May 12, 2012 by djackson.

When my pastor presented me with a copy of Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, compiled by Shane Claiborne, Johathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro, I was delighted. For some years, I have read the morning office from the Episcopal prayer book. I love its thoughtful liturgy and stately rhythms, but found the offices somewhat lengthy. Common Prayer, coming from something nearer to my own tradition, promised a more accessible format. Also, I have certain sympathies with the New Monastic movement which produced it and looked forward to entering its life of prayer. I’ve been engaging Common Prayer for about half a year now and would like to share a few thoughts.

First, let me say that I applaud the effort. Evangelicals have only recently turned to liturgy with any sort of positive spirit. We broke with all that sort of thing back in the days of the Radical Reformation when Baptists and Anabaptists, feeling that liturgical life in the established churches had become a “shrine/In which (we) could scarce spy the Christ for saints,” launched a project of intense personal piety. Latterly, however, personal piety has threatened to become private piety and leave the individual believer isolated in her daily worship life.

And it stands to reason that we will hit a few snags in our first steps along the liturgical path. After all, the Anglicans and Catholics have had centuries to let the voice of the Spirit and the incremental practices of the people smooth and polish their prayer books. Ordinary rock tumbled for centuries in a river receives a certain polish. If early Evangelical efforts at this sort of thing have an uneven texture, that is to be expected. The practice of the people extended through time will eventually provide the gentle smoothing that our rugged first efforts require.

That said, I want to express my own conviction that Common Prayer will not be the model that survives that process. I predict that it will remain an important book because it is among a few brave first-efforts and that though it fails lodge itself in the ongoing worship life of the free church it will hold a permanent place as a significant early attempt. I believe that Common Prayer will not become truly common because of its topical and colloquial style, its activist theology, and its ideological bias.

And it is the book’s ambition to become genuinely common. On the opening page of the Introduction the editors decry the division of the Church into (by their count) thirty-eight thousand denominations. “God’s deepest longing,” they explain, “is for the church to be united as one body.” (9) That’s rather a sweeping claim to back up with a single Scripture reference but let’s allow it to stand. The editors immediately make the common move of all one-church sects offering unity in the form of their own new denomination.

Of course, they don’t call it that. No unity-minded reformer ever does. Instead they write, “Folks are bound to ask if this prayer book is for Catholics or for Protestants. Our answer is, ‘Yes it is.’”

Common Prayer will not become a book for the ages in part due to its topical style. The book makes clear attempts at relevance. The problem, of course, with relevance is that it is necessarily relative. That’s to say, your relevance rests on whom you want to relate to. As C. S. Lewis more eloquently phrased it, the trouble about moving with the times is that “we know where the times move. They move away.” This tendency manifests itself particularly in the in many ways excellent Introduction.I could cite several examples but for brevity’s sake will take just a few.

We have references to Neo taking the red pill in the Matrix (12). Many current readers may have no insight into that pop-culture meme, and many more future readers (if there were any) would have less. We read that liturgy “outlasts McDonalds and Walmart.” (13) True, and when it does, references to those corporate plesiousaurs will only confuse readers. The editors declare war on the icons of the secular calendar such as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and leprechauns. (14) True again, and if those modern myths are temporary, why bring them up? Monday Night Football (15), iPods (15) and Facebook (20) all appear, which is strange since they are destined to disappear. (The last two items are particularly ephemeral given the rapid pace of technology in our society.)

Of course, one could argue that subsequent editions can delete and update such throw-away cultural Styrofoam but that is just the point: a book of “common” prayer seeks permanence, not relevance. One shouldn’t have to wonder if she has the latest edition. Change will come, but the calendar should be glacial rather than atomic, or even lunar.
The same contemporary feel appears in the songs selected for daily use. In the eclectic pastiche of various songs one senses a lack of depth, of the weight of time-worn words and notes of praise that will still be here generations into the future. (And for some reason the editors, while including the beloved hymn “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus,” have chosen to colloquialize the title as “Nothin’ but the Blood.” As a Texan and a Baptist, and thus one to whom the hymn is deeply beloved, I can’t help but feel offended, as if my more-sophisticated younger brothers assume we gap-toothed rednecks aint’ learned to talk no good English.)

Most such references rest in the Introduction and would not, by themselves, derail the volume’s ambition to become a truly common book of worship for the church at large, but Common Prayer also suffers from anointing of a specifically activist theology. The editors stud their work with references to “becoming the answer to our prayers.” (I count about twenty using the search-feature of my e-copy.) “Too often,” they complain, “we use prayer as a substitute for action.” True enough, but the tone of this volume lends itself to the (much greater) danger of letting action be a substitute for prayer.

Here I believe that the editors commit an admirable error which once again ties their book of “common” prayer to a very specific stratum of the life of the Church: the activist strain of American Protestantism. It is true that God may call me to act in response to my prayer; it is also true that God may answer my prayer without any further effort on my part.

