The Rector's Monday Message: April 9, 2012

Holiness versus Purity

I recently had occasion to attend an evening service in a large, urban church run by an inner city monastic community. The mix of people there was very different than what we normally see in the suburbs. There were men and women of every possible description present in that church service—the prosperous, the poor; the young, middle aged, and old; people in almost every conceivable human category were present in the building.

As diverse as these people were, they were united by one thing: the way they looked when they came back from taking communion. They appeared, for the moment, transformed. Something had happened in the liturgical transaction that made them, well, beautiful. It wasn’t as if they’d been cleansed. I was as if they’d been changed.

As I’ve reflected on this experience, I’ve come to think a good deal about the difference between purity and holiness. Religious systems seem to be interested in the former. Jesus offers the latter. It seems to me that when we confuse purity with holiness, we do so at our souls’ peril.

There is, of course, a good deal about purity in the Bible. Much of the book of Leviticus, and other sections of the Torah, is concerned with ritual cleanliness. Over time, the Temple cult in Israel built up a system of purity. If you were going to offer a sacrifice, the system said, you’d need to be ritually clean. So you’d better not defile yourself beforehand by touching certain types of people. There are pages and pages of regulations in the Bible telling us who’s clean and who isn’t. They all have to do with the administration of a purity system.

One of the ways of understanding Jesus’s ministry, though, is to see it as a critique of the purity codes. Jesus regularly consorted with all kinds of “unclean” people and in fact sat with them at his table. He questioned the reliability of any system that would provide ritual purity as a guarantee of righteousness. He offered in the place of purity a vision of holiness. For Jesus, holiness consisted in a compassionate, thankful stance toward life. It involved inner motivation as much as outward behavior.

The people I saw at this urban church may not have been—by their or our or anyone else’s definition—pure. But they did seem to me to be holy. Something about the unconditional acceptance they had received at God’s table had illuminated them from within. I don’t know what they did when they left the building, but I do know that for a moment at least they had known themselves to be loved and so made new in God’s image.

These days in the Episcopal Church it is common practice, during the great fifty days (Easter through Pentecost), to omit the Confession of Sin from the liturgy. Many people ask me why we do this. The technical answer is that, just as Lent is a penitential season, so Easter is a festival season, and so one way we mark the contrast between them is to omit the penitential markers that frame our Lenten observance. But the deeper answer has to do with this question of purity versus holiness.

Somehow, even though Jesus tried to reform the purity system of his day, we have built up one of our own. We in the church have fostered the idea that you need somehow to be “clean” in order to take communion. We have also fostered the cognate notion that you need to be “clean” in order to serve communion. In so doing, we have unconsciously conceived the bread and wine of the Eucharist as some kind of metaphysical cleaning solvents.

But the Eucharist has nothing, really, to do with cleanliness. It has to do with holiness. And by holiness I don’t mean being pure. By holiness I mean being internally aligned with what God is doing to and for and within and through you. Easter is about resurrection, about new life. It is about God’s transforming freedom as a new way of living. You don’t have to clean yourself up to deserve it. God offers this Easter living to you because God knows and loves and accepts you as you are.

So for the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost we won’t say the Confession. If that omission makes you nervous, perhaps God is asking you to think less about cleanliness and more about holiness. How can I be an Easter person? How can I live out the resurrection in my life and work and relationships? How can I both manifest God’s freedom in my own life and extend it to others?

Living with the risen Jesus at Easter may not make you and me clean. But it will over time make us holy. And we can be holy only because the One who loves and frees us is holy. That is a truth worth celebrating and living into. Happy Easter!

Gary Hall

Homily: Easter Day [April 8, 2012] Christ Church Cranbrook

If you live in Michigan, you will agree that we are enjoying a long and beautiful spring this year. When I lived in Chicago, we used to say that there was no spring there—just an extended battle between winter and summer that summer eventually wins. These past few weeks around here have been like living in a southern climate: we’re getting a spring that lasts more than a minute between swelter and frost.

