to enjoy the serenity of the river scene. As she read her book, she had the feeling she was being watched. When she looked up from her book, she discovered about 150 vervet monkeys were standing on the deck railings and hanging from the surrounding trees, staring directly at her. That night, when we went to bed, in addition to the sound of the gently flowing river we heard the sounds of natural selection at work. All would be quiet, and then suddenly you’d hear: Thunk! Splash! Scream, Scream, Scream! Munch, Munch, Munch! And then it would be quiet again.

Those of us who live in urban/suburban settings tend to think of “nature” as placid, peaceful, serene. Get to know nature, though, and you realize that there’s a constant struggle going on there beneath the postcard vistas. Our trip to the wilderness camp in Malawi reminded me of the great American nature writer Edward Abbey’s description of the Great American Desert:

Survival Hint #1: Stay out of there. Don't go. Stay home and read a good book, this one for example. The Great American Desert is an awful place. People get hurt, get sick, get lost out there. Even if you survive, which is not certain, you will have a miserable time. The desert is for movies and God-intoxicated mystics, not for family recreation.

It has been said, and truly, that everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry, and fierce as the animals. Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity. The soft evolve out. [Edward Abbey, “The Great American Desert”, from Desert Solitaire}

Edward Abbey, of course, was trying to get you to stay away from his beloved desert. He was one of the original movers behind the radical environmental group, Earth First! Like many of the Earth First!ers, Abbey believed that when it came to ecology, human beings are the problem. We are the problem, in their eyes, for two reasons: because we essentially mess up the place, polluting and exploiting it to our own purposes. And we’re the problem because we are sentimental about it, valuing, in theologian Sallie McFague’s words, “snow-capped mountains and pandas” while shunning the insects, rodents, and stinkweeds that also make up a valuable part the natural world.

Today is Earth Sunday, the second Sunday we have set apart to observe the season of Creation. In the course of my working life in the church, from the 1970s to now, the environmental movement has had an enormous effect on Christian theology. And it’s good that it has. For most of its existence, the church has read Genesis 1:28 as a warrant for doing whatever we want to the planet:

God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’

Since the 1960s and 70s, the increasing awareness of the environmental catastrophe that we humans have brought on the Earth—pollution and overpopulation, originally, now global warming and chaotic climate change—that awareness has caused many in the church to try to understand stewardship of creation in a different, less exploitive, light. Still, those who think about the environment have become conflicted about the role we human beings should play in the overall scheme of nature. Does nature exist for us? Are we the problem? Or is there some other way to understand how we and the earth relate?

The Earth First!ers might take some comfort from our Old Testament reading, the creation story as recounted in the Book of Job. As you remember in that story, Job is a prosperous person whose life suddenly turns upside down. Job complains to God about his suffering, and God responds “out of the whirlwind” with today’s account of the depth and mystery of creation.

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: . . .

‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know! [Job 38]

Although God loves Job and hears his complaint, the point here seems to be that the mysteries of life—from human suffering to the origin and purpose of the universe—are beyond human comprehension.

However you understand God’s words to Job here, there is a point being made in them we need to hear. Whenever we think of the world as the mere raw material for our commercial or aesthetic processes, whenever we think that nature is here simply for us to use for our own ends, whenever we treat the natural world as ours to do whatever we want with, then we are not honoring the natural world on its own terms. When I treat nature merely as a place to mine raw materials, support arguments for my version of reality, or provide placid vistas to enhance my own serenity, I am not doing justice to the natural world as it is in itself. The world is not here for my exploitation. It has its own integrity and meaning and purpose. It is, in theologian Sallie McFague’s metaphor, “the body of God.” As she says, “The world is the bodily presence, a sacrament of the invisible God.” [“The World as God’s Body” in The Christian Century, July 20-27, 1998, pp. 671-673] The point here is that the world is God’s body, not ours. It deserves the respect we would give to God’s incarnate presence in Jesus. We should treat the world as we would treat our incarnate God.

But lest we overvalue the earth at our expense, we also should realize that human beings deserve a particular kind of respect, too. In our treatment of the world, of God’s body, we have “erred and strayed like lost sheep” in our exploitation and misuse of the world. But just because we have overzealously run with God’s gift of dominion does not mean that we don’t matter. If one point today is that we should treat the world as if it were Jesus, the other point is that we should treat one another that way, too. As Jesus himself says in Matthew’s Gospel this morning,

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. . . . Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. [Matthew 25]

Just as we can become sentimental about snow-capped mountains and pandas, we can become Romantic about how human beings express the divine image. As Linus once said to Charlie Brown in Peanuts, “I love humanity; it’s people I can’t stand.” Nevertheless, Jesus reminds us of a central truth of Biblical faith. God created human beings in God’s own image. That means that together and separately we express, we represent, we embody something uniquely divine. We Christians may have used this truth, selfishly, as a warrant for doing what we want to the planet, but the misuse of the truth does not negate it. God is involved in us and we in God. God is involved in the world and the world in God. We are precious and we are responsible. It’s not that everything else is an imperfect version of us. It’s that everything exists in its own integrity and we are the caretakers, the shepherds, the stewards whose principal task is to love it all for exactly what it is.

