Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year B, December 18, 2011
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Let us try something different. Take a look at that extra sheet of paper you have. It is a prayer called the Angelus. It is a great prayer. Use it. Let’s just say the Hail Mary together.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
Anyone who grew up low church Episcopalian or from other more Protestant orientation, you feel funny saying the Hail Mary? Stick with it; it feels good eventually.
“My Soul Proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day on all generations will call me Blessed: the Almighty has done great things for me and Holy is His name.” The Magnificat. It is a canticle, which is an excerpt from Scripture to be used ritually. The Magnificat is drawn from St. Luke’s gospel. Mary is reflecting on what happened in today’s reading, becoming miraculously pregnant under the shadow of God, the Holy Spirit. Quite a reaction for a thirteen year old. That is how old Mary probably was. Girls, young women, married directly after puberty back then.
It is such a striking statement, not only in the gracefulness of it, but that it comes from the lips that it comes from. Mary was very, very low in the social hierarchy of her day. She was a she. She was very young. She was poor. And worse than being just poor, she was landless and was betrothed to a landless tekon, carpenter, probably better translated as a framer, making posts and beams, door frames and the like. She lived in the boondocks of Galilee, a backwater province of a poor kingdom in the Empire. She wasn’t a slave or a gentile, which was good for her, but she was way far down the pecking order. She would have had no reasonable expectation to have a voice or an identity, let alone one that “From this day on all generations will call me blessed.”
The story of the incarnation of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, the Person of God that became flesh and dwelt among us, or as I heard a local pastor say, that became flesh and Occupied, it is the story of unimaginable power and glory and honor arising from a place that society does not value. Doesn’t even usually notice. The powers that be, the patriarchy or kyriearchy tells us in so many ways that womb of a girl, particularly a poor girl, bears no good fruit, no fruit worth investing any effort or love into. That that fruit could be called Blessed never crossed anyone’s mind.
But here, in this brave little girl, a girl who did not ask for this task, did not ask to take on this burden, did not ask to take on the mantle of bearing, raising, loving, nurturing, a son, the Son of God and her also witnessing His torture and death, holding His dead body, burying Him… she did not ask for that and yet she did it. She rejoiced in it, AND she wept over it, AND she walked countless miles with Him in his life and work. And as soon as she was no longer perplexed by the messenger, her soul proclaimed the greatness of the Lord for it!
In thinking about Mary and the Magnificat and the Angelus, I was reminded of a talk by Eve Ensler that Windy shared with me recently. Eve Ensler wrote the Vagina Monologues. It is one of the TED talks, recorded in India in 2009. It is called “Embrace your inner girl”. It is on line. Watch it.
Ensler posits that we, all of us, men, women, boys, girls, all have this little part of ourselves, a cluster of cells that she calls girl cells. Our inner girl. These girl cells are where we carry compassion. Empathy. Our passionate self; openness, balance and relationship. It is intuition. It is Sophia. Wisdom. It is vulnerability and the understanding that vulnerability is our greatest strength. It is taking things personally. And it is, in her words, emotions, which “…have inherent logic, which lead to radical, appropriate saving action.”
Are these traits that are valued by our society? Do over achievers get kudos for their vulnerability? No. We are told that vulnerability is weakness. Is compassion something we put on a resume? No, compassion hampers our judgment. Do our political or business leaders brag about being emotional people? No, emotions cloud our thinking. They certainly were not teaching us about our inner girl when I was a young Marine Corps lieutenant at Quantico. You cannot build empire on empathy. You cannot concentrate wealth or exploit natural resources guided by our intuition. Resistance to structural adjustments is not suppressed by right relationship. Therefore these traits, the girl cells, are suppressed. And violently.
The suppression of our girl self means that we cannot feel what is going on. Good feelings, bad ones or indifferent, when the compassion, joy, emotionality, and relationality that Ensler calls our inner girl is squashed, we do not have the radical saving response in the world that that we need. Our girl self does not dig strip mines or do clear cuts; it farms organically. It does not pollute rivers or the air; but works cooperatively. It doesn’t force people into slavery or figure out how little someone can be paid; but makes sure everyone has enough. It does not hit or slap or punch or cut or shoot anyone, ever. It does not touch when not invited, particularly not children, or women, or anyone less physically capable than yourself, ever.
I am not down on men. I rather enjoy being one, we talked about that a few weeks ago. But for me, one of the signs that my inner life is in order is when tears come to my eyes easily. That is kind of girly. When I encounter something sad, or particularly beautiful… “This American Life”, on NPR. If I am a weepy mess, but not depressed after hearing that radio show, things are good. When I feel that I can ask for help, and I do it, that is me as a better person. When I can share that something is hard for me to do, or, God forbid, that I do not know something… when I do that I am being a better person, I am more the girl that I need to be. Really, I am that much more like Mary.
The Magnificat, the testimony of Mary reflects this inner girl. She is the essence of the inner girl that Ensler speaks of. The proud are scattered; the mighty cast down; and, the rich are sent away empty, sure but the greatest strength of God is God’s mercy. God’s mercy raises up the lowly. God’s mercy feeds the hungry. God’s mercy keeps promises. Mary witnesses not God Triumphant, but God the servant, God the Savior. A tender, loving God. God was alive in her 13 year old, probably malnourished body. Her intuition made this possible. She birthed Our God into the world in the form of a tiny baby boy born on the floor of a barn to parents too poor to afford a room. Her compassion made this possible. Her girl self rings through the ages. Her relationships made this possible. All generations have called her blessed. Her girlhood made this possible. And for that baby, that epitome of dependence and vulnerability, for Him, for our God, all of our souls proclaim the greatness of the Lord, our spirits rejoice in God our savior. AMEN
Monday, December 19, 2011
Third Sunday in Advent, December 11, 2011
Third Sunday in Advent, Year B, December 11, 2011
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Windy and I spent time in Thailand some years ago. I was working on a book for a Thai dissident and Windy was expanding her massage education and learning about Thai culture. There was a major election going on for the Governor of Bangkok, a very powerful political position in the country. One of the candidates was named Chewit, and his claim to fame was that he was the brothel king of Bangkok. No small feat. Well, his campaign slogan was “It is not how good you are, it is how good you want to be.”
“A light Shines in the Darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.”
So last week we heard tell of the man in the powder blue windbreaker with the words “Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe” written on the back. We talked about John the Baptist, too. We talked about sin, because if we do not have a good sense of sin, then the whole idea of repentance is moot. And we had some homework over this past week, we were supposed to think and pray on the things that get in the way of our relationship with God and Neighbor; things that distract us, that pull us away from being the person we are meant to be, that we are capable of being. Any report back on sin?
Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe.
Everyone knows that we have the sacrament of confession in the Episcopal church, right? Does anyone know the official name of that sacrament? The Reconciliation of a Penitent. Reconciliation. Have we all heard of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa? Could someone explain what it was? -----
Right. The point of reconciliation is that the relationship that was broken, was damaged, was violated, is restored, and that the conditions that allowed for such breaking of relationships no longer exist. Having the opportunity to tell your story, the whole truth; having to listen to the stories of others with no rebuttal, no punishment… this process saved South Africa from turning into Zimbabwe. Truth and Reconciliation brings light to the darkness. It shines truth on horror. It holds everyone accountable to everyone else not by force or threats of force, but with the desire to get on with living the lives we have been given. It is this process that can save us, too.
Now I am not saying that I am clearing my Fridays from here on out to hear confessions. I am willing to, but when it comes to the rite of reconciliation I proscribe it in the spirit of Queen Elizabeth, “All may, some should, none must.” What I am saying, though, what I am saying with as much spiritual force as I can express, we all must repent. We all must do whatever it takes, every day of our lives, to pull the logs from our eyes, to cut off that offending hand, to reconcile our beings and our lives with God in Christ. And we must try day in, day out, to create the conditions so that we may thrive in the blessed lives that God Almighty has graced us with. This is the only purpose of being Christian. John the Baptist cries in the wilderness across the ages. Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe.
Repentance is setting ourselves right. It is realigning ourselves with the trajectory that God has set our lives on. Paul Tillich said that the arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice. The constellation of relationships you live within, that is the arc of your life and it is long and it bends towards God. Repentance is the process we use to reconcile our lives with this arc. It is the primary work of the faithful, because if our relationship with God and/or our neighbors is left untended, we are of little use in fulfilling God’s mission to the world.
I can see that you are all following me theoretically. Notions of reconciliation just begs for good theology, and I do love my theology. However, theology is about religion, it is about God… what we need to approach a life reconciled with God and Neighbor, to be the human beings we are meant to be, to go beyond Chewit, and to be as good as we want to be… that takes actual religion. It takes practice, it takes instruction from those who have followed before us on the road upwards and inwards into Reality. How do we repent?
It is very simple. Paul gave us our prescription this morning. “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” That about sums it up. You want the keys to the kingdom? You want to see God face to face and know that that face is God’s? You want to live a life characterized by truth and reconciliation? then listen to Paul: Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances. If you do that, you will be saved. Any questions?
