June 9, 2010 by djackson.

I’m about to get a lot happier if I don’t kill myself first.

Those are my conclusions based on some conflicting research I recently came across. A recent Gallup pole published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that at fifty people’s sense of satisfaction tends to rise with a bullet. If we hang ride that rocket for the next thirty-five years we end up being as happy as we were at our previous peak age of eighteen. The difference, of course, is that at eight-five our happiness includes reality, whereas at eighteen we’re just too stupid to know better. And the half-century mark seems to be the Rubicon for both positive and negative emotions: anger, sadness, worry - after fifty they start dropping like the Dow Jones Average.

On the other hand, the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control show a spike in suicides between the ages of forty-five and fifty-four. For the last three years, this tranche of the population has offed itself at a higher rate than any other. Over seventeen percent of this demographic dies by its own hand, and men at a rate three times as high as women.

So, since a shiny new AARP card with my name on it slithered out of an envelope in yesterday’s mail, I can’t help but wondering: should I be laughing all the way to the morgue? That latest zero on my odometer begins to take on a new significance, but just what does it signify?

Well, there is this: the Gallup people report that happiness tanks big-time after the teenage years. I have a theory about why that may be. Perhaps beyond that point, as we lose that bullet-proof varsity letter jacket and the bullet-proof pecs that filled it out, we learn that our own bodies - and our own selves - aren’t sufficiently durable vehicles to get us all the way to the finish line. We marry and have kids, we commit to a job (we thought it was a “career” or a “vocation” but most days it ends up being a job) and must do that job in a community of coworkers. If we’re the Evangelical type, we leave the youth group and discover that we must now follow Christ and even attend church without big events featuring hip knock-offs of secular T-shirts and regular cry-fests at various camps and retreats (though serious addicts can do the Promise Keepers or the Walk to Emmaus as a sort of methadone). In other words, we cease building a self and begin instead investing it in those around us. We learn to apply the wisdom of Jesus in the social as well as the financial aspect: we stop storing our treasure in the increasingly moth-munched, rust-rotted, time-pillaged vault of our own bodies and minds and instead sink more and more of it into the unpredictable argosies of other people.

And then, after a long time of perhaps feeling that God has suckered us in a shell game where the pea isn’t under any of the three cups, we look up and discover that the prize is all around us in meaningful relationships with Christ and other people.

All of this is on my mind because in addition to celebrating my entrance into 1) The Happiness Demographic, 2) The Suicide Sector, and 3) the AARP, I am celebrating something else today: my twenty-sixth wedding anniversary. AND, just over a week ago, I performed the ceremony as my older son married a wonderful young woman who (for reasons best known to her) loves him madly. Fifty years of crawling between earth and heaven; twenty-six years of loving, honoring, and cherishing. Twenty-four years of trying to raise a son who, I found out early on, was smarter than I was. Where did the time go? Into my Lord, who turns my stumbling steps toward him into true transformation. Into my wife, my two boys, the three congregations I tried to serve, and the students I now teach. So I haven’t lost my youth; I know right where it is. I simply put it into relationships: Mortality Tupperware, containers that can keep it fresh.

So on my anniversary, I think I’ll round things off with the words of a better writer who, long ago, said much the same thing:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,–and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings’.

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June 5, 2010 by djackson.

This is the funeral sermon I preached on June 3, 2010, for Vivian Eubank, who died of cancer at the age of ninety-four. I’ve had a couple of requests, so I am publishing it here.

I Will Arise
Song of Solomon 2.10-13
Vivian Eubank: Funeral
Thursday, June 3, 2010

Death has won today, but death has not won.

Christians should never make light of death. Death entered this world as a result of sin, as Genesis records and Romans affirms. For this reason death is an enemy, and a frightening one at that. And this is true even for one like Vivian Eubank, who lived a long life, died a well-prepared death, and trusted in a deep, abiding faith.