The opportunity to live with the leaves as they emerge, the flowers as they bloom, and the birds as they return over an extended period gives us the chance to take in the splendor of life as it renews itself. As I walk around the neighborhood here, I see people already at work in their gardens. I think gardens fascinate us because they let us see, in a defined space, the drama of death and life as they interplay with each other. And gardens have an important role in the Christian story of salvation. The writer Frederick Buechner once said that humanity was both lost and found in a garden. We were lost with Adam’s disobedience in Eden and found with Jesus’s faithfulness in Gethsemane. Everybody loves nature generally, but some deep part of us is drawn to the garden because we see recognize it as the place where death, life, sorrow, joy, despair and hope all intertwine.

Today is Easter, the day of risen, resurrected, renewed life. Just as spring only comes after winter; just as the garden’s new growth only comes with the cutting away of the old and dead, so the joy of Easter gladness only comes after the death of Jesus on the cross. We cannot have life without death. We cannot have death without life. Everything we learn from scripture is confirmed by a walk in the garden. As Charles Wright, a poet who writes often about what he sees in his back yard, says:

Death’s still the secret of life,

the garden reminds us.

Or vice versa.

--[Charles Wright, “Disjecta Membra” in Black Zodiac, p. 73]

Today we are drawn, in John’s Gospel, to a very particular garden, the one adjacent to the tomb in which Jesus was buried. The focal character in this story is Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’s most faithful followers. She goes to the tomb, discovers it empty, and returns to bring Peter and the Beloved Disciple to confirm what she sees. Peter and the Beloved Disciple go into the tomb, but Mary stands outside weeping. She sees two angels who ask her why she cries. She then turns and sees Jesus, whom she does not recognize. As John tells it,

Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). [John 20]

To me, this is the most powerful of all the New Testament resurrection accounts. It is moving on its own terms, even more so when you remember the journey that Mary Magdalene has been on. She joined the Jesus movement early on in Galilee, as a result of being healed by Jesus from “seven demons” [Luke 8:1-2]. She followed Jesus faithfully all the way to the cross, and was one who stood near him as he died on Calvary. She has gone to the tomb to anoint his body, and when she gets there she discovers that the tomb is empty. She is therefore the first witness of the resurrection.

What touches me so deeply about this Easter story is the way it shows us a woman in the grip of two emotions each of us will recognize. Mary Magdalene is overwhelmed with grief: her loss is so profound that all she can do is weep. Mary Magdalene is overpowered with fear: the angels and even the risen Jesus himself seem so strange that she is terrified at the very newness of what she is trying to take in.

This story, then is about the two big emotions that can rule our lives: grief and fear. They are constants in our emotional experience. First there is grief. It seems that all through our lives we are confronted with losses of every conceivable kind—the deaths of parents, friends, and spouses; the transitions of time and change that mark every life; the losses and diminishments that naturally happen as we age. Grief is a constant in human experience. We are always losing, always being asked to adjust to life without something or someone on whom we have come to depend.

And if grief is a constant, so too is fear. Most of us probably can’t (or won’t) name what we fear. We fear death, certainly. We fear loneliness, to be sure. We fear being unknown or forgotten or unloved. So much of our culture is organized around fear, so many advertising and political appeals are made to our fears, that fear becomes like the water we swim in: an invisible constant in almost everything we do. We will do almost anything to protect ourselves from the things we fear. We’ll even let those things run our lives.

And here is where the depth and power of today’s Easter Gospel come forth. We see a grief-stricken, fearful Mary at Jesus’s empty tomb. She does not recognize Jesus. In fact, she thinks he’s the gardener. He asks her why she weeps. She answers that she is looking for the body. Jesus then calls her by name. “Mary,” he says. In the moment she is called by name, her fears and her grief all vanish. She calls Jesus her teacher, and moves to embrace him.

The central point, of course, is that Jesus calls her by name. In being known for who she is, Mary is able to move out of grief and fear into a new way of being—into a joyous embrace of God and life. When we are in the power of death (which, after all, is what grief and fear are mostly about), we shrink into ourselves, trying to protect what we have, holding on ever more desperately to things which are passing away. When we are called and known by name, we are able to let go of death’s hold on us and move passionately into life.

