Irreducible Minimums

A tiny book review

2012-01-16T18:56:00.001-07:00

Lauren Winner's Still is a moving, deep, theological, and resonant motion-capture of a life lived in the awareness of God's consolation and desolation - of how these dance as companions in the spiritual life.

I highly recommend it.

'New' - A Sermon for January 1st

2012-01-01T11:16:00.001-07:00

Sermon for Year B, Holy Name

By The Rev. ToreyLightcap

Saint ThomasEpiscopal Church

January 1, 2012

“New”

This morning is about what is new.

It’s about the chance to approach the altar of God stillwearing the garland

Of entrance into theyear 2012,

And to make anoffering appropriate to the day –

To the morning of the day, the beginning of theday, the first day.

You might be here asking, How will I live this year? What will I do?

Frame your intent this morning.

The following words are recorded in Isaiah chapter 43:

“Do not remember theformer things, or consider the things of old.

I am about to do anew thing [says the Lord];

Now it springsforth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a wayin the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

God clears a path and makes the impossible possible,

And that shoulddirect all our attention to looking ahead, right in front of us,

Where it’s going tohappen.

How will I live this year in the present, the here-and-now, and in the future,

So that I am notburdened by the past?

Or again, as it’s written in Lamentations 3,

“The steadfast loveof the Lord never ceases,

His mercies nevercome to an end;

They are newevery morning;

Great is yourfaithfulness.”

God’s radical and redeeming love, manifest in the Christchild whom we acclaim,

Is not onlynever-ending …

It isever-beginning.

It stirs in a baby asleep in a stone manger:

A baby who has justsurvived the slaughter of thousands of baby boys

Directed bysomeone who wanted to get rid of this one baby:

A baby who is aboutto be picked up and carried to Egypt,

So deep and directand restless is the threat on his life.

Love, always on the run; always starting over; always givento newness.

How might you live this year out of the well of that truth?

Or again, from almost the very end of Scripture, Revelation21,

God’s enduringpromise, “Behold, I make all things new.”

The God of possibility and enduring love and creation

Does not showpartiality;

In the economy ofGod, everything gets made over;

Everything is subjected to re-creation.

How might we live out of the depths of that promise?

Very often at this time of year,

We resolve that wewill do this or that – something specific like losing weight,

Or perhapssomething hazy, like being nicer to people.

We make promises to ourselves,

And sometimes toothers, and sometimes to God, that are hard to keep

Because they arebuilt on the vague notion

That for somereason, we’d ought to work at making ourselves better.

I urge you this morning to hear the promises of God –

God’s resolutionsfor how God specifically loves us –

Promises God haskept –

Not merely thefact of them, but what’s at the heartof them.

God is concrete and specific: a child now, living in atangible place

And in a time inhistory that we can point out and measure.

God does not discriminate: all things are made new.

God directs our attention forward, not behind –

To what is now, andto what will be.

These are God’s New Year’s resolutions to us brought fromScripture,

And they beg ourresponse.

How shall we live according to the measure of the promise?

How shall I return this love concretely, indiscriminately,

In this very momentand in the future?

Blessed be the name of God. Amen.

"Loved" - A Christmas Sermon

2011-12-24T20:12:00.004-07:00

Sermon for Year B, Christmas Eve

By The Rev. ToreyLightcap

Saint ThomasEpiscopal Church

December 24, 2011

Luke 2:1-20

“Loved”

Welcome, each and all.

Tonight, I wish to make the followingproposition:

Let’s be real, and honest, and as close to the bone as we can get.

Let’s let the words of our liturgyspeak for themselves,

And let the music be as beautiful and as moving and as true it’s meantto be.

And in this moment, let’s try to go all the way down, and touch bottom.

All the way down to the truth of thehuman condition,

Where there is no room for equivocation or falsehood,

No time for self-deception.

Because,

I suspect that out of deference to family obligation or plain-oldtradition, …

Or because we live in a culture that just expects it, …

Or because maybe you have a hole in your heart that you can’t close

And you’re so blue you don’t know how you’re going to get out of bedtomorrow,

And the idea of Christmas isjust making it worse –

For any of these reasons, you may have found yourself here tonight.

You’ve come tired or doubtful orbroke or depressed.

You’ve come wondering what the pointof it all is.

Or you’ve come whistling, with yourhands in your pockets

And the expectations of the joys of the season ahead.

You must know that all of that is okay. All of that iswelcome.

I pray you get what you need in anycase,

And that you get hungry later and want to come back here for more.

All well and good.

Whether you believe the narrative wepreach and sing tonight is virtually inconsequential.

There’s something much deeper thanthat.

And it’s really the only thing thatmatters right now,

And it’s this:

Can you allow yourself to be loved?

I’m not asking a psychologicalquestion;

I’m not even asking a terribly theological question;

I’m asking a practical question.

Can you allow yourself to know thatin spite of everything,

You are deeply and radically and unconditionally loved

By a Force that is both notyou,

And that, at the same time, richly indwells itself in you?

Let’s not get hung up on what to callthis Force for just this moment.

“God” is a simply shorthand term, andit means different things to different people.

The matter is this, what’s at stakeis this:

Can you, practically speaking, let yourself be loved

By this One who comes and lives in you all the time?

Selected you from before you wereborn,

And said, Ah, now this one. Here’sone I really really love …

Can you let yourself be loved?

Can you, in spite of your sins –

Both how you get it wrong andhow you get it right (for those are sins, too) –

Can you allow yourself to be loved?

Because the simple fact is … you are,already.

You can’t change that, and why wouldyou?

The child in the stable is, quitesimply, the incarnation of that fact –

The confirmation of that fact–

Of the truth of your being loved already so radically and so beautifully

For precisely who you are atthis very moment:

Scars, flaws, and all.

There is nothing else to know or to say

Until this fact is known and proclaimed in every quarter of the world,

And until it is seen for what it is in every human heart.

Religion will be nothing more than aset of performative statistics

And the appeasing of rituals without it.

It seems we spend the whole of ourlives beating our breasts and pounding on altars,

Staring into space and pleading: God,love me; I can do better; love me!

… When that’s senseless.

Karl Barth was a world-renowntheologian who wrote millions ofwords for 82 years.

Towards the end of his life, when somany people were seeking his wisdom,

Someone asked him how he would summarize all of his work in just a few words.

He is said to have replied, verysimply,

“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

I’m begging you, then, to take thistruth into you;

And if you can’t quite believe it coming from me,

Then take the learned teacher at his word.

You are loved.

Radically, completely, utterly,deeply.

No reasoning can undo that fact.

How that speaks to you in your life?Maybe the answer isn’t known.

Maybe you don’t even need to know right now.

Maybe it’s enough just to get the bigmessage.

So there, now.

It’s all out; it’s all on the table;

I don’t have a single card left unplayed in my hand;

There is no other shoe waiting to drop.

Hear the message. Sing the songs.Take the holy supper.

They all mean the same thing.

You are loved. Amen.

Box

2011-12-12T18:34:00.000-07:00

You talk and you make a point and you draw

a large rectangular picture frame in the space between us

and just like that the space takes up residence in ourconversation

because now we are predisposed to seeing one another

by virtue of the box now named and hanging there.

I didn’t see the space when I came in

so now I’m vaguely aware of the need to apologize

that I didn’t formalize it in the first place

but instead rudely waited for you to point it out

by constructing the frame for us both.