Vivian Eubank lived a long, happy life before death came. I never knew anyone more vital, who accomplished more or touched more hearts. I will never forget her own epitaph on her life. The last time Becky and I went to dinner with her, as we were walking out to our car, she suddenly stopped, fixed us with that imperious gaze and said, “Be happy. It’s a good world!”

Vivian saw death coming well in advance. For two years after her initial diagnosis she defied all the odds by continuing to live a strong, vigorous life. In fact, she once told me she regretted that lengthy hiatus: “It was embarrassing to be dying for two years!” she admitted.

Vivian faced death in the strength of a life-long Christian faith that was both deep and practical. She did not simply pocket the promise of salvation the way others would clutch a lucky rabbit’s foot. She proclaimed the love of Christ by both her words and her actions throughout all of those nine decades. She was a dedicated and gifted Sunday school teacher, a faithful church member, and a dear friend and supporter to her pastor.

Yet for all her long, happy life, and for all her advanced warning, and for all the undoubted depth of her Christian faith, Vivian looked at death with a certain amount of fear. In one of my final visits she asked me to read Shakespeare to her, specifically the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. When I reached the line where the Bard describes death as “that undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” she stopped me. “That’s just it,” she whispered. “We don’t know.”

But that didn’t – and doesn’t – bother me. Fear in the face of death is not a failure of faith, nor is grief following death a denial of our blessed hope.

Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus though Our Lord already knows that he will raise his friend to life moments later (Jo 11.35). Jesus cries at his friend’s funeral because death reminds us of the presence and power of sin. Jesus also cries because he identifies fully with the sense of separation we feel when a loved one leaves us for the last time in this life. N. T. Wright has wisely reminded us that the tears of Christ show his full presence in our griefs and sorrows, and that not until we see that “the Word who is God can cry with the world’s crying will we discover what the word ‘God’ really means.”

I urged Vivian then to feel no shame in her fear of death, and I urge you today to feel no shame in your sorrow that she has died. Tears are more than a tribute to the loss of the one we love; they are an act of defiance in the face of an enemy whose invasion goes all the way back to Eden. They are an act of faith in the goodness of a God who never intended that we suffer this anguish. The stinging salt tears of our Savior at that tomb outside of Bethany sanctify every sorrow felt in this place today. After all, death has won today, and that is bad news.

But there is good news: Death has won today, but death has not won.

In the text that I have read this afternoon, the beloved bride hears the cry of her lover as he hastens to her from afar. In poetry at least as beautiful as anything Shakespeare ever wrote, she describes how he bursts upon the place of her confinement, the house that holds her in and holds her back from his embraces. Winter has kept her housebound but now spring arrives, and what was a shelter quickly becomes a prison. So her lover charges onto the scene with the good news that she no longer needs to remain locked behind those barred doors and barricaded windows that separate her from him.

Rise up , my love, my fair one,
And come away!
For, lo, the winter is past , the rain is over and gone ;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come ,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
And the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise , my love, my fair one,
And come away!

Bible scholars through the centuries have seen in the Song of Solomon a picture of the love of Christ, the bridegroom, for the Church, his bride. Jesus himself uses this imagery to speak of his return for his church. “Now learn the parable from the fig tree: when its branch has already become tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.” (Mk 13.28) Jesus utters this saying not long after the famous miracle where he withers a fruitless fig tree. (Mk 11.12-14, 20) In context, his words mean that though the destruction of Jerusalem will appear to leave the redemptive work of God as futile as a blasted fruit tree, Christ will arise to give new life to his church and then will return to redeem her for himself.

That is the hope in which Vivian Eubank died. Cancer had ravaged her body until it was like that ancient fig tree whose ability to sustain life had finally left. What had been a shelter for nine decades suddenly became a prison. But the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that though this progression from health to death is the normal, seasonal pattern of life, it is not the last word or the best word. The fig tree, Jesus promises, will blossom again. The winter of death will give way to the bloom of the resurrection. Death wins for a day, but death does not win!