The story of Mary Magdalene and Jesus in the garden is not just a first-century Bible-land fairy tale. It is a story about Jesus and Mary, but it is even more a story about God and us. Just as Mary was drowning in a sea of grief and fear, so are you and I. And just as Jesus called Mary by name, so does God call you and me. There is nothing you and I human beings can do to eliminate death as a fact of our lives. Jesus knew that. Mary knew that. But in calling Mary by name, Jesus bore witness to a bigger, more important truth: God calls you by name, too. God knows you. God loves you. In going to the cross, God in Jesus took on what it is to be you. Your thoughts, your fears, your longings, your hopes, your disappointments, your losses, your glories—all of these things about you matter, because God has taken them on in Jesus. And the knowledge that we matter and are known, while it cannot take away the inevitability of loss and death, robs them of their power over us. We are free to go on without them.

Mary Magdalene went to the tomb a broken, fearful, grief-stricken woman. She left transformed into a passionately committed, joyful apostle of love, justice, compassion, and hope. She was the first witness to the resurrection and its promise of new and redeemed life not just for her but for the entire human community and the world. You and I are now witnesses of the resurrection, too. Easter is God’s answer to our grief and fear. We no longer need to cower and weep alone. We are invited into the embrace of a risen life where God’s loving, redemptive purpose even now goes forward to reclaim and redeem the world.

God loves you. God knows you. God calls you by name. Mary turned from weeping to embracing the living Jesus. So can you. Like the extended spring we’re enjoying now, life itself is abundant, beautiful, and joyous. Our griefs and our fears need no longer control us. We have been known and embraced by God. Step into the abundant, beautiful, risen, joyous Easter life. Alleluia! Christ is risen! Amen.

The Rector's Monday Message: April 2, 2012

Holy Week and Violence

Yesterday, Palm Sunday, is also known as “Sunday of the Passion”. It is a day on which we are asked to live with the terrible paradox that the people who welcome Jesus into Jerusalem as their king on Sunday will be the ones who shout for his execution at the hands of Roman authorities on Friday. It is a day, in other words, when we are asked to look the terrible paradox of human nature full in the face.

Two things are true about us. We are capable of enormous amounts of compassion, generosity, and love. We are capable of awful depths of violence, destruction, and hate. Christianity’s claim to truth lies in its willingness to hold on to both of these ideas at the same time.

As we enter Holy Week in 2012, it is hard not to do so (as theologian Karl Barth advised all preachers to do) with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. It is hard to ignore the biblical story of boundless compassion met with oppression and hate. And it is hard to ignore the recent spate of deaths by gun violence in our world just this last month: 16 Afghan villagers shot (allegedly) by Staff Sgt. Robert Bales; 7 French people (children, a rabbi, policemen) shot apparently by Algerian extremist Mohammed Merah; a young black man, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida, admittedly shot and killed by Neighborhood Watch patrolman George Zimmerman. March’s unseasonably warm weather brought a renewal of gun violence among teenagers in American cities. There are times when turning on the news or picking up the paper just makes you weep.

As tempted as we are to turn away from the recent incidents of terrible violence in our world, the logic of Holy Week suggests another way through them. Again and again in the scriptures we read of women, children, and men victimized by hatred. Though he is our prime example of suffering love, Jesus is by no means alone in the biblical story of innocent pain and death. What makes biblical religion credible to me, though, is the way it faces into these realities. We live through Holy Week (with its Old Testament resonances of Exodus and Exile) because we understand that God is uniquely present in the kind of suffering experienced by Jesus. God does not visit pain and death on you and me human creatures. But God does take our pain and death and turn them into something else. That is what resurrection is all about. Hate is transformed into love. Death is transformed into life. The miracle of Christianity is the way it points us to a God who always means to take the world’s ugliness as the starting point for the creation of something beautiful.

I don’t plan to get up in the pulpit on Easter Day and remind everybody about Trayvon Martin, the sixteen Afghan villagers, or the seven French children and adults killed in recent weeks. Nor do I plan to remind us of the unreasoning hatred and blind rage that led to their deaths. But as I make my own way through Holy Week, these people will be in my mind and on my heart, just as the thousands of people killed each year by gun violence in our cities and towns will be.

As tempting as it is to make Easter a spring festival, it is not primarily about the return of flowers and leaves. Early European Christians saw in the return of spring an analogue of God’s resurrection of Jesus. Just as plants and animals renew themselves, so God raised Jesus from the dead. But to experience Easter joy, we need to remember where it comes from. Jesus is dead. His movement is over. The Roman thugs have won. But then everything changes. Jesus is alive. His movement renews. Rome and its pretensions are shown up to be fake. Easter is about God’s bringing life out of death, hope out of despair, joy out of pain, love out of hate.

