In the beginning, God...

The writer/pastor/seminary professor, M. Craig Barnes, writes:

You cannot determine who you are by what you do. But few people believe that anymore... The biblical depiction of life begins with the words, "in the beginning God..." And it ends with a magnificent future that is also created by God. Just about everything in between also testifies to the eternal truth that life is made, redeemed and certainly blessed by God... As our theologians remind us, creation occurred "ex nihilo," or out of nothingness. This means that all things, even the dust with which humanity was created, derive their existence from God. So when we seek a different identity derived from anything other than God, we don't actually become different but only return to the nothingness we were before God created our lives. This is what gathers in the pews of church every Sunday ~ creatures who believed the serpent's lie that their identity could be changed by reaching for something other than what they were given by the Creator.

Some believed they could get a different - preferred identity - if they only got married. Others thought they just needed to find a better job or buy a better home in order to have a better life. Still others cling not to dreams but to the hurts of yesterday ~ as if they could improve the past by holding it so tightly. And all that the reach for a different source to their identity has left them with is souls filled with the primordial nothingness. Having grown exhausted reaching for a preferred self, many just give up and settle for busy or comfortable distractions that numb the emptiness of their souls.

Man, does this ring true to me!  Every day I see some form of this truth in ministry ~ sometimes I recognize it in myself, too.  And always the outward form is exhaustion: more and more, we are sick and tired of not being ourselves created in in image of the Lord.  And like the ancient story of adam ha adama suggests:  we tend to keep blaming others for our bad or even sinful choices when all God wants is to love us back into health. 

One of the reasons I mostly cherish ~ but sometimes chaff ~ at living into my calling by God to serve as a pastor begins and ends with blame. Barnes notes that on a local level ~ NOT an institutional or theological level as my Celtic friend Blue Eyed Innis so carefully notes ~ complaints about ministry are usually "a veiled lament about deeper issues of the soul." So, the blessing of being a pastor in a congregation has to do with inviting and encouraging a person to journey deeper into the wisdom of the soul: it is always uncharted territory, creative, challenging and fraught with danger but also deeply rewarding when both pastor and parish are open to the direction of the Holy Spirit.

I quit a doctoral program in Spiritual Direction after 9/11 because it became clear that in my Reformed tradition, most spiritual direction in a congregation was going to take place in a group setting. And while I learned a great deal in my first year of post-graduate study in this program, it was clear that individual spiritual direction was a long way away. Today, however, I find that I am doing both group direction and, in very limited and carefully defined ways, individual direction, too ~ and both are deep blessings to me. What's more, I see the opportunity to do more of this ministry taking root and shape the longer I am in this community. (Note to self:  this may be the next study/sabbatical forum, yes?)

Simultaneously, when individuals choose NOT to go inward and explore the wound or toxicity or fear of their soul ~ when they choose to stay trapped in the past and blame others (myself included) ~ well, this is the most frustrating and anguishing aspects of pastoral ministry.  And through one sad mistake after another, I've learned I have only two options in these cases:  1) Shake the dust off my sandals and move on trusting that God is God so I don't have to be; and 2) Pray that all souls will be returned home to the Lord ~ just some sooner than others.  I guess that implies a third and fourth option:  don't take yourself too seriously, learn to laugh a little at your failures and have a life bigger than just your church!

Barnes notes that the Christian hope claims that "in Christ we recover the life we were created to enjoy.  So let's be clear, we don't MAKE a living. We receive it through our participation in Christ who has brought us home to communion with the Creator." In a quiet, tender and playful way, the Bible gets it right AGAIN:  in the beginning God.

Hiding all away...

Do you know the old show Harry Nilsson did for TV back in 1971:  The Point?  I used to love it and still think of it sometimes...

