Homily: The Fifth Sunday of Easter [May 3, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            Last Wednesday I took advantage of a bit of free time to watch a couple of innings of the Orioles-White Sox game.  Happily for Orioles fans, Baltimore won that match 8 to 2.  But sadly for us all, the game was played in an empty ballpark.  Watching it was a bizarre experience:  images on the Jumbotron, music between batters, a full cadre of cameras and announcers, and no one in the stands.           

Last Monday’s civil unrest in Baltimore was disturbing on so many levels.  The then-unexplained death of Freddie Gray in police custody was just one more instance of an unarmed black man dying at the hands of police in a year already overloaded with such incidents.  The violence itself was unsettling first because it changed the character of what had until then been an entirely peaceful protest. And, as in all such disturbances, the violence further damaged a neighborhood already stressed by poverty, unemployment, and crime.

            Wednesday’s ball game wasn’t the only TV I saw last week.  On Monday night I watched some of CNN’s live coverage of the disturbance, and I was less shocked by the images than I was by what one of the CNN anchors had to say. “It is hard to believe this is happening in a major American city.”  “I don’t remember seeing anything like this in the United States of America in a long time.”  “This is a scene that a lot of us never anticipated seeing in a city like Baltimore.”

            Really?  I grew up in Los Angeles, and I still remember 1965 in Watts and 1992 in South Central L.A.  And then there’s Ferguson, Missouri a mere five months ago. CNN’s memory lapse wasn’t the worst. The people on Fox News characterized violence as positively un-American, one of them saying that Baltimore “looks like some riot in a third world nation”. Violent protest may be upsetting, disturbing, and disappointing, but it certainly isn’t un-American.  We’re a country that got its start with a revolution and solved its biggest social problem with a civil war.  Violent protests are not something new in American life.  There was Shay’s Rebellion in 1796, the New York draft riots of 1863, the Chicago Haymarket riots of 1886, the Bonus Army March of 1932, and of course the Long Hot Summer of 1967 and Washington’s own riot after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 to name a few.  Baltimore’s response to Freddie Gray’s death is only the most recent example of a longstanding American practice of taking it to the streets. Violent protest is as American as apple pie.

            And now, thanks to the charges filed against six Baltimore police officers last Friday, we have an inkling of the originating act of violence that caused the death of an innocent young man who was ridden around roughly and then blamed for his own death. Violent street protest is almost always a response to an originating act of violence. Slavery, segregation, economic injustice, aggressive policing—all these are acts of coercive force which sooner or later will necessarily provoke a violent response.

            That Baltimore officials have acted decisively to charge the officers involved is a cause for hope in an otherwise depressing routine being played out in American cities right now.  Just as in 1967 and 1968, something is desperately wrong in the racial politics of our nation. God is saying something to us in the streets of Baltimore, Ferguson, Oakland, and New York. We have the opportunity—and the responsibility—to read the current moment and respond.

            The theologian Karl Barth once said that Christian preachers should hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. How might we put the Bible and the newspaper together today? This morning’s Gospel is relevant here.  It gives us Jesus’s well-known allegory of the vine and the branches [John 15: 1-8], a familiar yet challenging text. Here is the part we always remember: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower,” says Jesus.  “Abide in me as I abide in you. “ Here is the part we always forget: “He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.”

            “I am the vine, you are the branches”—a saying that has brought comfort and joy to Christians over the centuries, an extended metaphor suggesting our unity, our oneness in Christ.  The vine, of course, was also a traditional metaphor for the people of Israel [Psalm 80].  In John’s rendering, Jesus himself is the new Israel and all of us who believe in him are what Paul would call “members one of another.” [Romans 12:5] But the more we press on it, the more we see that Jesus’s use of this figure is not just about Jesus and the church. To say that Jesus is the vine and we are the branches is to suggest something about the nature of God and the world.  All of us are woven together in one fabric of life.  We are all in this together.  So one thing we hear in today’s Bible-newspaper dialogue is a word of human solidarity even in hard moments like Ferguson or Baltimore.  We cannot look at these events—the protests or the violence that occasioned them—and not see ourselves implicated.  Jesus is the vine, we are the branches.  We are all in this together.

            But what are we to make of God’s role as the vinegrower? “He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.”  The Greek verb here (airo) suggests both cutting and cleansing.  The cheering news is that we are all connected to each other through our oneness in Christ.  The sobering news is that God is at work in events that try and test and shape us into the people God intends us to be.  Just as you would not let a rose bush grow wild but would cut it back to enhance its fullness, so it seems God uses hard events in our personal and social lives to shape us for God’s own purposes.  To describe this process of trial and testing, the Hebrew prophets often compared it to the smelting of precious metals. Jesus uses the figure of the gardener and the vine.