We preachers always say this, but it’s no less true for being oversaid: you just can’t get Easter without Holy Week. God really is remaking the world and transforming you and me. God really is bringing life out of death. God really is taking the ugliness of hatred and turning it into the beauty of love. Come to as much of Holy Week as you can, and keep Trayvon Martin, the sixteen Afghan villagers, the seven French people and our urban kids in your hearts. While you’re at it, keep their killers in your hearts, too. And then see what God will do with it all as we gather at Jesus’s table in the feast of the resurrection.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: March 26, 2012

Complicating Ourselves

One night last week, Kathy and I watched Martin Scorsese’s documentary, Public Speaking, a film about the life and opinions of writer Fran Lebowitz. Among the many hilarious and pointed remarks Fran Lebowitz makes in the course of the movie, my favorite is this: "There's too much democracy in the culture, not enough democracy in the society."

What she meant was that in matters of art and literature, our public taste seems to have flattened out. Everybody seems to be writing a memoir, tweeting their opinions, expressing themselves in blogs, Facebook postings, and on urban walls. At the same time, our democratic institutions and their processes seem if anything to be less representative, and the enormous amounts of money in our political system increasingly skew the legislative results toward favoring the powerful and connected. What we need, says Lebowitz, is a return to what she calls the “natural hierarchy of talent” in our culture and a revitalization of participatory democracy in our society.

As I was ruminating on this pair of ideas, I chanced on a couple of articles about a new collection of book reviews (called Reading for My Life) by the late critic John Leonard, familiar to many from his time as editor of the New York Times Book Review and his regular appearances on CBS Sunday Morning. I always liked John Leonard’s criticism: it was marked by an original ability to appreciate both high and pop cultures. As he aged, though, Leonard became less satisfied with the pleasures of the latter. As I read a recent review of this new collection, I found myself nodding in eager assent at one of his observations:

"Popular culture is … like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go to complicate ourselves."--John Leonard, "Reading for My Life"

When I read this passage, I almost shouted aloud, “Preach it, brother!“ As much as I love popular culture, I find myself more and more dissatisfied after partaking of it. Following a movie or a television show, I often feel the way I do after eating at a fast-food restaurant: full, but not satisfied. More and more, what we’re offered by mass entertainment (and I’d include many contemporary novels, plays, films, and even much poetry in this category) is cheap thrills, predictable payoffs, and third-hand ideas.

One of my favorite pieces in the history of literary criticism is a 1911 essay by the British critic T.E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism”. (For the full text, go to http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238694) I don’t entirely share Hulme’s taste, but he expresses, as no critic before or since has done so well, the difficulty of saying something beyond what we call “conventional wisdom”. He’s especially good on how difficult this is in writing. Here’s a sample:

The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognise how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise—that which is common to you, me and everybody. . . . Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. . .

There are then two things to distinguish, first the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them. This is itself rare enough in all consciousness. Second, the concentrated state of mind, the grip over oneself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees.

What differentiates high art and popular culture has little to do with aesthetic style. There is schlock classical music and sophisticated rap music. What differentiates high from low art is the willingness of its maker to say something precise, fresh, and true. And both Hulme and Leonard would agree that when we are awash in a cultural sea of conventional wisdom the rare experience of the precise, fresh, and true is as welcome as a lifeboat.

Why does this matter to Christian people? It matters because, especially in Lent, we are embarked on a journey of discovery of what God is doing in our interior lives. For many of us, art is a clarifying mirror in which we see the depth of ourselves reflected back to us. Chances are, I’ll get a truer picture from Hamlet than from CSI Miami.

We are complicated creatures. After all, we’re made in God’s image. As St. Augustine said, because God is mysterious, there will always be a part of us that is mysterious, too. We get access to that hidden, divine part of ourselves through works of art that strive to break free from the bonds of cliché and convention and say something to us precise, fresh, and true. As Lent moves forward, take some time to attend to something worthy of your inner complications. In doing so, you’ll see more deeply into yourself and into the One in whose image you’re made.