Prayer is the answer. To what? Everything, but most importantly, to repenting. To reconciling our relationship with God and everything. Well, it is not just prayer, but I need to introduce this next word delicately: mortification. I bet you haven’t heard that in church for a while. Prayer and Mortification… these practices are the root of the spiritual life, the ancients in our church tell us this time and time again. Evelyn Underhill, the great Anglican writer and mystic who died in 1941 has a lot to say on this matter. Underhill’s direction to prayer and mortification is not a call to return to horsehair shirts and kneeling on dried peas. By prayer she means attending to God. By mortification she means dealing with ourselves. She writes that prayer is, “…first turning to Reality, and then getting our tangled, half-real psychic lives – so tightly coiled about ourselves and our own interests – into harmony with the great movement of Reality. Mortification means killing the very roots of self-love; pride and possessiveness, anger and violence, ambition and greed in all their disguises, however respectable those disguises may be.”
In prayer, we face ourselves towards God and… we do all sorts of things. Some of us seek silence. The deep, inner silence of apophatic prayer, like that taught by the great Carmelite masters, Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and the modern Centering Prayer movement. Vipassana meditation of Southeast Asia is an apophatic prayer form. Hindu Transcendental Meditation is, too. Some of us find the cadence and imagery of the rosary to be meaningful. Some practice intercessions, praying for others, this is the metta meditations of Loving Kindness of Mahayana Buddhism. Others of us rejoice in chant, alone or in Taize forms of worship, or find stillness in the journey in and out of a labyrinth. There are other physical prayer forms like yoga, tai chi and chi kung. And if you do not know where to start, pick up your BCP in the morning and turn to page 80. Saying Morning Prayer is a superlative form of prayer, a communal spoken form of prayer, and when the words “us” and “we” come up in the service, remember that countless others around the world are saying the very same words.
Prayer is all about holy habits. Having a little corner to yourself, twenty minutes of your own in the morning, the wherewithal to remember to do the rosary on the little bumps on your steering wheel, or to say the Jesus prayer when you are standing in line at the grocery store. (Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. That is an ancient prayer. Say that unceasingly, and you will be called the child of God.) The other thing about prayer is that it is extremely hard to do by yourself. We need direction, instruction, encouragement. This is a goal of mine here at Resurrection: to build a practicing church. Let’s be observant Christians together. We have started saying morning prayer on Fridays. Keep your eyes open for some more opportunities to learn to pray well together.
Then there is Mortification… dealing with yourself… Mortification is all about building healthy habits and we do that by grace alone, because attending to ourselves, making better, healthier decisions for ourselves, it is not easy. Windy and I have dropped coffee from our lives. Wine, too, but for special occasions. No fun, but, but, better. Our life is better (crankier in the morning, but better). We stick to it by grace, as Flannery O’Connor wrote that “all human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” By grace we find the strength to live better than we might, certainly better than we want to. Eat better, develop some disciplines around food like Mark Bitman’s vegan before 6 idea of eating meat only at dinner. Exercise more, or at all. See a therapist. See a dentist. A doctor. Get enough rest. Try to learn how to do something new. Start being the person you want to be. This is mortification of the highest spiritual order. It is dealing with your own nature, with the express purpose of growing closer, to aligning our lives and our beings with the arc of God.
Repentance is all about returning to God. It is all about coming with a contrite heart and a plan to do things differently. This is the definition of reconciliation. Our sin hurts us more than it hurts other, largely. Sin is usually some form of breaking our own hearts. And that breaks God’s heart. Join me, please, in turning back to God in these coming years we will be working together. Let us work on praying together, and better. Let us learn mortification, dealing with ourselves, our bodies and our souls. Let us rejoice always, pray ceaselessly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. AMEN.
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Windy and I spent time in Thailand some years ago. I was working on a book for a Thai dissident and Windy was expanding her massage education and learning about Thai culture. There was a major election going on for the Governor of Bangkok, a very powerful political position in the country. One of the candidates was named Chewit, and his claim to fame was that he was the brothel king of Bangkok. No small feat. Well, his campaign slogan was “It is not how good you are, it is how good you want to be.”
“A light Shines in the Darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.”
So last week we heard tell of the man in the powder blue windbreaker with the words “Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe” written on the back. We talked about John the Baptist, too. We talked about sin, because if we do not have a good sense of sin, then the whole idea of repentance is moot. And we had some homework over this past week, we were supposed to think and pray on the things that get in the way of our relationship with God and Neighbor; things that distract us, that pull us away from being the person we are meant to be, that we are capable of being. Any report back on sin?
Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe.
Everyone knows that we have the sacrament of confession in the Episcopal church, right? Does anyone know the official name of that sacrament? The Reconciliation of a Penitent. Reconciliation. Have we all heard of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa? Could someone explain what it was? -----
Right. The point of reconciliation is that the relationship that was broken, was damaged, was violated, is restored, and that the conditions that allowed for such breaking of relationships no longer exist. Having the opportunity to tell your story, the whole truth; having to listen to the stories of others with no rebuttal, no punishment… this process saved South Africa from turning into Zimbabwe. Truth and Reconciliation brings light to the darkness. It shines truth on horror. It holds everyone accountable to everyone else not by force or threats of force, but with the desire to get on with living the lives we have been given. It is this process that can save us, too.
Now I am not saying that I am clearing my Fridays from here on out to hear confessions. I am willing to, but when it comes to the rite of reconciliation I proscribe it in the spirit of Queen Elizabeth, “All may, some should, none must.” What I am saying, though, what I am saying with as much spiritual force as I can express, we all must repent. We all must do whatever it takes, every day of our lives, to pull the logs from our eyes, to cut off that offending hand, to reconcile our beings and our lives with God in Christ. And we must try day in, day out, to create the conditions so that we may thrive in the blessed lives that God Almighty has graced us with. This is the only purpose of being Christian. John the Baptist cries in the wilderness across the ages. Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe.
Repentance is setting ourselves right. It is realigning ourselves with the trajectory that God has set our lives on. Paul Tillich said that the arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice. The constellation of relationships you live within, that is the arc of your life and it is long and it bends towards God. Repentance is the process we use to reconcile our lives with this arc. It is the primary work of the faithful, because if our relationship with God and/or our neighbors is left untended, we are of little use in fulfilling God’s mission to the world.
I can see that you are all following me theoretically. Notions of reconciliation just begs for good theology, and I do love my theology. However, theology is about religion, it is about God… what we need to approach a life reconciled with God and Neighbor, to be the human beings we are meant to be, to go beyond Chewit, and to be as good as we want to be… that takes actual religion. It takes practice, it takes instruction from those who have followed before us on the road upwards and inwards into Reality. How do we repent?
It is very simple. Paul gave us our prescription this morning. “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” That about sums it up. You want the keys to the kingdom? You want to see God face to face and know that that face is God’s? You want to live a life characterized by truth and reconciliation? then listen to Paul: Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances. If you do that, you will be saved. Any questions?
Prayer is the answer. To what? Everything, but most importantly, to repenting. To reconciling our relationship with God and everything. Well, it is not just prayer, but I need to introduce this next word delicately: mortification. I bet you haven’t heard that in church for a while. Prayer and Mortification… these practices are the root of the spiritual life, the ancients in our church tell us this time and time again. Evelyn Underhill, the great Anglican writer and mystic who died in 1941 has a lot to say on this matter. Underhill’s direction to prayer and mortification is not a call to return to horsehair shirts and kneeling on dried peas. By prayer she means attending to God. By mortification she means dealing with ourselves. She writes that prayer is, “…first turning to Reality, and then getting our tangled, half-real psychic lives – so tightly coiled about ourselves and our own interests – into harmony with the great movement of Reality. Mortification means killing the very roots of self-love; pride and possessiveness, anger and violence, ambition and greed in all their disguises, however respectable those disguises may be.”
In prayer, we face ourselves towards God and… we do all sorts of things. Some of us seek silence. The deep, inner silence of apophatic prayer, like that taught by the great Carmelite masters, Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and the modern Centering Prayer movement. Vipassana meditation of Southeast Asia is an apophatic prayer form. Hindu Transcendental Meditation is, too. Some of us find the cadence and imagery of the rosary to be meaningful. Some practice intercessions, praying for others, this is the metta meditations of Loving Kindness of Mahayana Buddhism. Others of us rejoice in chant, alone or in Taize forms of worship, or find stillness in the journey in and out of a labyrinth. There are other physical prayer forms like yoga, tai chi and chi kung. And if you do not know where to start, pick up your BCP in the morning and turn to page 80. Saying Morning Prayer is a superlative form of prayer, a communal spoken form of prayer, and when the words “us” and “we” come up in the service, remember that countless others around the world are saying the very same words.
Prayer is all about holy habits. Having a little corner to yourself, twenty minutes of your own in the morning, the wherewithal to remember to do the rosary on the little bumps on your steering wheel, or to say the Jesus prayer when you are standing in line at the grocery store. (Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. That is an ancient prayer. Say that unceasingly, and you will be called the child of God.) The other thing about prayer is that it is extremely hard to do by yourself. We need direction, instruction, encouragement. This is a goal of mine here at Resurrection: to build a practicing church. Let’s be observant Christians together. We have started saying morning prayer on Fridays. Keep your eyes open for some more opportunities to learn to pray well together.
Then there is Mortification… dealing with yourself… Mortification is all about building healthy habits and we do that by grace alone, because attending to ourselves, making better, healthier decisions for ourselves, it is not easy. Windy and I have dropped coffee from our lives. Wine, too, but for special occasions. No fun, but, but, better. Our life is better (crankier in the morning, but better). We stick to it by grace, as Flannery O’Connor wrote that “all human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” By grace we find the strength to live better than we might, certainly better than we want to. Eat better, develop some disciplines around food like Mark Bitman’s vegan before 6 idea of eating meat only at dinner. Exercise more, or at all. See a therapist. See a dentist. A doctor. Get enough rest. Try to learn how to do something new. Start being the person you want to be. This is mortification of the highest spiritual order. It is dealing with your own nature, with the express purpose of growing closer, to aligning our lives and our beings with the arc of God.