            As I have thought about Baltimore this week and what God might be saying to us through it, I have continually been drawn back to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered just weeks before his assassination in 1865.  We all remember his stirring words, “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” We often forget the words that precede them.  Looking for divine meaning in the civil war then drawing to a close, Lincoln poses this question:  is the war God’s judgment for the sin of slavery? If so, then his conclusion is inescapable:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

            It is hard to look at the events in our cities in this year alone and avoid the conclusion that we are still living out the scourge of which Lincoln spoke. As a people, as a nation, we are still paying for the sin of slavery and its subsequent mutation into racism, segregation, mass incarceration, police brutality, and a massive disparity in economic opportunity.  We cannot live in true harmony in America until justice prevails. As Jesus reminds us, we are all branches of one vine. And as Jesus warns us, we cannot escape the consequences of actions done by us or on our behalf. 

Revolt and unrest will continue until we attend to their causes.  We cannot observe the events in Baltimore and not see ourselves implicated in their origin. Jesus is the vine. We are the branches.  God uses history to prune and shape us to God’s own purposes.  We have a ways to go to be the healthy, fruitful people God wills and calls us to be.  If we look to Baltimore and dismiss it as a city of lawless thugs we will be missing the message we should take from this moment. The sin of racism is alive and well in our nation. Our job, as God’s people and Jesus’s followers is to face into it and not look away.

As Christian people, we must read the death of Freddie Gray and the protests that followed it as signs of the work we all have yet to do. We are members of each other. We will only heal our nation as we attend to the lingering effects of slavery, the originating act of violence that still ricochets through our history over time. The events in Baltimore are painful, but let our pain be that of a pruning moment that heals and shapes us into a people formed for justice, compassion, and love.  In this hard news there is good news.  All this suffering, injustice and pain can bring us to something healing and hopeful and new. In the words of the Psalmist [Psalm 19.9] and our 16^th president, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”  Amen.

 

           

 

 

 

Homily: The Third Sunday of Easter [April 19, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            There are several occupational hazards that go with being an ordained minister. Whenever people swear in your presence they immediately feel they have to apologize. The actors who play clergymen on TV shows are best described as wimpy, bookish nerds. And then there are all those questions you get regularly about the afterlife.

            I can’t tell you how many people over the course of my career have asked me some variant of this question: “What happens to us when we die?”  I don’t know how to say this politely, but the best answer is probably, “How would I know?”  I can tell you what Christians hope happens when we die, but I cannot tell you what we know about life after death.  No matter how worn out and frail I may look to you, I’m still alive.  I haven’t died yet.  I have no first-hand knowledge of what it is to die. I have met a few people who have had near-death experiences, and they talk very persuasively about how peaceful and transcendent they felt on the way out.  But I haven’t had those experiences myself.  So I cannot tell you what I know.  I can only tell you what I hope.

            With regard to the beyond, all of us live in a contradiction.  We think and hope that there is more to life than the here and now, but we do not know what that “more” might be. Emily Dickinson, our great poet of faith and doubt, has a poem that gets at this conundrum. (#373)

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond - 

Invisible, as Music -

But positive, as Sound -

It beckons, and it baffles - 

Philosophy, dont know - 

And through a Riddle, at the last - 

Sagacity, must go –

 

 

As Dickinson says, something calls to us from beyond this world.  “It beckons, and it baffles.”  It is invisible, as music.  And we’ll only finally know it firsthand when we go through our own death at the last.  We sense that a larger life is out there, and we desire assurance that it is available to us and to those we have lost.  But all the pulpit thumping in the world will never satisfy our longing.  Each will have to live with this riddle until we finally get the answer.  As Emily Dickinson says,

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -

Strong Hallelujahs roll - 

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul -

 

Something of this riddling curiosity about what might be next is on the minds of Jesus’s companions in this morning’s Gospel (Luke 24: 36b-48). The disciples are frightened when Jesus appears.  Who wouldn’t be?  They think they have seen a ghost or a disembodied spirit. The Greek word (pneuma) we translate “ghost” here can also be rendered as “spirit”. But the risen Jesus is not a spirit. He is a flesh-and-blood human being. When we talk about death or heaven in our popular culture or theology, we tend to think of a life beyond this one as something gaseous.  But when Jesus appears to his friends he is not a translucent apparition. He is a concrete physical person. He shows them his hands.  He shows them his feet.  He eats a piece of broiled fish. They may think him a spirit, but he is a person with a body.

            “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. . . . They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.” What do we know about life after death?  Very little.  What do we hope about the resurrection?  A fair amount. It all comes down to hands, feet, and a piece of broiled fish.

            Why are hands, feet and, fish so important?  They’re important because they stand for what we might call the earthly part of the resurrection.  Popular culture has turned the afterlife into a kind of immediate transportation to the beyond. (“Beam me up, Scotty!”) But for real Christian faith the resurrection of Jesus has always symbolized more than his survival of death.  It has always signified a new life.  And not only a new life: Jesus’s resurrection stands for a whole new creation.  In Jesus’s new and risen life, both spirit and body are renewed.  His resurrection is not just about life after death.  It signifies a new heaven and a new earth.