It kept running through my head throughout the day as I got comments and reactions after today's worship:  some folks GOT what was going on ~ they were in-synch with the music and message about being playful and grace-filled in community when it comes to the mystery of baptism ~ while other folks were perplexed and even annoyed. Who knows what they wanted or needed ~ it was just clear that today's non-linear conversation left some folk with more questions than answers ~ and they were uncomfortable.

That was, I suspect, what was supposed to happen:  those who were ready to be playful found nourishment while others scratched their heads ~ or even complained a little. Now, it used to really freak me out when folks complained to me about not getting my message ~ or being disconnected from the flow of worship ~ and my insecurities ran wild. But over the years I've come to two conclusions about all of this.  First, I am not really in control of worship: after the worship leaders give it their best shot, the rest is up to the Spirit. 

And second, most complaints (about worship or the pastor or church finances) are really a "veiled lament about deeper issues of the soul" according to M. Craig Barnes of Pittsburg Theological Seminary. In his book about the pastoral ministry, he writes in the opening chapter of The Pastor as Minor Poet:

Since people are unaccustomed to exploring the mystery of their own souls, they will often work out their spiritual anxieties by attempting to rearrange something external. like a church's music program. But it doesn't matter how many changes they make to the environment around them. They will never succeed in finding peace for the angst of the soul until they attend directly to it.  And this is why people have pastors. To be of service to the Holy Spirit, who is at work in human lives, the pastor can never reduce ministry to servicing parishioners' complaints about the church... (No we have to) invite people to look beneath their complaints to their personal loss.

And THAT is the POINT ~ the perspective ~ the reality I embrace at the close of this day. It was a rich day for us all:  we reclaimed sharing joys and concerns in worship and shared some deep prayers of joy and sorrow; we sang with gusto and listened for what the Spirit was saying to the church, too.  And then some of us gathered for a feast in the late afternoon and shared loved and music and stories and lots of laughter.

Barnes writes:  Poets have been blessed with a vision that allows them to explore, and express, the truth behind (our) reality. Poets see the despair and heartache as well as the beauty and miracle that lie just beneath the thin veneer of the ordinary, and they describe this in ways that are recognized in the mind, but mor eprofoundly in the soul. (Most of the time) what a congregation needs is not a strategist to help them form another plan for achieving a desired image of life, but a poet who looks beneath even the desperation to recover the mystery of what it means to be made in God's image.

I give thanks to God for the chance to explore faith poetically this day... and pray that I will have another shot at doing likewise tomorrow. More than that is out of my control, yes?

Lost memory of skin...

Last night I finished the troubling, nuanced, creative and insightful new novel by Russell Banks: Lost Memory of Skin. Writing in the NY Times, Janet Maslin concludes:

This book expresses the conviction that we live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new terrain.    

(go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/books/russell-bankss-novel-lost-memory-of-skin-review.html))

The story about a young and naive sex-offender challenges our sensibilities:  the  22 year old "Kid" aches for intimacy, but has only learned to experience it through Internet pornography.  From the time he was 10, his mother attends only to her own sad search for pleasure rather than guiding her flesh and blood. Consequently, the Kid is allowed to let his aching impulse for love lead him into degradation and addiction - without any clue that it is happening. As Banks has said, this is a novel that explores what it means to turn our children over to the wolves of this contemporary culture. "This is a story of how a good man losses his goodness."

(go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/books/russell-banks-talks-about-lost-memory-of-skin.html?pagewanted=all)

What's more, it is a story about how we are sacrificing our humanity in a world disconnected from "skin."  It is tragic that this man/child learns about love only through pornography; it is heart-breaking that he "doesn't feel real" until he sees his story being told on a computer screen. And there is the all too real indictment of the scriptures about the sins of the mothers and father being visited upon their children unto the third and fourth generation when the Kid discovers that there is more community to be found in the homeless camp for other sex offenders under the highway than any place else in our so-called healthy society.

