Homily: EDS Board Meeting Community Eucharist [October 22, 2015] St. Johns Chapel

We’re gathered today at the beginning of our annual three-day October board meeting, and I begin with the less than shocking observation that in our time together here a great deal will be at stake. At last year’s fall meeting we celebrated the school’s fortieth anniversary. Yet even though the community was undergoing a good deal of trauma at the time, not one public mention of that fact was made over the course of the three days.  As a brand new board member, it felt a bit crazy to me at the time.
A year later, almost everything has changed.  We have a new cast of leadership characters. The on-campus community has gone through a process of reconciliation and renewal. The board both in self-study and retreat has come to terms with its own performance, and we are perched now on the possibility of a new era in what we might call collaborative functionality.  Though each constituency maintains its own unique roles and responsibilities, I believe we have set the stage for taking account of the past and charting a visionary course for the school’s future.
I have had a lot of jobs in my career—parish priest, cathedral and seminary dean, school chaplain and administrator.  The one I think most about these days as I approach retirement is the one I was probably best suited for: college and high school English teacher. Over the course of my teaching life I taught mostly American literature, but because English teachers of my generation were expected to be polymaths, I also worked up a good deal of Shakespeare. In the last few years I have returned to Shakespeare as a kind of touchstone. Working in Washington has been a bit like inhabiting a Shakespeare history play:  everything there is about power and what people will do both to obtain and keep it. And when reflecting on the larger issues of life—suffering, redemption, forgiveness, hope—I find that Shakespeare’s late plays give a fuller expression than do abstract theology or—dare I say it—our liturgy itself.
Shakespeare’s late plays are pretty much about the horrible things people do to each other. Husbands betray their wives. Brothers sell out their brothers. In plays like The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest, evil is not a cosmic abstraction.  It is a lived, human reality. There are no witches or ghosts in these plays.  The action springs from simple human malevolence. And yet watching or reading them is a great, ennobling experience. Because as they unfold, a process takes place that allows for real complaint, real repentance, real forgiveness, and finally real reconciliation to be accomplished. At the end of Shakespeare’s late plays, the stage is set for a new community, one based in W.H. Auden’s great phrase, on “trust instead of threats”.
Shakespeare comes to mind this morning not only because of our own community need for mutual complaint, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation but also because of our Gospel reading for today.  When Jesus says
From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided:
father against son
   and son against father,
mother against daughter
   and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
   and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’ [Luke 12:52-53]
he is not making an esoteric prediction.  He is describing the functional dynamics of human life.
In the church we can become so Romantic about community that we forget the hard work that living and working with other people actually entails. Because of our innate tendency to put our own needs, wants, and aspirations ahead of others, all human communities (from the family to the classroom to the workplace to society itself) need to find ways to manage the inevitable conflict that ensues from just bumping up against one another. And that’s true just about ordinary communities. When you take a place like EDS (or the church at large) which has a high ideological expression of its own values, the stage is set for us to club each other to death using the weapon of our great, liberal commitments. There’s nothing like being assaulted in the name of virtue. As Bob Dylan says, “it happens every day”.
It’s at this point, I think that God calls us back to the values that were there before our values. In the sixth chapter of his letter to the Romans [Romans 6:19-23], Paul argues that his emphasis on grace is not an excuse to go ahead and sin. It all depends, says Paul, on what you give yourself over to. You can serve iniquity or you can serve righteousness. Again, to quote Bob Dylan, “You’ve got to serve somebody.” Paul’s point is that now we are freed from sin and bound to God we are becoming sanctified, literally holy.  That doesn’t mean that every thought or impulse we have is pure. But it does mean that we are part of something bigger and deeper and more inclusive than simply our personal wills or egos.
Many of you will know Shakespeare’s King Lear, an almost unrelieved tragedy which sees two families—those of Lear and Gloucester—turn against themselves. A father banishes a daughter. Sisters vie for power. A son turns against a father. At the end of the play, the stage is littered with the bodies of heroes and villains. And then one character steps forth and says this:
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. [King Lear 5.3]

I don’t normally think of Shakespeare as a guy who went through a lot of group process. Nevertheless, he understood the dynamics of human relationships. Without being Romantic about this or any other community, I would suggest that EDS and what it stands for are worth speaking the truth to each other about. My truth will not always align with your truth, but if we speak them to and with each other, we might just find ourselves making a new truth—one built on trust, instead of threats.
No human community will ever be free of conflict. In this as in any other society, we will all need to find ways to stand both for ourselves and with each other. In Paul’s words, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We can hang back and nurture our mutual resentments, or we can come together, hear each other’s truth, and work in community to build a new truth that does justice to all our partial perspectives.  I hope in these three days we will find ways to be both frank and charitable with each other. What we’re up to is too important for either defensiveness or self-dramatization. This work will no doubt be hard, but it will also be joyful and liberating as we open ourselves to it.  And the best place to start that work is here and now, as we gather around Jesus’s table to give thanks.  Amen.