            This hope for a new creation is deeply embedded in our scriptures. Our Bible tells us how, with Adam and Eve in the Garden, we blew it the first time around.  The scriptures tell a sorry story of God’s attempt to transform human enmity, selfishness and sin into love, compassion, and faithfulness. The story culminates in our taking Jesus, the one who perfectly embodies God’s attributes, to the cross.  But the story doesn’t end there.  God will not let us rest in our sinfulness.  Jesus comes back in a new and transformed life. God will not leave us to our own devices. God will not be stopped until everything and everyone is renewed. With Jesus and the empty tomb, God is enlisting us in a process that will heal all the pain and suffering and sin and death we know in this old creation and make us new people in the bargain.

            As we do with so many other religious experiences, we make of resurrection too light a thing.  We have personalized it, turning resurrection into an individualized consumer experience. “I’ll take one resurrection, please.” But resurrection is not only about you or me or the people we love.  Resurrection is about a new heaven and a new earth.  In raising Jesus, God has taken the first step in the remaking of creation.  Not just Jesus and not only his friends, but the whole world is being renewed.  When it is all over, creation will resemble what God originally intended.   A new heaven and a new earth are on their way.  Jesus’s new life is our first sign of this divine renewal of God’s world. If we only hope for our own individual survival, we are not hoping for enough.  We need to start hoping for what God actually promises: a world that will reflect God’s love, justice, compassion, and mercy. We can be the new people who inhabit God’s new world. There is new and risen life for us, too. But only as the whole creation is renewed.

            When I come down from the pulpit we will all stand together and say the Nicene Creed, one of the church’s primary faith statements.  When we say it you’ll notice that there is nothing in there about going to heaven. Instead we say, “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” I am sorry to say that I do not know what happens when we die.  But the resurrection of Jesus gives me the courage to say that a new world is coming and that you and I can be part of that new world now.  Resurrection is about body and spirit, heaven and earth.  Jesus’s new life brings new life to all of us.  It means, here and now, we are part of something that will transcend our losses and our fears and calls us to new, visionary, and courageous life.

            We make of resurrection too light a thing.  As long as we confine its meaning to “going to heaven when we die”, all the world’s suffering, injustice, and pain can continue unabated.  As long as I will be OK, what’s the difference?  But when we dare to allow Easter to expand to its fullness, resurrection takes on real implications for us in the here and now.  When the disciples finally “got it” that Jesus was neither a spirit nor a ghost but a new creation, they didn’t go out and buy columbarium niches or cemetery plots.  When the disciples finally got what Easter meant, they dropped what they were doing and began working to change the world.  They spread the Gospel.  They fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited the prisoners, and gave up their own possessions to share what they had with the poor.  Resurrection changed them, and it changed their world.  Because they knew they would be part of God’s new creation they became fearless advocates for peace and compassion and love. 

            When asked, “What happens when we die?” I have no pat, easy answer.  All I can do is point to Jesus who showed us his hands and his feet and ate a piece of broiled fish in our presence.  Resurrection is more than life after death. It is about a new heaven and a new earth. It is about a new life today. “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” Resurrection has implications.  As we look for our resurrection, let us build God’s new world.  The justice and peace we hope for in heaven can be true for everyone now on earth—including us. As we work together with God to bring on the new world we long for, we’ll know that, like Jesus, we are for once and all truly alive.  Amen.

 

 

 

 

Reflection: Good Friday Evening [April 3, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

This Lent I’ve been reading Helen Macdonald’s wonderful new book—part memoir, part nature-essay—H is for Hawk. Helen Macdonald is a writer and a scholar of the history of science at Cambridge in England. In H is for Hawk she tells a double story—one strand recounts her grief at the sudden death of her father, the other her deepening relationship with a female goshawk named Mabel.  It’s a deeply engaging book, and it lets you look into a process of loss, recovery and personal transformation that is both surprising and undeniably true.

Here is how Helen Macdonald describes the unlikely connection between knowing a wild animal and surviving a human loss:

I repeatedly dreamed of goshawks after my father died and some unconscious compulsion told me that training a goshawk was necessary. You can’t tame grief, but you can tame hawks. And the goshawk, as I explain in the book, wasn’t just a deep distraction. It was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed and free from human emotions. I didn’t want to be me anymore. I wanted to be something like a hawk: fierce, living entirely in the present and untouched by loss.—[Helen Macdonald, Salon interview, March 9, 2015]

 

            “Fierce, living entirely in the present and untouched by loss”—those words pretty well sum up our fantasies of human independence.  Yet tonight, as we gather in the wake of the cross, we experience ourselves as the antitheses of those wishes.  We are, if anything, humanly dependent.  When we grieve, we live not in the present but in the remembered dream of the past.  We are anything but fierce.  We are overwhelmed by loss.