So this morning, on Earth Sunday, our tradition and our faith tell us two powerful truths. Truth one: God made and loves the world. Truth two: God made and loves us. We do not own the world, but we do belong here. The best image might be of a fabric, a texture, a web woven to include the humans, the monkeys, the crocodiles, the stinkweeds, even the snow-capped mountains and pandas in one seamless garment of life.

When I was in college, almost everyone I knew had a copy of “The Desiderata” tacked up on their wall. It’s a sappy poem that begins,“Go placidly amid the noise and haste” and sounded better to mind-altered teenagers then than it does today. But it does have one line that says something profound: “You are a child of the universe; no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”

On this Earth Sunday, let us remember that the world and we are incarnations, embodiments, enfleshments of the divine. We all, together, are the body of God. Treat the world as you would treat Jesus. Treat everyone else—the poor, the sick, the imprisoned—as you would treat Jesus. Treat yourself as you would treat Jesus. It is too simple to say either that the planet matters or that we do. Everything matters, because everything that is somehow expresses the love of the One beneath, behind, and before it. As the Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich said when contemplating the hazelnut, that One is the maker and the keeper and the lover of all things. That One who makes and loves and keeps us now invites you to this table. As we come forward, may we be made open to seeing all creation—even ourselves—as threads in the fabric of God’s body. Amen.

The Rector's Monday Message: November 14, 2011

2011-11-13T13:45:00.001-08:00

Life in the Uncanny Valley

I’ve been reading a new collection of essays by Lawrence Weschler, a writer who regularly reflects on art, science, and culture in The New Yorker and other publications. His new book, Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative, opens with an essay about the difficulty of digitally animating a human face. It turns out that, as close as digital animation gets to replicating all the muscle movements and structures of the human face, it still cannot get there entirely. Digital animators call this distance between the real human face and computer approximations of it the “uncanny valley”. We know it’s almost right but not quite. And we don’t entirely know why.

Weschler makes a convincing argument that living in the uncanny valley is a condition of being human. In putting forward this case, he appeals to an dispute between two great Medieval Christian thinkers.

In the Middle Ages, the great Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) posited that you could attain a knowledge of God by just cataloging, in Weschler’s words, “everything—books, rocks, flowers, human emotions—so that by the end you have cataloged all of God’s creations.” The great German Cardinal and mathematician, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) countered Aquinas with a geometrical concept. In Weschler’s words,

So Cusa, who is a mathematician, says: “Well, I suppose that’s a bit like an n-sided polygon inside of a circle.” In other words, you take a triangle inside of a circle, and you keep adding sides to it, and the more sides you add the closer it comes to being a circle. And yet, at the same time, you keep getting further away, because a circle only has one “side,” one line, and here you’ve got a million lines and angles. Cusa was the one to come up with this concept that at a certain point, you have to make a leap of faith–from the n-sided polygon to the circle, say. And that leap of faith is accomplished through grace, which is to say, for free. [Lawrence Weschler discussing Uncanny Valley in a radio interview]

In other words: Thomas Aquinas thought that we could get to God (compared to a perfect circle) by adding up all of God’s creatures and attributes. Nicholas of Cusa also compared God to that circle but concluded that all we would ever achieve from our own efforts would not be a true description of God (the circle) but a very close approximation that would still be a polyhedron with a million sides and angles. For Cusa, the relationship of God and theology is like the relation of the human face to a digital animation of it. The distance between the two may be small, but it’s an uncanny valley. You and I can never prove or disprove God through our own calculations. We have, finally, to walk or leap or run across the valley to get there.

Where I find Weschler’s essay most meaningful is the implications he sees in the uncanny valley for the human condition. Try as we might, we can never achieve absolute certainty about God or about anything else. We can take a gradual series of steps toward the truth, but in the end we all have to embrace the truth more as an act of faith than as an act of knowledge. As long as I am alive in the world, I will have to live with the disparity between what I know is true and what I believe is true. . As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, ^“For now we see in a mirror, dimly,^* but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

This understanding of the provisional nature of all truth ought to help us evaluate the absolutist pretensions of human systems claiming to know how things really are. If these systems are led by faith, political, or cultural figures, and they insist on one version of truth that excludes all others, they assuage our anxiety at the expense of our freedom. Whether they like it or not, even these systems must dwell, with the rest of us, in the uncanny valley, in the gap between what we can know and what we can hope.

God has given us each other as companions as we traverse the uncanny valley. Instead of lamenting the ambiguity of life’s processes and possibilities, let us rejoice in the fellowship and celebrate the mystery toward which we travel both individually and together.

Gary Hall