The Rector's Monday Message: June 4, 2012

Table or Altar?

At the east end of Christ Church stands a beautiful wooden piece of furniture, usually decorated with a cross, flowers, a fair linen, and a silk frontal.  Some people call this structure an altar.  Some call it a table. The longer I am in the church, the more I see this choice of names as fundamental to understanding what it is we do when we gather together as the church.

I was raised to call this structure the altar. It was the place where the priest stood and supplicated God on the people’s behalf.  The idea of an altar is one with a long history in Christianity and Judaism, not to mention polytheistic religions. In the cult of the Jerusalem Temple, people gained entry to the building by bringing an animal to sacrifice.  When the early church began as a Jewish movement, it understood Jesus’s death much in the way Judaism had understood Temple sacrifice.  God was pictured as a wrathful, vengeful deity who needed to be “propitiated” (in the words of the old Prayer Book) or placated by the sacrifice of an animal or, in Jesus’s case, a human being. 

To think of the central edifice of Christian worship as an altar is to say something about God and about us.  A theology based on sacrifice is one that holds up purity as both the goal of human life and as something finally unattainable by imperfect human beings.  Jesus was a once-for-all sacrifice for human sin.  Nothing human beings can do will ever deserve such a transaction. Since we can never be fully pure, we need regularly to make a sacrificial offering at God’s altar as a way of asking for God’s continual mercy and forgiveness.

That, essentially, is the altar theology, and there is much to recommend it.  It takes our weakness and finitude seriously.  It represents the “size gap” between God and us dramatically.  It honors my need to worship the One at the center of creation with reverence and dignity. But this theology has drawbacks, too.  It pictures God as a divine monarch, and it makes my relationship with God very much like that of a subject petitioning a stern (but forgiving) king.  It assumes that the central dynamic between God and me is based primarily on power.

As a complement to the altar theology, there is another way to think of this piece of furniture at the east end of the church.  Rather than seeing it as an edifice on which to enact a ritual sacrifice (even one of “praise and thanksgiving”), we might, following Jesus’s lead in the Gospels, think of it as a table. 

Jesus spent a lot of his time in table fellowship.  He gathered people inclusively, generously, compassionately for meals at his table.  On the night before he died he gathered his companions and told them to eat bread and wine together in his memory until he comes again.  The ritual that Jesus instituted—the Eucharist—was really a meal.  And in making a meal the central act of Christian worship, Jesus was suggesting that fellowship with God and other people is all about mutuality, sharing, hospitality, and grace. 

It is significant that the Book of Common Prayer in all its iterations—1549, 1552, 1662, 1789, 1892, 1928, 1979—has consistently used the word “table” to name the place where this ritual meal takes place.  Most of the time it’s called “the Table”.  Sometimes it’s named “The Lord’s Table”.  In the most recent prayer book it’s called “the Holy Table”.  As far as I can tell by a quick perusal of all the prayer books, the Book of Common Prayer never uses the word “altar” in reference to the Lord’s Holy Table.  “Altar” is a word that came into common usage in our church during the 19^th century Oxford Movement.  In its time it was an important term that recalled us of the seriousness and transcendence of the Eucharistic liturgy.  But its use has snuck into our common consciousness in such a way that we have become disconnected from the basic, grounded humanness of what we are doing when we gather together for Communion.

When the early Christians proclaimed that Jesus was present with them in the Eucharist, they weren’t talking about the transubstantiation of the bread and wine.  What they meant was that, when they gathered together around the Lord’s Table to give thanks, Jesus was present with them in the room.  As the great Anglican theologian Richard Hooker said, the Eucharist is about the transformation of persons, not substances.  Holy Communion is not a magic act performed in a royal temple.  It is a meal in which we experience God’s presence among and with us as we break bread and drink wine with each other.

To see Communion this way may, for some, diminish its mystery and holiness.  Perhaps.  But from my perspective, the invitation to dine with Jesus and each other magnifies the depth and power of what we are doing together as we gather at the table.  God values us enough to gather us as guests at Jesus’s table.  God gathers us without reference to class, social, racial, ethnic, sexual, or ideological status or orientation.  The inclusiveness of the invitation is an indication of the kind of God we’re dealing with in Jesus.  Everyone is welcome. Everyone is accepted. Everyone is loved.