Solomon’s sonnet reminds me of another poem that Vivian and I shared in her final days, William Butler Yeats’ great work “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” In fact, the last time I spoke with her, she asked me to quote it to her. It’s lines echo, for me, those of the Song of Solomon:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

I think these two poems summarize Vivian’s life and death. Vivian once told me the motto by which she raised her family: “We run a hard race, but when we crash, we really crash!” Vivian had run a hard race, and a good one. She could truly say with the Apostle Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.” (2 Tim 4.7) She had earned her rest; she was ready to crash. Yet Mary told me that despite the pain and difficulty involved in even the slightest movement, and despite her increasing weakness, Vivian insisted every morning that she have her bath, put on a fresh gown, comb her hair and put on her makeup. Some might see that as vanity, but I don’t. It’s simply what any bride does when she knows her fiance is going to visit.
And so she was ready when she heard her Beloved, her Lord, the Lover whom she served so faithfully, call out to her as she huddled behind the barred windows of a body that had become a prison, a cage that kept her from His unmediated presence:

Rise up, my love, my fair one,
And come away!
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
And the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise , my love, my fair one,
And come away!

And she recognized the voice of the One who had promised her a cabin where she could dwell with him forever, who had told her that he went ahead to prepare her place in the many-roomed mansion of glory. “Arise,” he sang out to her, “and come away!” And Vivian responded with some version of the words of the poet, “I will arise and go now.”

And this is not a matter of the mere dreams nor the hope of deluded people unable to face the harsh reality of death. Because Shakespeare, great as he was, got it wrong! There is One who has returned from the unexplored bourn of that undiscovered country, One who did not cheat the grave but instead defeated it, the risen Lord Jesus Christ who by bearing our sorrows died our death and so, by conquering his grave conquered ours as well. It is because of that historical fact, and for that reason alone, that we can truly say once again with the Apostle Paul, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 15.55-57)

But there is one more important thing to say here, because just as the Christian life is not isolated but communal, not individual but congregational, so the Christian death is not lonely but relational. You see, to imagine Vivian all alone, even in some idealistic setting custom-designed to her likes and desires, is not to imagine her in Heaven. Because for all her many talents and gifts, her vast intellect, her indomitable will, and her organizational skills, Vivian’s true genius was for relationships. She touched lives and drew those around her into a web of love and joy. She reminded me of the beatified woman in C. S. Lewis’ Great Divorce: “Every young man or boy that me her became her son. . . .Every girl that met her was her daughter.”

Indeed, I’ve told you that she had some misgivings as she faced death, but for the most part, she did not fear for herself, but for those she left behind. She worried about all of you, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She wanted so much for you to do well in life, and she worried what would become of you without her around to keep everyone in line. For Vivian, then, isolation could never be Heaven; it could only be Hell!

Because Jean Paul Sartre got it exactly wrong when he wrote that “Hell is other people.” For the Christian, Hell is the absence of other people; Hell is isolation; Hell is the solitary soul twisted tightly around the sterile stem of the self.

But rejoice – the Christian God is a Trinity, which means that relationship rests at the heart of Heaven! One by one as believers die, their Lord calls them into eternity. But this is not the end. The Apostles Creed teaches us to affirm that we believe in “the communion of saints,” the unending fellowship of that great cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 12.1. Vivian has entered the presence of God, but also of those she loved who are beloved of the same Lord, there to await the arrival of the rest of us.

Because this promise is for all who trust in Christ. The whole of the New Testament buzzes with the news that one day all broken relationships will be restored in Christ, and all separations repaired. Last Sunday Jesus said to his servant Vivian, “Arise, my love, my fair one and come away,” but on that great and final day he will say it to his whole Bride – the Church. In that final hour, the Bible assures us, those who remain alive will not precede those who have died, but the redeemed dead will return WITH Christ and the living saints will return TO Christ and we will forever be together IN Christ. Heaven is not, as we too often imagine, a big family reunion where we rejoice with our friends and relatives while God hovers somewhere comfortably in the background. Heaven is all the church arisen in the unity of the worship of the one true God. And what Vivian wanted – and wants – most, is to see all of you there on that day.