This is an important novel - both for its critique of the still unknown consequences of our increasingly cyber-obsessed culture as well as its challenge to our all-or-nothing social norms - and I hope church groups choose to study and discuss it.  I am going to find a way in 2012 to do just that - hard stuff for some "Kleenex Christians" who are scandalized by the harshness of real life.  But God's grace doesn't stop at the suburbs... or polite society... or with the innocent.  God's grace was born in the filth of the stable - was raised up on a Cross at the intersection of religion and politics - and comes to us at the margins of our humanity. (It made me think of the workd Radiohead has been working in a similar vein...)

We'll be reading Jaco Hamman's A Play-Full Life first... but there has to be space this year for Lost Memory of Skin, too.

Listening to your life...

One of the on-going joys of the pastoral ministry is the constant surprises God brings into my life:  you would think that by now ~ 30 years into this thing ~ I would know how to take the  joy, horror, awe or tender acts of mercy in stride. But I don't. I regularly feel a palpable sense of mystery wash over me nearly every day. 

It could begin with the loving trust of a small child or the confessions of a wizened old addict ~ sometimes it is born while making or receiving music ~ or reading the NY Times. I have discovered how really vulnerable and bewildered I am, too, when an unexpected harsh or even cruel word is shared. Or when I wake to find I am exhausted and still have miles to go before I sleep.  And there are many times when the seemingly random visits, conversations and accidents of the day open my soul to the presence of the living God.

Call them epiphanies ~ appropriate for today, yes? ~ or a slipping in and out of God's kingdom, whatever analogy you prefer, I think Buechner gets it right when he notes:  "The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God's things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak - even the walk from the house to the garage that you have waled ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believer there is a God who speaks at all anywhere."

Yesterday, for example, three different ordinary encounters revealed to me something of the extraordinary hidden just beyond my perception. 

+ First, I had a conversation with a person who has been worshipping with us for about a year.  I don't know a lot about her but she was weeping during Eucharist this past Sunday.  I don't know the back story but followed up just to stay in touch only to discover she is a local visual artist and poet. We spoke about prayer and the mystery of God's still speaking voice that sometimes breaks into our art. She particularly loves the abstract expressionists (like me!)  So, we're going to try to collaborate on a workshop ~ or exhibition ~ or something as this New Year unfolds.

Don't get me wrong, the tears were always just below the surface in our meeting, but they neither define this artist nor shape the totality of her life.  No, God's mysterious and grace-filled presence is at her core ~ and in a totally unexpected moment, this truth was revealed.

+ Second, a church leader shared with me part one of our annual evaluation process.  Now sometimes this can be a real mixed bag ~ especially when there is someone with an ax to grind or even just those who aren't practiced at evaluation writing ~ and there was some of that going on here, too.  So, a few times I felt my defenses quicken ~ for good and bad reasons ~ and at other times I sensed that our small and struggling community of faith is growing deeper in our awareness of God's grace. 

As the conversation deepened, however, I realized that my defenses can be helpful in pointing us towards ways to solve perceived problems.  "That's a blessing," I thought.  "And they can also help me clarify and communicate more clearly, too."  Then I heard, "You know, when you first came I appreciated your casualness ~ the way you were helping us all slow down and take stock of who we were ~ hat was fun.  But as the years have progressed I've also come to see that below your casual and easy style is a deep, deep commitment to the Biblical witness of Jesus ~ and that has become very important to me and so many others."  Hmmmm... another surprise.

+ And third, as I was driving home to get ready for our jazz gig, my huge bass amp shifted in the back of the Subaru and smashed the rear window.  Not cracked or chipped, but totally shattered and that bad boy is history.  At first, it felt like I had been rear-ended ~ and clearly my head was shaken ~ but then I realized that the crash had come from within.  I felt nauseous ~ and rattled ~ and a wave of sadness washed over me because I HATE to deal with bureaucratic agencies.