Summer is a time when many of us will have occasion for a variety of meals in a range of settings.  As you gather at your various tables this summer, try to see them as Eucharistic meals in which, when two or three are gathered together, Jesus is present, too.  Let the tables at which we gather in this season be Holy Tables, the Lord’s Tables. The love and welcome we offer and experience are expressions of the ultimate love behind what God in Jesus is all about. This experience of table fellowship is (or should be) what we know in our churchgoing as well.

And, of course:  wherever you are this summer, don’t forget to go to church!

Gary Hall

With this issue, “The Rector’s Monday Message” goes on summer hiatus until Homecoming in September.  The next issue will appear on Monday, September 10. 

Homily: June 3, 2012 [Trinity Sunday] Christ Church Cranbrook

            There are many intriguing news stories abroad these days, but the one that interests me the most right now concerns the scandal of secret Vatican documents allegedly stolen and copied by Paolo Gabriele, the Pope’s butler.  The heart of the scandal involves mismanagement of the Vatican bank, including charges of malfeasance and cronyism.  But to me perhaps the greatest mystery is this:  the Pope has a butler?  Really?

            If the Pope has a butler, I ask myself, shouldn’t all Christian clergy have butlers?  More to the point, shouldn’t I have a butler? Once I open myself to these questions, all kinds of other queries cascade into my mind.  If I had a butler, what would he do?  I don’t have any secret correspondence, so there’d be no Top Secret documents for him to steal and photocopy.  And Christ Church Cranbrook doesn’t have a bank, so the only cronyism he could uncover might involve sweetheart deals around the treats at Vacation Bible School.  Where, precisely, do all those Goldfish and Graham crackers really come from?  Are the fruit punch providers getting kickbacks?

            Questions and mysteries abound.  Today is Trinity Sunday, the day I have always called “the preacher’s graveyard”.  Everybody has questions about the Trinity, and the mistake that many preachers make is to try to answer them in a fifteen-minute sermon.  As I used to say when I taught seminary students, “It took the early church 400 years to develop this doctrine.  Do you think you can make sense of it in a sound bite?”

The convergence of the papal butler banking scandal and Trinity Sunday suggests that many—perhaps most—of us come to church with big questions on our minds.   In this we are not alone.  Today’s Gospel [John 3: 1-17] tells us the story of Nicodemus, a Pharisee who comes to Jesus by night with his questions.  Jesus tells him, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus replies, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?”  Jesus responds, “You must be born from above. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”  In a fit of exasperation so violent you can hear it rise from the page, Nicodemus asks, “‘How can these things be?”

            How can these things be? When you and I think about the big religious questions—the Holy Trinity, the meaning of suffering, the persistence of evil and injustice in the world, life after death—Nicodemus speaks for us. How can these things be?  Jesus has told him he must be born again from above, by water and the Holy Spirit.  Nicodemus is flummoxed, as frankly you and I would be flummoxed, too. How can these things be?

            In some sense, the life of faith is offered to us as an invitation to step into a mystery.  It’s very much like the experience of going to a museum or gallery and looking at abstract paintings or contemporary works of art.  Whenever I go to a big museum show, I always notice the people who rent the audio guides.  They amble from point to point holding the devices to their ears.  They are looking at a painting and trying to make sense of it by listening to what an intelligent person says about it.  The problem, though, is that the primary thing about the painting is the experience of looking at it.  When you’ve got the audio guide to your head, you’re in danger of confusing someone else’s experience of the painting for your own.  I say, turn off the audio guide and look at the picture.

            You and I are all products of Western culture and its inheritance of rationalism.  A painting, like a poem or any other work of art, is not primarily a cognitive, mental experience.  A work of art is an invitation into a new way of being or seeing or hearing.  One of my favorite writers, the great Flannery O’Connor, says that most of us approach art “as if it were a problem in algebra.  Find x.” O’Connor believes that we regularly mistake the process of thinking about something for the experience of the thing itself. She goes on to say this:

Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction. [Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”]

Flannery O’Connor is talking about fiction here, but she could be talking about visual art or theology.  A priest scholar friend of mine has called this way of looking at religious problems, “the meaning heresy”.  What he means is that, since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, we Western people have tended to think that the most important thing about something is what it “means” as a mental experience.  People walk around art museums listening to curators talk on audio guides rather than looking at the pictures.  Readers pull apart stories solving for x rather than taking in the story as an emotional, mental, physical event.  Churchgoers take the bread and wine of communion and worry that they’re not “getting it” correctly because they don’t know precisely what the Eucharist is supposed to “mean”.