As big as that thing is, it must be very heavy and ornate.

Did you know making them is a whole little sub-industry?

I hear museum curators slave over such choices

in the belief that the wood around the paint editoriallyadds something or other.

Do you, by your pointing, mean to capture something of themoment

as though suddenly realizing you forgot your paint andbrushes?

Because this moment, though suffused with such great lightfrom your side,

is just another mundane tick of the clock from where I sit.

And how is it that what I perceive as so average

is worth taking the time to memorialize?

I suppose I could come over to your side and look

but I can tell you right now what I would see:

blank brown walls behind a plain table,

and an empty chair between them.

Torey Lightcap

"Straighten" - A Sermon

2011-12-04T14:42:00.001-07:00

Sermon for Year B, Advent 1

By The Rev. ToreyLightcap

Saint ThomasEpiscopal Church

December 4, 2011

Mark 1:1-8

“Straighten”

Advent: The making-straight of paths.

How do you straighten out a path?

God’s answer to that question is Johnthe Baptist.

John the Baptist: God’s willingnessto be misunderstood in order to get a message across.

I used to spend a lot of timeapologizing for John in my sermons,

Trying to get people to cozy up to the crazy guy

With the weird clothes and the bad diet,

And that has its own kind of effectiveness, I guess;

But the truth is, sermons that apologize for the Bible are wastingpeople’s time.

Sermons that follow the Bible are ultimately going to be

Of the best help to all involved.

John comes, then, to straighten out thepath for Jesus.

How do you do that?

In that day and age? In thatparticular religious and political setting?

You go as far as you can into themost inconveniently desolate place you can find,

Where only the most dedicated would bother to try and find you,

And you preach a hard, hard word:

Get ready, Messiah is coming, and he isfilled with Spirit.

Whenhe comes, things will be radically different.

Sohop in this cold water, and let me bury you in it,

As a symbol that you are dead to sin and theold ways of your life.

Andthen let me pull you out of it, up and out of it,

So that you can breathe again, a whole newcreature of the Christ to come.

Andthen I want you to get back home and start listening,

Looking for signs of this Messiah. Don’tworry; to you, it’ll be obvious.

I can imagine that it was terriblyexciting.

That it must have felt so compellingto be a part of something so alive.

I can imagine, too, that there weresome who went all that way

And who, when they finally got back to their homes,

Informed their families that there was really nothing to report –

Just another madman out on the fringes.

Just another religious loony with anaxe to grind.

There comes a time, though, that you lookat your life,

And you weigh the worth of your soul.

You look at your life, and you say, Man, this isn’t cuttin’ it.

And you think of how deadened, insome ways, your life has become:

The routine. The trite. The trivial. Grey and insubstantial.

How burdened you’ve become withthings that don’t matter.

How not even all the religious talk in the world could bring the idea of Godany closer.

And in pain and confusion,

You will go to the priest and ask for help,

And the priest … the priest will absolve you of your wonderment

And help you gently douse your burning questions;

So you will go a mountaintop and find a guru,

And the guru will tell you that the answer lies within,

Which seems true enough, but you wish that answer were a little morespecific

Given that you had to fly around the world and climb a mountain just tohear it;

So you will go to a seminar and write down your ideas about God in anotebook,

And in the end you will have … a noteboook … filled with plans and ideas,

And you will be organized but still dissatisfied.

It won’t be long after all thisnonsense

That in the cold light of morning you come to understand

What you should have understoodall along, which is this:

Why is God just an idea?

You’ll take another sip of coffee,

And you’ll say to yourself,

Well, I guess it’s time I moved beyond God as an abstract notion

And actually try to meet him. Her.Whatever: I just want to meet God.

Quite often, the minute you make thisdeclaration,

You start seeing and hearing the world in a new and different way.

Suddenly God is in everything, andyou understand, you’re back at the beginning:

Thedishes can wait, the business can wait –

Shoot, I was going to get over and sweep theporch of the church this morning,

But even that can wait – …

I’ve got to get back out to the desert andlisten to this John fellow

And maybe I’ll Meet God in the process.

As you most assuredly will.

You will. You will you will you will.

I’ve been around a while; I’ve seenit happen:

It takes some rearranging of priorities …

It requires letting go of things, and we do certainly fear loss …

It will not prove convenient or efficient by most any measurement …

But in the end you meet God;

You relate to God;

You walk and talk with God.

You just have to get yourself down tothe edge of the river,

Where you’ll be within earshot of the preacher,

And you have to be able to say it and mean it,

That I want that part of me thatis old and false to be left behind;

I want to jump in the water and berenewed.

And not for some abstract set ofreasons

That have to do with the arcane rules of what constitutes membership ina church:

I want to know God, relate with God:

The one-to-One and many-to-One. I want that.

It is so simple, and we make it socomplicated.

It comes to this: If you want God badenough, you will start to beat the bushes.

We all thirst and hunger after God.

It’s just a question of if we areaware enough of this terrible thirst and hunger.

And again, that’s John the Baptist’sjob: to wake us up.

But once we reach that point, we areresponsible for the choices we make

That either invite God in or keep God away.

The deepest and sharpest irony, ofcourse, is that you can’t keep Godaway.

It’s like running out into the oceanand telling the tide to go home.

Keeping God away is about asfruitless and as joyless an enterprise as it gets.

You know why?

… Because you were made for God’senjoyment.

The whole reason you exist

Is so that God has something amazing and wonderful to revel in.

And that’s not God being selfish;that’s God being self-giving.

That’s your job description.

Get that, and you get the wholething.

And then, of course, you start living the whole thing.

Friends, this is Advent: a time ofrenewal, prayer, waiting, expectation, and hope.

Brothers and sisters, ready or not, Jesusis coming.

He will come into this world bearingthe balm

Of healing, restoration, forgiveness.

Don’t you want to be a part of that?

Not just the overt cultural stuff –the mall, and Ho Ho Ho –

Not only the things the church does in its liturgy so well this timeeach year:

But God, and God’s life extended through you to the world?

Don’t you want that?

Then get ready, and ask for it, andwatch with me.

Because some beautiful and amazingthings are about to happen.

"Choir" - An All Saints Sermon

2011-11-01T09:50:00.001-06:00

SERMON FOR YEAR A, ALL SAINTS SUNDAY
BY THE REV. TOREY LIGHTCAP
SAINT THOMAS EPISCOPAL CHURCH
OCTOBER 30, 2011
MATTHEW 5:1-12
“CHOIR”

Week after week, we implore God to remember those who have died.
We do this in spite of knowing that it is already true, before we can even ask,
That “the souls of the departed are in the hands of God.”
We make our prayers for the dead even though we know very well
That they are heirs to the promise
That God will never abandon us. Will never abandon us.
Yet, as if to somehow reassure ourselves, we actively remember those gone before –
The great jumble of meaning they left in our lives,
The many impressions and memories and contradictions –
The good, and the not-so-good, all mixed in together at once –
Even in that way that memory can sometimes turn people into what they were not –
And we offer up our humble, fallible, beautifully well-intentioned human prayers.
We pray, God, may your will for them be fulfilled.

Week after week, we remember the dead. Remember them by name.
I hear their names murmured in this sanctuary, whispered like secrets.
I add my own to the list – each one bundled tight at the bosom,
Each whispered name a parcel of privately-held memories.