So we drove in the 11F weather with the heat on high, trusted that no one would do further damage to our new/old car while we played the gig and unloaded all my gear.  And then we played one of the best jazz gigs I can remember in the past 16 months:  it was freakin' sweet!  And the place was packed.  And it felt healing and hopeful and loving and mystical all at the same time.  We had some great guests sit in on guitar and later sax and trumpet ~ and once we even shifted instruments so that Benny was on drums, Jonnie was on harp and Andy was on piano for a nasty-ass, Texas-style blues take on "Rock Me Baby." 

When we left, who cared that the back window was gone!?!  And this morning, the glass repairman helped me work out the details so that the insurance covered the whole mess. A cornucopia of surprises and blessings all born of the ordinary.  Again, Buechner writes:

God speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys. We cannot, of course, life our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music.

Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear noting at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement.  But BE NOT AFFEARD, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. "Be not afraid," says another, "for, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our joureneys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him...

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments ~ and life itself is grace.

Oh yes, I find this happening over and over again... and still I am surprised.

Tonight we played JAZZ...compared to what!?!

I was driving home from church early this evening - amps and guitars in the car - when I stopped at a light and... BAM!  A huge crash... seems the momentum of the car shifted the musical gear and they crashed through my back window.  Shattered the whole thing out (it will be replaced tomorrow... sigh!)

So I arrived at the gig tonight a little stunned and shocked:  very upsetting.  But we played like a house a-fire tonight - hard core jazz - and it was soooo healing:  Latin grooves and blues, Miles and Bird, hard bop and a little Coltranesque stylings, too.  What a gas. What's more, it felt reassuring and blessed to hang with these guys tonight, too:  just what the spiritual doctor ordered.  One of my buddies asked for this tune... which we could have nailed except I didn't have the lyrics so... next time for sure!

Come away with me...

Today - finally - snow is falling in the Berkshires.  Sure, we had that freak blizzard in October and there has been a dusting once or twice since then, but nothing of significance. Today, however, large thin wafers are floating everywhere with a quiet grace. Snow carries with it a silence that is healing to me.

Tonight ~ in solidarity with the quiet snow ~ we'll play a jazz gig at Patrick's Pub that will mix contemporary and classic jazz with some funk and blues surprises.  One of the songs that has been going through my head of late ~ and really resonates with this day ~ is the sweet Nora Jones' tune:  "Come Away with Me."  Tender, bluesy, spare and oh so sensual. That is what the snow this morning feels like: an invitation to drift slowly away for a time...

A play-full life is lived at the right speed...

"A play-full life," writes Jaco Hamman, "is lived at the right speed."  Brilliant ~ amen ~ and all the rest is commentary, yes?

It is to have enough time to live with joy and in community with others. Slowness encourages you to slow down, to savor the relationships, tastes, smells, sights and sounds of life; to touch life gently. Slowing down in a world that is racing ahead is a challenge, but so freeing! (pg. 86)

Today at Eucharist we spoke of Christ's baptism ~ and will do so again on Sunday ~ in which God called Jesus "the Beloved" simply because he showed up.  He didn't DO anything before being baptized, he didn't confess his sins to John the Baptist (according to the texts) nor did he fast and pray and challenge the status quo.  That all came AFTER his baptism ~ after being anointed with the blessing of being God's beloved ~ after sensing a calling born from above.

Don't get me wrong, there is work to be done ~ there are people to visit, evil to be challenged, prayers to be shared, food to be cooked and all the rest ~ but THIS is not what inspires God to love us and call us "beloved."  No, that comes from God's own heart that is very different from the way most of us have been trained.  Isaiah 55 puts it like this:

I don't think the way you think.
The way you work isn't the way I work.
         God's Decree.
For as the sky soars high above earth,
so the way I work surpasses the way you work,
and the way I think is beyond the way you think.
Just as rain and snow descend from the skies
and don't go back until they've watered the earth,
Doing their work of making things grow and blossom,
producing seed for farmers and food for the hungry,
So will the words that come out of my mouth
not come back empty-handed.
They'll do the work I sent them to do,
they'll complete the assignment I gave them.
So you'll go out in joy,
you'll be led into a whole and complete life.
The mountains and hills will lead the parade,
bursting with song.
All the trees of the forest will join the procession,
exuberant with applause.
No more thistles, but giant sequoias,
no more thornbushes, but stately pines—
Monuments to me, to God,
living and lasting evidence of God.