            When we put the problem this way, our friend Nicodemus doesn’t seem so different from you and me.  Nicodemus is in the grips of an early version of the meaning heresy.  He goes to Jesus by night, puzzled by what Jesus “means”.  Jesus replies not with an intellectual discourse but by talking about being born from above.  A similar interaction occurs in Matthew’s Gospel. John the Baptist’s disciples come to Jesus and ask him if he’s the one they’re waiting for.  He replies,

Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. [Matthew 11. 4-5]

Jesus answers John’s disciples the same way he answers Nicodemus.  Christianity is not an idea.  It is an event, an experience, a relationship. Nicodemus and John’s disciples are looking for meaning.  Jesus gives them life.  

            When I read these stories I see something of myself.  As an educated Western person I so much want God to be a manageable, explainable, intellectual concept that I can take hold of and understand.  That I can’t quite understand God frustrates me, because I have been raised to expect that hard mental work will unlock all secrets.  But God’s mystery refuses to yield even to my exhaustive attempts to make sense of it.  As Saint Augustine said,”Since it is God we are speaking of, you do not understand it.  If you could understand it, it would not be God.” [Sermons 117.5]  

Today, Trinity Sunday, is the first Sunday after Pentecost.  By honoring the Trinity on the Sunday after the Holy Spirit comes, the church is saying that the first gift of the Spirit to the church is the revelation that we know God in three modes:  as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, as source of being, personal savior, and ongoing presence among us.  But the main point, if we need one this Sunday, is this:  the doctrine of the Trinity is a gift. It’s not an intellectual question or a problem to be solved.  It is an invitation to know and experience God not just as someone “out there” but as someone among us, “in here”.

            People go to museums and often come away having heard someone else’s ideas about the artworks rather than having entered the experience the painting or sculpture offered.  People read books the same way.  Nicodemus went to Jesus asking for an executive summary and was offered instead a new life, an invitation to be born again from above. Many people come to church thinking that what a preacher says about what we’re doing together is the most important thing about it.  As James Thurber once said, "Leave your mind alone".  Even people like me who think they understand the Trinity don't really understand it.  It's a mystery and a gift.  Like a beautiful painting, a poem, a symphony, or a dance, the Trinity is something we're invited to experience rather than interpret. It’s not an idea.  It’s a new way of being.

            The Trinity, like the Eucharist, is a gift.  In this gift, God offers you a new way of living and being.  Don’t mistake what it means for what it is.  It’s God we’re talking about, and if you think you understand it, then it isn’t God.  The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it but you don’t know where it comes from.  We are all here, together, in the presence of a deep and wonderful mystery.  Don’t let your intelligence get in the way of it. Receive it as God’s gift. Step into it.  Let it embrace and transform you.  Doing that, for this morning at least, will be enough.  Amen.

           

           

The Rector's Monday Message: May 28, 2012

Thoughts on Memorial Day

“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,” said the Roman poet Horace.  In the Latin original, the phrase went, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”  This Horatian phrase was on the lips of many young European men as they went off to fight the First World War.  The realities of trench warfare turned out to be quite different from the sweet and decorous battles they had imagined.

The great English poet of that war, Wilfred Owen, took Horace’s phrase and made it the ironic title of his anti-war poem, “Dulce et decorum est.”  The poem details the horrors of trench warfare and the indignities to which battlefield soldiers are exposed. It memorably ends with these lines, addressed to someone who seemingly still thinks that 20^th century war is sweet and decorous:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Memorial Day, which we observe today, had its origins during the American Civil War, the first “modern” war, which was also notable for its horrific battlefield conditions.  Decoration Day, as the holiday was first known, began when women in the South and North decorated the graves of soldiers on the last weekend in May as a time of remembrance.  Over the years, Decoration Day turned into Memorial Day and became a national holiday.  It is the day on which we rightly remember all those who have given their lives in the service of their country.

