waiting for Jesus – an Advent-season-prayer-a-day, Day 6, Friday, December 8, 2017

Note: Advent, from the Latin, adventus, “coming”, is the Christian season of preparation for Jesus’ birth, the heart of the Christmas celebration, and, according to scripture and the Christian creeds, his second appearance on some future, unknown day and also according to scripture and Christian tradition, his daily coming through the Holy Spirit. Hence, the theme of waiting for Jesus is Advent’s clarion call.

O Lord Jesus, I wait this day for the wonder of Your Wilderness. Your herald, John the Baptizer, came out of the wilderness to proclaim Your coming. You entered the wilderness to wrestle with Satan’s temptation that You be other than the self-sacrificing, sanctifying, saving Love of God. By Your Spirit, teach me and teach me again, for quickly I forget, that You are present not only at times and in places of favor, but also and especially in the desolate spaces of life where darkness looms, where want and need are constant cries, and fear ne’er dies. Teach me, O Lord Jesus, teach me to wait in trust for You there. Amen.

a-Lenten-prayer-a-day, day 7, Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Note: As a personal, spiritual discipline, I write a prayer for each of the forty days of Lent; each petition focusing on a theme, truly, relating to a care or concern weighing on my mind and heart, at times, vexing my soul and spirit…

On the certainty of my ignorance and my trust in God: Everlasting God, as a child, from a time before I can remember, when night fell, whether soft or hard upon my sense of the state of the world, my world, I oft prayed as I was taught, “Now, I lay me down to sleep, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep.” Yea, as I grew, oft confident – arrogantly, ignorantly – of my self, my will, my way, I prayed less and less for Your guardianship at night and still less for your guidance during the day. Yet, for years, and surely now, at these current and latter days of my pilgrimage through this earthly realm, as I know more of my self and of life in this world, I am certain that I know less about each. Now, O Everlasting One, in chiefest trust, I turn to You, throughout the hours of each day and night, praying, “Guide me waking and guard me sleeping that awake I may watch with Christ, and asleep I may rest in peace.”[1] Amen.

Footnote:

[1] My personal paraphrase of the antiphon, Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace, from An Order for Compline, The Book of Common Prayer, page 135.

truest thanksgiving

a personal reflection on an American holiday from a Christian perspective for Christian folk, based on John 6.25-35, on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 2016

“This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”

Jesus multiplied five loaves and two fish, feeding and filling 5000 famished bellies. The people, amazed by this miracle, perceive Jesus as a great prophet, like Moses, who they will compel to lead them in throwing off the shackles of their Roman oppressors. However, Jesus’ empire is not of the world, but of the Spirit, its methodology, not overpowering force, but unconditional love, its market, not self-interest, but justice, its manner, not avarice, but service. Jesus, recognizing the people’s misunderstanding and refusing their misdirected acclaim, withdraws in solitude and silence to the other side of the lake.[1] The people, still hungry for signs and wonders, pursue Jesus. Knowing they mistakenly have made physical sustenance the greatest good, Jesus challenges them to labor for “the food that endures for eternal life”. The people, barely comprehending that Jesus points to something spiritual (thus, beyond the material, yet, paradoxically, no less real), ask: “What must we do to perform the works of God?” In other words, how do we get this spiritual food? Jesus answers, “Believe in me.”

Belief. Not mere assent to an intellectual proposition that Jesus is Messiah or prophet or wise teacher or Lord or Savior (whatever any of these titles might mean), but rather an attitude arising from a relationship of trust, calling us to follow him…

One of my finest mentors, Verna Josephine Dozier wrote: “Jesus did not call us to worship him, but to follow him. Worship is setting Jesus on a pedestal…enshrining him in liturgies, stained glass…biblical translations…pilgrimages to places where he walked…Following him is doing what he did.”[2]

Thanksgiving Day. Historically, an annual occasion to express gratitude to God for helping the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony persevere during the harsh winter of 1621. Later, for the harvest. Later still, for all the blessings of this life.