We should observe two cautions about this major theme in Common Prayer: First of all, God is the not only the Answerer but the answer to our prayers. Prayer seeks God first of all, not God’s action and there is a sense in which using prayer to bring God to bear on a specific need, no matter how noble, shares theology with the health-wealth gospel movement. Second, the undercurrent of such a theology is that prayer is not a “real” thing, not a genuine communing of the soul with God, but simply a preliminary, though no doubt an important one, to our own activity. I do not know if the editors really feel this way about prayer; I believe they do not, at least consciously, but the language sets the worshiper in that direction.

But the truly fatal flaw of Common Prayer is its ideological bias. This is not a book created by and offered to the Church as a whole. It is a book created by and thus aimed at post-Evangelical Americans who suffer from classic white liberal guilt.

The editors explain in their Introduction that they intend to introduce some contemporary, and even a few secular “saints” into the calendar or, as they phrase it “Saints with a big S. . .and saints with a little s.” (23) This in itself is a bold undertaking. As a Baptist I am not big on saints, but I have long admired the careful process by which the Catholic churches canonize. Years, decades, centuries pass before the hierarchy establishes that a certain individual’s life has made the kind of impact – and withstood the kind of scrutiny – that merits holding them up as universal examples. To be fair, the editors of a new book, working out of a new tradition, cannot be expected to have the kind of structures in place nor the kind of history established to achieve the same results – and they don’t.

This inevitably leads to political bias. Gandhi, a non-Christian, makes the cut, but Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a devout Russian Orthodox believer, does not. We read about Rachel Corrie whose martyrdom (in the editors’ opinion) mirrors the deaths of “countless Palstinian people,” but we find no reference to the destruction of the Jewish temple in AD 70.
We learn that on April 30, “North and South Vietnam were reunited.” Of course, another way to say that is that on April 30 Communist North Vietnam subjugated South Vietnam by military conquest. Peace, reductionistically defined as the lack of shooting, is preferable to any other outcome, especially if that outcome does not touch comfortable American Christians.

On April 17, the editors hold U. S. President John F. Kennedy up for admiration for backing out of the Bay of Pigs because it was “an attempt to escalate the Cold War.” One wonders if the editors have ever read Armando Valladares’ Against All Hope, the Cuban Gulag Archipelago. Valladares was rotting in a Castro prison on that day in 1961 and recalls that “the prisoners’ euphoria knew no bounds” as the early reports rolled in. “There were those who shouted at the top of their lungs, jumped around, and embraced their friends, possessed by a joy the reader can easily imagine.” The invasion’s failure unleashed a tsunami of Castro’s vindictive paranoia as he swept thousands into his festering jails, including women and children. Valladares recalls that “in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs failure, not only our psychological state, but living conditions generally in the prison became much more severe.” Kennedy’s heroism in a last-second change of mind is at least an ambivalent matter to thoughtful Christians. It is, at any rate, too complex for the post-mortem triumphalism of safe and well-fed American believers.

For all of this, Common Prayer is a helpful book. I continue to use it for the daily office and have given copies to my students. Some of its occasional prayers are moving, as are other features such as the daily benediction of the morning office which begins, “May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you: wherever he may send you,” and closes, “May he bring you home rejoicing: once again into our doors.” That one would work well as a regular blessing for Sunday worship.
Still, the combination of a topical and colloquial style, activist theology, and ideological bias prevent this book from achieving its noble goal. Really, Common Prayer is not THE book for the whole church; it is a fairly representative production of the young post-Evangelical American theology and ethos. It is a prayer book for them. And that’s fine - as long as its authors do not presume to transcend their ghettos and set themselves up as those who have solved the denominational problem of Christianity. As one of my students – who also continues to use Common Prayer and has urged his church staff to observe the evening office together daily – phrased it, the embedding of a political agenda in what should be a book of common worship breaks faith with the reader.

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March 25, 2012 by djackson.

Note: Once again, meditating on the lectionary gospel for this week led me to some thoughts that no one invited me to share, but that i wanted to express. I conceived the sermon with my own congregation, Windsor Park Baptist Church of Corpus Christi, in mind, so some of the personal references won’t make much sense to anyone else, but you’re welcome to listen in. (After all, we don’t know who Paul is talking about half the time when he goes to naming names in particular churches either.)

Text: Luke 1.26-38

Introduction

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, the day the liturgical calendar sets aside to remember Gabriel’s message to Mary that she would bear the Christ. As a Baptist, anytime I think about the liturgical calendar I remember that old trailer from the movie “Jaws II”: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.” See, the thing is, we Baptists long ago rejected the liturgical calendar, and for good reason. The church had so bogged down with various saints that we tended to forget that only Christ saves and that every other person who ever walked this planet, no matter how holy, was in essence a depraved sinner whose example is, at best, limited.

