Miscomprehending Jesus' reign

Maybe you’ve seen documentaries about it on the Discovery Channel or Nat Geo. There are even guided tours now, but it was once upon a time it was a deep dark secret. Nothing more than a rumor, idle gossip or an urban legend…or more accurately a rural legend! When I first went to minister in West Virginia nearly twenty years ago I heard stories about the “Secret” at the Greenbrier Hotel, a luxury resort in southwest West Virginia. Stories were about “the bunker.” The bunker, they said, was a huge bomb shelter dug into the mountain immediately behind the main building of the hotel. There were stories of the mysterious “television repair shop” whose staff went around in coveralls. Maybe there were a lot of broken tv’s at the Greenbrier or else….these “television repairmen” worked in the bunker.

Turns out all the stories were true. It was revealed that the government did build a huge bunker at the Greenbrier, and it was designed to hold the entire United States Congress during and after a nuclear attack. The idea was that when the alert level was high enough, the entire US Congress would be taken by train (later by plane) to the Greenbrier.

The television repair guys really did work in the bunker…except for the ones who repaired televisions. And to top it all off, the entrance to the bunker is behind the curtained wall of the grand ball room. It was hidden in plain sight.

When the bunker was officially revealed, everyone saw it as a relic of the cold war. It shows how we our national defense was built around protecting the leaders first. Maybe that makes sense strategically, but it was kept a secret not because of fear of Soviet attack, but out of fear that a frightened citizenry might resent or even rebel against the idea that the elected leaders of this country might get a level of protection that the rest of the citizenry would not.

In today’s Gospel we hear about Jesus being taunted while he is being crucified. The religious leaders taunt him because he said he was the messiah. They jeer if he were really the messiah he should save himself the crucifixion they inflicted. The soldiers and even one of those crucified with Jesus echo the same taunt. In jeering at Jesus, the Romans taunt all Jews by putting up the sign “Here is the King of the Jews.” What kind of people has a king who gets crucified?
Notice that this insult and taunt echoes what Jesus heard in the wilderness at the start of this ministry: the Evil One tempts Jesus to hurl himself off the pinnacle of the Temple so that angels would appear and take care of Jesus at his moment of greatest need.

They were so certain of Jesus’ powerlessness, that they dared him to take revenge against his tormentors as they were certain they would do if they were given divine power and a chance to use it.

Of course, God is up to something else. Everyone but one person—the second thief also being crucified—misses the fact that God is work in this crucifixion. It is easy miscomprehend the kind of reign that Jesus brought to earth.

Many people think of God as someone who made the watch and wound it up and then stepped back to let it tick away by itself. If we think of God as involved in our lives and creation at all, we have this image of God up on the top floor in the cosmic executive suite pushing heavenly paper, making divine decisions and letting others do the dirty work. So it is easy to think that if Jesus is the messiah, he is somehow privileged by virtue of his elevated status. Yeah, Jesus walked on earth but he has the key to the most executive washroom of them all. And we assume that when push comes to shove, he will act accordingly: he will, sooner or later use his power to get more power. This is at the core of one of my many problems with the theology and images of Jesus put forward in books like the Left Behind series, where in the last volume Jesus is portrayed not as the Savior on the Cross but as a vengeful, angry who obliterates his enemies. The cross, in this way of thinking, is a mere set-back, an incomplete distraction from the Real Jesus, who comes to give roundhouse kicks to his enemies.

But Jesus did not ride into Jerusalem in a motorcade. There was no divine limo with the flags of the kingdom led by an angelic flying wedge of Electra-Glide motorcycles. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. And even when arrested, falsely accused and mocked, he did not strike back. And when he was crowned king, it was a crown of thorns, and when he was lifted up, it was on a cross. Clearly God’s idea of kingship, of reigning in glory is very different than ours.

The reign of Christ is a reign of broken people who are healed; it consists of a citizenry of service; God’s reign is built on powerless people who find their power, their purpose and their hope in a living relationship to a loving God who made us and loved us first.