Why do we do this? …
I can see someone with hard edges and bitter eyes,
Cold from the years, standing at a distance and judging all this:
Looking at us as we pray from the corner of his eye, and laughing a little, saying,
It’s useless, Christian: the dead are dead, leave them be:
Why do you prattle on so,
And stir at the ashes of a fire long extinguished?

It’s as good a challenge to the faith as you’re likely to find: a faithful question, really.
After all, Why can’t we leave the dead to just be, to rest in peace?
Isn’t the fact of their lives sufficient?
Did not Jesus himself advise his followers to let the dead bury their own?
Why this urge, especially this time each year at All Saints,
To not allow bygones to be bygones?
Do we exhume the dead with our prayers and place them on trial again,
For what they did or didn’t do;
Or do we simply honor and remember them?

Why do we possess this primal urge to pray for them?... why ever on earth must we pray,
When all we dream and more has already been accomplished
For those we love who have gone before us in death,
And it’s just a matter of our own inability to believe it?
Isn’t that our problem and not God’s task?

Could it be that we pray for the dead
Because the memories of those gone before are like a mirror to our lives,
And we imagine them longing for us to have better for ourselves and to do better –
To optimize the minutes and days remaining in our lives,
So that they will be lived as well and as faithfully as possible?

When we pray for the repose of the souls of the dead,
Is that the same moment that we’re being beckoned by those same souls
To live, work, pray, study, think, act, give, and love
With all we’ve got, for as long as we’ve got it?
With all the energy and will we possess, leaving out nothing?

One of my favorite quotes –
One that I’ve thought about for more than a decade –
Is from George Bernard Shaw, from 1907.
I heard it this past summer, again, on our mission trip to Colorado;
It came at the end of a particularly hard day.
Shaw says,
“My life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live,
It is a privilege to do it for whatsoever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die,
For the harder I work, the more I live.
I rejoice in life for its own sake.
Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me.
It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment;
And I want to make it burn as brightly as possible
Before handing it on to future generations.”

I heard Shaw’s words and went outside and sat down and breathed warm air
And looked up at that bright blue, almost overly happy, imposing Colorado sky.

“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die,
For the harder I work, the more I live.”

I thought of all the saints who have so far gone before me,
Whose names I often recall when we pray for the dead:
Johnny and Nick and Lois and Leland;
C.J. and Christy and Julia and Floydia;
Glenn and Charles and a special case (to me) named Paul;
People known over coffee and the slow news crawl of life unfolding;
People I sat near in the pew or said last rites over.

I could hear them, chorusing off in great echo of Shaw’s words:
Be thoroughly used up when you die, Torey;
Heaven is like the counter of a rental car agency, only the policies are reversed:
So that when you return the vehicle of your body
There will be an upcharge if you do so
Without any wear-and-tear on it, or with any gas left in the tank.
St. Peter kicks your tires,
And if they are still properly inflated, you pay a fine.
Don’t expect a big party if you don’t show up with a fender half dragging behind you.
Be thoroughly used up.
Take every chance you get to brighten up the world in the small way we all have,
To do some simple thing to help make things right for a little while;
Love everyone recklessly;
Preach, and live, the unfailing providence of God;
And when you mess up, apologize to those you’ve hurt and get on with it.

And there it was:
A simple set of instructions for life, flung from on high.

I didn’t need Joel Osteen to tell me to live my “best life now.”
It just took a few friends and relatives getting together
In that heavenly place and time that Karl Barth called “provisionally inaccessible,”
And reminding me, and now you, of the great responsibility
And unfolding daily joy that life is.

Today, my brothers and sisters, is Sunday, the day of resurrection.
Light has broken in on our lives again, and why should we want to stop it.
The weekly cycle of life has repeated itself.

I am sure that you had many chances to become “thoroughly used up” this week
For the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven come on earth as Jesus preached it.
After all, this is your work :: your life :: your Christly vocation.
I am sure that you had many chances to live our your baptismal vows:
Those promises we make in the Baptismal Covenant
That just seem impossible to keep, so wide in scope they are,
But that are our work nevertheless,
And that thoroughly use us up.

To exercise poverty of spirit, meekness, purity of heart and vision;
To hunger and thirst for righteousness and be taken to task for righteousness’ sake;
To stand in solidarity with those who mourn
Or those who are reviled or persecuted or slandered
Or are otherwise misunderstood.
To remember that the “reward” may be great, but it’s not the focus,
That in a sense it’s merely incidental to the Christian life.

I know you had those chances, and I pray you took them.
Heed the chorus of your own saintly choir and whatever advice they give,
And do not neglect to pray for them.
For theirs, too, is the kingdom –
God’s kingdom and God’s power and God’s glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Executive Council says no to Anglican Covenant

2011-10-24T20:24:00.002-06:00

Good word from Episcopal News Service:

[Episcopal News Service – Salt Lake City, Utah] The Episcopal Church's Executive Council will submit a resolution to General Convention next year that would have it state that the church is "unable to adopt the Anglican Covenant in its present form."

The resolution also promises that the church will "recommit itself to dialogue with the several provinces when adopting innovations which may be seen as threatening the unity of the communion" and commits to "continued participation in the wider councils of the Anglican Communion" and dialogue "with our brothers and sisters in other provinces to deepen understanding and to insure the continued integrity of the Anglican Communion."

The 77th meeting of General Convention July 5-12, 2012 will decide whether to pass, amend and pass, or reject the resolution. Convention is "the only body that can act on behalf of the whole church in this matter," Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said during a post-meeting press conference.

The unanimous decision to submit the resolution to convention came Oct. 24, on the last day of council's four-day meeting here.

Seven times

2011-09-11T05:55:00.000-06:00

SERMON FOR YEAR A, PROPER 19
BY THE REV. TOREY LIGHTCAP
SAINT THOMAS EPISCOPAL CHURCH
SEPTEMBER 11, 2011
MATTHEW 18:21-35
“SEVEN”

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

As we gather under the roof of this holy house today,
We are confronted with competing realities:
Two realities: each one, paradoxically,
Equally true, and seemingly opposed, to the other:
We have been wronged;
And we must forgive.

To the Christian, forgiveness is not optional; it’s not an add-on or a nice-to-have;
It’s not a state we mystically achieve after we have reached some spiritual plateau.
It is, quite simply, required of us each and every day;
And for many of us, it can be the hardest thing to do.

Because forgiveness, for whatever else the dictionary may tell us,
Means admitting at some level that whatever you have done to me,
Not only have I been wronged, but I’ve been wrong:
Wrong to hold on to anger, resentment, this callous heart
That lets me stereotype you and label you and put you on a shelf.
Letting go of all that is the admission that not only have I been wrong,
I’m also not the one in charge,
And if we were really truly truthful, we might confess that we like being in charge.

Brothers and sisters, Jesus teaches us through (if you will) this straightforward parable
That suffering comes from not being able to let go
Of all the frail emotions and desperate narratives to which we cling.
He teaches us about fundamental human behavior,
About the basic need and nature of forgiveness.