There’s a line I’ve always loved from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Balin and Balan” in Idyls of the King. Sir Balin, trapped in the castle of the evil King Pellham and dashing down dark corridors in search of escape barges through the first door he spies and blunders into the chapel. There, Tennyson reports, “he scarce could spy the Christ for saints.” We Baptists feared the church had so bedizened her worship with saints that she lost Christ in the clutter.

The return to an emphasis on Christ alone was something we had to offer the church, and I think it was a valid contribution. Still, I can’t help but wonder if, four centuries after we slew that particular shark, it may not be safe to go back into those saintly waters. Perhaps we can discover that the church originally found wisdom in reminding herself that certain events in the drama of redemption deserve regular attention.

Anyway, I’m going to operate on that assumption today and see where it takes me. To return then to my beginning, today is the Feast of the Annunciation to Mary. I think another reason we Baptists don’t like that idea is the intense theological debate that surrounds this teenaged peasant girl from first century Nazareth. See, we always start off (I think) asking the wrong question about Mary: the “not” question. We take great pains to point out that Mary is NOT, for instance, the product of an immaculate conception, but a sin-stained child of Adam like the rest of us. We want to insist, again, that Mary was NOT a perpetual virgin, but bore Jesus’ brothers and sisters by the usual process. We go on to declare that Mary is NOT a co-redemptrix or fourth and female member of the Trinity or a proper recipient of our prayers.

Now, I believe all of that. I’m a Baptist, after all. If you don’t believe all of that - or even any of that - or if you do, stick with me: Because what I’m saying is that those questions, while important, are not primary. I think if we’ll lead off with the right question about Mary, then we can all learn from her and maintain the bond of Christian brotherhood. You see, the best question about Mary isn’t what we should or should not believe about her, but what we should do about her. And to answer that question, I think we need to ask two more: What was Mary asked to do? and What real choice did she have?

What was Mary asked to do?

I see three challenges put before Mary here: The Lord called her to bear the Christ, to do it alone where necessary, and to do it in the community God provided. For openers, then, the Lord called Mary to bear Christ into the world. Now, that seems like a pure win. I have heard that every Jewish woman in that age (and possible still), upon learning she had conceived a child, prayed that it would be the Messiah. Now Mary gets advanced notice that she’s the chosen one. But there’s a catch: This isn’t the way she or anyone else figured it to happen. She’s unmarried and a virgin.

I’m always amused at people who tell me they cannot believe in the virgin birth because we know too much in our modern scientific age. Well, we don’t need to know any more than Mary knew at this point, which is that this isn’t how babies get born. She seems to say to Gabriel, “Look, I don’t know if you believe all those cruel things the mean girls at Nazareth Junior High tweeted about me last semester but those are lies. I’m a good girl.” She cites the simple biological fact that she can’t have a baby. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen. True enough, Isaiah 7.14 said so, but everybody had missed that, and besides, their Hebrew scholars knew that the word there could mean “young woman.” It didn’t make sense back then and it doesn’t make sense now and that’s the whole point: The way Jesus comes never makes sense.

It seems to me that Jesus still comes into the world in unorthodox ways. We pray that lovely petition from the Lord’s Prayer “Thy kingdom come.” But the kingdom never comes the way we envision it. See, Jesus told us it would happen this way, but like the ancient rabbis we miss that point - one which is much less obscure. Jesus warned us in Matthew 25 that he would come to us in the hungry and naked and sick and incarcerated and a whole bunch of other people we’d rather have nothing to do with. But we always manage to interpret our way around that. But Jesus keeps showing up and stubbornly insist that we bear him once again into the world.

I’ve had personal experience with this. I love the line in Frederich Buechner’s novel Lion Country where the narrator, Antonio Parr, explains how he knew that a particularly obnoxious old man would take an instant shine to him: “All my life it has been that way. The boy with the worst breath in school, the aunt who has made ouija board contact with Lillian Russell, the person who has recently had his gallstones removed and is carrying them around in an envelope - I have inevitably been the one they felt drawn to.”

That’s my story! I go through life like the Wedding Guest in “The Ancient Mariner.” It seems like anytime Becky and I go to a party everyone else is laughing and enjoying interesting conversations, while the one monomaniac in the crowd fixes me with his glittering eye and pours out some endless and inane autobiography or conspiracy theory or theological theory about how one of the Backstreet Boys is actually Moses re-incarnated. (Of course, now at the next church party I go to, NOBODY is going to talk to me.)

And that’s Jesus! And that’s my calling! And that’ your calling! To bear Christ into the world by loving the person who seems to unlike Christ, the person in whom Christ comes to you, in the words of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in a distressing disguise.