Repentance is all about returning to God. It is all about coming with a contrite heart and a plan to do things differently. This is the definition of reconciliation. Our sin hurts us more than it hurts other, largely. Sin is usually some form of breaking our own hearts. And that breaks God’s heart. Join me, please, in turning back to God in these coming years we will be working together. Let us work on praying together, and better. Let us learn mortification, dealing with ourselves, our bodies and our souls. Let us rejoice always, pray ceaselessly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. AMEN.
Monday, December 5, 2011
December 4, 2011, The Second Sunday in Advent
December 4, 2011, The Second Sunday in Advent, Year B
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Windy and I grew up North of Boston, home to, among other things, the Topsfield Fair. It is the oldest county fair in the nation, this coming year is its bicentennial. It is great: rabbits, horse shows, fired dough, real honest to goodness carneys and consistently the place where the world’s largest pumpkins are shown, and did I mention the fried dough? The record is something like 1650 lbs.. The last thing I did in Massachusetts before leaving was go to the opening night of the fair with Win and the girls. The fair looms large in the North Shore’s imagination.
Back in high school, I was on my way into the fair and there was a man standing near one of the entrances. This man looms large in my imagination. He was wearing a powder-blue jacket like old men used to wear, and he had a holder, one of those old cigarette girl holders full of pamphlets, religious tracts. Written on the back of his jacket in black magic marker were the words “Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe”.
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins….”
That man in the powder-blue jacket was a voice crying in the wilderness. He looms large in my imagination much like John the Baptist does, probably because he was doing the same thing John was doing; being a religious wacko, going where he was not expected or particularly welcomed, dressing oddly, in general someone you do not want to have over for dinner. Mostly, though, both of these men, they spoke with conviction about repentance, the need to repent… No one, well, at least very few of us in Anglican/Episcopalian circles like to talk about repentance; I think because it begs us to be so repentant! No, actually I think we do not talk about repentance with any conviction because we too often do not talk with any conviction about sin. And let’s face it, the entire reason for the Christ Event, for the coming of God in the form of a human being is the whole problem of sin. “Lamb of God who….” The thing is, if we do not understand sin, then we cannot understand repentance. And if we cannot understand repentance, then we miss the point of John the Baptist and the guy in the blue wind breaker which means we miss the depth and breadth of the ministry of Jesus Christ whom they herald and if we miss that we might as well skip Christmas… so as not to be a grinch, let’s save Christmas and talk about sin. Sound good?
What is sin?
Ok, let’s try this on for size: Everyone pick up a BCP and turn to page 843. “An Outline of the Faith,” (Turn the page) “commonly called the Catechism.” Turn to page 848. Would someone read the answer to What is sin? “Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” How does that sound? Sounds reasonable. Sin thought of this way could even be forgiveable, no? The catechism is not policy, it is not something we need to accept word for word, it is a point of departure for prayer and learning about our faith. And in it is a pretty good starting point.
Sin: “the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” Another way to say it is that sin is anything that gets in the way of right relationship with God and Neighbor. What this really means is that the sin we need to talk about in church, what John the Baptist got all excited about, what God is ultimately concerned with, is not so much a law forbidding specific actions or behaviors, but a recognition that some things we do and think are disordered, they prevent us from seeing others for who they really are, for seeing our selves for who we really are, for feeling the true consequences of our own action and inaction, that lays road blocks between us and God, the true nature of things. Sin is that which prevents us from being what we are supposed to be. When it comes to sin it is not so much about doing as it is about being.
Drinking too much is sinful not because of the drinking, but because of the drunkenness. It is the too much part that is sinful, and for some of us, one Drink is too much, it treads into the world of sin. Ever tried to pray drunk? Be a good friend drunk? No. Being gluttonous, hording material things, be it food, possesions, money, anything beyond what we need is sinful because, first, having too much means others can not have enough (neighbor) and second, whenever humans get too concerned with things we are not concerned enough with God. Anything that gets in the way you being your best self, is sinful.
Take sex. (Really, how can we talk about sin without talking about sex?) Sex is not a sin. It something that people do, and joyfully. Men, women, transgendered, in whatever combination, it does not matter to God who is having sex, or even how, so long as it is done in mutual love between adults. Sex becomes sinful, becomes adultery or worse when sex is used mindlessly or carelessly, exploitively, violently, in any way that anyone is harmed, and that includes harming yourself. Unsafe sex is a sin because it can cause harm. You can die from it. One of my closest friends is going to die because they had unsafe sex; once. Sex before you are physically or emotionally ready for it can be devastating. It is not the action that tells us if something is sinful, it is the result of the action. And yes, we are culpable, responsible for knowing this difference. We are beautiful, wonderful creatures, and we are very fragile creatures. We break easily. We are horribly distractible. We constantly get confused and treat things more importantly than they should be treated. Idolatry, treating as God that which is not God, this is our primary individual sin.
More conservative theologies of sin focus a lot of energy on the individual nature of sin. In the choices and actions that you, and you and I take; that is where the big break in relationship with God comes. We are certainly sinful creatures, but the big sin, to be a big, big sinner requires group effort. Reinhold Neibuhr’s Moral Man, Immoral Society teaches us that individually our sins are small, and primarily hurt ourselves, but collectively, joined together in sin as a society, that is how the Holocaust happened. That is how 6 million people have been killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo so far. 6 million and counting. That is how between 2009 and 2010 the homeless census in Eugene increased by 47%. That is how we have children living in campers in church parking lots, and who are glad for it. This is the result of what we call structural sin. Structural sin occurs when whole societies and cultures take on traits that prevent right relationship with God and neighbor. Structural sin the plight of women in Saudi Arabia, and many, most other places. Structural sin is the oppression of indigenous peoples in every corner of the world. Structural sin is the blatant and latent racism and continued segregation of our nation, he says to a vastly white congregation. That 1% can control wealth beyond imagining and hold all the keys to Caesar’s kingdom while student loan subsidies are being slashed by $18 billion, Social Security, Medicare and Medicade are on the chopping block. I have a 67 year old mentally retarded aunt on Mass Health, the equivalent of OHP, and her dental care was just eliminated. Sin. And she cannot get glasses any more. Sin. And in the worst employment climate in two generations, unemployment benefits are not being extended… When a society forgets its least of these… there is some sin of biblical proportion.
And original sin… we cannot forget that, but I don’t know. I take the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to represent the archtype of loneliness. The apple had the power to delude us into thinking that we are separate, even different from God and from each other. We are not. I heard this story about the author Madeline D’Engle and I think it is largely true. I heard it in a sermon, so you never can tell, poetic liscense and all. Some friends of hers had a 4 year old and a new baby. One day the 4 year old went into her baby sister’s room and the parents overheard her saying, “Please, tell me something about God, I think I am forgetting.” Is that what growing up means? Putting on original sin?
We have homework this week. This coming week I want you all to think about sin. I want you to think about the things you encounter in your life that pull your eyes away from the prize that is God. Think about what prevents you from being happy. Whatever is preventing inner happiness is sinful. I want you to pay attention to the things that get in the way of you being a peaceful family, that derail your efforts to be a patient friend, a good husband or wife or partner, or parent or grand parent. Think about the things that keep you from being the clear reflection of God Almighty, the imago dei that you are in spades. Next Sunday we will get back to John and the man in the powder-blue jacket. We’ll get on with repentance. The answer to our prayers. The reason for this and every season. And until then, no sinning. AMEN.
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Windy and I grew up North of Boston, home to, among other things, the Topsfield Fair. It is the oldest county fair in the nation, this coming year is its bicentennial. It is great: rabbits, horse shows, fired dough, real honest to goodness carneys and consistently the place where the world’s largest pumpkins are shown, and did I mention the fried dough? The record is something like 1650 lbs.. The last thing I did in Massachusetts before leaving was go to the opening night of the fair with Win and the girls. The fair looms large in the North Shore’s imagination.
Back in high school, I was on my way into the fair and there was a man standing near one of the entrances. This man looms large in my imagination. He was wearing a powder-blue jacket like old men used to wear, and he had a holder, one of those old cigarette girl holders full of pamphlets, religious tracts. Written on the back of his jacket in black magic marker were the words “Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe”.
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins….”
That man in the powder-blue jacket was a voice crying in the wilderness. He looms large in my imagination much like John the Baptist does, probably because he was doing the same thing John was doing; being a religious wacko, going where he was not expected or particularly welcomed, dressing oddly, in general someone you do not want to have over for dinner. Mostly, though, both of these men, they spoke with conviction about repentance, the need to repent… No one, well, at least very few of us in Anglican/Episcopalian circles like to talk about repentance; I think because it begs us to be so repentant! No, actually I think we do not talk about repentance with any conviction because we too often do not talk with any conviction about sin. And let’s face it, the entire reason for the Christ Event, for the coming of God in the form of a human being is the whole problem of sin. “Lamb of God who….” The thing is, if we do not understand sin, then we cannot understand repentance. And if we cannot understand repentance, then we miss the point of John the Baptist and the guy in the blue wind breaker which means we miss the depth and breadth of the ministry of Jesus Christ whom they herald and if we miss that we might as well skip Christmas… so as not to be a grinch, let’s save Christmas and talk about sin. Sound good?