And that is why I can say again: Death has won today, but death has not won, and death does not win! So arise, Vivian Eubank, and come away! Your Lord and Lover has come for you, the winter of dying is past, and the voice of the Spirit coos like a dove to welcome you into eternal life. Arise , my love, my fair one, And come away!

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May 26, 2010 by djackson.

My last blog drew some interesting comments - in particular, one affirmation and one critique, both of which I felt missed the point. I had attempted to write about how church - the actual local body where Christians worship - disappoints and even hurts us. What I wanted to say is that this is just as it should be; what Jesus went through to birth this church and what he still suffers to redeem her should be our clue.

One person assumed I agreed that “the precious church is also HIS body which is so often unrecognizable.” Another called me to task and pled for certain actions on the part of the church (very good actions, let me hasten to say), warning of disaster if we neglect these things and adding that, “I have only to look around at most churches I know of to believe this is the case.”

Now, I see the point in both responses and let me be quick to deny any kind of quietism which would imply that any local expression of the church fully manifests the face of Christ to the world. What bothers me, though, is the very American idea that we can “fix” her if only we hit on the right combination of spiritual disciplines or slick promotions. I sometimes think I hear (and this could be more a revelation of my own heart than an insight into anyone else’s) a running subtext which believes that if “those people” in the church would just get their stuff together I could be a part of the life of the church without having to bear all the aggravation and pain that such community always seems to involve.

Is Christ’s church imperfect? Is Christ’s church “unrecognizable”? Are the answers to both questions the same? What I sense behind this kind of inquiry is a yearning for the good old days when the church was “really” the church. Generally, if I look very far into this kind of thinking, I discover that the speaker pines for the New Testament era. Well, if I read Acts and the Epistles, then put the average local church in a lineup, can I spot her from the written description?

Let’s see: The church in Revelation 1-2 - only two congregations out of seven (Smyrna and Philadelphia) receive a clean X-ray. In the others we find hard work laid alongside dull routine (Ephesus), martyrdom laid alongside syncretism (Pergamum), increasing works laid alongside decreasing doctrinal purity (Thyatira), seeming life laid like a tablecloth over spiritual death (Sardis), and tepid prosperity in the place of true fire (Laodecia). Total score: a little better than twenty-five percent. A church that scores an “F” in spiritual health? Yes, I recognize that.

Let’s see: The church in Corinth, perhaps? Divisions, power struggles, beer bashes at the Lord’s Supper, behind on their stewardship pledges and a guy shacked up with his step-mother. Yes, I recognize that.

Let’s see: The church in Philippi, maybe? Two powerful female pastors causing such a stink that Paul, from the safe distance of his Roman dungeon, tells them to work it out and throws another pastor into the ring to act as referee. (Phil 4.2-3) Yes, I recognize that.

Let’s see: The church in Thessalonica, then? People skivving off their jobs in the name of a debased eschatology that says there’s no point working to pay next month’s electric bill when Jesus may come back by the weekend. (2 Thess 3.10-13) Yes, I recognize that.

Let’s see: The church in Galatia, possibly? Falling away from the real gospel, embracing works salvation, bad-mouthing the one who originally brought them to Christ? Yes, I recognize that.

And in general, a quick overview of the churches we find in Scripture: disrespect for pastoral leadership, gossip, false doctrine, right alongside heroic faithfulness, undeniable love of the brethren, and even martyrdom. Yes, I recognize all of that.

What matters more is that Jesus recognizes all of that. In fact, THAT’S what he considered worth dying for. Yes, he will present her one day without spot or wrinkle, and yes, we who are the church should be passionate about bringing to bear all the spot-remover and wrinkle-cream we can get our hands on, and yes, the New Testament contains an endless supply of both. But we must never forget that we are to love the church who IS, not the one we have imagined and believe we will one day create. Ralph Wood of Baylor University writes eloquently on this subject when he states that “for the church to be a faithful remnant - a frail and frayed thing, often suffering prsecution and barely keeping alive from one generation to the next, even at best offering a minority report within in an overwhelmingly larger world - is not for the church to be stunted and eclipsed but for it to have real life.”