He says that all people are like this one person
Who was offered forgiveness on an exorbitant amount of money he owed –
Fifteen years’ worth of paychecks – No chance of repayment –
And of course, he took that forgiveness.
But when the time came for him to be reasonable back,
About forgiving a much smaller amount of money –
About three months’ wages –
He just couldn’t act with the same kind of compassion he himself had received.
He who was forgiven so much could not, himself, forgive even a little.
In the very next teaching, which is on marriage,
Jesus will call attention again to this pattern of thinking,
And he will call it what it is: hard-heartedness.

We must ask: is this going to be our legacy? Hard-heartedness?
On this day, of all days –
This day that means ten years since towers fell and people died –
This day that brings incalculable hurt to the collective memory
Almost just because of how it occurs on the calendar –
This day, a memory of having been wronged,
Senselessly, in a terrible, terrible way –
… On this day, are we really going to choose to be callous and prideful?
Will we be the hard-hearted ones?

Or will we open a new chapter in our collective narrative
That dares to speak of accepting forgiveness and offering forgiveness?

… Sit with that for a moment …

If it seems too audacious a thing to do, then let me ask …
The command is to forgive eternally, perpetually:
What if, as a start, you just forgave seven times?
Not seventy times seven; not yet; just seven times the one wrong.
As a start?
Not just to have done it, but because it’s the right thing to do?

… What if?
If you’re thinking, Gee, I don’t know …
Well, what if you did know?

Who would you choose to forgive in this way?
Just seven times. To start.

Maybe not some monolithic thing like global terrorism;
Maybe, instead, just someone you know,
Someone you’ve had in your life; someone who needs your forgiveness.

It would change your life!

The first forgiveness would be something of a practice, a dry run:
A remembrance, a sting, the memory of the pain.
But imagine pushing through it, maybe – I don’t know – for a month or two;
Imagine getting to the point of being able to say, I really genuinely forgive you.

I daresay the load would be lighter, even if only a bit.

The second forgiveness would be a regret and a lament:
You would say, Do I really have to go back over this territory again?
But just imagine staying with it, sitting with it,
Letting go of just a tiny fraction more of it –
Enough to be able to sit and breathe in that place of pain,
Rather than reacting immediately –
And finally being able to say, again, I forgive you.

One night in February 1993, Oshea Israel, who lived in Minneapolis, was at a party.
He got into an argument with Laramiun Byrd, just 20 years old,
And shot and killed him.
Oshea went into Stillwater Prison for seventeen years,
And eventually, while still in prison,
He agreed to meet with Mary Johnson, Laramiun’s mother.
Mary didn’t ask to meet Oshea at first; it took her a while, better than a decade;
She wanted justice for the death of her only son;
She thought Oshea “was an animal who deserved to be caged.”
But the more she thought about it, the more compelled she felt
That her faith in Jesus demanded that she find some way to forgive.
So she sat down across from Oshea at Stillwater, and she said,
“Look, you don’t know me; I don’t know you; let’s just start with right now.”
When the meeting was over, she stood up, and she hugged him!
And, she says, “Instantly [I] knew that all that anger and the animosity,
All the stuff I had in my heart for 12 years … –
I knew it was over, that I had totally forgiven.”
And she kept coming back, and they just kept trying to understand each other.
He was eventually released;
And now – no lie – his Minneapolis apartment is next door to hers.
He lives in number 902; she lives at number 904.
They look after each other now, keep each other out of trouble.

In the news reports, he looks at her and says,
“You still believe in me.
And the fact that you can do it, despite how much pain I caused you – it’s amazing.”
And the she looks at him and she says,
“I know it’s not an easy thing, to be able to share our story together.
Even with us sitting here together right now,
I know it’s not an easy thing.”
And they tell one another that they love each other.
Not in some fake moment for the cameras, but in real sincerity, and with Christly charity.

By the third forgiveness, my brothers and sisters, you’ll be cursing me
For having brought up this idea in the first place:
When I get a hold of that priest.
And then, gradually, a softening.
Stick with it, push through; stick with it, push through;
Eventually you will find yourself back on that ground: I genuinely forgive you.

By the fourth forgiveness, Jesus’ words will ring in your ears:
Because I have been forgiven much, so must I forgive at least this much –
I cannot be like that petty, unforgiving servant; I know I am called to do better.
And those words will come again, on their own: I forgive you.
It might not be any easier, but I know that by God’s grace,
You will bring it to flower once again.

Bud Welch is the father of Julie Marie Welch, who at age 23,
Was one of the 167 people Timothy McVeigh killed
With a truck bomb targeting a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
McVeigh was caught, tried, and remained unrepentant all the way to the grave.
Bud was scarred forever.
This is his testimony. He says,

Three days after the bombing, as I watched Tim McVeigh being led out of the courthouse, I hoped someone in a high building with a rifle would shoot him dead. I wanted him to fry. In fact, I’d have killed him myself if I’d had the chance.

Unable to deal with the pain of Julie’s death, I started self-medicating with alcohol until eventually the hangovers were lasting all day. Then, on a cold day in January 1996, I came to the bombsight – as I did every day – and I looked across the wasteland where the Murrah Building once stood. My head was splitting from drinking the night before and I thought, “I have to do something different, because what I’m doing isn’t working.”
For the next few weeks I started to reconcile things in my mind, and finally concluded that it was revenge and hate that had killed Julie and the … others. Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols had been against the US government for what happened in Waco, Texas, in 1993 and seeing what they’d done with their vengeance, I knew I had to send mine in a different direction….

I also remembered that shortly after the bombing I’d seen a news report on Tim McVeigh’s father, Bill. He was shown stooping over a flowerbed, and when he stood up I could see that he’d been physically bent over in pain. I recognized it because I was feeling that pain, too.

In December 1998, after Tim McVeigh had been sentenced to death, I had a chance to meet Bill McVeigh at his home near Buffalo. I wanted to show him that I did not blame him. His youngest daughter also wanted to meet me, and after Bill had showed me his garden, the three of us sat around the kitchen table. Up on the wall were family snapshots, including Tim’s graduation picture. They noticed that I kept looking up at it, so I felt compelled to say something. “God, what a good looking kid,” I said.

Earlier, when we’d been in the garden, Bill had asked me, “Bud, are you able to cry?” I’d told him, “I don’t usually have a problem crying.” His reply was, “I can’t cry, even though I’ve got a lot to cry about.” But now, sitting at the kitchen table looking at Tim’s photo, a big tear rolled down his face. It was the love of a father for a son.

When I got ready to leave I shook Bill’s hand, then extended it to Jennifer, but she just grabbed me and threw her arms around me. She was the same sort of age as Julie but felt so much taller. I don’t know which one of us started crying first. Then I held her face in my hands and said, “Look, honey, the three of us are in this for the rest of our lives. I don’t want your brother to die and I’ll do everything I can to prevent it.” As I walked away from the house I realized that until that moment I had walked alone, but now a tremendous weight had lifted from my shoulders. I had found someone who was a bigger victim of the Oklahoma bombing than I was, because while I can speak in front of thousands of people and say wonderful things about Julie, if Bill McVeigh meets a stranger he probably doesn’t even say he had a son.

About a year before the execution I found it in my heart to forgive Tim McVeigh. It was a release for me rather than for him.

I hope you don’t think that the fifth or the sixth forgiveness gets any easier;
If anything, by now you will have worked around some of the why of it – or not –,
And you may still be well within your rights to say,
What you did to me I can understand – or do not – yet the act itself
Remains unforgivable.
That will never change;
Nevertheless, I forgive you.