What is sin?
Ok, let’s try this on for size: Everyone pick up a BCP and turn to page 843. “An Outline of the Faith,” (Turn the page) “commonly called the Catechism.” Turn to page 848. Would someone read the answer to What is sin? “Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” How does that sound? Sounds reasonable. Sin thought of this way could even be forgiveable, no? The catechism is not policy, it is not something we need to accept word for word, it is a point of departure for prayer and learning about our faith. And in it is a pretty good starting point.
Sin: “the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” Another way to say it is that sin is anything that gets in the way of right relationship with God and Neighbor. What this really means is that the sin we need to talk about in church, what John the Baptist got all excited about, what God is ultimately concerned with, is not so much a law forbidding specific actions or behaviors, but a recognition that some things we do and think are disordered, they prevent us from seeing others for who they really are, for seeing our selves for who we really are, for feeling the true consequences of our own action and inaction, that lays road blocks between us and God, the true nature of things. Sin is that which prevents us from being what we are supposed to be. When it comes to sin it is not so much about doing as it is about being.
Drinking too much is sinful not because of the drinking, but because of the drunkenness. It is the too much part that is sinful, and for some of us, one Drink is too much, it treads into the world of sin. Ever tried to pray drunk? Be a good friend drunk? No. Being gluttonous, hording material things, be it food, possesions, money, anything beyond what we need is sinful because, first, having too much means others can not have enough (neighbor) and second, whenever humans get too concerned with things we are not concerned enough with God. Anything that gets in the way you being your best self, is sinful.
Take sex. (Really, how can we talk about sin without talking about sex?) Sex is not a sin. It something that people do, and joyfully. Men, women, transgendered, in whatever combination, it does not matter to God who is having sex, or even how, so long as it is done in mutual love between adults. Sex becomes sinful, becomes adultery or worse when sex is used mindlessly or carelessly, exploitively, violently, in any way that anyone is harmed, and that includes harming yourself. Unsafe sex is a sin because it can cause harm. You can die from it. One of my closest friends is going to die because they had unsafe sex; once. Sex before you are physically or emotionally ready for it can be devastating. It is not the action that tells us if something is sinful, it is the result of the action. And yes, we are culpable, responsible for knowing this difference. We are beautiful, wonderful creatures, and we are very fragile creatures. We break easily. We are horribly distractible. We constantly get confused and treat things more importantly than they should be treated. Idolatry, treating as God that which is not God, this is our primary individual sin.
More conservative theologies of sin focus a lot of energy on the individual nature of sin. In the choices and actions that you, and you and I take; that is where the big break in relationship with God comes. We are certainly sinful creatures, but the big sin, to be a big, big sinner requires group effort. Reinhold Neibuhr’s Moral Man, Immoral Society teaches us that individually our sins are small, and primarily hurt ourselves, but collectively, joined together in sin as a society, that is how the Holocaust happened. That is how 6 million people have been killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo so far. 6 million and counting. That is how between 2009 and 2010 the homeless census in Eugene increased by 47%. That is how we have children living in campers in church parking lots, and who are glad for it. This is the result of what we call structural sin. Structural sin occurs when whole societies and cultures take on traits that prevent right relationship with God and neighbor. Structural sin the plight of women in Saudi Arabia, and many, most other places. Structural sin is the oppression of indigenous peoples in every corner of the world. Structural sin is the blatant and latent racism and continued segregation of our nation, he says to a vastly white congregation. That 1% can control wealth beyond imagining and hold all the keys to Caesar’s kingdom while student loan subsidies are being slashed by $18 billion, Social Security, Medicare and Medicade are on the chopping block. I have a 67 year old mentally retarded aunt on Mass Health, the equivalent of OHP, and her dental care was just eliminated. Sin. And she cannot get glasses any more. Sin. And in the worst employment climate in two generations, unemployment benefits are not being extended… When a society forgets its least of these… there is some sin of biblical proportion.
And original sin… we cannot forget that, but I don’t know. I take the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to represent the archtype of loneliness. The apple had the power to delude us into thinking that we are separate, even different from God and from each other. We are not. I heard this story about the author Madeline D’Engle and I think it is largely true. I heard it in a sermon, so you never can tell, poetic liscense and all. Some friends of hers had a 4 year old and a new baby. One day the 4 year old went into her baby sister’s room and the parents overheard her saying, “Please, tell me something about God, I think I am forgetting.” Is that what growing up means? Putting on original sin?
We have homework this week. This coming week I want you all to think about sin. I want you to think about the things you encounter in your life that pull your eyes away from the prize that is God. Think about what prevents you from being happy. Whatever is preventing inner happiness is sinful. I want you to pay attention to the things that get in the way of you being a peaceful family, that derail your efforts to be a patient friend, a good husband or wife or partner, or parent or grand parent. Think about the things that keep you from being the clear reflection of God Almighty, the imago dei that you are in spades. Next Sunday we will get back to John and the man in the powder-blue jacket. We’ll get on with repentance. The answer to our prayers. The reason for this and every season. And until then, no sinning. AMEN.
Monday, November 28, 2011
November 27, 2011, First Sunday in Advent
Year B, Advent 1 November 27, 2011
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Sometimes things are not what they seem.
The end of the Church year, lectionary wise, is kind of brutal. Weeping and gnashing of teeth in the parable of the talents; the goats cast into eternal hell fires… and now this week, Advent 1, the first Sunday of the church calendar, the re-creation of the endless cycle of time we live in begins with Mark’s Apocalyptic discourse. “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light…” Rough. It reminds us that Christianity, or at least Christian scripture, is not for the faint of heart.
What does the word apocalypse mean? Total destruction. Yes. Mark was written in some ugly times, somewhere between 64 (the persecution of Christians by Nero because of the burning of Rome) and 70 (the desolating sacrilege of the temple). What else does it mean? Revelation of the future, hence the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine is more commonly referred to as The Book of Revelation.
“Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down….” Thus says the Prophet Isaiah apocalyptically. So here is another Bible quiz. The heavens were torn open in the Biblical record when? Clue, it happened twice, both times apocalyptically; one representing the total destruction meaning of apocalypse, the other referring to the revelation of the future nature of the world. The first was in the beginning, in Genesis. The dome of the heavens was torn apart and what poured into the world? Water. The flood. When was the second time? The Baptism of our Lord. “And the heavens were torn open and the Spirit of the LORD descended like a dove upon Him.” “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down….” Sometimes things are not what they seem.
We are just starting Advent. This is my favorite season of the Church year. It is the season of creation, of waiting for the new creation in the incarnation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Holiday wise, it does not get any better than this. Let’s put Advent, the season of creation in perspective with the larger Christian story, even the largest Christian story, our cosmology, our understanding of the universe.
To do this, we have to go back, way, way back to the rivers of Babylon where we sat down and remembered Zion. Israel was taken in bondage to Babylon in the 6th century BCE. As fate would have it, Hebrew writing and scholarship was coming of age in the time of the Babylonian captivity. It was the Axial Age, the couple hundred-year span of human history when the consciousness of our species collectively increased exponentially. Plato and Aristotle were running around in Greece. Confucious in China, Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha) in South Asia, and it was the time when the books of Moses were first put to papyrus. The priestly scholars who began to write down the developing Jewish mythology of creation were scholarly enough to have become familiar with the Babylonian mythology of creation. This came in the form of an epic poem called the Enuma Elish. The Babylonians were going through an evolution too, and their creation narrative reflects this. Since Pre-history, we were all in the Goddess culture, worshipping the divine Earth Mother in Her curvaceous gorgeousness. Cycles of stars and moon and seasons reflected the dark watery mysteries of maternal fertility.
The Enuma Elish describes the “evolution” of Babylonian cosmology, from the centrality of an amorphous watery, maternal goddess Tiamat, in whose immense body was contained the universe, to the dominance of a young, angry storm God Marduke. Marduke got into a fight with Tiamat’s consort and killed him. Tiamat was enraged and the two fought. Marduke raised his sword and cleaved Tiamat in two. He separated the two halves and made them like a dome, and inside that dome, a more understandable life happened, one sheltered from the Chaos of Mystery. It was a decidedly feminine Mystery. “God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, separating the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.” That is our story; that the world we know is a contained by a dome cleaved from the Body of the Goddess to hold back the soup of infinite Mystery and Chaos. That is our story and it is Babylonian. Sometimes things are not what they seem.
The dome of heaven was torn apart by God first as a redux, to reboot. Things got off to a bad start and the destructive apocalyptic nature of reality was released and the Earth was purified with the Mystery of Water of Great Depth. The dome of the heavens, this thing constructed to keep the true nature of things walled out was torn open a second time when God revealed God’s self to us in the form of Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, God from God, light from light, True God from True God. And he was here, walking around, being human. Being our salvation.
What I am saying is that this dome of the heavens is a myth, a powerful and pervasive myth, but one not true. This is what Christ reveals. There was the old covenant, then there was version 2.0. 2.0, Jesus Christ, shows us that there is no dome; that the heavens and earth are not separate, that dualities are not real. The Incarnation of Jesus shows us that being can be understood in terms much broader than what we can see and feel and hear, that all equations do not have to balance in a way we rationally expect them to. Look with eyes wide open into the eyes of a baby or the eyes of anyone you deeply love… nothing computes there. Nothing adds up, but it is the most real and truthful thing I have ever experienced, looking into the windows of someone’s soul.