"A play-full life..." ~ a faith-full life ~ an authentic and compassionate life ~ "is lived at the right speed... (where we) have enough time to live with joy and in community with others."  Here's my prayer and commitment for the New Year.

The baptism of jesus...

NOTE:  Here are my worship notes for this coming Sunday, January 8, 2012. It is the Baptism of Christ Sunday.

“Poets don’t make arguments, they reveal mysteries.” (M. Craig Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 131) And I would hope you might keep that distinction in mind today as we consider what the Baptism of Christ is saying to us in 2012. Because, you see, neither the Bible nor our tradition ever fully explains WHAT is taking place during baptism and WHY it matters.

• Did you know that? Scholars and theologians clearly don’t agree; and the five major religious traditions – Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Pentecostal, Baptist and Reformed – are equally at odds with one another about the meaning of Baptism, too.

• What’s more, even the Bible itself doesn’t explain what is going on when we experience Baptism – or why it is important to us –and yet ALL denominations and religious orders agree that being baptized is an essential ingredient for faithful discipleship.

This is fascinating to me: our Holy Scriptures bring up the importance of Christian baptism six different times – check it out in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts and Romans – while the Bible only refers to the Lord’s birth and Christmas twice. Clearly the baptism of Jesus is more important that his birth but we still don’t really know why and what that means for us.

So, using the poetry of the Bible – and claiming the prerogative of a poet to play with the mysteries therein revealed – let’s see if we might discern a little more of God’s light for our generation when it comes to baptism, ok? Specifically, I want to call your careful attention to three insights:

• First, how baptism can be a reordering of our lives like the creation narrative suggest in Genesis 1.

• Second, how the baptism of Jesus offers each and all of us a chance to welcome and honor God’s grace as it is poured into our hearts.

• And third, how the blessing of being God’s Beloved empowers us to live by gratitude, faith, hope and love in a confusing and often broken world.

Are you with me? Let’s see what the poetry reveals, ok?

The Biblical story in Genesis 1 opens with the Spirit of the Lord hovering over the chaos of creation in order to give it shape and form. The words of tradition say: In the beginning – but listen to how Peterson reworks it:

First this: God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don't see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God's Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss. God spoke: "Light!" And light appeared. God saw that light was good and separated light from dark. God named the light Day, he named the dark Night. And it was evening and it was morning — Day One.

We know this isn’t science – although it doesn’t oppose or contradict science either as the Creationist would have us believe – rather this is poetry: a carefully constructed theological poem that uses symbols and images to teach us at least two truths:

First, knowing that this poem was written by the former priests of Jerusalem while Israel was being held in captivity in Babylon – between 587 and 538 BCE – scholars now understand that this creation story was intended to bring pastoral comfort to a people in bondage, shame and fear.

• It was, in fact, a way of reassuring them that even in the darkest and most chaotic times, God’s Spirit is still present bringing light into our darkness, hope into our despair and clarity into our ignorance.

• It is to Israel, if you will, what the story of Christ’s death and resurrection is for you and me: a way of revealing God’s truest nature in spite of our feelings and the objective evidence in the moment.

What I’m trying to say is that one meaning of this poem is comfort. The prophet Isaiah – in the same period of time – put it like this in what has become one of our Advent hymns: Comfort, comfort ye my people, speak ye peace, thus saith our God; comfort those who sit in darkness, mourning 'neath their sorrows' load; speak ye to Jerusalem of the peace that waits for them, tell her that her sins I cover, and her warfare now is over. Are you still with me?