So, Justin and Allyson, you pray for Jesus to come, and when Child Protective Services calls and says they have a fourteen-month-old child, and they can either place him with you or stick him in the system, you have your answer. So, Ryan, you pray for Jesus to come, and when someone says that a bunch of homeless addicts and mental patients downtown need a church on their own turf and a pastor to care for them, you have your answer. So, Grover and Jana, you pray for Jesus to come, and when you discover that a depressed little church, fresh off a devastating split and on the verge of dying, held together by a tired, dispirited, and grieving group of senior adults needs a pastor, you have your answer. So, Stephen and Randi, when you pray for Jesus to come, then go on a mission trip and meet a single woman working in a former Soviet republic who tells you how desperate she is for fellow laborers in that white harvest halfway around the world, you have your answer. So, Esmie, you pray for Jesus to come, and when someone tells you that in Corpus Christi there are women who share at least one thing with Mary - they are pregnant out of wedlock, alone and scared - and they need someone to perform ultrasounds to show them the wonder of the baby they bear and to love them without condemnation even if they make a horrible choice, you have your answer.

The Lord called Mary to bear the Christ. The Lord also called Mary to do so alone if necessary. Mary is in a fix. Nobody’s going to buy this story, and the angel doesn’t mention appearing to anybody else. We know that Joseph decides to divorce her. We have hints here and there in the Gospels that Jesus lived under the social stigma of being a bastard for the rest of his life. The angel offers no insight on this point, but Mary does seem to ask. “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Now, that question is mostly gynecological: Told you Mary knew as much science here as she needed. But I hear a hint of a more practical question: How am I going to do this? I can’t get pregnant alone. And even if I do, my family will disown me and my fiance will dump me and in case you haven’t noticed, job openings for unwed mothers are scarce here in Nazareth, and government-provided day care is non-existant.

And the angel answers, in essence, God will take care of it. That’s it: No reassurance, no, “Don’t sweat it. I’m just about to send a tweet to Joseph and explain the whole thing.” No: Just, Believe God and change your status on Facebook to “Mary is in a relationship and it’s complicated,” and trust the Lord.

Sometimes we have to obey all by ourselves, even when the task at hand is one we can’t do all by ourselves. I love the scene in C. S. Lewis’ wonderful book Prince Caspian (not Hollywood’s lousy movie; C. S. Lewis’ wonderful book) where Lucy sees Aslan when nobody else does, and he tells her that they are going the wrong way and that she must warn her brothers and sister and then follow Aslan.

“Will the others see you too?” asked Lucy.

“Certainly not at first,” said Aslan. “Later on, it depends.”

“But they won’t believe me!” said Lucy.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Aslan.

You see, sometimes you see Jesus clearly when nobody else does, and they will only see Him when you follow Him. This does not mean that you become arrogant and abandon your community, but it does mean that you obey even if you can’t bring your community with you. And it does mean that when God calls you to bear Jesus in ways that exceed your abilities, you leave that to God.

So, Justin and Allyson, when Godly people who really care about you tell you that it is insane to upend your lives by taking in a child who may very well have serious health and developmental issues, and who may ultimately be taken from you and put back in a terrible situation, you follow Jesus.. So, Ryan, when caring Christians tell you that you are wasting your incredible gifts on people who are never going to change, you follow Jesus. So, Grover and Jana, when people tell you that a guy with your education and abilities can find a bigger, more prestigious church, you follow Jesus. So, Stephen and Randi, when devout Christians say, “Don’t bury yourself halfway around the world! And don’t take little Ollie away from us where we can’t watch him grow up!”, you follow Jesus. So, Esmie, when people tell you you’re becoming one of those rabid pro-life kooks, and that women are going to have abortions no matter what you do, and that someone with your credentials as a nurse can make a lot more money working somewhere else, you follow Jesus.

The Lord called Mary to bear the Christ. The Lord also called Mary to do so alone if necessary. But the Lord also provided a community.

Joseph doesn’t abandon Mary: the Lord takes care of that. The Lord sends Joseph to be there when she bears her first child in a strange city in a cave of a cow stall. Mary was right when she said she couldn’t do it alone. God did directly for and through her what no one else could - brought the Christ into her virgin womb - but then God did through others what others could do.

I think that’s usually how God works. I think God does in and for us what only God can do to allow us to bear Christ into the world. For instance, only God can save you. Nobody else can do that. And only God can call you to a specific task or ministry. But once you are saved, others can educate and train and guide you, and usually that is how God will do it. And once God calls you, others can assist you in the practical matters of that call, and that is usually how God will do it.