Thinking inside the dome we dread the unknown. Thinking inside the dome we value only the seen, not the unseen; but God created that, too. Thinking inside the dome we fear the greatest gift God gave in the Creation act: Mystery. Mystery this is the true nature of things and we cannot continue to live with the mystery of God and the world walled off behind bad religious mythology. We need to say to the myth of the dome what Glinda said when the Wicked Witch threatened her and Dorothy, “Rubbish, you have no power here.” O! that we were in Munchinland with Glinda. The constraints of the dome are powerful enemies, but only if we let them be.
The theologian Paul Santmire writes that the church happens under a hole in the heavens. It is like right above us, it happens each time we gather. The heavens are torn apart and the power and the glory of God is revealed in the people, in us gathered around this table in the actions we are about to take together. Church happens under a hole in the heavens where Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior is revealed to us. In Advent we are again practicing waiting for His arrival, cloaked in flesh, an infant child born in poverty, into a world of empire and violence and despair and the indelible knowledge and hope that God loves us absolutely, unconditionally and eternally, time and time again no matter what. That is the story we as Christians hold up for the sake of the world. Sometimes things are not what they seem. And sometimes that is great. AMEN.
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Sometimes things are not what they seem.
The end of the Church year, lectionary wise, is kind of brutal. Weeping and gnashing of teeth in the parable of the talents; the goats cast into eternal hell fires… and now this week, Advent 1, the first Sunday of the church calendar, the re-creation of the endless cycle of time we live in begins with Mark’s Apocalyptic discourse. “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light…” Rough. It reminds us that Christianity, or at least Christian scripture, is not for the faint of heart.
What does the word apocalypse mean? Total destruction. Yes. Mark was written in some ugly times, somewhere between 64 (the persecution of Christians by Nero because of the burning of Rome) and 70 (the desolating sacrilege of the temple). What else does it mean? Revelation of the future, hence the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine is more commonly referred to as The Book of Revelation.
“Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down….” Thus says the Prophet Isaiah apocalyptically. So here is another Bible quiz. The heavens were torn open in the Biblical record when? Clue, it happened twice, both times apocalyptically; one representing the total destruction meaning of apocalypse, the other referring to the revelation of the future nature of the world. The first was in the beginning, in Genesis. The dome of the heavens was torn apart and what poured into the world? Water. The flood. When was the second time? The Baptism of our Lord. “And the heavens were torn open and the Spirit of the LORD descended like a dove upon Him.” “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down….” Sometimes things are not what they seem.
We are just starting Advent. This is my favorite season of the Church year. It is the season of creation, of waiting for the new creation in the incarnation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Holiday wise, it does not get any better than this. Let’s put Advent, the season of creation in perspective with the larger Christian story, even the largest Christian story, our cosmology, our understanding of the universe.
To do this, we have to go back, way, way back to the rivers of Babylon where we sat down and remembered Zion. Israel was taken in bondage to Babylon in the 6th century BCE. As fate would have it, Hebrew writing and scholarship was coming of age in the time of the Babylonian captivity. It was the Axial Age, the couple hundred-year span of human history when the consciousness of our species collectively increased exponentially. Plato and Aristotle were running around in Greece. Confucious in China, Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha) in South Asia, and it was the time when the books of Moses were first put to papyrus. The priestly scholars who began to write down the developing Jewish mythology of creation were scholarly enough to have become familiar with the Babylonian mythology of creation. This came in the form of an epic poem called the Enuma Elish. The Babylonians were going through an evolution too, and their creation narrative reflects this. Since Pre-history, we were all in the Goddess culture, worshipping the divine Earth Mother in Her curvaceous gorgeousness. Cycles of stars and moon and seasons reflected the dark watery mysteries of maternal fertility.
The Enuma Elish describes the “evolution” of Babylonian cosmology, from the centrality of an amorphous watery, maternal goddess Tiamat, in whose immense body was contained the universe, to the dominance of a young, angry storm God Marduke. Marduke got into a fight with Tiamat’s consort and killed him. Tiamat was enraged and the two fought. Marduke raised his sword and cleaved Tiamat in two. He separated the two halves and made them like a dome, and inside that dome, a more understandable life happened, one sheltered from the Chaos of Mystery. It was a decidedly feminine Mystery. “God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, separating the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.” That is our story; that the world we know is a contained by a dome cleaved from the Body of the Goddess to hold back the soup of infinite Mystery and Chaos. That is our story and it is Babylonian. Sometimes things are not what they seem.
The dome of heaven was torn apart by God first as a redux, to reboot. Things got off to a bad start and the destructive apocalyptic nature of reality was released and the Earth was purified with the Mystery of Water of Great Depth. The dome of the heavens, this thing constructed to keep the true nature of things walled out was torn open a second time when God revealed God’s self to us in the form of Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, God from God, light from light, True God from True God. And he was here, walking around, being human. Being our salvation.
What I am saying is that this dome of the heavens is a myth, a powerful and pervasive myth, but one not true. This is what Christ reveals. There was the old covenant, then there was version 2.0. 2.0, Jesus Christ, shows us that there is no dome; that the heavens and earth are not separate, that dualities are not real. The Incarnation of Jesus shows us that being can be understood in terms much broader than what we can see and feel and hear, that all equations do not have to balance in a way we rationally expect them to. Look with eyes wide open into the eyes of a baby or the eyes of anyone you deeply love… nothing computes there. Nothing adds up, but it is the most real and truthful thing I have ever experienced, looking into the windows of someone’s soul.
Thinking inside the dome we dread the unknown. Thinking inside the dome we value only the seen, not the unseen; but God created that, too. Thinking inside the dome we fear the greatest gift God gave in the Creation act: Mystery. Mystery this is the true nature of things and we cannot continue to live with the mystery of God and the world walled off behind bad religious mythology. We need to say to the myth of the dome what Glinda said when the Wicked Witch threatened her and Dorothy, “Rubbish, you have no power here.” O! that we were in Munchinland with Glinda. The constraints of the dome are powerful enemies, but only if we let them be.
The theologian Paul Santmire writes that the church happens under a hole in the heavens. It is like right above us, it happens each time we gather. The heavens are torn apart and the power and the glory of God is revealed in the people, in us gathered around this table in the actions we are about to take together. Church happens under a hole in the heavens where Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior is revealed to us. In Advent we are again practicing waiting for His arrival, cloaked in flesh, an infant child born in poverty, into a world of empire and violence and despair and the indelible knowledge and hope that God loves us absolutely, unconditionally and eternally, time and time again no matter what. That is the story we as Christians hold up for the sake of the world. Sometimes things are not what they seem. And sometimes that is great. AMEN.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Christ the King, November 20, 2011
Christ the King, November 20, 2011
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Windy and I lived in Portland nine years ago. I was interning in a church up there. Every one remembers what happened in March/April 2003, right? Right. Remember the mess up to Portland? It was really living up to George HW’s moniker “Little Beruit.” It was my first introduction to Eugene as I heard at one protest, “The Eugene anarchists are here, they’re the worst! (meaning best)” It was pretty exciting.
Folks from the church I was working in were quite active in protesting the downward spiral towards war, and one nasty, cold, rainy night, like only nights down by the waterfront in Portland can be, we were part of a big candle light vigil. We were somewhat huddled against each other, backs to the wind, trying to keep warm and keep our candles lit. From a far I bet we looked like a glowing cluster of yaks. We were standing there in silence, praying, and a presumably homeless, decidedly drunk man pushed his way into the circle. He sat down, looking around. “What is everyone doing?” He had a loud, disagreeable voice. “Why does everyone have candles? I don’t have a candle.” And he started singing, kind of. I have never seen that many church folks look so mortified at once. Well, a young pastor there walked over to this man, handed him a candle, and helped him light it. The man said thanks and sat there quietly for the remaining 20 minutes of the vigil. I do not know if he had any idea what we were doing there, but he sat quietly and kept that beautiful, warm little flame safe a top his candle. As we walked away, he kept sitting there, doing a better job of keeping his candle lit that we all did.
“I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me… Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.”
Does anyone recognize the term “preferential option for the poor”? What does it mean? It means that God prefers the poor, God is on the side of the poor. Does anyone know where it comes from? It comes from the world of liberation theology. It means that God, that Jesus Christ is most potently and palpably present with the weakest, the most at risk, the most broken and poverty stricken. The face of our savior is most clearly witnessed in the faces of the most beaten down by our world, by our community, lets face it, if not locally then certainly globally, by us. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these you did it to me.”
Gustavo Gutiérrez was a Dominican priest who grew up in the slums of Lima, Peru, as difficult a city as there is in South America. And Gutiérrez grew up in the middle of it. He wrote A Theology of Liberation in 1971. The term “Preferential option for the poor” arises in this groundbreaking book. He lived in the world that most humans throughout history have known as a reality: a world of squalor, of sickness, of violence, of cold nights and dirty water and of really not knowing if you can feed your children today. That was certainly the condition of Jesus’ Galilee. And this little mestizo priest wrote, “I desire that the hunger for God may remain, that the hunger for bread may be satisfied… Hunger for God, yes; hunger for bread, no.” Of course tidings of great joy have also coursed through humans engaged in suffering and survival; it is not all terrible all of the time. This is what Gutiérrez and his contemporaries saw in the slums of Lima and San Salvador, and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. In the midst of body, mind and spirit bending poverty, joy happens. Love happens. Life happens. Christ happens. In fact, Christ happens most in the places of deepest suffering. That is one of the paradoxes, the great mysteries of our faith. Can you imagine anything more liberating? The more miserable you are, the sicker you are, the more depressed you are the more our God is there with you.