            The book of Job is the biblical text that gives the fullest expression to the shared human experience of grief and loss.  At one point in his sorrow and pain, Job says this to God:

 

A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last. Since their days are determined, and the number of their months is known to you, and you have appointed the bounds that they cannot pass, look away from them, and desist, that they may enjoy, like laborers, their days. [Job 14:1–2; 5–6]

 

“Look away from them,” Job demands.  Since our life is already short and we cannot do anything to extend the days you have allotted us, perhaps it would be just as well if you left us alone.  This sounds blasphemous. We are always tempted to upbraid Job for his impiety.  But we cannot blame him for his truth.  Who but a deeply faithful person could talk to God so rudely?

            One of the drawbacks of our polite and learned style of Christianity is our tendency to make our religion too intellectual.  Because we value ideas, we make Jesus into more of a teacher than he probably was.  Those who followed him came and stayed because they knew him as their healer and friend.  It was his teaching and preaching that got Jesus into trouble with the Romans.  It was his healing and compassion that built the community that gathered around him in life and continued after his death.

            Tonight we--who are Jesus’s companions as much as his Galilean friends were—we gather to move with Jesus to the tomb in the reality of his death. We acknowledge that we have lost not a philosopher but a brother, not a guru but a friend.  But before we ask what the death of Jesus means for us, we have to ask what it means for me. When we lose someone close and important to us, we experience the loss as personal and private. As Helen Macdonald reminds us, “Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.” As George Herbert asks in his great poem “The Sacrifice”, “Was ever grief like mine?” Jesus is speaking in this poem, but his question could be posed by each of us.  “Was ever grief like mine?”

            In the evening after the events of Friday afternoon, each of us must come to terms with Jesus’s question.  “Was ever grief like mine?”  Our bereavement drives us apart.  Yet clearly our own loneliness cannot be our final destination. Again, my guide here is Helen Macdonald:

What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later. . . . What I should have realised, too . . . is that what the mind does after losing one’s father isn’t just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

 

            Tonight, as we move with Jesus to the tomb, we move more deeply into the experience of bereavement, and the loss of Jesus helps us know and claim what it is to lose those others in our lives—parents, spouses, partners, friends, and God help us, even children. “Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”  You don’t really know what it means to lose somebody until you experience the loneliness yourself.  We may all gather in the same physical space, but in relation to the death of Jesus, we are each of us alone.

            And only in that loneliness can we begin to imagine a new and deeper form of human connection.  As we move through our losses we begin to reach out to “pick new fathers from the world” and “pick new selves to love them with”.  Because we know our own losses, we can begin to feel the pain of others. Because we have been changed by grief, we can engage each other and the world in new and empathic ways.  What you know after you lose someone close to you is that you emerge from grief a different person than you entered it.  Before Jesus died, his companions were a pretty sorry bunch of customers.  After Easter they changed the world. They were made into new people who could love and serve others not in spite of but because of their loss.

            But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  It is enough tonight to rest, with Jesus, where he lies. As we sit in our loneliness, let us remember what it is about Jesus we will miss the most.  Again, from Helen Macdonald:

We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost. [Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk]

 

                        Jesus has died, just as many we love have died.  Jesus has died, just as one day we will die. We cannot truly live with ourselves and others until we take this in. We cannot become the people God is making us into unless we let down our guards and accept that life is precious precisely because it is so fragile. Acknowledging our vulnerability can drive us into isolation, or it can bind us together in new and life-giving ways. If we let it, our time tonight alone, with Jesus, and each other will do God’s work within us to heal and remake us and those we have lost.

The last word belongs to Job: 

A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last. Since their days are determined, and the number of their months is known to you, and you have appointed the bounds that they cannot pass, look away from them, and desist, that they may enjoy, like laborers, their days. [Job 14:1–2; 5–6]

Amen.

Medittation: Good Friday Noon [April 3, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            Karen Armstrong begins her new book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, recalling the way our religious forbears ritualized the transfer of their sins on to sacrificial animals:

Every year in ancient Israel the high priest brought two goats into the Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement.  He sacrificed one to expiate the sins of the community and then laid his hands on the other, transferring all the people’s misdeeds onto its head, and sent the sin-laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere.  In this way, Moses, explained, ‘the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.” [Leviticus 16: 21-22] [Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, p. 3]

 

            The first animal was the sacrificial victim.  The second was what we have come to call the scapegoat. In the Christian history of Good Friday meditations there is a lot of talk of Jesus as the human symbol of the first but not as much about how we relate to him as the second.  We seem to be more comfortable thinking of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away, by his death, the sins of the world.  We’re a bit more uneasy acknowledging the way we use him, in Armstrong’s words, to place the blame elsewhere.