Eugene Peterson, in his wonderful and under-appreciated little book “The Wisdom of Each Other,” writes to an imaginary friend who, as an adult convert, has just begun worshiping with a local body of believers. “Well, that didn’t last long, did it? I mean your romance with the church. Did you so easily forget that is is sinners that God calls to repentance, and that a lot of them, having heard the call and decided that they like the sound of the good news of salvation, somewhere along the way ditch the repentance part?” Peterson, writing as a seasoned pastor, neither denies nor apologizes for that local body’s failures. Instead, he recommends them to his pal as the means of grace. “Go back to the company of those seventy or eighty people on Sunday, listen believingly to the Scriptures read and preached, offer your prayers, receive Jesus in the sacrament, and bless your neighbors. And wait for the Kingdom. It’s the Holy Spirit’s style to fashion holy lives among the inept.”

Which brings me to the comment from the person who says she has “only to look around at most churches I know” to see what a pitiful thing the body has become. I won’t deny the results of her survey; I’d probably lose the argument if it moved to the ground of raw data. What troubles me is the idea of a devout and sincere Christian speaking of “looking around at” the church. It sounds to me a little like a husband saying, “I have only to look around at most wives I’m married to to know that marriage fails to reflect Christ.” The statistical veracity of the claim becomes a non-issue in light of its relational dissonance. The church is not an organization a Christian examines; she is an organism a Christian inhabits!

Karl Barth likened this objective evaluation of the church by the church to Mrs. Lot’s backward glance at Sodom! “The Church also lives by the fact that it looks out above itself. As soon as it looks into itself it finds only the religious community. But it must not do this. It, too, must learn from Lot’s wife what must not happen. As the earthly body of Jesus Christ it may - as is believed and proclaimed in the Lord’s Upper - be nourished by its own eternal truth in its form as the heavenly body of Jesus Christ. It cannot be nourished in any other way. If it nourishes itself in any other way it can only die as the Church. But as it lives by this nourishment, as therefore it realises the unity of its earthly with its heavenly form, the fact that this is already realised in Jesus Christ and actual in the work of the Holy Spirit, means that, as the Church of God, it is already perfected even in its imperfection, that even as a religious community it is already the tabernacle of God among men and therefore the answer to the question of how we come to participate in Jesus Christ and His person and work.” (Dogmatics, Chapter V, 26.2, “The Readiness of Man”)

If anyone is to blame for the prominence of this kind of objective thinking about churches, it is our own leaders! The megachurch rock stars have fully adopted the corporate model which (rightly, in the case of a business) looks at any system as a sort of machine, where efficiency rules and productivity determines success or failure. This has led to what Peterson powerfully condemns as “ecclesiastical pornography,” an airbrushed centerfold of the perfect local church which offers the individual member endless ecstasy and never has a headache or wants us to go shopping with it. Why should we preachers be surprised if the folks in the pew assume they have a right to critique, even to waive their receipts and demand a refund when the product fails to fulfill its propaganda? We have somehow taught ourselves that dogging the church is a mark of spiritual maturity. Just as well to say that a man criticizing his wife proves how good a husband he is.

I much prefer the description of George Bernanos’ marvelous character, the crusty old Cure of Torcy in the novel “Diary of a Country Priest.” The Bride of Christ rightly understood, the Cure insists, is “a sturdy wench who’s not afraid of work, but who knows the way of things, that everything has to be done over and over again, until the end . . . .For all the efforts of Holy Church this poor world won’t turn into a shining altar for Corpus Christi day.”