The second meaning has to do with allegory and symbolism – tools the early church utilized to great advantage – but one that our current obsession with fundamentalism has sadly lost: I’m talking about the ability to be playful and creative with poetic words so that we grow closer to God. In what I regard to be the finest contemporary scholarly challenge to narrow-minded and mean-spirited Christian fundamentalism, Jonathan Dudley’s Broken Words, he writes about St. Augustine of Hippo who lived between 354 and 430 of the Common Era.

Specifically, he notes that Augustine took the first two verses of the Genesis poem: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters…”

… and finds a reference to the Holy Trinity in these verses, reading the ‘wind from God’ as a reference to the Holy Spirit and ‘in the beginning’ as a reference to Jesus who, according to St. John 1;1, ‘was with God (the Father) in the beginning.’ Augustine ends his exposition, in an affront to modern evangelical sensibilities, by pondering the wide number of other possible interpretations you might get from Genesis – condemning the tendency to advance only one reading to the exclusion of others.

‘Since, then, so rich a variety of highly plausible interpretations can be culled from these few words, consider how foolish it is rashly to assert that Moses intended just one particular meaning rather than any of the others. If we engage in hurtful strife as we attempt to expound his words, we offend against the very charity of God for the sake of which he said all those things.’ (p. 121)

Augustine is doing in his time what Jewish theologians have been doing for millennia and what we are invited to do now: playing with the text in a careful and loving way to make connections with our own lives and grow closer to God’s grace. It is called midrash – a Hebrew way of exploring a biblical text – that “goes beyond the simple distillation of religious, legal or moral teachings… and fills in many of the gaps left in the biblical narrative regarding events and personalities that are only hinted at… on the page.”

As Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has said: (Midrash) involves seeing the Word of the Lord in both the black letters on the page as well as all the white space around them, too.” So when we use the Genesis story in relationship to our baptism…

Could it be that baptism is one of the ways we let God’s reordering of the chaos of our lives and world become ordered?

• Could it be that here is a separating and reunion taking place in baptism that offers us clarity within life’s confusion?

• Commitment to living deeper within God’s grace rather than merely treading water? What are you thinking…?

It is my hunch that Christian baptism is partially about reordering and bringing some clarity to our chaos according to God’s grace. Because I don’t think it is just coincidence that the four times in the church year we are asked to read the stories about Christ’s baptism – and listen to the Lord’s response as “You are my beloved” – are also the bookends to what we call the two seasons of Ordinary Time.

And while this may be arcane to some, I think the wisdom of the Spirit is at work here. After Advent and Christmas come to a close with Epiphany, there are two seasons we call Ordinary Time: One is before Lent – the days between the Baptism of the Lord and Transfiguration Sunday – the Sunday before Ash Wednesday.

And then the longer Ordinary Time that takes place after Pentecost – between Trinity Sunday and the marking of Christ the King – and each of those days includes a reference to the baptism of Jesus and God’s announcement that: This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.

Baptism, it seems to me, points to the mystery of the Spirit’s reordering our lives so that we might live in more clarity and commitment: that’s my first hunch. The second is simple – and awesome – namely that what God offers to Jesus in his baptism is offered to us in ours: we are embraced by Gods grace.

• Think about this for a moment, what does Jesus do in this morning’s story according to Mark’s gospel to be called the beloved of the Lord?

• Anybody have a Bible: would you please read Mark 1: 9-11?

What does the story tell us? Did Jesus do anything besides show up at the River Jordan? Has he faced down Satan and his temptations in the desert? Has he gone to the Cross? Has he been betrayed by those who loved him? Or even begun his teaching ministry?