The most basic way we participate in God’s reign is through our prayer and worship. God is not far away in the Cosmic Executive Suite but close to us right now. Christ meets us at the point of our deepest need, and lives with us through all that life brings us.

It is the gathered people of God who are citizens of the reign of God. It is the people of God learning and doing the work of Jesus who represent Christ’s reign to the world God loves. It is people who gather in prayer, study, worship, service who embody the reign of God. It is when God’s people look beyond what separates us, dare to gather around Christ’s Eucharistic table, dare to baptize and teach, even in the face of our differences, that we show off that Christ’s reign is bigger, more enduring, more powerful than any that human beings can come up with by themselves.

Our tendency to reduce God’s reign to only the institutional life of the church—instead of seeing our institutional life as a servant of our status as followers of Jesus and citizens of his reign—turns the Church into nothing more than a bomb-shelter, nothing more than a place to huddle against a scary world. We are so much more than that: we are citizens of Christ’s household, we are members of His body. We are Christ’s people in God’s world making his reign known in our work, relationships, and our daily living.

Yesterday was a good day to see the reign of Christ in action: once again this church and several volunteers from a variety of other churches and groups came together to serve Thanksgiving Dinner to one hundred and twenty or so guests at the Ark Soup Kitchen. While this was going on, one crew of volunteers from this parish was renovating our chapel bathroom to make our church more welcoming to everyone who comes here. Another crew was laying paving stones in the sidewalk. Others were getting ready for the Interfaith Thanksgiving Choir Festival this afternoon.

Last week, I got a "tweet" from Charlie Barebo. Charlie, remember, was our Consecration Sunday speaker a few weeks back and is chair person of the New Hope Campaign. He was in Kajo-Keji, Sudan, last week with Archdeacon Stringfellow. So I get this message from halfway around the globe on my phone last Sunday and it says "School is open. Pictures coming." You know what that means, right? It means the Trinity Primary School in Sodogo which you and I and lots of people in the Diocese of Bethlehem helped build is now open and teaching kids, half of them girls. You see, that's how God's reign works. That's how Jesus' kingdom operates. A bunch of faithful people see a need, have a vision, act on it, and putting their own selves aside they share power with school kids they've never met across the globe.

When people whom the world would say have every right to ignore the weak and look past the hungry make turkeys and bake pies and serve the humblest of God's people, that is living in the Jesus' kingdom. This is a citizenship of service.

And when do that, the world is turned upside-down, because people who fed, visited, schooled, cared for, and the ones who step out of their comfort zone to do it, cannot see God’s reign as something far away. Citizens of service cannot reduce God to some kind of cosmic chief executive. People who known God's healing cannot settle for ecclesiastical bomb-shelter anymore. The surprise is that in Christ God is intimately involved in all our lives every day. Through his Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection, Jesus both establishes his reign and rule over all creation, and makes it possible for all of us to become by faith citizens of God’s reign.

The second thief on the cross understood this. He does not expect Jesus to save his own skin but he does expect and know that Jesus’ authority will defeat death and become, against all expectation, a gateway to life with God. When we see Christ's power and reign in the cross we will know that we are remembered as Christ comes into his kingdom.

The End...and the Beginning

Not, I hasten to add, of this blog. Nor again of Anglicanism writ large. But of the Anglican Communion? Yes, I think so.

What do I mean? This:

There was a very curious document in last week’s Church Times (full-page advertisement, page 7). In it, two organisations, Inclusive Church and Modern Church, for which I have formerly had the highest regard, turned themselves into the nearest to an ecclesiastical BNP that I have encountered.

They resort to the old tactics of misinformation and scaremongering about foreigners and outside influences to whip up a campaign against the Anglican Covenant, and replace reasoned argument with a “Man the barricades!” mentality that is little short of breathtaking.

We are to beware, the advertise­ment says, of the machinations of “another Anglican province any­where in the world” and of a move “to subordinate the Church to the judgements of the Standing Committee of the Anglican Com­munion. [The Covenant] would thereby make the Church of England subject to an outside power for the first time since Henry VIII.”