So I guess I’ll just grab my mop and go on slogging ahead, realizing at the same time that the very water of life I slop on the floor touches the dirt of my own filthy boots, meaning the one who comes behind me has to mop up my muddy footprints. I rejoice that I’ve been made eternally clean, and that some dear servant of Jesus is willing to wash my feet.

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May 18, 2010 by djackson.

A lot of what I read and hear these days seems directed toward the goal of getting church “right”. The unspoken assumption of such a project is, of course, that church as we currently do it is wrong. On top of that tenet we stack another unstated given: that we can do it right.

Immediately, I spy a problem: the New Testament does not speak of the church as “it,” but as “her.” I once had my head quite politely handed to me because, while serving on a committee doing some devotional writing for a hymnal, I referred to the church in the feminine. I cited the feminine pronoun in Ephesians 5.25 and the bride imagery of Revelation 21. For good measure I threw in the tradition of denominating ships as “she”. All of this got me nowhere. Still, as a Baptist with a sort of blind predisposition in favor of the Scripture, I cling to the language and in this instance it proves singularly helpful. We can comfortably speak of “doing church” only if we think and speak of church as “it.” Try the phrase with the feminine pronoun and, well, you get a phrase that isn’t very nice.

Which may be exactly the problem. When we “do the church” we treat her exactly the way a hormone-addled Lothario treats a woman - not as a human being but as an apparatus, a means to an end. In his essay on Eros in “The Four Loves,” C. S. Lewis has poignantly observed that it is the least accurate of phrases to say that a man on the prowl “wants a woman.” “Strictly speaking,” Jack explains, “a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus.” And it sometimes seems to me that the church-growth gurus are more interested in “doing” church - obtaining the pleasure of particular results - than in the church herself.

Perhaps I can express this best if I say that much of our thinking about the church seems more Jim Collins than Jesus Christ. Collins, in his book “Good to Great,” works from the paradigm of getting the right people on the bus. “The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great,” Collins gushes, “did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, the first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.” Calvin Miller offers what is actually a Christian alternative to this image: church, not as a bus that I drive where I will and in which I drive whom I will, but as a train that runs on rails to a location that Another determines, carrying passengers that Another puts on board. Collins’ ideas may work fine for running a secular organization; they may even be true for all I know, but they become blasphemous when nailed over the New Testament reality of the church which, by the way, is supposed to be an alternative society where none of the world’s rules apply.

Now, I say all of this to say one thing: the church stinks, she always has, and we need to quite trying to tart her up. So many of the church growth gambits I encounter work on the basis that if we can get the mechanism right, if we can vet the “seekers” in advance so that only those who truly drink the Kool-Aid - er, pardon me, only those who buy into the vision - get past the turnstile, all will be well. Deacons will disappear, cantankerous Christians will bounce off like bullets from the chest of Superman, dogs and cats will live together in perfect harmony and we can quit preaching eschatology because the millennium will already hold six services each weekend in our state-of-the-tart facility.

But even if that is the church of the church growth gurus, it is not the church of the New Testament. Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas offers contingency as the key to understanding any aspect of Christian living. “To say that our lives are contingent,” Hauerwas explains, “is to say that they are out of control. . . .Learning to live out of control, learning to live without trying to force contingency into conformity because of our desperate need for security, I take to be a resource for discovering alternatives that would otherwise not be present.”

Hauerwas’ words remind me of the comments made recently by Father Philip Lawrence, OSB, abbot of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico. In his weekly column, the abbot wrote, “So often in family life and in community life, there are realities that we cannot change. Whether those realities be an older monk making funny noises all the time, another monk clacking his false teeth, someone always talking in the areas of silence, another monk who always needs help with something, etc., there are always these kinds of situations over which we have no control, whether in the family or in the monastic community. The challenge is not to try to change them but to live with them creatively. When I am tired and cranky, I don’t want to be creative! I just want things to change.”