So when Justin and Allyson bear Christ in the form of an abandoned child, God orders all of Windsor Park to help provide clothes and toys and books, and to babysit sometimes and to do whatever we can to help. So when Ryan invests in those men and women at The Station, God sends Rusty and Jessica and Geoff and Avery to help. And the Lord saves Lynn and delivers her from addiction and sends her back to minister in a setting she knows better than the rest of us ever can. So, Grover, when you find yourself as pastor of Windsor Park, God gives you Kathaleen and Patsy and Bob to help you learn the heart of this church, and God sends Paul and Geoff and J.B. and on and on and on the list goes so that this church can do her work. Jana, when the crowd gets too big for one person - even YOU - to feed alone, the Lord sends Laura to help with the cooking, and many others to help with the serving and clean-up. So, Stephen and Randi, when the call seems so crazy, God sends you parents like Rusty and Jessica who support you at every turn, even if it means not seeing their only grandson very often. So, Esmie, when the work seems to challenging, God sends you Windsor Park to support you with her prayers and gifts.

God calls each one, but provides through all. When Adoniram Judson said God had called him to preach, everyone said, “Amen!” When Adoniram Judson said that God had called him to be a missionary, everyone said, “Amen!” When Adoniram Judson said God had called him to bring the gospel, not to the Native Americans there in New England, but to the far east, in a day when no American Christian had ever become a missionary to foreign shores, everyone said, “You’re out of your mind!” Yet when Judson persevered, money for his support began to pour in. One night, he heard horses’ hooves galloping nearer, then a soft thump on is door, then horses’ hooves galloping away, and opened the door to find a leather purse full of gold coins! Don’t try to go it on your own. Let the God who calls you as an individual support you in a community.

That’s what the Lord asks of Mary. And it’s what the Lord asks of us. Now, I know - somebody always raises the objection - and it is entirely fair - that Mary had it relatively easy, because God send an angel to her. But I don’t know: Mary had to see the angel, and the story of Balaam’s ass in Numbers indicates that they can be tricky to spot. Hebrews 13.1 warns us that God sends angels all the time, and too often we turn them away because we think they can’t have a word for us. Let’s pray to be better listeners, to listen like Mary.

So what matters most about Mary isn’t that she WAS NOT immaculate or a perpetual virgin or the Mother of God or an object of our prayers. Or that she WAS. What matters most is what we should do about her. We’ve already answered one of the questions that helps us with that: What did God ask of Mary, and consequently what does God ask of us. Now for the second question that helps us with our big question: What real choice did Mary have?

What choice did Mary have?

Mary answers the angel. This leads me to believe that Mary had a choice - a real choice. I remember as a kid, my dad used to give us “choices,” but they never really were. “Kids, we can go to MacDonalds and eat greasy fast-food in a place that’s probably not very clean with a bunch of noisy people all around, or we can get dressed and go to a nice restaurant where we can get something besides just hamburgers. Now it’s your choice, but it seems to me. . . .”

I don’t think the angel gives Mary that kind of choice. I think she could have said “no.” And I think two consequences would have followed from this. First of all, God would have loved her just as much as ever. I don’t think the angel would’ve struck her dead or blind or turned her into a lizard or anything. Heck, Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, struck dumb just sixteen verses earlier for asking the same question Mary did.

See, God loves unconditionally. If you have a chance to bear Christ to the world and you turn it down, God doesn’t love you any less. So Justin and Allyson, you could have said no, we just can’t take in a baby right now, and God would still love you. Ryan, you could have stayed away from The Station and sought a more traditional ministry, and Jesus would still be glad to see you coming. Grover, you could have let Windsor Park go and the Lord would still use you. Stephen and Randi, you could have said no to the mission field and God wouldn’t white out your name in the Book of Life. And Rusty and Jessica, you could use every manipulative trick of the trade to keep these kids at home and Jesus would still intercede for you before the throne of grace. Esmie, you could have said you couldn’t spare the time away from a child with unusual needs and quoted Scripture to back it up and you’d still be saved.

So yes, Mary really could have said no and not missed the love of God. But she would have missed the blessing of God. I don’t think Mary could derail God’s kingdom. We don’t have that kind of power, and we need to quit puttig ourselves under that kind of pressure. Remember the story of Queen Esther in the Old Testament: God called her to risk her life by pleading for her people before the king, a move that could get her killed. When she balked, her guardian Mordeci warned her, “For if thou altogether holdest thy peace, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews fromanother place,” then he adds, “and who knkoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this.”

Esther couldn’t condemn Israel to death, but she could miss the glory of delivering them. Mary couldn’t keep Messiah from coming, but she could lose otu on being a part of it.

I have to remember my sins before Pharaoh this day: I have to confess to an addiction. It’s pretty bad. I’ve gotten hooked on a reality TV series. I’ve started watching “Storage Wars.” Have you seen this? People abandone possessions in storage lockers and the owner auctions them off to contractors who sell the contents for what they can get. Do you know what kind of stuff they find in there? Rare coins, bags of cash, antiques. The other night I saw one where a guy paid two-and-a-half bucks for a locker with nothing in it but a beat-up bureau, then opened one of the drawers to find some rare glass bottles that ended up being worth two grand!