Homily: The Twenty-first Sunday afer Pentecost [October 18, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

Do you think Jesus was happy?  Would you describe his earliest followers as happy? Do you think Christianity is about being happy? Are you happy yourself?

These questions arise as I find myself approaching retirement at the end of the year. Many people ask me what my plans are. What will make me happy? Am I going to rest and relax, do something new, or become a Howard Hughes-like weirdo walking around the house with Kleenex boxes on my feet instead of shoes?

Do I think I’ll be happy? Is that the right question in the first place? Is retirement about being happy? Is working about being happy? Is life itself about being happy? Or is it all about something more?  One of the thinkers I depend on to help me navigate these kinds of questions is Rebecca Solnit, a San Francisco-based writer who engages a range of issues--the environment, contemporary culture, and social justice questions to name a few.

Rebecca Solnit wrote about happiness in recent essay in Harper's Magazine. Listen to a bit of what she said:

 

 

Maybe part of the problem [with happiness] is that we have learned to ask the wrong things of ourselves. Our culture is steeped in a kind of pop psychology whose obsessive question is: Are you happy? . . .

 

Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is understood to be a matter of having a great many ducks lined up in a row — spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences — even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.

 

We are constantly given one-size-fits-all recipes, but those recipes fail, often and hard. Nevertheless, we are given them again. And again and again. They become prisons and punishments; the prison of the imagination traps many in the prison of a life that is correctly aligned with the recipes and yet is entirely miserable.  [Rebecca Solnit, "The Mother of All Questions", Harper's, October, 2015]

 

 

            As I understand her argument, Rebecca Solnit is suggesting that our tendency to equate the good life with the happy life boxes us into defining a good, meaningful life in far too narrow terms. As she says later in her essay, we need “better language to describe” what a fully realized life might look like. “There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person [than happiness]-- honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope.”

            I begin this morning asking questions about happiness and the good life because I think they are central to the problem this morning’s Gospel poses for us. Today we heard the well-known story of James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who ask that Jesus do for them “whatever we ask of you”, that is “to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” [Mark 10: 35-45] This request does not come out of thin air. It has a context. In the passage immediately preceding this one, Jesus has just told them, 

See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again. [Mark 10: 33-34]

 

James and John ask Jesus to sit at his right and left hand in glory after he has just told them about what awaits them in Jerusalem. Jesus will die on the cross. Their request is a response to this prediction. When talking about James and John preachers customarily tee off on the brothers and accuse them of self-serving careerism. I have even been known to do this myself on occasion.

But as I read the story anew this year, it seems to me that James and John are not guilty of ambition or self-promotion.  Their request is not to be the executive vice presidents of the Jesus movement. Their request is to put a happy ending on what Jesus has just named a tragedy.  The problem here is not ambition. No, it’s something much more insidious.  The problem here is the conventional wisdom of wishful thinking. James and John want Jesus to be happy. If they can just get through that crucifixion, everything will be all right.  And then they can be happy, too.

When Jesus predicts his own suffering and death, he talks about it with his companions in very matter-of-fact language.  He does not give them this news in order to frighten them.  He tells them so that they may be prepared for the consequences of a life lived on God’s terms—a life that cannot help but come in conflict with the powers of his day. If we have defined the good life as the “happy” life, then Jesus’s persistence in his way of living seems at best perverse and at worst suicidal.  If we define the good life using Rebecca Solnit’s terms—“honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope”—then Jesus’s decisions begin to make sense.

The English art critic and writer John Berger talks about our need for “another way of telling”. We need, not only as Christians but as citizens and fellow human beings, to reach for new language to describe what a meaningful, honorable, deep, engaged, hopeful life might look like.  One place to look for such language is in the life and story of Jesus. He came into a culture where the good life was defined in terms of power. Those who had it were deemed to be favored. Those without it were seen as condemned. In the second part of today’s Gospel, Jesus talks about the good life in language that turns power relationships upside down:

You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. [Mark 10: 42-45]

 

Jesus did not let his culture’s definition of the good life determine how he himself would live.  He did not organize his own life around getting and wielding power over others. He did not spend his life pursuing achievements and possessions. Instead, he gave of himself to others. He built a community of mutuality, compassion, and justice. He consorted with and healed the people whom his own society defined as outcasts.  For Jesus, the good life was the life built not on power but on service. “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

When he told his companions that he came not to be served but to serve, Jesus knew he was being counter-cultural. The values of the Gospel will always stand just slightly apart from those of the world. As followers of Jesus, you and I need to do some thinking on our own and together about what it is we want from life.  We need another way of telling ourselves and the world what finally matters. We inhabit a culture that will always define the good life in unimaginative, consensual ways. In Rebecca Solnit’s words, we are always “getting clobbered by the same old ways of telling”, and we cannot help but find that continual pummeling “disheartening”.  Following Jesus gives us not only new life but another way to live this one: a way that might include such elusive and overlooked principles as “honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope”.