This follows in Christ’s teaching that he came not for the righteous, but the sinners, not the well, but the sick. God goes where God is most needed. And where is that? Where there is the most need. Where there is the most brokenness. Where there is the most pain and heartbreak. In the darkest nights, in the hardest places, in the most desolate lives, we will find our Savior and our salvation.
So if you haven’t noticed, I am male. I am awfully white. I happen to be straight, and married and with healthy children. I grew up loved and safe, and have kept up the habit of being well fed. I was afforded the privilege of way too much elite education. In short, I have to be careful about being too self-righteous because when we are talking about the least of these, I am pretty sure what side of the equation I am on. I am in the 99%, which I am certain God prefers, but I, many of us maybe in this place, are not among the least in the kingdom.
Does this mean that God is not with me, is not with us in our relative comfort and wealth and privilege? No. God so loved the world that not only were we given the only begotten Son, but we each were also, each of us given life. Full, loved, blessed life. This is a sign that you are loved by God unconditionally. You are. But the preferential option for the poor, the idea that God in Christ gravitates to the places of most suffering teaches us that God is most present not in our shiny, happy places, the places we like to lead with, that we bring out on first dates, but God is most present in our hurt. Our broken bits. In the sores we carry on our bodies and in our hearts. God is sort of like a holy T-cell, rushing to the broken part because that is where God is most needed.
By this rule it would mean that God is most present in me when I am feeling most cranky. So, let’s say at 5:00 most mornings I am most bursting with God? Well, sort of. How does this work? Some years back I knew someone who was going through a really hard time. Her marriage was complicated. She had young children. She was depressed and everything was stressful. She felt incompetent, she felt like a lousy mom. That must be a terrible feeling. I don’t think I would have known how bad things were going for her, or how badly she felt, but she told me some of the things she had been feeling, and doing and not doing with her kids, quite literally to the least of these, you know what, it was like she was held in the arms of a host of angels. Telling me some pretty ugly things, opening herself up to God and the world made what conventional wisdom says to be an ugly thing, a lousy mom, it turned it, it turned her into a beautiful thing, a child of God as hurt and broken as can be, AND who needs, and wants the light of Christ to shine in her. And it did. Brilliantly.
There is an old rabbinic teaching that tells us that God sits atop our hearts and it is not until they are broken that the Word trickles in. This is the heart of liberation theology. God is most present where God is most needed. When we accept our brokenness, our ugliness, our distance from God not as some punishment or mark of the evil one but as another opening for God to enter; the kingdom is that much closer to us. With the eyes of our hearts enlightened, may we know the hope to which we are called. AMEN
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Windy and I lived in Portland nine years ago. I was interning in a church up there. Every one remembers what happened in March/April 2003, right? Right. Remember the mess up to Portland? It was really living up to George HW’s moniker “Little Beruit.” It was my first introduction to Eugene as I heard at one protest, “The Eugene anarchists are here, they’re the worst! (meaning best)” It was pretty exciting.
Folks from the church I was working in were quite active in protesting the downward spiral towards war, and one nasty, cold, rainy night, like only nights down by the waterfront in Portland can be, we were part of a big candle light vigil. We were somewhat huddled against each other, backs to the wind, trying to keep warm and keep our candles lit. From a far I bet we looked like a glowing cluster of yaks. We were standing there in silence, praying, and a presumably homeless, decidedly drunk man pushed his way into the circle. He sat down, looking around. “What is everyone doing?” He had a loud, disagreeable voice. “Why does everyone have candles? I don’t have a candle.” And he started singing, kind of. I have never seen that many church folks look so mortified at once. Well, a young pastor there walked over to this man, handed him a candle, and helped him light it. The man said thanks and sat there quietly for the remaining 20 minutes of the vigil. I do not know if he had any idea what we were doing there, but he sat quietly and kept that beautiful, warm little flame safe a top his candle. As we walked away, he kept sitting there, doing a better job of keeping his candle lit that we all did.
“I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me… Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.”
Does anyone recognize the term “preferential option for the poor”? What does it mean? It means that God prefers the poor, God is on the side of the poor. Does anyone know where it comes from? It comes from the world of liberation theology. It means that God, that Jesus Christ is most potently and palpably present with the weakest, the most at risk, the most broken and poverty stricken. The face of our savior is most clearly witnessed in the faces of the most beaten down by our world, by our community, lets face it, if not locally then certainly globally, by us. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these you did it to me.”
Gustavo Gutiérrez was a Dominican priest who grew up in the slums of Lima, Peru, as difficult a city as there is in South America. And Gutiérrez grew up in the middle of it. He wrote A Theology of Liberation in 1971. The term “Preferential option for the poor” arises in this groundbreaking book. He lived in the world that most humans throughout history have known as a reality: a world of squalor, of sickness, of violence, of cold nights and dirty water and of really not knowing if you can feed your children today. That was certainly the condition of Jesus’ Galilee. And this little mestizo priest wrote, “I desire that the hunger for God may remain, that the hunger for bread may be satisfied… Hunger for God, yes; hunger for bread, no.” Of course tidings of great joy have also coursed through humans engaged in suffering and survival; it is not all terrible all of the time. This is what Gutiérrez and his contemporaries saw in the slums of Lima and San Salvador, and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. In the midst of body, mind and spirit bending poverty, joy happens. Love happens. Life happens. Christ happens. In fact, Christ happens most in the places of deepest suffering. That is one of the paradoxes, the great mysteries of our faith. Can you imagine anything more liberating? The more miserable you are, the sicker you are, the more depressed you are the more our God is there with you.
This follows in Christ’s teaching that he came not for the righteous, but the sinners, not the well, but the sick. God goes where God is most needed. And where is that? Where there is the most need. Where there is the most brokenness. Where there is the most pain and heartbreak. In the darkest nights, in the hardest places, in the most desolate lives, we will find our Savior and our salvation.
So if you haven’t noticed, I am male. I am awfully white. I happen to be straight, and married and with healthy children. I grew up loved and safe, and have kept up the habit of being well fed. I was afforded the privilege of way too much elite education. In short, I have to be careful about being too self-righteous because when we are talking about the least of these, I am pretty sure what side of the equation I am on. I am in the 99%, which I am certain God prefers, but I, many of us maybe in this place, are not among the least in the kingdom.
Does this mean that God is not with me, is not with us in our relative comfort and wealth and privilege? No. God so loved the world that not only were we given the only begotten Son, but we each were also, each of us given life. Full, loved, blessed life. This is a sign that you are loved by God unconditionally. You are. But the preferential option for the poor, the idea that God in Christ gravitates to the places of most suffering teaches us that God is most present not in our shiny, happy places, the places we like to lead with, that we bring out on first dates, but God is most present in our hurt. Our broken bits. In the sores we carry on our bodies and in our hearts. God is sort of like a holy T-cell, rushing to the broken part because that is where God is most needed.
By this rule it would mean that God is most present in me when I am feeling most cranky. So, let’s say at 5:00 most mornings I am most bursting with God? Well, sort of. How does this work? Some years back I knew someone who was going through a really hard time. Her marriage was complicated. She had young children. She was depressed and everything was stressful. She felt incompetent, she felt like a lousy mom. That must be a terrible feeling. I don’t think I would have known how bad things were going for her, or how badly she felt, but she told me some of the things she had been feeling, and doing and not doing with her kids, quite literally to the least of these, you know what, it was like she was held in the arms of a host of angels. Telling me some pretty ugly things, opening herself up to God and the world made what conventional wisdom says to be an ugly thing, a lousy mom, it turned it, it turned her into a beautiful thing, a child of God as hurt and broken as can be, AND who needs, and wants the light of Christ to shine in her. And it did. Brilliantly.
There is an old rabbinic teaching that tells us that God sits atop our hearts and it is not until they are broken that the Word trickles in. This is the heart of liberation theology. God is most present where God is most needed. When we accept our brokenness, our ugliness, our distance from God not as some punishment or mark of the evil one but as another opening for God to enter; the kingdom is that much closer to us. With the eyes of our hearts enlightened, may we know the hope to which we are called. AMEN
November 13, 2011, 22nd Sunday after Pentecost
November 13, 2011, 22nd Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
The parable of the talents. This is a hard scripture to hold on to. It was hard to write on. Sometimes a sermon just flows. Sometimes it feels like the Holy Spirit is just dancing with my finger tips on the keyboard. Sometimes it feels more like I keep stepping on them like so many toes.
It is a hard story to hear. To the two who did well, who invested wisely and brought their master 100% returns, they were welcomed into the master’s joy. Who does not want to be welcomed into someone’s joy? But the one who was scared, “you reap where you did not sow, gathered where you did not scatter”, who buried the talent in the field, he was to be thrown into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
A preacher I knew used to have a good way to talk to someone who said “I do not believe in God.” The preacher would say, “Describe the God you don’t believe in and I’ll bet, I do not believe in that God either.” To be clear, I do not believe in, nor have I experienced in my life a God that casts anyone into any kind of outer darkness. I have, though, known more than a few people who have been cast out by their fellow humans, and those who cast themselves into some pretty horrible places all by them selves.