That fascinates me! Evidently people all over the country either have so much stuff, or so little idea of which of their stuff is truly valuable, that they can stash it away somewhere and forget they own it. Or else they want to save the comparatively small cost of paying rent on the locker and sacrifice the huge value of what lies within.

And I think that’s where a lot of Christians miss out. In fact, I sometimes have nightmares that the Judgement Day will be like an episode of Storage Wars. The angel Gabriel will escort me down a golden street to a locker, slice off the lock with his laser gaze, and reveal all the people, all the opportunities, all the sorrows and crosses and losses that I stashed away because I thought they held no value, and because I had so much of the world’s stuff that I preferred to hang onto, and because I wasn’t willing to pay the small price in sacrifice and self-denial to get any of it out of hock. To make matters worse, he’ll probably make me watch the episode where somebody else came along and snapped up what I sluffed off, and show me how incredibly it enriched that other person.

Conclusion

So that’s about it: That’s what God asked of Mary and asks of us, and that’s what we can do about it. To frame what I really think is going on here, I want to close with a poem by Malcolm Guite (http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/) called “A Sonnet for the Anunciation.”

We miss the shimmer of the angels’ wings
We come now to the feast of the annunciation, that blessed moment of awareness, assent and transformation in which eternity touches time. In my own small take on this mystery I have thought about vision, what we allow ourselves to be aware of, and also about freedom, the way all things turn on our discernment and freedom.

As always I am indebted to Margot Krebs Neale for the accompanying images, and she has kindly offered the following note for the images that accompany this sonnet:

‘As I was making suggesting a picture for another sonnet, Malcolm said he was working on the Annunciation sonnet. A little cheeky I sent a picture of a beautifully blurred lily wondering if it might help. Malcolm liked it and could see angel wings in it, I thought we needed a face. A young woman of sixteen. One of the many 16 years old I know and love or…myself. I remembered and found this picture of me taken when I was 16 or 17. Why me? Because of the “We” of the first strophe, I read it like an “I” : We see so little, only surfaces, and yet we have a choice.

« Quel fruit lumineux portons-nous dans l’ombre de la chair? » What luminous fruit do we carry in the shade of our flesh?

« un fruit éternel enfant de la chair et de l’Esprit ». An eternal fruit, child of the flesh and the Spirit »

May we be granted the joy of giving it to the light.’

As usual you can hear the poem by clicking on the ‘play’ buton or on the title.

Annunciation
We see so little, stayed on surfaces,

We calculate the outsides of all things,

Preoccupied with our own purposes

We miss the shimmer of the angels’ wings,

They coruscate around us in their joy

Eyes wide open, living wings unfurled,

They guard the good we purpose to destroy,

A hidden blaze of glory in God’s world.

But on this day a young girl stopped to see

With open eyes and heart. She heard the voice;

The promise of His glory yet to be,

As time stood still for her to make a choice;

Gabriel knelt and not a feather stirred,

The Word himself was waiting on her word.

but on this day a young girl stopped to see

With open eyes and heart. She heard the voice;

The promise of His glory yet to be,

As time stood still for her to make a choice;

Gabriel knelt and not a feather stirred,

The Word himself was waiting on her word.

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March 21, 2012 by djackson.

Note: Victorian novelist George MacDonald once published a three-volume series entitled, “Unspoken Sermons.” Presumably he wrote them because no one asked him to speak them. At any rate, nobody asked me to preach on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, yet as I meditated on the lectionary texts a set of ideas took shape in my mind and heart. So here is my unspoken sermon.

Introduction

In the opening paragraphs of The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan introduces us to a man with a burden on his back and a book in his hand. The book tells him that the burden will eventually sink him lower than the grave into the fires of Hell. He sets out seeking deliverance and meets Mr. Worldly Wiseman who advises him to seek relief from one named Legality who dwells in the town of Morality, but when the pilgrim tries it he finds only the threat of destruction. At last, he encounters Evangelist, who sets him on the narrow path and tells him to run. After many adventures, our hero comes to the cross. At that moment, his burden tumbles from his shoulders and rolls into the open mouth of a nearby sepulcher, never to be seen again.

Jesus offers that image of salvation to Nicodemus, a burden-backed theologian, and our text offers it to us. I find two things I don’t like about this offer, but one that I like very much indeed.

The cross is all we can look at.

The first thing I don’t like about this text is that it tells me the cross is all I can look at. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.” Jesus refers to Numbers 21.4-9, a story that Nicodemus, a Hebrew scholar, would know well. It comes from the narratives of the wilderness wanderings of Israel. When Israel gets drunk on malcontent moonshine and suffers the hangover of judgment, God prescribes some scale-of-the-serpent-that-bit-her. Fresh from avenging their previous loss at Mount Hormah (Nu 14.39-45), the people forget the new lesson of obedience and instead lapse into the familiar litany of grief: the food is terrible and the portions are too small! God sends serpents that sting like fire and proves that if righteousness cannot pierce our hardened hearts, it can at least puncture our tender flesh. When the people repent, God prescribes a curious cure: Look at the snake! God orders Moses to make an image of the very embodiment of their rebellion and then insists that they gaze upon it if they wish to live.