I don’t know if I would say that Jesus was “happy”. In the terms our culture to define happiness, probably not. But he did life a life characterized by those elusive and overlooked principles so often lacking in human existence.  Honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope: these are the qualities that defined Jesus’s life and ministry. They are the qualities that have given shape to the best of the church’s efforts to follow Jesus.  They are the qualities that you and I can embrace, allowing us to be something more than happy. They can help us live lives that are real and true and deep and faithful.

You can lead a good life free from the way our culture defines one. As long as we continue to describe the good life as the successful, powerful, affluent, healthy life, then we are destined to think only very few among us as having lived one. Jesus calls us to expand our horizons. What is it you so deeply value that you would be willing to give your life over in service to it? Who is it that deserves your empathy compassion, and trust? These commitments, and not how many monuments that you leave behind, are what really matter. Jesus said the same to James and John, but they could not help hoping that the cross would only be a bump in the road on the way to worldly glory. They didn’t get it, but you and I just might. Whoever among us wishes to be great must be a servant. Not exactly great career advice, but a principle worth organizing your life around.  Amen.

 

 

 

Homily: Altar Guild Evensong/Linda Roecklein's 50 Yeas [October 13, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

             We’re gathered this evening to do two things, one of them ordinary and the other extraordinary.  The first thing is to say thanks to the Altar Guild, something churches do fairly regularly.  The second is to recognize Linda Roeckelein for fifty years of service. (She started here when she was five years old—you probably read about it in the papers.) Fifty years of doing anything in a sustained way is out of the ordinary.  Fifty years of working with sacred vessels, floral arrangements, and the people who maintain and create them is really unheard of. So let me say a word first about the Guild and its work and then second a word about Linda.

            I’m a preacher, and we preachers like to speak about the biblical texts we’re given for an occasion.  I’m sorry to say that tonight the church’s lectionary hasn’t given me very much to work with.  The story of Jonah’s call to prophecy and his flight from his task and subsequent swallowing by a great fish [Jonah 1:1-17a] is a wonderful tale, but it’s not much help when praising those who serve the church. And Jesus’s warning that we will all be hated because of his name [Matthew 10:16-23] doesn’t really speak to the occasion either. Yet because of my abiding faith that, if you hang with it long enough, the lectionary will always give you something to work with, I have found these words from Psalm 11 that might just do when recognizing members of an altar guild:

                         For the Lord is righteous;

     he delights in righteous deeds; *

                    and the just shall see his face. [Psalm 11:8]

 

                    Because we call ourselves the “national cathedral”, and because we inhabit Washington D.C., in all our language around here we tend to define “righteousness” as “doing important stuff”:  inaugurating presidents, hosting public policy summits, standing up for this or that public issue.  All those endeavors qualify as “important stuff”, but a night like this one calls us to remember what cathedrals are here for in the first place. The word cathedral is shorthand for cathedral church, and the most important of the many things all churches do is to pray. And because we are a cathedral church in the Anglican tradition, the central way we pray is to pray liturgically.  To be sure, we encourage private devotion and other forms of worship, but central to our life together are the church’s two dominical sacraments of Eucharist and Baptism and then all the other liturgical actions related to them:  marriage, ordination, confirmation, burial, not to mention our regular round of daily offices. 

                    Worshipping liturgically is hard work.  It requires not just sitting and thinking but getting up, moving around, and, well, working with a lot of hardware:  patens, chalices, pyxes, ciboria, pitchers, lavabo bowls, and the like. And because we are who we are we want that hardware to be not only useful; we want it to be beautiful.  And we want not only hardware:  we want what we might call the “software” of vestments and linens, and the even softer ware of flowers. To be sure, we could praise God authentically without all these things, but we couldn’t do that in our own particular way if we didn’t have silver and silk and linen and the bold and gracious floral arrangements that consistently decorate all the altars of this cathedral church.

                    So when Psalm 11 reminds us that,

     . . . the Lord is righteous;

     he delights in righteous deeds; *

                    and the just shall see his face. [Psalm 11:8]

 

we should hear this word as one deep form of thanks and affirmation for what the members of our Altar Guild do.  Maintaining all the hard- and soft-ware of a big operation like this is serious work. We could not pray liturgically the way we do without that work.  Those of us who stand up and perform in this space usually get all the attention.  But those of us who do so know to whom really all the attention belongs:  the women and men of the Altar Guild who make the rest of what happens here possible in the first place.  Speaking for all of us who preside and preach in this place:  thank you for the generous, selfless ways in which you serve the cathedral and beautify our common space.  We literally could not do it without you.

                    That’s my word to the Guild as a whole.  And now to Linda.  You know, searching tonight’s scriptures I finally did find a verse that might say something about Linda Roeckelein’s fifty years here:

See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. [Matthew 10:16]

                    When you behold someone as sweet and gracious as Linda, the idea of being as canny as a snake doesn’t immediately come to mind.  But in recognizing Linda Roeckelein we honor not only her extraordinary ability to arrange flowers and take care of the vessels we use in the service.  We honor Linda for her ability to pull this whole enterprise off not in an artistic vacuum but with the likes of flesh and blood human beings.  Arranging flowers and caring for linens and silver requires managing the people who work with them. And as I’ve observed Linda at work in my time here, I’ve been impressed with more than her aesthetic abilities.  I’ve seen the way she guides and inspires the women who work with her to aspire to new heights of creativity in their flower arranging, the way she supports those who care for the vessels of the altar.  Leading an Altar Guild requires more than good taste.  It requires great interpersonal skill, the ability to guide and motivate the people you work with.  It means that to do Linda’s work you have to be wise as a servant and innocent as a dove.