Today, looking through the lens of doing what Jesus did – loving unconditionally, acting justly, being of service – I see Thanksgiving Day as a yearly reminder that Christianity is an incarnational religion; at its heart, the ongoing, never-ending story of the Spirit of God’s love and justice taking flesh, yes, in Jesus and in his followers, and through his followers that Spirit being alive and active in this world.

I oft have said that Jesus would have a good reputation if not for the church. Through two millennia, the community of his disciples frequently wielding instruments of force, wedded to self-interest, and well-versed in materialism have strayed from his path.

In truest thanksgiving, I pledge anew, paraphrasing the song, to “follow Jesus more nearly, day by day.”[3] Again quoting my beloved sister, Verna: “The important question to ask is not, ‘What do we believe?’ but ‘What difference does it make that we believe?’ Does the world come nearer to the dream of God because of what we believe?”[4]

For me to answer humbly, honestly, “Yes!” is my thanks giving for bountiful blessings and, even more, my prayer that I, in my living, will be a thanksgiving, a blessing for the world.

 

Footnotes:

[1] See John 6.1-24.

[2] From The Dream of God, page 98 (my emphases), by Verna Josephine Dozier (1918-2006), retired District of Columbia public school teacher and administrator; theologian, biblical scholar, workshop leader, church consultant, and lay preacher; an advocate for the authority and ministry of the laity in religious communities; and, at the time of her death, a 50+ year member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Capitol Hill, where I served as rector (1998-2015).

[3] Words by Richard of Chichester (1197-1253)

[4] The Dream of God, page 105 (my emphases)

my hope is God

a sermon, based on Lamentations 1.1-6 and Lamentations 3.19-26, preached with the people of Epiphany Episcopal Church, Laurens, SC, on the 20^th Sunday after Pentecost, October 2, 2016

Over 2500 years ago, the Babylonian Empire destroyed Jerusalem, slaughtering many, enslaving the rest, carrying most into exile. A horrified observer wrote:

How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!

How like a widow she has become,

she that was great among the nations…

She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks.

My mother, in the years immediately following my father’s death, as Alzheimer’s disease insidiously robbed her of all memory, spent her days sitting in her easy chair, a quilt draped across her lap, flowing over her knees to her feet, onto the floor. On a side table, stacks of letters, written by my father during their fifty-three years of marriage; words on tattered pages she read and reread, each time for the first time, her lips moving in silent speech, at other moments, sounding the syllables aloud, each breath, an increasingly faint whisper of her past. Next to the letters, a small frame with my father’s picture, smiling his half smile, gazing at her. She would look back and smile. Then a time came when she asked repeatedly, “Who is this?” Enveloped in the cloud of her unknowing, her amnesia was anesthesia for her lonely despair.

This image of my mother, etched in my mind, is my portrait of desolate Jerusalem: How lonely, like a widow, is the city.

Save for the Book of Job and those psalms known as songs of desolation,[1] no other word in scripture shouts, screams of unrelieved pain like Lamentations. Though it’s hard to hear, one inescapable reality of human living calls, commands us to listen: Suffering. For some of us, all the time and sometimes, for all of us.

Yes, happiness can be found in this life. Yet, when it is the fruit of favorable circumstance, we know, given the fickle nature of everything we don’t control, it won’t, can’t last. Therefore, Lamentations mirrors our universal experience of suffering, whether on global, national, local, or individual stages of life’s drama, whether through endless war, terror’s threat, natural calamity, personal tribulations of accident and illness, or by our own will whenever we, under the reign of unruly temperament or unlicensed affection abuse ourselves, souls, and bodies, or those of others.

Engulfed by this tsunami wave of suffering, is there anything beyond weeping that we can do? The one who wrote, “How lonely, like a widow, is the city”, later answers emphatically, Yes!

The thought of my affliction…is wormwood and gall!

My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.

But this I call to mind, therefore I have hope:

God’s steadfast love never ceases, God’s mercies never end;

they are new every morning; great is God’s faithfulness.