Every time I ponder this passage I find myself thinking of Indiana Jones as he gazes into the pit which leads to the Ark of the Covenant, only to see a tangle of serpents slithering on the floor: “Snakes! Why does it have to be snakes?” We’re just not generally fond of snakes. Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day. Among other things, legend holds that St. Patrick charmed all the snakes out of Ireland, and while scholars may debate whether or not he actually did this, no one seems to doubt that it would be a good thing to do. Emily Dickinson, in her poem “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” captures the cold shiver one might experience upon having a snake slide across one’s bare foot in a grassy field, and then comments:

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February 26, 2012 by djackson.

J. Kameron Carter of Duke argues in his book Race: A Theogical Account, that while an African-American can be a bigot, she cannot be a racist. Bigotry, he explains, is the hatred of a person because of that person’s race or nationality, and is an all-skate in which anyone can participate. Racism, by contrast, he defines as systematically harming or depriving an individual of the means to life. For this you need control of wealth and power, which on the whole African-Americans and other ethnic groups lack.

I might argue with Dr. Carter, a brother in Christ, that given Jesus’ teaching about the continuum of anger and murder, the distinction falls to the ground, but that isn’t my point at the moment. My point at the moment is that by similar reasoning, religious institutions cannot violate the First Amendment. Just by way of review, the First Amendment states that:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note the first word: “Congress.” Religions can’t enact federal legislation, thus they cannot violate this law. Congress, on the other hand, can.

Well, congress hasn’t, but the Obama administration has. The White House recently declared that the Roman Catholic Church must fund birth control for employees at its schools and hospitals. They have since backed off of this political blunder but the poor reasoning surounding the subject continues - witness a recent piece by New York Times editorialist Dorothy Samuels: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/back-to-first-principles-on-religious-freedom.html?_r=1&ref=opinion. Ms. Samuels claims that the issue is a simple one (it isn’t, no matter which side you take), and then advances three arguments: 1) The Church is “imposing” its views on the majority - including the majority of Catholics. 2) Supreme Court precedent in the form of the 1990 Employment Division vs. Smith and the Congressiona Religious Freedom Restoration Act settle the matter in the administration’s favor, and 3) It doesn’t matter anyway because the ruling does not affect the church’s worship practices.

As to the first: It is difficult to talk in a country where language no longer seems to have meaning. “Coercing” someone means forcing that person to do something. No Catholic bishop - so far as I have read - wants to kick down the doors of its employees and wrest their birth control devices from them at gunpoint. THAT would be coercion. They aren’t even saying they will fire employees who use birth control, though I think they have that right. They are simply saying that the Church does not want to pay to put those birth control devices into their employees’ hands. If you want health care that covers birth control, don’t work for the Catholic church. And by the way, it does not matter what the majority - including the majority of Catholics - believes. This is a matter of settled church doctrine that predates not only the Obama administration but the United States of America by a matter of centuries. As a Christian, I’ve read about the time when the vast majority of folks in the Roman empire thought my faith-ancestors were incestuous atheistic cannibals who should be thrown to wild animals in the arena. As a Baptist, I have studied the days before the American Revolution when the majority thought that people who belive as I do should be jailed, fined, whipped, and forced to pay taxes to support a state church with which they disagreed. I’m a trifle jaundiced about majority opinion. Any good Christian should be.

As to the second: Ms. Samuels cites a case where two people claimed the right to smoke peyote as a religious ritual, and their employer claimed the right to a drug-free workplace. The employer won. Ms. Samuels notes that “The justices said that First Amendment protections do not mean individuals are free to violate valid laws simply by claiming a sincere religious objection.” Exactly! This was a case of the EMPLOYEE wanting to force the EMPLPOYER to change its policy in order to accomodate the EMPLOYEE’S religious convictions. In the case under discussion, EMPLOYEES want to tell their EMPLOYER (the Catholic church) that it must plut the employees’ convictions above its own. Ms. Samuels is right: precedent clearly settles this case - in favor of the Church. As to the R.F.R.A., Ms. Samuels simply declares that the federal government has a “compelling interest” in making other people pay for birth control. She offers no arguments in support of that statement so I can offer no refutation.