                    There is no place I know of in America or in all of the Anglican Communion that manages the accouterments of liturgical worship as well as we do here. The beauty and dignity of our flowers and linen and silver are no accident:  they derive from visionary, dedicated work by all the members of the Altar Guild and especially from the leadership of the faithful, brilliant woman who leads them. So how do you say thank you to a woman like that—one who leads others in doing righteous deeds, one who is herself as wise as a serpent and as innocent as a dove?

                    The only way I could think for the cathedral community to honor Linda and the women and men who work so closely with her tonight is to do what I have done, and what I am pleased to announce tonight. On my recommendation to the bishop, and our joint recommendation to the chapter, and the chapter’s enthusiastic approval, I am pleased tonight to name Linda Roeckelein as an Honorary Canon of the Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Paul. Linda, our liturgical prayer in this space and the space itself would not be the same without you. Please know of our high admiration and deep gratitude for all you and your companions do.  May God continue to bless you and to bless us through you, and may tonight be not just a summation but the commencement of another generous span of time in wise, righteous service in the house of God.  Amen.

Homily: The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost/Cathedral Day [September 27,2015] Washington National Cathedral

       All right.  I confess:  I, too, have been taken over by Popesteria, a disorder I would define as a complete and total fixation on the words, actions, and teachings of Pope Francis. Popesteria always carries with it a fair amount of denial. For days on end I told myself that I could not be bothered to stand with 11,000 people on the White House lawn for three hours waiting for his holiness to arrive. Then on Tuesday I said to Kathy, “Well, I might as well pick up my ticket just in case.” And then on Wednesday morning, at 5:30 a.m., I found myself walking down to the White House and then milling around with the gigantic crowd until the ceremony started almost four hours later. It doesn’t matter that I could neither see Pope Francis nor even hear him very well. When you suffer from Popesteria you take what you can get. It was enough just to be in roughly the same zip code with the man.

            I confess to having Popesteria even though I am probably the most jaded person there is when it comes to being around famous people. There are very few celebrities I would walk around the block to see. But Pope Francis is something else.  He’s an actual Christian person who has somehow found himself leading the world’s largest church.  His personal authenticity, his intellectual and theological depth, his obvious empathy and compassion—all of these traits combine to make him an inviting face for the gospel in the 21^st century. And from what I’ve seen of the coverage of his visit, I know his trip to America has been as transformative for our nation as it has been for me and my fellow popestericals.

We respond so powerfully to Pope Francis because he incarnates our highest aspirations and deepest values. It’s not only that he articulates the faithful Christian response to the world’s besetting social problems; it’s also that he lives the way all of us who follow Jesus aspire to live. He takes the gospel seriously. He actually does what Jesus advises us to do—living not only simply and generously but also joyfully and expansively. He treats both individuals and classes of people as bearers of God’s image in the world. Listen again to his words to Congress last Wednesday about how we together might respond to the crises plaguing today’s world:

Our response must instead be one of hope and healing, of peace and justice. We are asked to summon the courage and the intelligence to resolve today’s many geopolitical and economic crises. Even in the developed world, the effects of unjust structures and actions are all too apparent. Our efforts must aim at restoring hope, righting wrongs, maintaining commitments, and thus promoting the well-being of individuals and of peoples. We must move forward together, as one, in a renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity, cooperating generously for the common good. [Pope Francis Address to Congress, September 24, 2015]

 

By his very being, Pope Francis is teaching us what it means to be a Christian person. Now I’m spending all this time talking about him not to imitate a high school book report but as a way into saying something about Cathedral Day. Once a year, on the last Sunday in September, we here at Washington National Cathedral pause to observe the founding of this cathedral on September 29, 1907, and we take the occasion to think together about what a place like this is for. In a world of gross inequality and suffering—not to mention selfies, snapchat, and the Kardashians—what possible meaning can a gothic edifice like this have? It seems to me that the answer to that question lies not in a set of ideas but in a person. Pope Francis tells us not only what it means to be a Christian human being.  He shows us what it means to be a Christian church, and by extension, a Christian cathedral.