The last time I felt compelled to really forgive someone, it took such a long time;
I’m still doing it.
Number seven can’t be far away; after that, I guess if Jesus has anything to say about it,
I just go on forgiving.
And I’m pretty sure that the last thoughtless thing I did to someone
Left a searing scar that itself cannot be taken away;
It’s just part of that person now – that person I’m thinking of right now –
Even despite, and maybe even because of, my apologies.
Jesus doesn’t command us to understand, after all:
Just to forgive, and to keep on forgiving.
And then to keep on.
Otherwise, it’s like Nelson Mandela said:
“Not to forgive is like drinking a glass of poison and waiting for your enemies to die.”

Don’t be mistaken.
There’s no glory for us.
There’s no glamor in it; no extra beef in the soup,
No additional stars in our crowns, bye-and-bye.
Though it can be nice to walk a little lighter, sleep a little more peacefully at night.

Nevertheless, the commandment stands:
If we would Jesus people be, this we must do.

And glorify God all the same,
“Not only with our lips, but in our lives.”

Forgive, he said. Forgive, forgive, forgive, if you would my disciple be.

What a revolutionary act.

Let us pray.

Lord God, when we are hurt, scared, cornered, out of patience, or have just plain been wronged, you tell us to look to you, through the cross-shattered image of Christ, for hope and restitution and healing and forgiveness and reconciliation. And you tell us to give of the good of what we have received.

May this day be the opening-up of something new and real for each and every one of us and our country. May we find it within ourselves to do as you command.

In Jesus’ name. Amen.

New One-Page Introduction to Covenant Available

2011-07-19T08:03:00.001-06:00

London, July 19, 2011 — Seeing a need for a concise introduction to the Covenant, the No Anglican Covenant Coalition has issued “A Short Introduction to the Anglican Covenant.” This document consists of a single page of text.

“A Short Introduction” is intended for duplication and distribution to Anglicans who need to know about the Covenant but who do not have the time or inclination to wade through the flood of history and commentary available on this Web site and elsewhere. As the Revd. Dr. Lesley Fellows, Moderator of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition put it, “This brief, plain‐language explanation is intended to help ordinary Anglicans worldwide to understand what is being proposed.”

“A Short Introduction” also attempts to give a more balanced view of the Covenant than is available elsewhere. As our Convenor for the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Revd. Canon Hugh Magee, has said, “Many people have complained that the official study material from the Anglican Communion Office has lacked balance and has failed to take seriously the concerns of Covenant critics.”

Committing place to purpose

2011-05-31T20:10:00.003-06:00

Look at Mr. Catolick's latest on Lambeth's, er, conference facilities:

I'm not Church of England; I'm not even "cradle" Episcopalian. I would love to go to England, but I haven't even done that yet. (I saw Ireland from a plane at sunrise, and that was pretty good, though obviously insufficient.) I'm a stateside massing priest, a guy who cares, and who understands that image and first perceptions count.

It occurs to me that perhaps our C of E friends might entertain turning Lambeth into some kind of all-seekers-welcome sort of spirituality/helping-the-needy kind of place - Iona Nueva with a dash of seek-knock-find Taize, or somesuch, with the "least" of Matthew 25 as its guiding spirit.

If Lambeth itself - center of that messy, polymorphous object of grace called the Anglican Communion - was seen to represent some kind of health and healing and a move toward the center of the Gospel, perhaps more would take it seriously.

The great round world has shifted out from under Christendom. This is understood. Lambeth is not for knocking around in; it is for the centrality of mission, and the unashamed heart of same.

More head-scratching here in Iowa.

My, what we have made of Jesus and his ministry. Repentance is the only appropriate response at this point.

Sticky situations and language games: Anglican Covenant edition

2011-05-18T13:32:00.002-06:00

- Subscribe (to)

- Accept

- Accede

- Receive

- Endorse

- Believe (in[to])

- Approve

- Support

- Endure

- Tolerate

- Decline

... ???

There is a language game here: What terms can we deploy that are gently reassuring but also nonbinding upon us? What language can we borrow to seem like willing participants but not also bear responsibility?

I suggest these distinctions would be made to seem irrelevant in a world in which the Anglican Covenant is made operational and the logic of Jesus -- that whoever is not against us is for us -- is turned on its ear, making us explicitly either for or against, pro or con. The point is to sweep as many provinces into the one camp as possible, create critical mass, and then use that leverage to move to predetermined outcomes.

Perhaps I am too fatalistic about this. That may be. I only desire to remain pragmatically realistic.

On Jim Wallis' failed leadership

2011-05-10T14:45:00.004-06:00

The fact that the matter before the public and Sojourners went to Jim Wallis' desk so fast, and that he felt compelled to respond in what he saw as a comprehensive way so quickly, demonstrates the nature of the threat as it's been articulated - that he doesn't want to have this mantle removed from him yet, especially after that tussle with - er, whatshisname? - oh yeah, Glenn Beck. So he understands now that he and staff cannot be passive in handling these things, and on this score, that it's already too late. They should consider themselves as being on notice, as I'm sure they now do.

The question as I see it is framed by his prose that welcoming LGBT "has not been at the core of our calling" - that the core of their work is poverty, racial equality, stewardship of creation, etc. Specifically, that welcoming LGBT is not of a piece with these concerns, or that it's detachable, or some kind of throwaway or add-on, when clearly all these things belong at the core. If he's incapable of seeing this holistically then his organization is less calculating than anyone figured, which I do not believe is the case. He's simply not going to take a clear stand, and will continue to be mealymouthed about this, until something outside him shakes him, and what he's written backs that up - "all show and no go," as they say. Therefore, it really is time to ask: Who is capable of speaking for the religious left in a way that is comprehensive, holistic, and unapologetic?

Instead of what Sojourners did yesterday, they should have reprimanded the responsible parties, rewritten their policies, and put out a brief statement declaring inclusion of all persons as a basic tenet of Christian life. Anything else would have fallen short, and did.

Mr. Wallis, by his prose, seems to think he's dodging a bullet, but what is he protecting after all? The causes for which Sojo stands are basically virtuous, but you can't play pick-and-choose as they've done here.

Scapegoat

2011-04-17T11:34:00.002-06:00

SERMON FOR YEAR A, PALM SUNDAY

BY THE REV. TOREY LIGHTCAP

SAINT THOMAS EPISCOPAL CHURCH

APRIL 17, 2011

MATTHEW 26:14-27:66

“SCAPEGOAT”

Think of violence like a spiral: broad and general at the bottom, where all the low-lying discontent is … but the higher up you go, the faster and more intense it gets, until finally someone must take the blame, and the hit, and then the cycle slows down and it starts all over again. The man Jesus is a scapegoat, and the spilling of his blood brings an odd sensation of release to the crowds and the authorities who placate the crowds by piercing innocent flesh. Tomorrow, we’ll dig more graves: but for today we have reached our quota, and we’re feeling better about ourselves.

“We.”

We all do this: we all make scapegoats, even, sometimes especially, out of the ones we love, and then, after the deed is done, we deny ever having known them as we warm ourselves beside the fire.