            Today’s reading from the Book of Wisdom closely parallels the Suffering Servant Songs of Isaiah, and it rather uncomfortably reminds us that Jesus is not only the exalted Saving Victim dying for our sins but also the one on whom we have projected the parts of ourselves we cannot bear:                                      

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. . . . Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. [Wisdom 2: 1, 12-24]

 

By his or her very existence, the righteous person reminds us that we are not righteous.  We want him not so much to die for our sins as just to go away. 

            Jesus was not the first scapegoat in human history, and he certainly was not the last.  As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” We look at Jesus and, though a large part of us responds to him, another part cannot stand what we see.  And so, in what feels from a distance like a perverse process, we come to hate him for the way he shows, or refuses to show, ourselves back to us.  In many ways Jesus is a clarifying mirror of human nature.  We see in him what we aspire to.  We see in him what we are and what we are not.  It would all be so much easier if he would just go away.

            As we gather on Good Friday, our experience with Jesus asks us to ponder a couple of questions about what is going on here.  What are we doing with Jesus?  What is God doing with us?

            When I think about it honestly, the ritual of the scapegoat makes a lot of sense.  It would really be nice if I could find someone else to take on all the negative stuff about being human.  I love life and I love all the good things about it.  Indeed, the culture I inhabit tells me I deserve all those good things and that, if I do things right, I can limit my experience of life only to the enjoyable part.  The image of the good life offered us by late Capitalist consumer society is a picture of healthy, fulfilled, happy prosperity.  Happiness is presented as the norm. If you’re not happy, if you’re not healthy, if you’re not prosperous—well, there’s just something wrong with you.  It would be best for all of us if you just went away.

            One of the things we learn from following Jesus through Holy Week is how deeply false this consumerist vision of life really is.  The fantasy of a human existence without suffering, loss, and pain is just that—a fantasy.  The hard truth that some of us never own up to is just how fragile and finite we people really are.  Like it or not, we are all mortal.  Like it or not, we are not in control of the universe.  Like it or not, we are subject to events and forces beyond our control.  If my vision of the good life implies that I must always be happy, I will leave this world thinking myself a failure and wanting to project the things I can’t accept about me onto someone else. If my vision of the good life acknowledges that a full life involves loss and gain, sickness and health, failure and success then I might just have a chance of being a real and rounded person.  I might become a bit like Jesus.

            So what, on Good Friday, are we doing with Jesus?  In Karen Armstrong’s words, we’re making him a scapegoat, “transferring all the people’s misdeeds onto [his] head . . . literally placing the blame elsewhere.”  In so doing we’re vainly trying to forget, deny, and reject our own finitude.  By making Jesus the scapegoat, we are expressing the sad and childish hope that all the pain, suffering, and loss of life will come to him and not us.

            That’s what we’re doing today with Jesus.  What is God doing with us?

            Last month, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer—winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature—died after years of incapacitation.  In 1990 Tranströmer suffered a massive stroke which left him partially paralyzed and totally unable to speak.  Yet he continued to write and publish poems of stark and transcendent beauty. In his poem “Out in the Open” he says this:

 

The sun is scorching. The plane comes in low,
throwing a shadow in the shape of a giant cross, rushing over the ground.
A man crouches over something in the field.
The shadow reaches him.
For a split-second he is in the middle of the cross.

I have seen the cross that hangs from cool church arches.
Sometimes it seems like a snapshot
of frenzy.

—Tomas Tranströmer “Out in the Open,” from The Deleted World

 

Something—represented in this poem by an airplane, but standing for what, God? the world?—something throws the shape and shadow of the cross over the form of a human life.  We are in the middle of that cross.  It is not only the shape of Jesus’s life.  It is also the shape of ours.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” We would all rather that shadow passed us by.  We would all rather send the scapegoat out of the city.  We would all prefer not to be reminded that a full human life must comprehend both suffering and abundance.  So here’s what God is doing today with Jesus: God is refusing to let us make him our scapegoat. Because we cannot stand at the cross very long and deny or forget or reject our own vulnerability, weakness, and mortality.  In the crucifixion of Jesus we see the fullness of human frailty and the depth of divine love.  You cannot stand at the cross and come away thinking that life is only what we see in advertising.  You have to come away having looked into some of that reality that we human beings cannot stand.

It always perplexes that we call this Friday “Good”.  Yet if we let it, our forced engagement with the reality we cannot stand can be a transforming experience.  We have brought Jesus to the cross much in the way ancient priests transferred the people’s sins to the scapegoat.  In showing us ourselves to ourselves in the ugliness and pain of this moment, God has put away forever the wish and fantasy of the scapegoat.  There is no scapegoat. Each of us must bear our own burdens.  Each of us must acknowledge our own sins.  Each of us must accept that as we crouch over something in the field, the shadow of the cross above us will put us at some point in its center.  God, the world, and we are cruciform.  We are made in the shape of a cross.