On Cathedral Day we always read the gospel account [Matthew 21:12-16]: of Jesus entering the Jerusalem temple and casting out the money-changers. As Matthew tells it,

Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, ‘It is written,
“My house shall be called a house of prayer”;
   but you are making it a den of robbers.’ [Matthew 21: 12-13]

When Jesus tells us that we are turning a house of prayer into a house of thieves, we usually infer that he is criticizing commercial transactions.  (Given that Washington National Cathedral has a store, a café, and that we charge for admission, reading Jesus’s words as a proscription on any money changing hands would be very bad news for us indeed.) But the word Matthew uses is the Greek word lēstēs which in English really means something more like “brigand”.  A brigand is not only a thief: a brigand is part of a gang which lives by looting and pillage. Translation: Jesus implies that by institutionalizing and commodifying sacred transactions, the money-changers are hijacking the mission of the temple itself.  It’s not so much that selling doves for sacrifice sullies the holiness of the place; it’s rather that the entire temple system of sacrifice which presumes to guarantee holiness has become a caricature of what the life of faith is really all about. As the prophet Hosea reminds us [Hosea 6:6], God desires “mercy, not sacrifice”.  In promoting a culture of worship disconnected from human need, the temple system has bought into the false idea that one can pray to God while ignoring human suffering. The temple has become an impediment to the life of prayer.

So Cathedral Day, if it means anything, recalls us to what the mission of a place like this is all about.  Are we called to be a beautiful edifice where prayers are said flowers are arranged, and beautiful music is heard, or are we called to be something more? Who, if we are honest with ourselves, are the real money-changers in this temple? By serving a vision of holiness disconnected from the pains and injustices of the world, how are we hijacking the gospel mission of a house of prayer?

We get some help in answering this question in the same address Pope Francis gave to Congress. In that speech, his holiness cited four exemplary Americans—only two of them Roman Catholics.  Abraham Lincoln, our 16^th president, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights leader are well-known.  The two others are less familiar to most of us.  Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement and spent her life working among and for the poor.  Thomas Merton was a Cistercian monk who wrote about prayer and its connection to the issues of the day. In his summative words to Congress, Pope Francis said this:

A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to “dream” of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton. [Pope Francis Address to Congress, September 24, 2015]

 

Defending liberty, establishing rights, striving for justice, sowing peace: these are the marks of a great nation.  They are also the marks of a great cathedral, particularly one that calls itself the “spiritual home of the nation”.  In aspiring to be the nation’s church, do we not thereby seek to embody America’s highest national affirmations? We cannot stand for both gospel truth and American values simply by being beautiful. If we are to be a “house of prayer” in the way that Jesus means it, we must embody the commitments of the four Americans Pope Francis cited in his speech. We must work for the freedom of all. We must stand for the rights of all. We must agitate for justice, especially in regard to poverty and race.  We must work for peace not only internationally but in our city streets. As beautiful as it is, a building like this is a sentimental fantasy if all we do here is bury presidents, welcome tourists, or applaud ourselves for being a national treasure. A cathedral lives out its holiness not only by being pious. A cathedral lives out its holiness by standing with and for the people God cares most about:  the poor, the sick, the grieving, the oppressed, the prisoners, the hungry, the lonely, the lost. The beauty of a place like this does not consist primarily in its stained glass, its wrought iron, or its carvings. The beauty of a place like this shines forth from what it stands for.

As an American, I will always be grateful to Pope Francis for his visit among us, recalling us to our essential vision of ourselves as a nation. As a Christian, I will likewise be grateful for his life as a constant reminder of what it means really to follow Jesus. On this Cathedral Day, let all of us who love and serve Washington National Cathedral rededicate ourselves to the vision of a holy place aspiring to be not only a “house of prayer” but also a house of justice.  May our piety shine forth both in prayer and in action. May our love for God shine forth not only from this building but in lives dedicated to defending liberty, establishing rights, striving for justice, and sowing peace. Amen.

 

 

Welcoming Remarks: "Coming Together in Faith on Climate" [September 24, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

Good Evening.  I’m Gary Hall, Dean of Washington National Cathedral, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you all tonight to “Coming Together in Faith on Climate:  Religious Leaders Support and Extend the Pope’s Call to Action”. This event would not be possible were it not for a real spirit of collaboration between and among all the sponsoring organizations.  I want to extend my personal thanks to Ruth Frey, the cathedral’s director of programs, for the work she has done on our behalf to work with our partners to bring this important symposium together.

The poet Gary Snyder says, “When you find your place where you are, practice starts.” Those of us who follow Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, and the Buddha inhabit not just a tradition.  We also dwell in a place, and our shared place is the planet.  Speaking for the Christian tradition, in our early attempts to differentiate ourselves from nature religions, the church often built a false dichotomy between valuing human beings and honoring the creation.  The environmental crises of the late 20^th and early 21^st century have demanded that theologians from all our traditions reassess our historic teachings and reassert our core beliefs about the sacredness of the world we share.  The looming calamity of climate change (which has already begun) has not only intensified our need, as people of faith, to speak out on creation’s behalf; it has galvanized our determination to do so.

In his encyclical Laudato si’, Pope Francis has issued a powerful challenge both to religious and secular leaders to see climate change as the theological issue it is and to mobilize to reverse it on all our behalf.  All of us who gather tonight are deeply grateful for the pope’s leadership, and we have taken the occasion of his visit to America as the opportunity to come together to think, pray, organize and act to reverse global warming here and now. 