It is not just or fair that Jesus should die – it is not just or fair that we do this. After all, if he is truly the Messiah, the Chosen One, then he of all people should live in order to teach us all the more how to live. His reign should extend into all times and places, and he should be its head – the righteous King on his throne – not only head of those of many years before us, to the people he loved and knew, but to us, too – and to all people, in his flesh – why not? King for all time. Isn’t that what gods do, after all: show us how they’re more powerful than we are?

But that’s not what happens. And again, it isn’t just, and it isn’t fair; but it is sound logic. We need to put our blame on something; and we need to watch as that something is expelled and made to pay the price.

“The … scapegoat,” Jean Chevalier wrote, “stands for the deep-seated human tendency to project one’s own guilt upon someone else, thus appeasing one’s own conscience which always requires some victim to bear responsibility and punishment.”

We need not make anything more or less of it than that at this point. No time. For from here we go running through the thorns: the briars of Thursday, when Jesus is betrayed; the thistles of Friday, when he dies; and the prickles and quills of Saturday, when the grave makes a bed.

Be assured: there is no way to next Sunday without picking our way over these terrible brambles. This is but the first station, and our feet are already bloody because of how hard this teaching is.

I wish with every ounce of energy I possess that I had a shortcut around the thorns, but there’s just no way that can be accounted as faithful.

The first station is done: we all make scapegoats. Let us acknowledge that with Christ as our reigning head, it need not be this way. At least, not among us, his followers.

Amen.

Crossposted: Duncan issues godly directive to his diocese

2011-02-17T08:07:00.001-07:00

From the blog New Virginia Church Man ... And His Wife:

Duncan issues godly directive to his diocese
Bob Duncan, The Archbishop of the one province ACNA, bishop of the ACNA Diocese of Pittsburgh has issued a statement to his diocese concerning the settlement that the Somerset Anglican Fellowship negotiated this with Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh without the input, fore-knowledge or approval of the Diocese.
In light of these very serious developments, I feel compelled to issue a godly directive to all of the clergy of the diocese not to engage in, conduct, or conclude negotiations without first discussing such actions with me, or with Canon Mary, and with our chancellor.

There have been rumblings of buyer's remorse in Duncan's diocese. Will tightening his grip improve matters, or widen the fissures?

The entire letter follows.
__________

Letter from Robert Duncan to the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh (source)

Dear Friends,

Attached is a letter describing an agreement made by Somerset Anglican Fellowship with the TEC Diocese. Some of you have already read about this in the newspaper or received an email; many of you have communicated with me your concerns that there might be many “secret deals” being made which will leave many congregations “on their own.” Here is some information about the agreement, and our current situation, that we thought it would be helpful for you to know.

1) Somerset Anglican Fellowship negotiated this settlement without the input or approval of the Diocese. In fact, we have reason to believe that the lawyer representing SAF advised them not to inform the Anglican diocese. We are very concerned that a congregation thought itself to be so in jeopardy as to necessitate secret legal action.

2) St. Stephen’s, Sewickley and Church of the Savior, Ambridge have consulted legal counsel with regard to individual settlements with the TEC Diocese. Both parishes informed the Anglican Diocese at the time and both parishes have decided not to participate in any settlement without the involvement of the Diocese.

3) To the best of our knowledge, there are no other parishes which are unilaterally attempting to make a settlement with the TEC diocese.

4) The Anglican Diocese remains committed to finding the best solution for each of its parishes in light of the recent legal decisions. We also continue to hope for and look for some kind of settlement that would benefit all of our congregations.

5) Please do not hesitate to email or call Canon Mary, Geoff Chapman (Chair of the Standing Committee) or Jonathan Millard (Standing Committee member) or me if you have further questions or concerns.

In light of these very serious developments, I feel compelled to issue a godly directive to all of the clergy of the diocese not to engage in, conduct, or conclude negotiations without first discussing such actions with me, or with Canon Mary, and with our chancellor.

Faithfully,

The Most Rev. Robert Wm. Duncan

"Start" -- Sermon for 9 January -- Responding to Violence

2011-01-09T14:48:00.000-07:00

Sermon for Year A, First Sunday After the Epiphany

(The Baptism of Our Lord)

By The rev. Torey Lightcap

Saint Thomas’ Episcopal Church

January 9, 2011

Matthew 3:13-17

“Start”

Sometimes a sermon has been written, or mostly written,

And then something happens in the news,

And the writer returns to the manuscript in the fresh light of that news,

And it all seems so wide of the mark

That the preacher feels compelled to start again,

Even when it’s inconvenient to do so,

And, I suppose, when even there’s a risk that it might not make for much.

Christians do not ignore the world around them – not if they believe in God.

They live in it; they love it; they critique it; they allow themselves to be formed by it;

A Christian is a responsible member of the human family.

A pulpit whose occupant ignores the life around

Is an empty place filled with contradiction.

So when I saw the news of a shooting in Tuscon yesterday

That a judge and a nine-year-old girl, among six total, had been killed,

With twelve others injured,

And that a congresswoman (the mother of two children) was fighting for her life

After being shot at nearly point-blank range,

I felt compelled to basically scrap what I had,

And pray it through,

And begin again.

Every so often, I get a call from someone who wants to have a child baptized.

(In my experience, it is almost always the mother who makes the call.)

There may be a solid connection to the church,

But in most cases there isn’t.

We make an appointment; the responsible parties bring in their baby;

And we sit down and I ask why this is desired at this time.

There’s usually a litany of reasons.

Many have to do with fears of what happens with a soul when a human body dies

And that person has not been baptized.

This view of baptism suggests that one is best placed

To have purchased some kind of insurance just in case.

Some say that it’s simply what they themselves did, and now it’s the child’s turn.

Others speak to an innate desire for their children

To participate in some ritualized way

Of acknowledging that they exist

(I mean, other than with a birth certificate or a Social Security card),

And of showing that the person they have labored to bring into this world

Is really real in the eyes of God.

Some talk about baptism as recognition of forgiveness

And the need for some symbol that we all get a clean start.

Every once in a blue moon, there’ll be mention of the idea

That having a community to belong to – some kind of family –

Is probably better than not having one,

And that somehow baptism is connected to that.

This is all tied to language, of course.

When someone says, Look, I want to have Little Johnny done,

What they mean is, Do for Johnny what your precedecessor did for me.

They mean to say, Johnny needs doing and you are the doer.

So do what you do, and we’ll be done.

They mean, in other words, to say, that regardless of the reasons we could list,

There is a task called baptism they know needs doing,

And the priest is the one to do it.

But “done,” of course, means precisely what it implies: getting whatever it is over with.

One of my Lutheran colleagues here in Sioux City says

That whenever he is presented with this language he tries to turn it around,

And to suggest that instead of Little Johnny getting “done,” he needs to get “started.”

Started in a gathering community of faith, started in study and prayer,

Started in nurturing a fellowship, started in learning about selfless service.

Jesus comes to John to be baptized not at the end of his ministry, but at the beginning.

He participates in a small token of his intention to walk more fully in God’s ways.

The cultural institution of baptism has a hard time recognizing this;

Yet all who minister in any capacity know that one does not set out on a journey of faith

Without having been consecrated for the task in some way.

For Christians, baptism is the primary symbol of that consecration.

Those who toil for the sake of God’s kingdom as Jesus saw it and preached it

Need some touchstone – some way of knowing that they, too, got started at some point.