And so this Friday is Good Friday.  God has shown us ourselves in all our fullness. We can no longer pretend that the hard things in life happen only to other, less deserving, people.  We now must admit that they happen also to us.  And if they happen both to them and to us, then we have the possibility of a new kind of community. I no longer need to shun the poor, the sick, the sorrowful, the defeated because I now can see something of myself in them and something of them in me.  Good Friday opens the door not only to the fullness of being human; Good Friday also opens the door to a new possibility of community and compassion with each other and the world.  That is why we call this Friday “Good”. And that is why, together, we proceed to give thanks.  Amen.

Homily: The Fifth Sunday in Lent [March 22, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

One of the first books I ever bought for myself was the paperback Pocket Books edition of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, the narrative of the Jewish teenager and her family who spent the years 1942 to l944 in hiding from the Nazis in a house in Amsterdam. It was published in the fifties and cost, I think, 35 cents.  I was in sixth grade when I got it, and I quickly read it from cover to cover.  I think it spoke to me then for a couple of reasons.  It was written by someone close to me in age.  And the elementary school I attended in Beverly Hills, California was almost entirely Jewish.  So the account of a Jewish teenager's hiding from the Nazis was bound to be a compelling read when World War II was still a fresh memory.

Last week Kathy and I were in Amsterdam for a couple of days on our way back from visiting some cathedrals in England.  We spent Thursday morning at the Anne Frank house and museum and found the experience both sobering and ennobling.  How could any regime declare someone like Anne Frank its enemy?  And how could a young woman who loved movies and theater and the outdoors spend two years locked away from them and still declare that she found hope for humanity? The Anne Frank house raises more questions than any museum can answer.

And then there is the fact of the confinement itself.  As we were leaving, Kathy admitted that she had begun to feel claustrophobic after about a half an hour in that small, narrow, blacked-out space. I agreed. The Frank family couldn't look out a window in daytime. They couldn't make any noise.  They were packed in like sardines.  The whole place gave me the creeps.

And yet I found myself cheered by some of the house’s human touches.  There were decorations on the walls and magazine photos of movie stars in Anne's bedroom. There was a ladder leading to an attic skylight through which the children could look at the treetops, the birds, and the sky. A place like the Anne Frank house sends two contradictory messages at once:  people are no good, and people are better than you could ever think they might be.

As we make our way through Lent toward Holy Week and Easter, those two messages assert themselves today in our scriptures.  We human beings are a mess. And yet we witness moments of human depth and compassion that show us what we might be on our way, with God's help, to becoming.  A bit about each.

Our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah [Jeremiah 31:31-34] expresses both the prophet's and God's frustrations with the human community. Yet for Jeremiah, God’s solution to human cussedness is not destruction but rather a total remaking of the human person. As Jeremiah puts it,

 

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. [Jeremiah 31:33]

 

You and I resist God's will for us because we see it as something external to ourselves, something imposed on us from the outside. Human nature is broken.  We fall for things we should avoid, and we shun the ones that give us life. God's solution to our resistance is a compassionate one.  God isn't going to muscle us into obedience.  God is going to remake us so that we will love what is good and true and right.  As another prophet, Ezekiel, says, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” [Ezekiel 36: 26] God will put a new heart and a new spirit within us. God will heal and remake us into the people we were created to be.

In today's Gospel [John 12: 20-3] Jesus gives us an inkling of how this might work:

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. [John 12:24]

 

Jesus often used agricultural figures to express spiritual truths. In this instance he turned to the seed, that mysterious package of life and energy at which the ancients marveled.  How could such a tiny thing produce a mustard plant or a tree?  And why did you have to bury them in the ground in order for them to fulfill their purpose and spring to life?

For Jesus, the seed was the perfect image of the way that new heart and new spirit worked in the human person.  We must die in order to live.  We must experience pain and loss and grief in order to be open to the full radiance of what God offers us.  The mysterious connection of suffering, death, and rebirth is central to all great religions.  It is the enigma that confounds our intelligence yet confirms our experience.  We never fully live until we have died.  We never know what grace and love and acceptance and forgiveness are until we have found ourselves in need of them.

This Gospel passage about the seed dying was the text for Oscar Romero's final sermon, delivered just moments before he was shot by Salvadoran death squads on March 24, 1980--twenty-five years ago this Tuesday.  Romero was the Archbishop of San Salvador who was grieved by the government's violence against the people and abuses of human rights. Toward the end of the sermon he said this:

 

Those who surrender to the service of the poor through the love of Christ will live like the grain of wheat that dies. . . The harvest comes because of the grain that dies. . . . We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us. [Oscar Romero, March 24, 1980]

 

Earlier this year, Pope Francis declared Archbishop Romero a martyr for the faith, clearing the way for his beatification and possible sainthood. Oscar Romero died resisting tyranny and standing with the poor and oppressed. Anne Frank died an anonymous Holocaust victim. Both of them have become symbols of the depth and power of human hope.  The harvest of which Jesus speaks is the fulfillment of that new heart the prophets promise.  It's not only that we have to die to ourselves to be open to the liberating love and forgiveness of God.  It's also that in taking on the plight and suffering of others we become like that grain of wheat that dies so that all may be born.