When I was rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, I used to marvel at how old the graves were in our churchyard.  The oldest were graves contained veterans of a conflict that preceded the Revolution, the French and Indian War.  Over the course of our history, Americans have been involved in numerous wars:  the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican American War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World Wars I and II, the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq Wars, and now the longest conflict in American history, the War in Afghanistan.  Young American men and women have repeatedly gone off to serve their country, and they have done so often under horrifyingly inhumane conditions.  So on Memorial Day it is important not only to remember the sacrifice of those who gave their lives for their country.  It is also essential that we remember the sacrifice of those who have endured much even as they have survived the battlefield.

Many in our congregation have experienced war.  Many more have known and lost relatives and friends in warfare. Every one of us understands the tragedy of lives cut short in battle.  We also understand the tragedy of lives broken and altered by the stresses of the kind of warfare our contemporary soldiers must now endure.

Wilfred Owen died in battle just a week before the Armistice in 1918. His poems have stood as a reminder that, given the mechanized, hi tech efficiency with which we now can kill each other, modern warfare will be exponentially ever more grisly both to participate and behold.  Our notions of heroism must evolve with the evolution of warfare.  We should correspondingly praise and thank those who engage in military service on our behalf.

If Memorial Day means anything to us as followers of Jesus, we must see it as an occasion to renew our commitment to stand and work for peace, to help build a world in which the youth of our country will be able to live the fullness of their lives in the blessings of peace.  As we celebrate this day, let us give thanks for those who have given their lives, let us honor those who continue to serve, and let us dedicate ourselves to being agents of blessing and peace.

Please join me in using this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, in whose hands are the living and the dead:  We give you thanks for all your servants who have laid down their lives in the service of our country. Grant to them your mercy and the light of your presence; and give us such a lively sense of your righteous will, that the work which you have begun in them may be perfected; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.  Amen.

Gary Hall

The Communicant, Christ Church Cranbrook [May 27, 2012]

Merry Whitsunday!  Happy Pentecost!

This Sunday is the Feast of Pentecost which is, along with Christmas and Easter, one of the three great festivals of Christian life.  Preachers often talk about Pentecost as “the Church’s birthday”, and to the extent that Pentecost ritualizes the Spirit’s descending on the gathered community, it is that.  But it’s also something more. Something great is happening at Pentecost, and it is this:  in creating the church, a community of people who gather as followers of Jesus, who open themselves to each other and the world,  God is undoing the effects of the avalanche of sin that characterized human life between Eden and the Crucifixion.  In creating the church, God has made a community where people of a variety of backgrounds, classes, races, and cultures come together in true human mutuality and oneness.  In creating the church, God has made a living, loving body of Christ empowered to spread the blessings which began in Jesus and which continue in his name.

Now this is not just fancy religious thinking.  It has real implications for you and me and our lives in the world. We live in a culture which is a monument to self-centeredness.  Our culture promises us in all kinds of ways that we can achieve total human fulfillment entirely on our own as individuals.  It proclaims that we do not need each other,that each of us can and should be entirely self-sufficient. As a friend of mine says:  the great benefit of living in an overly individualistic culture is that it offers us the opportunity of being in hell while we’re still alive.

Pentecost is deeply true in that it reminds us how God has called us each and all into a body, a community, a gathering where we can live out life as God intended it to be in Eden. Human life at its best is interconnected, and true human freedom realizes that it always stands in tension with real obligations—to God, to each other, to the world, and yes, to ourselves.  We cannot be free without love for each other.  Our independence is meaningless without justice.  When we say that “in Christ there is a new Creation,” we mean exactly that.  In the life and death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus, in the giving of the Spirit to the community which follows Jesus and gathers in his name, God is doing a new, radical, creative thing which you and I are part of.  God is beginning the world again, in and through us, and God is calling us to step into that new world of grace and joy and hope and forgiveness and love. 