In a country that still thinks of itself as Christian, then,

With so many people walking around consecrated for service and community,

Why does it seem that so many never got started? Why so much immaturity?

Why is there so much hate? Why so much hate parading as Christ?

I can only conclude that thinking or saying that one is a Christian is far easier

Than it is to actually ask myself what it means, and to go to Scripture,

And to live out the example laid forth by Jesus himself.

We preach openness, but we practice exclusion.

We advertise love, but we practice hatred.

We affirm tolerance, but we practice bigotry and small-mindedness.

We advocate charity toward our neighbors, but we practice the religion of self.

Maybe we just never actually got started; maybe we thought there was a loophole.

Jesus got started in a river and then went into public ministry.

I read those actions as a direct invitation to follow him,

And to do what he did to the best of our ability.

(It’s a cop-out, by the way, to suggest

That just because we can’t turn water into wine,

We somehow get a free pass but still get to wear the cross around our necks;

That’s not how it works.)

Openness, love, tolerance, and charity are on the billboard.

Exclusion, hatred, bigotry, small-mindedness, and love of self are on display.

Which would you believe?

And so judging by their actions,

We might concur that Christians have no time for anyone but themselves …

That they live a failed philosophy …

That indeed their baptisms are collectively an empty symbol …

That they have successfully deluded themselves.

The life-giving, spirit-restoring waters of baptism have flowed over so many of us.

To us is given the task to speak a word of peace, as Jesus spoke it,

To speak out against violence –

To incite no persons to use their power negatively.

The waters of baptism flow, and the example to follow is clear,

But when we don’t follow, we shouldn’t be surprised at what else flows.

Blood flows, and it’s perfectly obvious.

Blood in Tuscon.

Blood at Virginia Tech.

Blood at Fort Hood.

Blood in Lower Manhattan.

Blood in Oklahoma City.

Blood at Columbine.

Blood in Uganda.

Blood at Auschwitz.

Blood at Uzbekistan and in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Blood in South Africa.

Blood flows and tears flow and life ebbs away.

Tears in Algeria and on the West Bank.

Tears in Tiananmen Square.

Tears in Belfast, Juarez, Kent State, Zanzibar, Lebanon, and Armenia.

Life ebbs away in El Salvador and in Northern Ireland and Paris

And Afghanistan and Greece and Constantinople and in Macedonia.

This is not some external problem.

Blood flows in Sioux City, too, and tears flow, and life ebbs away.

Even so, the Spirit intercedes with words too deep for sighing.

Even so, Jesus enters the locked rooms of our hearts and psyches

And breathes on us and pronounces,

“Peace be upon you.”

Even so, Jesus lifts up his hand and stills the storm and says,

“Don’t be afraid.”

Even so, Jesus looks to the grieving parent and says,

“Do not fear. Only believe.”

Then, looking at us and loving us, he says,

“Now go and do likewise.”

We can’t get around this; we have to do this.

Baptism is an initiation into the Christ-life.

We must live lives of peace and self-control,

And we must speak out about what seems unjust

Before threats become real violence.

We have to get started now on what it means to have been baptized.

It’s way past time.

Let us pray.

Lord Christ, you tell us plainly to work for peace, to speak for peace: help us, we pray, to set aside whatever it is that keeps us from doing that, so that we may be channels of your love and grace – imperfect as we are, and as unready as we may be. For yours is the way of peace, and you alone are the Way. Amen.

Anglican Fighting

2011-01-07T10:27:00.011-07:00

In the following I speak for no one but myself.

I was a string bean adolescent who did his best to keep out of fights. The few I got into did not go well; even just the thought of violence being visited upon my skinny frame would make me cringe and sway inside, no matter how bravely fixed I may have set my jaw. Suffice to say: I didn't go looking for trouble, but when it found me as a ready target, it tended to pounce.

Fights did break out, though, and particularly as I recall in junior high. If you were close by, you could stand in a distant circle and watch the combatants strut and preen and wail and stomp the asphalt like kabuki warriors. Actual fisticuffs were limited, though a certain number of rudimentary wrestling holds were often employed to simulate violence.

The main thing I remember about fights is that they never lasted for very long. Some administrator or teacher got wind and stepped in quickly, leaving the proclamation of victory not to the strongest but usually to the swiftest -- whoever could manage that one well-aimed punch. But then it was generally over, and we were dispersed to some less malign activity.

In other words, what I associate with fighting as an act of pure physical violence or aggression is something that starts spontaneously and ends in an instant. Insults are traded, the ante is upped, someone gets off a kick or a punch; then it's over.

I suppose that's all by way of contrast, because the protracted nature of the fight currently consuming the Anglican Communion has broken all my inner referents about what a fight is and what it looks like and, mostly importantly, how long it's supposed to take.

Teenagers spit and hiss and lock arms, and then a teacher runs out and it's done. We who call ourselves adults have been arguing with one another for so long that it's virtually exhausted us.

In the run-up to the fight, we had years to intellectualize, theorize, theologize. We didn't know it, but we were cutting out trenches and strategically connecting them.

Then, when precipitating factors landed (about seven years ago in my time), we had objects of scorn -- individuals and organizations we could point to that externalized and concretized what the fight was going to be about. And we were ready.

I cannot imagine how dreadful it would be to watch a thing as simple as a cloud wind itself into a hurricane, but this is what has happened.

I speak about, and to, virtually each and every one of us.

This fight is killing us. We are bone-weary. Why can't we see that?

How I long for this to be done and the consequences pronounced and the combatants made to come to some form of peace. I'm aware that I say this as one who's found himself aligned, as one with passionately held opinions who's doing his best to keep it together.

But you can't fight with one hand and make peace with the other. Not if you expect to keep your nose intact.

Meanwhile, we trench further down and think through the logistics of the battle. No one is coming to break this up. From here there is no end in sight. The unique gift of Anglicans within the body of "that wonderful and sacred mystery" called the church withers, its gifts and witness retracted. Those with no stake in the fight can't look away; they've encircled us; yet we mistake their interest in our looming disaster for something else -- something we call witness.

Whither charity? Where is the other cheek? Walking a mile in the other guy's shoes? Just how far did we have to come -- on either side of the Anglican fence -- for us to not be able to flinch or at least (at least?) recognize Christ in the other?

For that matter, whither the wisdom of truly visionary global leadership? Do we really think that administration and procedure are going to make things better? We counted on an intervention from cooler heads, and instead of throwing themselves between us, they showed up in a referee's shirt and read us the rules for how to destroy each other. (If Anglicans are anything, it's orderly.) Is that helping?

Meanwhile, wretches that we are, who will save us from this body of death?

Anglican Communion to Administer Virtual Self-Ordinariate; Rabble Confused

2010-11-25T12:31:00.008-07:00

LAMBETH PALACE, VIA A FACEBOOK LINK FROM TWITTER DM -- A 500-member panel of theologians, experts, and leaders from throughout the 78-million-member Anglican Communion have pieced together a self-administered, online Ordinariate through which its own disaffected members will be able to be received into the arms of their own mother church, a thoroughly confused Archbishop of Canterbury announced yesterday.

The hastily called press conference produced more questions than answers.