This is a hard scripture because there is noting neat or tidy about it. It is not pretty. And worse yet, it describes a lot of people’s experience of the world. Fearfulness. Enslavement to all sorts of things. The arbitrary nature of good fortune. I mean why did one slave have five talents, another two and the last one to begin with? Sometimes there are clear answers for why some have and some have-not: structural racism; cycles of generational poverty; the insidiousness of domestic violence and sexual abuse; the heavy burden of mental and physical illness. Addiction. And then sometimes… not so much, we do not have clear answers. We do not have a theological category for bad luck. Nothing tidy in this parable.
Here is the context. Matthew was writing not too long after 70 CE. Who knows what happed in 70 in Matthew’s neighborhood? Right, the destruction of the Temple by the Roman imperial legions. It would be like Wall Street, Washington DC and every major religious group’s national headquarters were simultaneously destroyed by an occupying army. It was a desolating sacrilege.
Even in this time of utter fragmentation of a society, there were those who clung to the temple cult. The Judiasm of Deuteronomy, where YHWH demanded blood offerings in a specific place, the Temple in Jerusalem. It was folly. The Temple was not going to be rebuilt. This was the beginning of the Diaspora. It had been a precious thing, this cult, but its leaders were fearfully protecting their tradition, hiding it under a bushel; burying it in a field.
At the same time, in that season of desolating sacrilege, even in that dark time there was a tiny sect of people who followed the Way. It was the Way of a messianic peasant dissident who had been executed by the Romans at the behest of the collaborators who led the Temple and the government. Their Way was an immanently optimistic way. Their leader, Jesus, martyred 40 years prior, had risen from the dead and was expected to return. Expected any day. Any day. For 40 years, the followers of this way, a way not even calling itself Christian yet, expected His return any day. And they knew that they had something really good. Really, really Good. Good news about a God that was available, freely offered to everyone, not just Jews like themselves, but to everyone, starting with the Greek speaking peoples Paul carried the Word to. And the folks Matthew was writing for worked hard, really, really hard to spread this word and build the lives they knew they had to live and they fully expected that any day now, any day now Jesus the Annointed One of God would return and the age would come to an end. And, not but, and, they kept on working and living and praying and having families, and telling everyone they could that God loved them and that to truly experience the love of God required us to love God fully and love our neighbor as our self.
The slave with five talents and the one with two, they knew they had something of value and they did with it what the master expected. The exploitive nature of these relationships, all the great Marxist critique of the nature of capital that this story seems to beg for is not the point. Do not get me wrong, Marxist critiques of the nature of capital are generally complimentary to a Christian worldview. The point, however, is that the slave who had one talent, one nugget of great value, he squandered the gift he had been given. If he had truly valued that which he had been entrusted with, he would have done something with it. He didn’t. His fear guided him. He wasted the opportunity he had been given and then the master is back and then came the whole outer darkness thing… bad choice.
So what does this mean for us? Well, in a way it means for us the same it meant for Matthew’s people. Of course, the Great Recession and the slow motion collapse of European economies we are not at the level of desolating sacrilege. But the Church is in decline. The way we have understood and practiced our faith and how we have lived as a religious community, like assuming a time when most folks went to church on Sundays, that we have enough money to do what we want, that churches grow… that time is over. We are entering the post-Christian century, and to my mind, this is a very good thing, the best thing that could happen to the church. Our anscestors left us a beautiful church of great value, but for too long, for the past fifty years probably, we have been hiding this beautiful thing in a hole, fearful of fate, of not succeeding, of losing something we are incredibly attached to. And the bugaboo looming on the fringes of our perception, that cruel master with the power to banish into the outer darkness, that is not a vengeful God, it is the cold hard drumbeat of progress, of evolution, of change… so many of us have been fearful of the church’s decline that we have hunkered down. Faced inboard. Steadied ourselves against the onslaught. Buried our talent in the ground.
What Jesus Christ demands of us and with loving kindness empowers us to do is to let that light we hold shine in the darkness. Our own inner light of God needs to shine in the world in the face of adversity. In the face of lay offs and sickness and heart break and death, when we can remember that God abides in us, always and everywhere no matter how dark the night seems, our light shines brighter even bright enough for others to find there way by.
And together, in the face of an institution in decline, when we together witness into the world the light of Christ, practicing living in the Kingdom of God by living like we are in the Kingdom of God… you know, being kind, sharing, taking care of each other and the world around us, living with eyes wide open AND not being cowered by fear… this is The Way; it needs to be Our Way. That is our pearl of great price sowed widely, and watch it will return 30 and 60 and even 100 fold. Those kind of returns would make the most greedy capitalist happy; imagine how happy our humble Lord Jesus Christ will be with our diligence? A light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. AMEN
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
The parable of the talents. This is a hard scripture to hold on to. It was hard to write on. Sometimes a sermon just flows. Sometimes it feels like the Holy Spirit is just dancing with my finger tips on the keyboard. Sometimes it feels more like I keep stepping on them like so many toes.
It is a hard story to hear. To the two who did well, who invested wisely and brought their master 100% returns, they were welcomed into the master’s joy. Who does not want to be welcomed into someone’s joy? But the one who was scared, “you reap where you did not sow, gathered where you did not scatter”, who buried the talent in the field, he was to be thrown into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
A preacher I knew used to have a good way to talk to someone who said “I do not believe in God.” The preacher would say, “Describe the God you don’t believe in and I’ll bet, I do not believe in that God either.” To be clear, I do not believe in, nor have I experienced in my life a God that casts anyone into any kind of outer darkness. I have, though, known more than a few people who have been cast out by their fellow humans, and those who cast themselves into some pretty horrible places all by them selves.
This is a hard scripture because there is noting neat or tidy about it. It is not pretty. And worse yet, it describes a lot of people’s experience of the world. Fearfulness. Enslavement to all sorts of things. The arbitrary nature of good fortune. I mean why did one slave have five talents, another two and the last one to begin with? Sometimes there are clear answers for why some have and some have-not: structural racism; cycles of generational poverty; the insidiousness of domestic violence and sexual abuse; the heavy burden of mental and physical illness. Addiction. And then sometimes… not so much, we do not have clear answers. We do not have a theological category for bad luck. Nothing tidy in this parable.
Here is the context. Matthew was writing not too long after 70 CE. Who knows what happed in 70 in Matthew’s neighborhood? Right, the destruction of the Temple by the Roman imperial legions. It would be like Wall Street, Washington DC and every major religious group’s national headquarters were simultaneously destroyed by an occupying army. It was a desolating sacrilege.
Even in this time of utter fragmentation of a society, there were those who clung to the temple cult. The Judiasm of Deuteronomy, where YHWH demanded blood offerings in a specific place, the Temple in Jerusalem. It was folly. The Temple was not going to be rebuilt. This was the beginning of the Diaspora. It had been a precious thing, this cult, but its leaders were fearfully protecting their tradition, hiding it under a bushel; burying it in a field.
At the same time, in that season of desolating sacrilege, even in that dark time there was a tiny sect of people who followed the Way. It was the Way of a messianic peasant dissident who had been executed by the Romans at the behest of the collaborators who led the Temple and the government. Their Way was an immanently optimistic way. Their leader, Jesus, martyred 40 years prior, had risen from the dead and was expected to return. Expected any day. Any day. For 40 years, the followers of this way, a way not even calling itself Christian yet, expected His return any day. And they knew that they had something really good. Really, really Good. Good news about a God that was available, freely offered to everyone, not just Jews like themselves, but to everyone, starting with the Greek speaking peoples Paul carried the Word to. And the folks Matthew was writing for worked hard, really, really hard to spread this word and build the lives they knew they had to live and they fully expected that any day now, any day now Jesus the Annointed One of God would return and the age would come to an end. And, not but, and, they kept on working and living and praying and having families, and telling everyone they could that God loved them and that to truly experience the love of God required us to love God fully and love our neighbor as our self.
The slave with five talents and the one with two, they knew they had something of value and they did with it what the master expected. The exploitive nature of these relationships, all the great Marxist critique of the nature of capital that this story seems to beg for is not the point. Do not get me wrong, Marxist critiques of the nature of capital are generally complimentary to a Christian worldview. The point, however, is that the slave who had one talent, one nugget of great value, he squandered the gift he had been given. If he had truly valued that which he had been entrusted with, he would have done something with it. He didn’t. His fear guided him. He wasted the opportunity he had been given and then the master is back and then came the whole outer darkness thing… bad choice.
So what does this mean for us? Well, in a way it means for us the same it meant for Matthew’s people. Of course, the Great Recession and the slow motion collapse of European economies we are not at the level of desolating sacrilege. But the Church is in decline. The way we have understood and practiced our faith and how we have lived as a religious community, like assuming a time when most folks went to church on Sundays, that we have enough money to do what we want, that churches grow… that time is over. We are entering the post-Christian century, and to my mind, this is a very good thing, the best thing that could happen to the church. Our anscestors left us a beautiful church of great value, but for too long, for the past fifty years probably, we have been hiding this beautiful thing in a hole, fearful of fate, of not succeeding, of losing something we are incredibly attached to. And the bugaboo looming on the fringes of our perception, that cruel master with the power to banish into the outer darkness, that is not a vengeful God, it is the cold hard drumbeat of progress, of evolution, of change… so many of us have been fearful of the church’s decline that we have hunkered down. Faced inboard. Steadied ourselves against the onslaught. Buried our talent in the ground.
What Jesus Christ demands of us and with loving kindness empowers us to do is to let that light we hold shine in the darkness. Our own inner light of God needs to shine in the world in the face of adversity. In the face of lay offs and sickness and heart break and death, when we can remember that God abides in us, always and everywhere no matter how dark the night seems, our light shines brighter even bright enough for others to find there way by.