“To live with them creatively” - that’s the key. We so often hear the megachurches praised as being “creative,” and what the adjective means in that context is that they use PowerPoint or hold services on a baseball diamond or dress like rock stars. But the real creativity comes, not as we reshape the church to fit us better, but reshape ourselves to love the church. In fact, much of what I hear from the church growth folks is not creativity but realism. We have to be “realistic” about what the “seekers” will and won’t put up with; we have to be “realistic” about catering to the materialistic needs from which Jesus actually came to redeem people. “The problem with realism,” Hauerwas quips, “is that it can shut down the imagination.” At which point, tired and cranky, we just try to change everything - including the church, the bride for whom Christ died.

George Bernanos, in his stirring novel “The Diary of a Country Priest,” states it well. His crusty old abba-figure, the Cure de Torcy, challenges the young protagonist to think about just what the phrase “bride of Christ” means. “What’s a wife, lad - a real woman as a man’d hope to get if he’s fool enough not to follow the advice of Saint Paul? I’ll tell you: it’s a sturdy wench who’s not afraid of work, but who knows the way of things, that everything has to be done over and over again, until the end. . . .For all the efforts of Holy Church this world won’t turn into a shining altar for Corpus Christi day.”

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May 14, 2010 by djackson.

Watch Your Language!
Pentecost, Year C
Acts 2.1-21

You’re more likely to hear Vlashki spoken in Queens, New York, than in Croatia where it originated. In fact, residents of the Five Boroughs converse, curse, comfort, confront, worship, marry and burry in some eight hundred different languages, making NYC the most linguistically diverse city in the world.

(For more, see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html.)

Of course, most of these people speak English, at least well enough to get by, but as Robert Holman of the Endangered Language Alliance notes, “Everybody wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.”

At Pentecost, God’s Spirit empowers the church to speak, not in facts but in dreams; to sing, not by chanting anthems of conquest to foreign foes but by crooning lullabies to the frightened infants of Adam. Everyone standing in that crowded street spoke enough Greek to understand the disciples’ message, and perhaps even knew Aramaic. But Peter’s Greek came filtered through the redneck twang of a Galilean fishmonger and would make the foreigners feel superior. And their Aramaic suffered from lives spent entirely on Gentile soil, which would tempt the disciples to smugness. So God inspired the preachers’ hearts to speak in the heart-languages of their hearers.

Pentecost invokes the ancient Hebrew ceremony of the first fruits, when a handful of harvest proclaimed faith in God’s full provision. It coincides with Sinai when, after God’s conquest of Egypt, Moses ascends to Heaven then descends bearing the ten words that bind twelve tribes into one nation. The day undoes Babel: arrogant ascent fragmented humanity; now divine descent reunites the rent fabric of the race.

Theological debates rage over the nature of the specific gift of Pentecost as proponents of unlearned languages battle the partisans of glossolalia. At least we know that the universal language of Christ’s Kingdom is love, and that if we want people to see Jesus, we need to speak the dialect of dreams, lilting love’s lullaby to a world wrapped in nightmare.

When that happens, we might once again live out the Geoff Mack country/western chorus of Acts 2, “I Been Everywhere,” and hear the wretched refuse of a thousand teeming shores proclaim, “How is it that we each here them in our own language to which we were born? Aramaic, Mandaic, and Irish-Galic; Bukhari, Chamorro, and Rhaeto-Romanic; Istro-Romanian, Kashubian and Lithuanian; Chaldic, Garifuna and Mamuju.”

Now You’re Speakin’ My Language,
Doug

Collect

Almighty God, you spoke the world into being by your Word, and birthed the church into the world by giving her the one Word in many tongues. Grant us now anew the filling of Your Spirit that we may speak the one Gospel in diverse words and ways. In the name of the same Spirit, together with you, Father, and your Son Jesus Christ, Amen.

Benediction

Go forth in the name of the Father,
The One God who creates all peoples of the world.
Go forth in the name of the Son,
The One Word who redeems all peoples of the world.
Go forth in the name of the Spirit,
The One Wind who breathes life to all peoples of the world.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
Amen.

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