“When you find your place where you are, practice starts.” The planet is our place, and we are the people.  Tonight our practice starts. Welcome to this work, and welcome to the cathedral.

Address: Matriculation [September 10, 2015] Episcopal Divinity School

            It is a great pleasure to be with you today and it is a great honor to serve, for a while, as the chair of the EDS board of trustees. Over the past several months I have been working closely with our President and Dean, Frank Fornaro, and I have come to learn what everybody here already knew about him: that he is the perfect person to lead EDS in this moment, possessed of great leadership ability, theological depth, and a compassionate heart. I know that when Frank and I are finished with our work together, EDS will have thrived under his visionary and caring stewardship, and I thank him for the invitation to be with you today.

It is hard for me to believe that, on a September evening 42 years ago, I signed the matriculation book here in St. John’s Chapel as a member of the last class to enroll at the Episcopal Theological School.  This was in the fall of 1973, and though we had heard that a merger with PDS might be coming, nobody then knew what the new school would feel like as a lived reality. And as a first-year student who had come all the way to Cambridge from California, I had even less sense of what seminary would have in store for me. As it turned out, the external peace and justice movement cataclysm I had been part of at U.C. Berkeley was nothing compared to the internal transformation that seminary would hold for me, my classmates, and our spouses and partners. But that’s another story.

            So enough about me. Today is about the EDS community and those who today are joining it. I’d like to say a general word about EDS and a particular word to those who are matriculating.

It is no secret that the Episcopal Divinity School has been through a rough patch. I don’t mean a rough patch just recently. I mean for its entire existence. This school was born in the struggles of the movement for women’s ordination. Nine years before the merger, ETS Jonathan Daniels had been killed in Alabama. The Cambridge school had its origins in the quest to teach the higher criticism of the Bible and explore the implications of the rise of science in the 19^th century free of ecclesiastical interference. And after the merger, things hardly cooled down. There was the establishment of a Feminist Liberation Theology program in the 1980s, the open acceptance of LGBT students in the 1990s, and (this one may only seem like a controversy to us academic nerds, but believe me it’s contentious when you go to ATS meetings) the extension of seminary education through distance learning early in this century. In its 40 years of existence, the Episcopal Divinity School has been ahead of the church and academy on almost every issue. And it is no wonder that those of us who serve the church and have graduated from this school are often viewed with some suspicion. EDS has staked out a prophetic role in the life of the church and the world. It’s no wonder that we are often seen as more of a problem than a resource.  If I meet one more bishop who says, “I’m really glad that EDS exists; I just don’t want any clergy in my diocese who have gone there,” I don’t know what I’ll do.

So here’s the problem. We feel called to be bold and prophetic, and then we’re surprised when the establishment sees us as troublemakers. I’m reminded of what the philosopher Jonathan Lear says about the character Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear. You may remember that Cordelia is the one daughter in the play who refuses to tell her father what he wants to hear and is banished as a result.  Here’s what Jonathan Lear says about her:

             

To identify with Cordelia is to want to be blunt, to avoid embellishment, flattery, or hypocrisy-and to want to be loved for doing just that.  This is not a set of desires which get satisfied often.  By and large, people prefer to be flattered.  They find it hard to recognize love in a blunt appraisal; and they find it even harder to reciprocate such love.  Cordelia's strategy is not the route to massive popularity. -- Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, p. 3

 

            In other words:  we want to tell the truth, and we want to be loved for doing it—not, in Lear’s words, “a set of desires which get satisfied often”.  We shouldn’t be surprised that when a community like EDS experiences some internal tensions as this one has, many on the outside will be quick to dance on our grave. And that is why it is important, in moments like this, to remember what we came out to do in the first place. As an educational faith community shaped by the Gospel, EDS will always be one or two steps ahead of the conventional wisdom of institutional Christianity. This has consistently been the school’s vocation, and if we are to be true to our calling we will ever risk being unpopular and misunderstood. That perception simply goes with the territory. But it cannot be otherwise.

            I have always found these words from the 11^th chapter of Hebrews both personally and corporately inspiring:

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them. [Hebrews 11: 13-16]

 

            The author of Hebrews is talking about a certain kind of holy restlessness which motivated the matriarchs and patriarchs of Israel.  They knew themselves to be “strangers and foreigners on the earth”, people who desired a better country. And because they were faithful in their search for that homeland, God has “prepared a city for them”.

            You could say that EDS is a community of faithful learners who desire a better country.  You could say that we are strangers and foreigners not only on the earth but in the church. And you could also say that, to the extent that we are faithful in our perseverance in seeking that homeland, God has prepared a city for us.  We often talk about working for peace and justice as if it is the bitter pill of faithfulness. But anyone who has done justice work knows that the work itself is liberating. If EDS sees its reward as enduring all this justice work so that we will be popular across the Episcopal Church, we will miss the point.  If we see our justice work as allowing us already to inhabit the city that God has built for us, then we will be standing now together in our true homeland.