Pentecost is as important as Christmas and Easter, but we rarely give it the attention it deserves.  As we gather this year, let’s give thanks that God has given us the divine presence in each other.  Merry Whitsunday!  Happy Pentecost!

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: May 21, 2012

A New Type of Criminal

This spring I have been teaching a senior Religion elective at Cranbrook/Kingswood, a course called “Ethics: The Problem of Evil”.  It’s a class of long standing in the curriculum there, taught for many years by my predecessor as Chaplain, Dave Tidwell. 

“The Problem of Evil” is a major topic in human thought.  As British philosopher/critic Terry Eagleton notes in his 2010 book, On Evil, prior to the twentieth century the problem of evil was primarily a theological topic.  Taking  as example an event like the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, in which somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people were killed, Western religious thinkers defined evil as cosmic:  how could a good God permit so much innocent suffering in a natural disaster like a plague, earthquake, or other calamity?

In the twentieth century, the problem of evil came to be defined less as a religious problem and more a secular one.  The focusing event this time was Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people were killed between 1942 and 1945.  The question this time:  how could people we define as “human”, who share fundamental qualities and values with us, perpetrate such a massive slaughter of innocent human beings? 

I have to confess that before I read Eagleton’s book and taught this course, I did not think much about the problem of evil.  Don’t get me wrong:  I was, of course, horrified and outraged by innocent suffering on a large scale, but I never found the existence of evil in the universe and society something that shook either my faith in God or my solidarity with fellow human beings.  As God says to Job in the 38^th chapter of the Book of Job, the theological problem seems to be what theologian Marilyn McCord Adams calls the “size gap” between God and me.  God is God and I am not.  The disparity between us pains both God and me.  All I can do in the face of suffering is to lament the pain of it in trust that doing so will enable God and me jointly to grieve and heal together. And as for the persistence of sin in human beings:  I have what Robert Frost called enough experience of my own personal, internal “desert places” that I should not be surprised when I encounter them in others.

The last major work we engaged in the Problem of Evil class was Hannah Arendt’s famous 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  Arendt was a noted German Jewish philosopher who emigrated to America at the start of World War II.  Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi bureaucrat put in charge of the “final solution” to “the Jewish problem”, i.e. the planned extermination of all Jews in Germany and its occupied territory. In 1960 he was captured by the Israelis in Argentina and tried in Jerusalem for “crimes against the Jewish people”.   Sent by The New Yorker to report on the trial, Arendt gradually began to become aware that in Eichmann we were seeing  what she called a “new type of criminal”.  The problem with Eichmann was not that he was an inhuman monster; the problem was that he was so “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”  She went on to say that this new type of criminal “commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing something wrong.” [Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 276]

I have found it helpful, in thinking about both Adolf Eichmann and the Lisbon Earthquake, to remember the renunciations in the Prayer Book’s service of Holy Baptism.  As part of that liturgy, the candidates (or their sponsors) renounce evil in the following interchange:

Question    Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?

Answer      I renounce them.

Question    Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?

Answer      I renounce them.

Question    Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?

Answer      I renounce them.

When we present ourselves for Baptism, we’re asked to renounce evil in three forms:  first cosmic (Satan and the spiritual forces of wickedness), next social (the evil powers of this world), and finally personal (sinful desires).  In America, we tend to think of Evil and Sin as personal attributes or shortcomings.  But long before Hannah Arendt looked at Eichmann and saw “not a monster but a clown” our tradition has understood that before evil is personal it is cosmic and social. 

I draw two implications from all this.  First:  because we are enmeshed in systems, we often do not perceive the many hidden ways in which our actions—innocent in and of themselves—can contribute to the pain or suffering of others.  So we’re guiltier than we think we are.  Second:  as guilty as we may be, we are often caught up in systems that control and govern us.  In other words, we’re more innocent than we think we are.

Teaching this course has helped me see that the problem of evil is finally not an invitation to affix blame.  The problem of evil is instead an opportunity to explore my enmeshment in systems bigger than myself, to investigate the ways I am complicit in others’ pain and suffering even when I think I’m innocent, and to lament with God the pain that causes God, them, and me.  Evil is cosmic, social, and personal in that order.  Let us dedicate ourselves to working with God to heal it in all its forms. 

Gary Hall