No, he hasn’t done anything yet – he just shows up – and upon being lifted from the water by John he hears the Lord announce: behold THIS is my beloved. And this, too, is what we are offered in our baptism: we don’t have to earn God’s love or prove our value to the Lord. We are God’s beloved just as Christ is.I’ve been touched and convinced by the way the pastor, Brian Stoffregen, puts it in his commentary noting that Biblical scholar:

James R. Edwards (The Gospel according to Mark) tells us: "As the inaugural event of Jesus' public ministry, the baptism tells us not what Jesus does but what God does to him" [p. 34]. (That means) We can say with Martin Luther when tempted to doubt, "I am baptized." (I find it interesting that he didn't battle temptation with, "I am a Christian" or "I believe.") The strength of his faith was found in his baptism – when God put his claim on him. So, too, we have the assurance through baptism of being children of God and being filled with the Holy Spirit even when it seems as though everything and everyone else is giving contrary messages, e.g., "You're a nobody." Our baptisms are not what we have done, but what God has done to us
(CrossMarks @ http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/mark1x4.htm)

• John’s baptism appears to be conditional, yes? With John you have to DO something – do you recall what it was?

• You have to confess your sins – you have to think about them and name them – and then humble yourselves for repentance.

And while that is clearly one pathway of faith, Jesus seems to offering another and different charism of baptism that emphasizes an intimate, mystical relationship with God as Father and Beloved. Without doing anything, God says to us through Jesus: you are special to me. In this, I see Jesus reclaiming his own poetic tradition for baptism:

• Do you know Psalm 139?
Oh yes, O Lord, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother's womb. I thank you, High God—you're breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration—what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something.

• What about Psalm 84?
What a beautiful home, O Lord of Hosts, you offer: I've always longed to live in a place like this, always dreamed of a room in your house, where I could sing for joy to God-alive! Birds find nooks and crannies in your house; sparrows and swallows make nests there. They lay their eggs and raise their young, singing their songs in the place where we worship. How blessed they are to live and sing there! And how blessed all those in whom you live, whose lives become roads you travel…One day spent in your house, this beautiful place of worship, beats thousands spent on Greek island beaches. I'd rather scrub floors in the house of my God than be honored as a guest in the palace of sin.

So first, baptism is gentle and poetic reordering of our lives that empowers us by grace to move from chaos to clarity.

Second, like Jesus, God offers us this intimacy by the Spirit in baptism not by what we do but because of God’s deep love for each and all of us. 

And then third, as the Beloved of the Lord, we are asked to live into the spirit of gratitude by our baptism – sharing light and clarity, hope and integrity with others – for this is one way the miracle is multiplied.

What is at stake in our baptismal vows, you see, is a deep eagerness to share in the flesh with others what Christ has shared with us: it is a promise to live lives of counter-cultural generosity and gratitude within a broken and violent world as a healing alternative to the madness. And so our liturgy of baptism asks:

• Do you renounce the powers of evil and desire the freedom of new life in Christ?

• Do you promise, by God’s grace, to follow in the way of our Savior, resisting oppression and evil and showing love and justice to others as best you are able?

• And do you promise to be a faithful member of the church, celebrating Christ’s presence and furthering his mission in the world?

We live in a world that is crazy busy: our bottom line values are greedy and self-centered, we are terrified and addicted and compulsive, we have elevated speed to the status of idolatry and are entertaining ourselves to death. In the baptism of Jesus – as in our own baptism, too – God has offered us an alternative that has always been better – the way of the Lord – salvation.

From the beginning, this alternative has offered us humanity and holiness, rest and work and play, light and darkness, balance and grace, peace and justice. In fact, the word for salvation in Hebrew – yashah – “basically means creating space, making room and living without compulsion.” (Jaco Hamman, A Play-Full Life, p. 46)

In baptism, we promise the Lord to let Christ make a space within and among us to grow and mature – to heal and nurture – to bless and forgive. It is not we who bring salvation – and healing and hope – it is God growing within us. And, THAT, beloved is what the sacred poetry reveals to us about the good news for today.

credits:
1) theautumnrain.blogspot.com
2) loc.gov
3) anglicansonline.org
4) spu.edu
5) arthistoryhousewife.blogspot.com
6) evangelicalfellowship.ca
7) nmhistorymuseum.org
8) jbu.edu
9) monkschronicle.wordpress.com

A new/old path to peace and justice living...