            And these thoughts about our corporate pilgrimage lead me to say a word to those who today embark on this more personal sacred journey of theological education. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t experienced yourself as a stranger and foreigner in the place you came from.  You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t seeking a homeland. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want a better country for yourself, your household, your nation, your world. You have seen and greeted the promises from afar. You have come here to figure out how further to step into the pathway and pursue them.

            Theological education is a wonderful, bracing, invigorating experience. It is also really hard. It is hard for a couple of reasons.  First, you’re trying to take in four new disciplines from a dead stop.  In my first year of seminary, I soon realized that I didn’t have enough Bible to understand theology. I didn’t have enough theology to understand the Bible.  I didn’t have enough history to understand either. Ethics was a total mystery. And who had time for pastoral care?

            The point is: you are embarking on a process which is inherently destabilizing. And that leads to the second reason that seminary can be hard. Not only are you trying to wrap your head around an interlocking series of intellectual challenges; you’re doing this in the context of trying on a whole new set of cultural and vocational attitudes. You might have a spouse or a partner who didn’t think that this was the life they signed on for. You’re going into hospital rooms and people are looking to you to have something healing to say. And then there will be those ridiculous GOEs. This is hard work. It’s hard intellectual work. It’s hard spiritual work. It’s hard interpersonal work. I don’t say this to scare you off. I say it because as a former seminary professor and dean myself, I know something of the internal dislocation that this experience can cause.

            And I say it not only because I know that you, as seekers after a better country, will persevere through that dislocation.  I say it because—and this is the experience of everyone who goes through theological education—it actually gets better.  There will come a day, not all that far off, when you will begin to integrate all this. There will come a day when Bible and history and theology will come together and inform the way you understand both God and yourself. There will come a day when your internal sense of your own vocation will align with your personal and interpersonal relationships. There will come a day when the process not only helps you prepare for a life in ministry but gives you the intellectual and personal skills to reflect on your life, your ministry, and the contextual situation in which you find yourself.  There will come a day when you will realize that theological education is not about downloading all the right answers and perfect things to say. It is about getting the skills and tools to access and live out the deep truths that you uniquely know and can tell about God.

            People who graduate from seminary remember it so fondly because so much happens to them there. So think of signing this matriculation book as signing your passport to adventure. Both you and the school itself are embarking today on a pilgrimage together toward that better country, that city which God is preparing for us. What you discover when you’re on it is that we encounter the heavenly city in the steps of the pilgrimage itself. And that is why the speakers of Psalm 126 have always had it right:

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.

 

             

     Translation: God is already doing for us now that which we hope for. As we walk together on this sacred pilgrimage toward God’s heavenly city, we endure both personal and corporate disruption. It cannot be otherwise. But we do not experience that dislocation for its own sake: we endure it for the sake of the vision of personal peace and social justice and shalom that Jesus holds out to those who cannot do other than walk with him.

            And so, to the EDS community at large and to those who now join it today, not I say, but Jesus says: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? . . . But strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” [Matthew 6: 25-34] It really will be OK for you. It really will be OK for us. So let’s take up that passport to adventure.  Let’s get on that road and walk together with Jesus and each other--with the poor, the oppressed, the sick, the grieving, the homeless—let’s walk toward that better, heavenly country and help God build it, all the while advancing the work of peace, justice, and liberation among ourselves and in the world.  Amen.

Homily: The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 6, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

Everybody has their favorite diversions. In recent years I have become interested (my wife Kathy would say “obsessed”) with Japanese cinema.  On my day off afternoons you will often find me sprawled on the sofa watching a movie by Akira Kurasowa, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Yasujiro Ozu. Kathy doesn’t usually join me in these enjoyments; indeed she says that when she walks through the room she is greeted either by the image of a screaming samurai or a whistling kettle. Japanese movies are not everyone’s cup of tea.

I’m not sure why in these last years I have found Japanese films so compelling.  Certainly the great directors of Japan are masters of cinema in their own right.  But something else is going on here. When I look at Japanese culture on screen, I see something that illuminates my experience of being an American.  In the same way we learn foreign languages to understand our own, so we engage other cultures so we may better see ourselves.  The poet James Merrill used the term, “a kind of clarifying mirror” to describe the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Her poems, he said, reflect and clarify the self-understanding of their readers. The “clarifying mirror” idea applies not only to art.  It also works more broadly with cross-cultural experiences. Other people, other traditions, other languages serve as clarifying mirrors in which we can comprehend ourselves more fully. We cannot truly see ourselves until someone “other” reflects our image back to us.

I have had another—perhaps obsessive—viewing interest this summer, and I do not mean True Detective or Show Me a Hero. In the last months I have become nearly overwhelmed by the plight of refugees and migrants attempting to cross from Africa and the Middle East into the European Union.  I think the discovery in Austria of a van with 71 dead Syrian refugees pushed me over the edge, but for months leading up to that horrible news we had been pummeled with stories of refugees drowning at sea, being preyed on by gangs, or jumping into trucks entering the English Channel Tunnel at Calais. And just this last week we saw new images—a Kurdish boy dead on a Turkish beach; thousands of refugees trapped on a train to nowhere in Hungary.