Finally, Ms. Samuels insists that the point is now moot because the administration caved by forcing the insurance companies, not the Church, to pay for the services. She laments this cowardice and claims that it is enough that the original rule exempted houses of worship. In other words, Ms. Samuels is all for “the free exercise of religion” as long as both “free exercise” and “religion” are relegated to the ghetto of a church building on Sunday. William James famously mis-defined religion as (roughly but accurately paraphrased) “what a man does with his solitude.” Ms. Samuels seems to define it as “what a member of the clergy does in a church on Sunday.” The rest of the time, the government rules. But the early Christians saw it differently. The Empire demanded that they offer incense to Caesar as a god and confess him as Lord. No one said they had to do it on a Sunday in church, but they chose death instead because they saw all seven days and all the earth as God’s.

I do not share the Roman Catholic Church’s views on birth control, though I agree with them on abortion. I do share the Presient’s deep and abiding faith in Christ. But no amount of magic mirrors can make it legal for the United States Government to force a religious institution to pay for conduct that violates its faith.

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February 18, 2012 by djackson.

I like Lent. Quiet, austerity, the desert: Thomas Merton says they are the marks of a mystic. Others say they are the marks of a misanthrope. Maybe both are right. What I have learned is that if I yearn during Advent, I can rejoice through Christmas, and if I mourn during Lent, I am better able to celebrate at Easter.

I like Lent, but it’s always a challenge discerning how to mark it, what to “give up.” There’s always the obvious - desserts (but I’m not a big dessert eater anyway), meat (but the one year I did that my cholesterol rose to unhealthy heights for the only time in my life), coffee (but I’m pretty sure God would NEVER ask that of me). Then in the February 8 issue of the Christian Century I came across an article by Lauren Winner describing how she had given up anxiety for Lent. A chronic worrier, Winner agreed that for forty days she would sink the U. S. S. Stress & Obsess beneath the rolling waves of trust and sail on clinging to a little lifeboat of faith. Identity theft, house fires, forgotten airline tickets - she sort of vowed not to let such fears rule her life.

Now, I’m really too lazy to be a good worrier, and perhaps too absent-minded into the bargain, but Winner’s account inspired me: for Lent this year, I will give up sitting with my back to the wall.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Arizona, home of the OK Corral; maybe it’s my Texas heritage - but I remember a country/western song my folks had on an old forty-five when I was a kid. (Yes, we had forty-fives back then, and hand-cranked ice cream churns and you had to get up to change the TV channel.) Anyway, the song was called “Gunslinger,” and it include the line, “But when the night’s over and your friends are gone/You sit with your back to the wall.” I asked my mom what that meant. “Well,” she explained, “a gunfighter had to keep his back to the wall so no one could sneak up on him and shoot him from behind.”

The phrase stuck with me, and somewhere along the line I started subtly seeking out chairs that faced the entrance of any room I occupied. It was a joke, or at least I made a joke out of it: “That’s how they got Bill Hickok, you know,” I’d explain to friends. In case you aren’t up on your wild west hagiography, Wild Bill Hickok a famous sharpshooter, quickdraw artist, and Yankee scout (well, nobody’s perfect) who did a stint as a U. S. marshall, was gunned down by Broken Nosed Jack McCall in Saloon Number 10 in Deadwood, South Dakota when friends persuaded him that for once he could forego his usual spiritual discipline of sitting with his back to the wall. He died owing the house fifty bucks on a hand of two pair - eights and aces, clubs and spades - a combo that has since gained fame as “the dead man’s hand.”

As I say, it was a joke, a nod to an American meme, the kind of little idiosyncrasy that I have always felt should be nurtured until it can bloom into a full scale neurosis. But as I read Winner’s frank revelations, it occurred to me that I really did want to know who entered a room behind me. I didn’t really think anyone was going to shoot me; I’ve given enough people cause, I suppose, but none of them was a Hell’s Angel or an IRS agent. Still, the conviction grew that I felt the need to keep my guard up, to be ready in advance for anything or anyone who came along. I had to admit that when it came to the plea of St. Patrick’s Breastplate:

Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

I was only willing to buy in at the three-fourths mark. Then I thought about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s searing challenge in The Cost of Discipleship: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” Jesus dealt me the dead man’s hand when I first sat down at His table, and he dealt it from a dead man’s hands that still bore the wounds he received when he died owing the house the debt of the world’s sin. He didn’t sit with his face to the door; he gave his back to the smiters. My gunslinger gestalt amounted to an effort not to need Christ’s promise of eternal life in spite of death, or at least to need it a little less.

So beginning next Wednesday I will drop my guard for forty days. It may seem like a little thing - it IS a little thing - but that probably just means it won’t be as easy as I think. I’ve tried it a couple of times already and must admit to a certain frisson at the new feng shui. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll learn to turn my back to my constant over-preparation, my quasi-compulsive cleanliness, or the exhausting reserve that holds me back when encountering other people. But if I have to die to myself - even just a little - for the forty days ahead, I’m not too worried; Easter is coming, and that’s a fact I am unlikely to lose sight of.

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