 

Toward the end of her Diary, Anne Frank says this:

 

It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. . . . I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more-- July 15, 1944

 

People are no good.  People are better than you could ever think they might be. Anne Frank and Oscar Romero suffered and died at the hands of human beings, and yet they are witnesses to the power of human goodness and hope.  They are like the seed that dies so that we all might be reborn.  Their lives and stories enact the depth of what Lent, Holy Week, and Easter are all about.  Jesus gives himself that we may have life, and he empowers us to do the same.

If the Christian religion means anything at all, we see it on offer this morning.  God really does intend to write the law on our hearts.  God really does mean to remake us into those who love what God commands and desire what God promises.  God really does help us make sense of our world and our suffering by showing us what those new hearts will mean for us. God does that by sending us witnesses--a German teenager in Holland finding her voice and her spirit in captivity, a formerly carreerist archbishop becoming a martyr for compassion and justice--witnesses who show us the heights of what we are capable.

I pray that no one in this cathedral this morning ever has to face what Anne Frank, or Oscar Romero, or Jesus himself faced.  But I know that life will dole out its challenges and traumas, its gifts and blessings, to all of us in one way or another before we depart.  May we face into those challenges and blessings with the new heart the prophets promise, so that we may, like Jesus, become seeds of life in a harvest that will bear the fruit that can change both us and the world.  Amen.