          In the same way that samurai pictures tell us something about the old west, these stories of Africans, Afghanis, and Syrians seeking refuge in Europe have illuminated for me something in our own national character.  While we Americans might decry the callousness of European nations refusing to offer shelter to those who suffer real persecution in their home countries, we seem to tolerate presidential candidates who describe Latin Americans seeking refuge here as rapists and murderers and who describe children born to immigrants as “anchor babies”. Yet many fleeing Central American countries like Honduras seek to escape the same violence and suffering that emigrants from Libya and Syria face in their homes. Demagoguery is easier to see from afar than it is up close.

          The dead child, the packed train, the Austrian van remind us, as nothing will, of what occurs daily on our own border. Death in Austria, Hungary, or Turkey reflects back to us the hard truth about death in the Sonoran Desert. Sometimes we can only see our own callousness in the clarifying mirror of someone else’s.

A similar clarifying reflective process is going on in today’s Gospel [Mark 7:24-30], a story that I have always found truly shocking. Jesus leaves Israel and goes to Tyre, one of the major cities of what was once known as Phoenecia. A Gentile woman, called by Mark a “Syrophoencian”, approaches Jesus and asks that he heal her daughter. She is a foreigner, a Gentile, a non-Jew.  Following Jesus around Galilee, we have come to expect that he will embrace her warmly and cast out the girl’s demon. Instead, he says a really ugly thing: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” I always thought of Jesus as a nice guy, and here he is expressing a sentiment worthy of a demagogue. In Jesus’s figure of speech, Jews are children, non-Jews are dogs. The translation: go back where you belong.

So the first surprising thing about this story is that it shows us a rare instance of Jesus when he wasn’t compassionate, forgiving, or warm. But there’s a second surprising moment here.  The woman, not cowed at all by Jesus’s holy man stature, responds in kind: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” OK, buster: you want to call me a dog, let’s carry that logic out to its completion. Even if in your eyes I’m a dog, I still deserve some kind of humane consideration. Although in Gospel wit duels, I usually root for Jesus, I’m happy here to score one for the woman.

And then here comes yet another surprise.  Jesus gets converted. He changes his mind. “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” Something about this interaction—the woman’s perseverance, not to mention her audacity, I suppose—has altered Jesus’s understanding of things.  In these seven short verses Jesus has moved from being an exceptionalistic religious rule-abider to a healer possessed of a new, expansive vision of what it means to be human. Something in the Syrophoenecian woman’s argument has showed Jesus to himself. As the representative of a culture outside of the one Jesus inhabits, she has served as a clarifying mirror of his own.

Once we’ve recovered from the several shocks this story delivers, Mark’s Gospel invites us to open ourselves to its transformative personal implications. If Jesus—the Messiah, not to mention the Word become flesh and the pre-existent Son of God—if Jesus can change his mind about something, then so can you and I. We tend to think about Jesus as an omniscient deity walking around the Holy Land in human disguise, but theologically we have always understood him to be truly and fully human too. And, frankly, to be truly and fully human means that one cannot help carry around a lot of unexamined social attitudes.  In his interaction with the Syrophoencian woman, Jesus finds himself confronted by the ugliness of his attitudes and changed in the process.  He has to look under the rock of his own prejudices, and he is not pleased with what he finds there.  And so he changes his mind. He relents.  He opens himself to someone he would have previously shut out.  If Jesus can do that, so can I. So can you. So can we all, together.

Jesus changes because he sees himself in the clarifying mirror of someone from outside his own usual frame of reference.  Jesus changes because the woman shows him himself, and in that moment of self-discovery he realizes what few of us ever get to know.  He learns that he is not normative. He is not the standard. His way of being human is one way, but it is not the only way of being human. There are other, perhaps quite different, maybe even better ways of navigating the world.  Jesus can learn this because he is lucky enough to be encountered and engaged by another, by a woman from a different race and culture. How many of us regularly hang out with people who come from someplace else? How many of us have the opportunity, much less the grace, to readjust our self-understanding in the light of an outside perspective?  Lucky for Jesus that he entered that house. Lucky for us that he did, too.

As this summer marked by demagoguery at home and suffering abroad comes to a close, and as our leaders play to the fears of our national and international electorates to build higher walls and razor-wire fences to keep the refugees out, let us hold on to this precious gospel moment shared between Jesus and a woman who would not let him let her go.  “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” In this moment, Jesus saw not only the truth but also the truth’s implications for his need to act.  We Americans destabilized the Middle East in the first place.  We should take in a generous share of these refugees as well.

It is an act of divine grace and mercy to get to see under the rock of our own social attitudes. God doesn’t always give us the chance fully to see ourselves, and then often only by the light of the clarifying mirror of someone from the outside.  We need that mirror—we need those others—in our lives to show us ourselves in all our contradictions and complexities.  We may not like what we see there, but if we never see it, we’ll never change. And if we never change, then we will never become the people God is calling us to be. If Jesus can grow, then so can we.  That’s hard news, but it’s life-giving news as well--both there and here, today and always, for you, for me, for Jesus, and for the world.  Amen.