Last night I slept for 11 1/2 hours ~ no kidding ~ and woke up FINALLY feeling refreshed and rested.  Apparently this hasn't been the case since... when we were on our retreat/vacation in Montreal. Hmmm... Interestingly, two thoughts were swimming around my mind when I woke up in an odd little personal midrash on scripture and song:

+ First, I kept thinking of the words St. Luke puts into Christ's mouth in chapter 12: "Then he turned to the crowd: "When you see clouds coming in from the west, you say, 'Storm's coming'—and you're right. And when the wind comes out of the south, you say, 'This'll be a hot one'—and you're right. Frauds! You know how to tell a change in the weather, so don't tell me you can't tell a change in the season, the God-season we're in right now."  I grew up with the Revised Standard Version's:  "Hypocrites you can read the signs in the sky but you cannot read the signs of the times!" 

+The second were the gently prophetic words from a reggae Christmas song we've been playing this season that begins:  "All I really, really want for Christmas is just to be a little more conscious..."
In yesterday's NY Times, Pico Iyer, wrote a feature article in the Travel section:  "The Joy of Quiet."  At the heart of his essay, Iyer notes:

Has it really come to this?     
  

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.       

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.       

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.  
     
THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).       

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.
(For the whole enchilada, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=pico%20iyer&st=cse

Now for most of my active life over the past 45 years ~ from the time I was first drawn to peace and justice commitments in the 60s ~ I have been more drawn to the "trickster" and foolish/playful side of peace-making than the hardcore political world.  My friends have often called me the Pentecostal/Zen Buddhist/Hassidic monk:  a little Bob Dylan, a little Bruce Springsteen, a little Thomas Merton and a whole lotta Kathleen Norris.  But now, in reading Jaco Hamman's book, A Playfull Live, I've discovered the key reason when he states:

Whoever MUST play, cannot be play-full. The Hewbrew word for salvation, yasha, bassically means creating space, making room or being without compulsion...

So as my Advent watching and waiting has made clear, this is the year to take the next step towards deepening my play-fullness so that I have time ~ and inner space ~ to be a person of peace and justice in my everyday life.  This is part of what it means to live into the healing of our age - tikkun olam - to be a gentle warrior for compassion and hope. Iyer's article notes that in our day and age:

The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.       

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.       

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.”

He also writes that: "Empathy, as well as deep thought, depends on neural processes that are inherently slow. The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for."  I will be sharing more thoughts about what it means for me ~ and those in my community of faith ~ to start to embrace the "slow movement" as another aspect of our baptismal vows. 

+ We promise to renounce the powers of evil as we desire the freedom of new life in Christ, yes?

+ We vow, by the grace of God, to follow the way of our Savior, to resist oppression and evil, to show love and justice in our lives, yes?

Let's see where this leads...

Happy New Year...

Today I read a sweet prayer for the New Year that goes like this:

May your home always be too small
to hold all your friends.
May your heart remain ever supple,
Fearless in the face of threat,
Jubilant in the grip of grace.
May your hands remain open,
Caressing, never clinched,
Save to pound the doors
Of all who barter justice
To the highest bidder.
May your heroes be earthy
Dusty-shoed and rumpled,
Hallowed but unhaloed,
Guiding you through seasons of tremor and travail,
Apprenticed to the godly art of giggling
Amid haggard news
And portentous circumstance.
May your hankering
Be in rhythm with heaven’s
Whose covenant vows
A dusty intersection with your own:
When creation’s hope and history rhyme.
May Hosannas lilt from your lungs:
Creation is not done
Creation is not yet done.
All flesh,
I am told,
will behold
Will surely behold…

And here are some graphics from the past year's collection that fall under the category: "No Comment Necessary."

=

(This one appeared with the caption:  church officials still uncertain about birth control)

Happy New Year...