Homily: The Third Sunday in Lent [March 8, 2015] Salisbury Cathedral

I cannot overstate the pleasure and honor of being with you this morning.  I have long admired the ministry of your dean, June Osborne, and Salisbury Cathedral is for me the home of everything best in Anglican worship. I am a lifelong adherent of the Sarum liturgical style, —an English tradition and color scheme developed here in Salisbury and still the standard in Anglican churches around the world. In the 1980s I served as the Vicar of St. Aidan’s Church in Malibu, California--it was a rough placement, somebody had to go there!--and it may please you to learn that St. Aidan’s Malibu is one of a handful of Sarum parishes in America. So I bring greetings from a wide range of Anglicans in the US: from snowy Washington all the way to sunny California, and I hope, on this late winter morning, that your souls will be warmed by the knowledge that even today, in far off Malibu, movie stars and surfers are waking up to worship using Salisbury’s Lenten array.
The pulpit at Washington National Cathedral where I serve is called the “Canterbury pulpit”, and it is so named because it is made of stone given to us in 1904 by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He gave the pulpit in memory of his predecessor Stephen Langton, who led the barons when they demanded Magna Carta from King John.  Right in the center of the pulpit as you face it is a large carving of King John and Archbishop Langton, and so aside from the many missional connections our two cathedrals share, we are united in our joint heritage of common prayer and common law. (You, however, have the real Magna Carta here in Salisbury.  We only have an artist’s rendering.) So it means a lot to me and to my cathedral that I am with you here representing Washington National Cathedral as you begin your observance of Magna Carta’s role in the English-speaking world. Neither the United Kingdom, the United States, nor  Anglicanism itself would be what they are were it not for the human rights and civil traditions set forth in Magna Carta. The document may be 800 years old, but it remains a living force in our civic and church lives.
In today’s Old Testament lesson, Moses receives the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, an apt scriptural context for us to think about Magna Carta from a Christian perspective.  You live in a country with an established church.  I live in a country that separates church and state.  The anniversary of this great charter poses for us a central question: what is the proper role of religion in society? Or to put it slightly differently, what it does it mean to be a faithful citizen?
First, to today’s scripture:  every time we read the Decalogue together in church, I can’t help thinking about the way the Ten Commandments have unwittingly become a flash point for the culture wars in American politics. When he came down the mountain with the tablets, could Moses possibly have thought that he was starting a process that would lead to endless American litigation? It seems as if every time you turn around in the U.S. there is a controversy somewhere about the display of the Ten Commandments in a public space—usually a city hall, a courthouse, or a state capitol building.  The U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In the Constitution’s 18th century context, that means two things: the United States, unlike the United Kingdom, will not have an established “official” church. And all Americans will be free to pray or not to as their consciences dictate.
You’d think the intent of this amendment was pretty clear on its face, but we Americans have been arguing about what it really means almost since our country’s inception. In recent years, the dispute has become much more divisive. Civil libertarians have claimed that any public display of religious teaching violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of the separation of church and state. Others have countered that America’s founders meant our country to be what they call a “Christian nation”.
As an American and as a Christian I have to admit that I am a bit conflicted about this issue. On the one hand, my inner civil libertarian agrees that in America no one religion should be given preference over another. On the other hand, though, as a Christian I’m deeply troubled by the knee-jerk secularism unintentionally ushered in by the First Amendment. We seem, in Western Culture, to stand at the intersection of two contradictory trends: increasing secularism on the one hand, deepening spirituality on the other. People distrust the institutions that have historically mediated religious experience, but they don’t distrust the experience itself. Fewer people go to church, but more people use religious language to understand the world and their lives.
Here is where the Ten Commandments and Magna Carta become relevant. The Ten Commandments are the sign of God’s covenant with Israel. Magna Carta reintroduced the biblical idea of covenant and its role in government into Western society.  Kings may rule by divine right, but they can exercise that right only in covenant with the people they govern.  The relation of a ruler and the people is modeled on this biblical ideal. The Bible employs the idea of covenant to express the relationship of God with God’s people. Israel’s God is not a tyrant. He is a companion. His power exists not abstractly but in relationship. When Moses ascends Mount Sinai he is given the Ten Commandments as the terms of God’s covenant with Israel. They are the conditions on which Israel is called to live if it wants to be God’s people. Israel is free to accept or reject them.  They are not imposed.  For these commandments to be binding, both God and Israel have to consent.
So if society and its laws are formed in a covenant—a covenant we people of faith believe to be not only between ourselves but with God--what then does it mean to be a faithful citizen?  How, in an increasingly secular society, can a person of faith participate? When, in an increasingly pluralistic society, should a Christian raise a voice?
I have two quick thoughts about these questions. Briefly, here they are.
Thought one: though we no longer live in the world of shared cultural assumptions that built cathedrals like this one, we people of faith are nevertheless called to bring our voices and values into the public arena. All our faith traditions have a stake in our public life. Our churches, synagogues, and mosques are more than simple aggregations of like-minded citizens.  Our faith communities are part of the fabric of civil society and therefore essential to the common good.  We no longer have the right—if we ever did—to impose our values on society.  But we do have the right—and the obligation—to express those values in the civic debate. Who but we will stand for the values expressed in the scriptures—justice, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, love? If our shared public life is to remain humane and decent, then an increasingly secular society will need even more to hear what we have to say about a host of public issues:  war and peace, climate change, violence, income inequality and poverty, human trafficking, gender, sexuality, and race relations. Let's not forget that yesterday, in Selma, Alabama, Americans observed the 50th anniversary of the walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge--a signal event in the struggle for American Civil Rights. Our Bible and our traditions give us a point of view on these matters, and we are obligated to bring our convictions to bear on public policy debates.  The Bible knows no distinction between religion and politics, and neither should we.
That’s thought one. Here’s thought two: We are called specifically to be Christians in a religiously pluralistic society. The terms of the deal are extended to those who have agreed to the covenant. The Ten Commandments are never presented as universal laws. They are presented as Israel’s laws. Like Israel, the church is a covenanted community. You are in it or out of it because you choose to be. Our truth does not pretend to be a general, universal truth. Our truth claims to be a particular, personal truth.
The Ten Commandments are the rules that you and I have agreed to live by. They are absolutely binding on us. They are our truth because the One who speaks them is our God. But nowhere in the Bible do we read that God gives us the right to impose our truth on someone else. God didn’t say, “Here are the Ten Commandments. Make sure the Egyptians obey them.” God said, “Here are the Ten Commandments. You obey them. You live them out, and, by your example, draw others into your life and witness.”
We’re gathered on this Third Sunday in Lent to reaffirm both the right we have to be faithful citizens and the precious gift we have Christianity as one great faith tradition among many. All we can do is proclaim and live by our truth. We cannot impose it on others. The Ten Commandments are the sign of our covenant with the One who has called us to be a particular set of God’s people in the world.  And in its way, Magna Carta stands as the other sign of the public covenant under which we live with our rulers.  Whether you believe that kings rule by divine right or the consent of the governed, Magna Carta proclaims that the bond between a ruler and a people will always stand as a covenant of mutual obligation modeled on Israel’s relationship with God. Yahweh rules not by power but by consent. Earthly kings and presidents can do no less.
I am thankful for the Ten Commandments as the sign of our covenant with God.  The Ten Commandments are our commandments because they are given to us by the One whom Jesus called his Father. They are no less true for being ours. I am thankful for Magna Carta as the sign of our covenant with those who govern.  These two living documents are our shared warrant for a civic life together even when our ultimate affirmations differ. May we so live out the truths enshrined in both Decalogue and charter that we and our society will be transformed by God’s love and blessed by our shared participation in our work for the common good. We cannot dictate, but we must not abdicate.  The One we call our God loves not only us us and all the others with whom we share this blessed world. Magna Carta serves as a civic witness to that divine love and compassion.  In its next 800 years, may Magna Carta continue to serve as the terms on which we together in civil society value our own traditions, respect others, and thereby witness to God’s transforming love.  Amen.