It’s unbelievable that one who has endured horrors unspeakable, whose lament is ever-fresh, can utter this stirring a word of trust! But perhaps not! For what value is a word of assurance spoken by one who hasn’t suffered? Virtue resounds in the claim of confidence only from one who knows sorrow. As an anguished Job declared, “I know my Redeemer lives…and after my skin has been destroyed, then in my flesh, I shall see God,”[2] so Lamentations proclaims, “My soul is bowed in affliction, yet I have hope, for God’s love and mercy never end.”

Now, we could believe the sincerity of the speaker. Nothing more. Nothing else. After all, anyone who suffers desires release, at least relief. Yet this is a word of anticipation, looking forward for something to come and expectation, looking backward on a historical relationship with a God of unconditional, unconquerable love.

Still, to speak of God and suffering in the same breath raises theodicy’s nagging question: How can the evil of suffering whether of human or natural cause exist in a creation of an omnipotent benevolent God? Years ago, at a time of turmoil, then the worst of my life, a spiritual dark night of my soul, my experience of God’s absence, God’s abandonment of me, I often cried: If God is all-powerful, then God, allowing evil, can’t be good; and if God is good, desiring the welfare of all, then God, unwilling or unable to restrain evil, can’t be God.[3]

I’ve come a mighty long way since then. This is where I stand today. Whene’er I or you suffer, I have hope. Sometimes, measured in the depth of my desire for you and me to be free of pain, my hope is great. Sometimes, when I see only a flicker of a possibility beyond the sorrow, small. Yet whichever, I can – I am able and willing – to hope. For I no longer place my hope in God. My hope is God. The existence of my capacity through spiritual eyes to look beyond what is to behold a vision of what might be is evidence of God’s presence and power. Because that is true, whate’er suffering befalls, anticipatory, hopeful visions always come. Therefore I can sing:

Great is Thy faithfulness,

Great is Thy faithfulness;

Morning by morning new mercies I see.

All I have needed Thy hand hath provided.

Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.[4]

 

Photograph (by Walt Calahan): me preaching at The Washington National Cathedral, Friday, January 27, 2006

Illustration: The Flight of the Prisoners (The fall of Jerusalem, 586 BCE) (1896-1902), James Tissot (1836-1902), The Jewish Museum, New York City

Footnotes:

[1] For example, Psalm 22 and Psalm 88

[2] Job 19.25-26, my emphases

[3] A paraphrase of the word of the character, Nickles, in Archibald MacLeish’s J.B.: A Play in Verse (1958)

[4] Words (1923) by Thomas Obadiah Chisolm (1866-1960)

transparent opacity?

Yesterday, two videos, from police body and dashboard cameras, of the shooting and killing of Keith Lamont Scott were released to the public. This followed a press conference by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney who, among several points, stressed his efforts at transparency. Neither video, from my perspective, proves definitively the assertion either of the police that Mr. Scott had a gun and, thus, was considered “an imminent threat” or of his family who maintained that Mr. Scott, holding only a book, posed no harm.

The authorities are in possession of additional video. To achieve the aim of transparency, why not share all recorded footage with the public? I’ve not heard, again, from my perspective, a justifiable rationale.

This is my argument for fullest disclosure…

No matter what the videos show and don’t show, all who view them will evaluate what they’ve seen through the lenses of their individual perceptions and opinions, in part, freshly formed in the moment and in equal, perhaps greater part wrought from their personal histories and their memories of their life’s experiences and their suppositions about the way things are. This is to say that there will not (and never will or can) be one truth, one explanation of what happened, one way to interpret the evidence.

At a deeper degree of existential complexity, verily, difficulty, an underlying matter – hardly the proverbial elephant in the room of a conspicuous concern that no one wants to identify and address, but rather an issue long named and known – is trust between, at the least, a portion of the populace and the police. I also believe that the loss of trust is mutual. Some people have little to no confidence in anything the police say or do and some police feel a similar lack of assurance in the intentions and action of some people.

One (though surely not the only) way to attempt to restore not merely the idea of faith, but its reality, “good faith”, is to have all share the same information. Transparency without fullest disclosure remains a convenient word or an idealized concept, ever apparent, but never actual.