And together, in the face of an institution in decline, when we together witness into the world the light of Christ, practicing living in the Kingdom of God by living like we are in the Kingdom of God… you know, being kind, sharing, taking care of each other and the world around us, living with eyes wide open AND not being cowered by fear… this is The Way; it needs to be Our Way. That is our pearl of great price sowed widely, and watch it will return 30 and 60 and even 100 fold. Those kind of returns would make the most greedy capitalist happy; imagine how happy our humble Lord Jesus Christ will be with our diligence? A light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. AMEN
All Saint's Day, November 6, 2011
All Saint’s Nov 6, 2011
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Ok, so my family and I just moved to Eugene two weeks ago. We moved from North of Boston, not too, too far from where Patti and Doug moved from. Today was my first day as the Priest in Charge at Church of the Resurrection down in South Eugene. So I am very new to town, but I have already figured out enough to know that the way to endear myself to Oregonians is probably not to preach on the wonders of Los Angeles, California. That’s accurate, right? I want to make sure I have the pulse of the community before I get started in my ministry here...
Has anyone here been to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in LA? I do not know anything about architecture; I generally prefer a meadow to a building any day; but some years ago I was at a conference down there and we were introduced to this cathedral. It opened in 2002, and replaced the former cathedral which was destroyed in the ’94 Northridge quake. From day one in the planning of this building, it was going to be different. The building, and all of the major systems and furnishings were to be designed to last for 500 years. I was amazed by that. What do we do now that could possibly last for 500 years? Have you ever thought in that kind of time frame? 500 years… The design of this building apparently pushed the envelope of seismic design, the whole building floats in some way over this 100 foot deep trench. It has passive air circulation that cools it with no moving parts, and instead of stained glass it has windows consisting of the largest amount of alabaster ever used in a construction project. And it is beautiful, it is a post-modern mission style, concrete instead of adobe… it is just fantastic.
It did not go with out controversy, primarily over the $189 million price tag that many said could have been used to feed the poor. (Judas said something like that once, too, no?) It is a fair critique, but then again, 500 years from now, it will be the only building still standing that was intended to still be standing. Who but the church could do this? Who but the church can think in terms of 500 years?
I bring up the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on this All Saint’s Day because of something I saw inside of that church when I visited. All along the side walls, maybe 20 feet tall and as long as the walls (the sanctuary is 333 feet long -1 foot longer that St. Patrick’s in New York) there are these tapestries made by John Nava. It is s cycle of 25 tapestries and is called “The Communion of Saints”. So first off, remember, these tapestries were commissioned to last 500 years. And to describe these tapestries, I need to describe the process, because this piece of art is the epitome of the process and the medium being the message, and the message is All Saints.
The over all effect of the work is that the walls of the church are lined with 200, maybe people, 20 foot tall people lining the walls, all looking directly toward the altar, all this energy in this crowd facing forward in this immense and amazing building in the heart of LA. So that is the effect, how it was arrived at is the magic.
So Nava started by taking photographs of 200ish of his friends’ faces. The weaving happened on these very special digital looms in Beligum, so the images are really from the photographs. Then he asked 200ish people how they prayed. Like, how they held their hands, what posture they were in. Hands folded. Arms out. Lotus position…how they prayed. So he portrayed the bodies in all of those various postures; then he costumed the figures in the dress of the period from an historical saint. Each figure represented an actual saint, and each figure had a label at the bottom. So the head and hands of his friend Bill became St. Thomas Aquinas and was clothed as Thomas would have been clothed. St. Matthew is there, a few of the Johns, I’ll assume that your John was there, folks from Springfield, you don’t leave out the guys that write the Apocalypses, Blood of the Lamb and all. Woe be it on the one who forgets the one who wrote about the Blood of the Lamb and the Beasts. Mary of course is there. And mixed in are some children and something like six anonymous saints. We all have met that kind of person before, the anonymous saints.
The process of making that art, this gorgeous tapestry that will hang for 500 years in a holy place. We are in it together. We are not alone. It takes a crowd to approach God. The message is the process and the medium.
I did not participate in a Mass there. But I sat in the pews for a good long time with the other conference goers, a collection of academics gathered for an annual meeting of the Society of Buddhist – Christian Studies. A pretty interesting group of folks to go to church with. It was not Mass, but I could imagine having Mass there. The effect was so deep. You really were surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, a legion that went before us, that is still with us, that continues to lead us, that we are part of and will become part of…The Communion of Saints. How many times have we said that line, “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints…” Everyone says that every morning when you say Morning Prayer, right? I had never gotten the meaning of that line from the Apostles Creed ‘til I sat there, really surrounded by that polyglot of saints from across time and space.
And look at us here. Our little slice of the communion of saints in this place at this time are gathered here’ we are from different parishes, from different cities, from different backgrounds, with different futures with different gifts and problems. But we are gathered here together, praying together, being a communion of saints. Now none of us have plans to be here in 500 years; at least not realistic plans of that, but here we are, Maybe this gathering will last 500 years. Not this actual gathering…
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Ok, so my family and I just moved to Eugene two weeks ago. We moved from North of Boston, not too, too far from where Patti and Doug moved from. Today was my first day as the Priest in Charge at Church of the Resurrection down in South Eugene. So I am very new to town, but I have already figured out enough to know that the way to endear myself to Oregonians is probably not to preach on the wonders of Los Angeles, California. That’s accurate, right? I want to make sure I have the pulse of the community before I get started in my ministry here...
Has anyone here been to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in LA? I do not know anything about architecture; I generally prefer a meadow to a building any day; but some years ago I was at a conference down there and we were introduced to this cathedral. It opened in 2002, and replaced the former cathedral which was destroyed in the ’94 Northridge quake. From day one in the planning of this building, it was going to be different. The building, and all of the major systems and furnishings were to be designed to last for 500 years. I was amazed by that. What do we do now that could possibly last for 500 years? Have you ever thought in that kind of time frame? 500 years… The design of this building apparently pushed the envelope of seismic design, the whole building floats in some way over this 100 foot deep trench. It has passive air circulation that cools it with no moving parts, and instead of stained glass it has windows consisting of the largest amount of alabaster ever used in a construction project. And it is beautiful, it is a post-modern mission style, concrete instead of adobe… it is just fantastic.
It did not go with out controversy, primarily over the $189 million price tag that many said could have been used to feed the poor. (Judas said something like that once, too, no?) It is a fair critique, but then again, 500 years from now, it will be the only building still standing that was intended to still be standing. Who but the church could do this? Who but the church can think in terms of 500 years?
I bring up the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on this All Saint’s Day because of something I saw inside of that church when I visited. All along the side walls, maybe 20 feet tall and as long as the walls (the sanctuary is 333 feet long -1 foot longer that St. Patrick’s in New York) there are these tapestries made by John Nava. It is s cycle of 25 tapestries and is called “The Communion of Saints”. So first off, remember, these tapestries were commissioned to last 500 years. And to describe these tapestries, I need to describe the process, because this piece of art is the epitome of the process and the medium being the message, and the message is All Saints.
The over all effect of the work is that the walls of the church are lined with 200, maybe people, 20 foot tall people lining the walls, all looking directly toward the altar, all this energy in this crowd facing forward in this immense and amazing building in the heart of LA. So that is the effect, how it was arrived at is the magic.
So Nava started by taking photographs of 200ish of his friends’ faces. The weaving happened on these very special digital looms in Beligum, so the images are really from the photographs. Then he asked 200ish people how they prayed. Like, how they held their hands, what posture they were in. Hands folded. Arms out. Lotus position…how they prayed. So he portrayed the bodies in all of those various postures; then he costumed the figures in the dress of the period from an historical saint. Each figure represented an actual saint, and each figure had a label at the bottom. So the head and hands of his friend Bill became St. Thomas Aquinas and was clothed as Thomas would have been clothed. St. Matthew is there, a few of the Johns, I’ll assume that your John was there, folks from Springfield, you don’t leave out the guys that write the Apocalypses, Blood of the Lamb and all. Woe be it on the one who forgets the one who wrote about the Blood of the Lamb and the Beasts. Mary of course is there. And mixed in are some children and something like six anonymous saints. We all have met that kind of person before, the anonymous saints.
The process of making that art, this gorgeous tapestry that will hang for 500 years in a holy place. We are in it together. We are not alone. It takes a crowd to approach God. The message is the process and the medium.
I did not participate in a Mass there. But I sat in the pews for a good long time with the other conference goers, a collection of academics gathered for an annual meeting of the Society of Buddhist – Christian Studies. A pretty interesting group of folks to go to church with. It was not Mass, but I could imagine having Mass there. The effect was so deep. You really were surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, a legion that went before us, that is still with us, that continues to lead us, that we are part of and will become part of…The Communion of Saints. How many times have we said that line, “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints…” Everyone says that every morning when you say Morning Prayer, right? I had never gotten the meaning of that line from the Apostles Creed ‘til I sat there, really surrounded by that polyglot of saints from across time and space.
And look at us here. Our little slice of the communion of saints in this place at this time are gathered here’ we are from different parishes, from different cities, from different backgrounds, with different futures with different gifts and problems. But we are gathered here together, praying together, being a communion of saints. Now none of us have plans to be here in 500 years; at least not realistic plans of that, but here we are, Maybe this gathering will last 500 years. Not this actual gathering…
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