The main target of their opprobrium, worse than a European Commission or a Spanish Inquisi­tion, is “a new international body, the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion”. In fact, this body is the same Joint Standing Committee that has muddled through the business of Anglican Communion affairs now since 1969. It is scarcely new — even if it was given its new name by a two-thirds-majority vote of Anglican provinces ratified at the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Jamaica in 2009.

And the most extreme power at the Standing Committee’s disposal under the Covenant is — wait for it — “to make recommendations” (4.2.7). It is this potential for shock “recommendations” that has Inclusive Church and MCU quaking in their boots, since they argue that any such “recommendations” will “subordinate [the General Synod] to the new centralised authorities”. In fact, the Covenant text clearly says: “Each Church or each Instrument shall determine whether or not to accept such recommendations” (4.2.7).

The Covenant also states quite clearly that “mutual commitment does not represent submission to any external ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Nothing in this Covenant of itself shall be deemed to alter any provision of the Constitution and Canons of any Church of the Communion, or to limit its autonomy of governance. The Covenant does not grant to any one Church or any agency of the Communion control or direction over any Church of the Anglican Communion” (4.1.3).

Like so much else in this advertise­ment (and I could offer an extensive list), the assertion is simply rubbish.

During the past 150 years, many of the Churches of the world have been formed into Christian world com­munions; the newest was formed this year, the World Communion of Reformed Churches. There is a general recognition that if local or national Churches are to be truly international and live in a global fellowship, they must do more than just assert their autonomy, but seek to live into an interdependence that truly honours the fellowship of the whole body. This truth was recog­nised by the Lambeth Conferences of 1920 and 1930, and the Covenant is a careful attempt to balance autonomy with responsibility.

There is no element of coercion anywhere in the text, but there is an acknowledgement that neither can everything that one Church does be foisted on the whole Communion without the recognition that relations can be damaged. What the Covenant sets out in Section 4 is a proper mechanism that allows the articulation of discomfort, even distance, but which honours autonomy.

But this is too much for our latter-day Little Englanders, who bemoan the passing of the armchair bonhomie of the Athenaeum as the measure of Anglican inclusivity. They would, it seems, rather see the disintegration of the Anglican Communion into a series of acrimonious factions than restate a common faith and witness and find grown-up and responsible mechanisms for the articulation of the life of a whole Communion.

The author of this effusion, Geoffery K. Cameron is presently the Bishop of St Asaph, boasts of his connection to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (an early mentor, whose chaplain he has been), and his role as Deputy General Secretary of the Anglican Communion in which he was involved in "the ecumenical relations of the Anglican Communion at global level, and responsible for staffing the Lambeth Commission, which produced the Windsor Report."

This is not some oddball writing; it is a protege of Abp. Williams, and a high-ranking official in the Anglican Communion.

Well, is he right? Is the advertisement false? Father Jake lays out the text of Section 4 of the Covenant as it presently stands for voting, and the past history of recommendations (like, the Windsor Report, for which Bp. Cameron takes some credit) being treated within a brief period of time as juridical and binding. Cameron's argument is disingenuous in the extreme, quite frankly.

However, it is his invective which fascinates me. It's further evidence of the metastasizing within the Anglican Communion of hatred toward those who even defend the Episcopal Church. It's not enough to claim that critics of the Covenant are wrong; they are the BNP (a fascist party) or "Little Englanders" (xenophobic, ultra-nationalists). This is coming from, quite literally, one level below the top. This is rhetoric I would expect to see on Virtue Online, or Stand Firm. Not from any Bishop (OK, I'd expect of the now-retired Abp. Akinola, but I'm cynical with regard to him).

But surely the real point is this: If this is how Abp. Rowan's protege views those who believe the Covenant is intended to be punitive, what does it say about the likely objects of that punishment? And, add to that the fact that Canon Kenneth Kearon has stated that the Episcopal Church does not “share the faith and order of the vast majority of the Anglican Communion," is it not clear that we are entering into a very frigid period indeed in our relationships with the C of E, at least officially, and with at least those parts of it which take their cue from Canterbury?

And yet--the Anglican Communion was founded well after the Episcopal Church was founded. Anglicanism in the United States has always been different from the other provinces because of that early political break from England. We will survive if the Covenant is adopted and we do not join in, as I hope and trust we will not. And why do I hope and trust we will not? If for no other reason, than for this: the hatred they bear those who defend us reflects their hatred of us. Covenantal relationships do not flourish in an atmosphere of hatred and contempt.

Richard Hooker's Day

I'm kvetching about the elections over on Facebook, but I'll spare you that. Instead, let's take a moment to commemorate Richard Hooker, that "learned and judicious divine."

Hooker's merits grow in my estimation the more I read him, and, frankly, the more I read others. Where Cardninal Newman's thirst for an infallible institution which can command obedience as of right, Hooker strove to restore reason to its proper place in the spiritual life. Without being disregardful of Scripture and Tradition, Hooker validated the role of reason in interpreting both.

Not that Hooker was a modern; far from it, he was deeply engaged in the struggles of his time. That said, he brought a charity and a clarity (he's the easiest read, by far, of the Elizabethan writers I've read) that illuminates every issue he writes about.

Here is an interesting introductory reflection on Hooker for those who would like a first taste.

A collect for the Richard Hooker, November 3:

O God of truth and peace,
who raised up your servant Richard Hooker in a day of bitter controversy to defend with sound reasoning and great charity the catholic and reformed religion: Grant that we may maintain that middle way,
not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Miracles happen. Start now.

A few weeks ago, we were all chanting “Chi Chi Chi Le Le Le!” for the 33 Chilean miners who were rescued from their underground shelter 69 days after the mineshaft collapsed. It took them a few months, (but not as long as they thought) to drill a new shaft down to the miners, and then haul them up one at a time in a little capsule called, appropriately, the Phoenix.

The amazing rescue riveted the world’s attention and was a welcome piece of good news in a media landscape filled with crime, war, violence and mud-slinging politics. We heard of their faith, we heard of their resilience and how they stayed together as a team during the long weeks trapped in the dark a mile under the earth. One story going around was that all or some of the miners were led to the pre-placed shelter just before the collapse by a butter fly that found its way all the down to the bottom of the shaft. We heard one miner say “We saw both the devil and God. God won.”

Now the miners are adjusting to life back with their families and to their new-found celebrity. Two things kept popping up over and over again in the commentary and conventional wisdom surrounding this event: first, that their survival and their rescue was a “miracle”; second, we heard people ask if their new-found faith would endure once they re-entered their worlds.

The second question is more than simple academic curiosity. Can the faith we discover or hang on to when things are going bad endure or even help us after we pass through the crisis? Given that we will all experience some kind of crisis—a death, a loss of a job, an injury, some kind of relational crisis—we will all have our faith tested or discovered in the crucible of crisis.

I remember right after 9/11, how the churches and synagogues were filled with people, but before a few weeks attendance was right where it was before. As a former chaplain, I can recount dozens of “fox-hole” conversions that all but evaporated when the crisis was past.

But not always. Some people found their faith strengthened in these moments and it stayed with them. I remember a member of this parish who died a few years back. She in the Twin Towers when the planes struck and I remember how she told me about all the ways that she knew that God was with her during the whole ordeal. She told me this story as she herself was dying from cancer. She knew that God was with her during that ordeal as well.

People who study this kind of thing tell us that the ones whose faith helps them the most during the crisis are the ones who cultivate it before the crisis even hits. People who pray and worship, people who meditate and read scripture, people who learn generosity and don’t hoard their things, people who help others and look out for their neighbor before the crisis are much more likely to draw on their faith as the crisis unfolds. Sure there will be moments of fear, uncertainty, even emptiness…but they know that these are part of the process, not things which cancel out faith. Sometimes people who have been cultivating the roots of their faith without doing anything particularly conscious or public will learn that as much as their faith helped them, there is so much more to do.

So one lesson is that we develop a resilient faith early and often when things are dull, boring, and normal. What we do when things don’t matter very much have huge consequences when they do. If you want to cultivate miracles in the future, start now.

The other question to come out of the Chilean mine disaster was whether or not the rescue was a miracle.

I am of two minds on this. Was this a “water-into-wine”, “walk-on-water”, “feed-the-five-thousand-from- two fish and three loaves” kind of miracle? Well, no. No laws or rules of nature were changed, no molecules were rearranged, and time did not stop. It was not that kind of miracle.

And that’s okay with me, because it opens us to see something else at work…and if you want to call it miraculous, well, that’s okay, too. I like the butterfly story because it reminds me that I am not alone and that God watches over us in ways that we are usually not conscious of, but that’s not the real miracle to me. The real miracle is something much more humble. Something, if you’ll pardon the expression, earthy.

The remarkable thing about the Chilean mine rescue was that…it worked. On all kinds of levels. The miners apparently did not lose themselves into panic, they did not become like the boys on the island in the Lord of the Flies. The rescuers also did not lose their heads. They worked the problem, were not ashamed to ask for help (which they got from all over the world, including NASA and mining professionals from Pennsylvania). The people who helped did not care about getting the credit, but stepped aside to allow the Chileans “their” moment. The people in charge sought out and listened to all kinds of experts from engineers to people trained in psychology to chaplains to nutritionists and doctors. And when they decided, they decided---which is no small thing. Faith is as much about decision as it is about meaning.

If there was a miracle here, it was the miracle that given all the chances for all the ways that human beings could devolve into shame, blame, fear and hopelessness, they decided to stay focused “on the mission.” In a season where best most of the people running for office can come up with “I’m mad as hell” this is, perhaps, the greatest miracle of all.
To stay focused on what’s important, to not give into fear, to do things which build up courage and bring people together, to think through a problem and not throw in the towel, and to take responsibility for the choices we’ve made, is perhaps the greatest lesson we can draw out of the miracle of the thirty-three.

God made us for a purpose, and that purpose is to care for each other, for creation, and for ourselves. Living out that purpose requires us to focus on God and give God the glory and the credit and the honor for making us able to do amazing, powerful, compassionate things. To live out God’s purpose means learning how to do the mundane things of faith now so they’ll be there when things really go sour. We are tasked with using the brains, creativity, skills, and experience of everyone to directly address the desperate needs of all people that are always before us. We have the chance, everyday, to do the small things that makes our lives richer and another person’s life better.

When we choose God’s purpose, especially when the chips are down, it’s, well, a miracle!

On being honest and resting in God

Don't just pretend to love others. Really love them.



"Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good." Romans 12:9

Here is what Jim Naughton wrote today on the Episcopal Cafe:

One argument that gets made against the Episcopal Church's efforts to fully include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Christians in the life of our church is that this initiative entails compromising the vaules of the Gospel with the values of permissive Western culture. Another argument sometimes offered is that our efforts at inclusion matter place the interests of a privileged class of western activists ahead of those of the church in the developing world.

There is, at the heart of both of these arguments, a willingness to ignore the fact that our purportedly permissive culture is in many cases quite hostile to LGBT people, that this hostility in some instances has lethal consequences, and that church leaders both here and in the developing world often fan the flames of this hostility.

In the wake of the bullying-related suicides of recent weeks, it is time for Episcopalians to make it clear that they are not surrendering to the prevailing culture, but attempting to transform it through the love of Jesus Christ. We are small in numbers, and our example may not posses the power we would like, still--if judged by the expensive ferocity of the resistance it has encountered--it counts for something.

We have, on occasion, compromised the authenticity of our voice, by seeking to placate those who have argued either that we were moving too far, too fast, or that we were heading entirely in the wrong direction. But we did not move fast enough to save any of the lives of the young people who killed themselves in recent weeks, and there is no moral equation in which tranquil relations within our own church multiplied by the good opinion of the leaders in other parts of the Anglican Communion counts for more than the lives of bullyed children.

Here are some important resources:

http://community.pflag.org/Page.aspx?pid=566

http://www.welcomingresources.org/communityorg.htm

http://www.integrityusa.org/

Believe Out Loud:

http://bolec.integrityusa.org/

http://believeoutloud.com/