"On this day, noted as Thanksgiving Day in the United States, and marked for the faithful there as the day in which all give thanks for freedom to worship God as they see fit, we are especially grateful for the way in which we have quickly established a new port in the stormy seas of global Anglicanism," Dr. Rowan Williams said as he was flanked by noted Anglican primates, scholars, and bishops. "From this day, the Anglican Communion is truly offering a place for all people on their life-pilgrimage to participate in the ongoing work, worship, and mission of the Anglican Communion, free from the hard restraints of the Bonds of Affection."

Under the terms of the Ordinariate - which Williams, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, stressed more than once was in the formative stages - requirements for membership would be based upon taking at face-value a model familiar to many: the Canons of The Episcopal Church.

Those Canons (particularly Canon I.17.3) state, in part, "All communicants of this Church who for the previous year have been faithful in corporate worship, unless for good cause prevented, and have been faithful in working, praying, and giving for the spread of the Kingdom of God, are to be considered communicants in good standing."

The idea for an Ordinariate came about when leaders were engaged an in email conversation over the Church of England's recent and seemingly painless commendation of the proposed Anglican Covenant to individual synods for their study and approval through its General Synod. The Covenant, ostensibly a set of governing principles intended to gather the church in unity, has been described by opponents as ill-conceived, coercive, and downright un-Anglican. The Covenant has been received by groups on both the left and right with disdain and skepticism.

"Running away from the way things seem to be going appeared to be a good strategy, even though my endorsements have gotten us into the way things seem to be going," Williams said as he looked around, shrugged his shoulders, and took a sip of coffee so strong its smell was detected in the back of the press room. Noted Anglican scholar and former bishop N.T. Wright then whispered something in Williams' ear for the next ten minutes.

While Wright continued whispering, The Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, took the microphone and laid out the particulars.

"There's only one place left to escape to, and that's cyberspace," she said. "We have therefore designated Facebook a jurisdiction-free zone with respect to territorial incursion. It is therefore its own jurisdiction."

At this point, a number of reporters left the room.

"All one must do, therefore, to belong to the newly constituted Anglican Ordinariate of Facebook is attend virtual services, give the equivalent of a dollar through a Paypal link, commit to a life of prayer, and work for any of the thousands of designated Facebook causes."

"Yes," interjected Archbishop of York John Sentamu. "Mission is, of course, primary for Anglicans. While we wish future members of the Ordinariate well and will pray for them as they go, we encourage them to remember that Facebook is rife with many ways to participate in the various causes of justice, from not eating all your french fries on the way home to not running out of hot water in the middle of a shower. All that requires is one click of the mouse."

Commensurate with the historic fourfold ministry, the Anglican Ordinariate of Facebook (AOF) will be served by a number of Virtual Episcopal Visitors - retired bishops, essentially, who will be assisted by priests and deacons, all ready to chat, comment on photos of members' grandchildren, or administer virtual sacraments. A number of competent, faithful, pastoral, tech-savvy female priests in the United states have been nominated AFO Provisional Primates pending their own consent through a complicating "Liking" process.

"No doubt the Americans would be overrepresented in this scheme, but apparently I have no say in the matter," Williams said. "I mean, these women - they aren't even bishops."

In the hours following the announcement, things grew strange; a number of power-plays occurred, none of which it is certain will prove fruitful for those involved.

Elizabeth Regina, who is Canon Theologian, Professed Life Member of the Order of St. Arbucks and Priest-Lecturer at Obnox College in the (Nonextrajurisdictional) Super-DioSynod of Llangolen-Upon-Whitby, was nominated by supersecret floor-ballot for Cosmopolitan of the emerging AOF, but, as with others whose names have come forward, "She is a she and therefore subject to her own her/men/eutic of suspicion," ACO Secretary General Kenneth Kearon noted.

The Primate of the Province of the Antarctic then posted the following to his blog, leaving open the question of his ability to handle matters confidentially.

We have had considerable experience in this part of the world of dealing with international claims which segment our territory. Ever on the lookout for godly growth and a slice of North American money we would be happy to offer hospitality.

I'll have Archdeacon Penguin draw up a scheme. I can mention now, even before its promulgation, that joint (even multiple and overlapping) memberships will be possible and that membership fees may be paid in international red herrings.

Confidentially, I have made an approach to the Diocese of Uruguay but have not yet had an reply.

No Anglican Covenant Coalition on General Synod Vote

2010-11-24T11:13:00.001-07:00

NO ANGLICAN COVENANT COALITION RESPONDS TO GENERAL SYNOD VOTE

LONDON – Responding to the voting on the proposed Anglican Covenant by the Church of

England General Synod, No Anglican Covenant Coalition Moderator, the Revd. Dr. Lesley

Fellows made the following statement:

“The No Anglican Covenant Coalition is disappointed that the Church of England has voted

to continue consideration of the Anglican Covenant. The debate made it clear that many

members believe the Covenant will undermine the traditional Anglican comprehensiveness.

We have lost this round. We will continue to oppose the Covenant in the Diocesan Synods

and work to defeat it when it returns to the General Synod.

“We note that the GAFCON Primates have said ‘the current text is fatally flawed and so support

for this initiative is no longer appropriate.’ A two‐tier communion appears to be unavoidable.”

The Anglican Covenant, Barnyard Animal Edition

2010-11-18T19:24:00.002-07:00

Lionel Deimel gets it right:

Is the Covenant really not about forcing compliance with some least permissive Christianity upon which all Anglican churches can agree? The Covenant declares its innocence of imposing strong-arm discipline. But, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Effects of the Proposed Anglican Covenant

2010-11-16T08:39:00.004-07:00

Thinking Anglicans has posted a simple electronic broadside, "What will the Anglican Covenant do to the Church?" Written for members of General Synod (who next take up deliberation on November 24th), it spells out in clear and concise prose what would happen if the final draft of the Covenant now under consideration were to be implemented. Though targeted to that group in specific, it's helpful on this side of the pond as well to facilitate understanding.

I urge everyone to read it.

Support the No Anglican Covenant Campaign

2010-11-03T06:30:00.002-06:00

Announcing the No Anglican Covenant Campaign, sponsored by a coalition of bloggers (including myself) and concerned individuals calling themselves Anglicans for Comprehensive Unity.

The cause is well described in the group's press release, issued this morning:

LONDON – An international coalition of Anglicans has been created to campaign against the proposed Anglican Covenant. Campaigners believe the proposed Covenant constitutes unwarranted interference in the internal life of the member churches of the Anglican Communion, would narrow the acceptable range of belief and practice within Anglicanism, and would prevent further development of Anglican thought. The Coalition’s website (noanglicancovenant.org) will provide resources for Anglicans around the world to learn about the potential risks of the proposed Anglican Covenant.

“We believe that the majority of the clergy and laity in the Anglican Communion would not wish to endorse this document,” according to the Coalition’s Moderator, the Revd. Dr. Lesley Fellows, who is also the Coalition’s Convenor for the Church of England. “Apart from church insiders, very few people are aware of the Covenant. We want to encourage a wider discussion and to highlight the problems the Covenant will cause.”

The idea of an Anglican Covenant was first proposed in 2004 as a means to address divisions among the member churches of the Anglican Communion on matters ranging from human sexuality to the role of women. The current draft of the Covenant, which has been unilaterally designated as the “final” draft, has been referred to the member churches of the Communion. The proposed Covenant establishes mechanisms which would have the effect of forcing member churches to conform to the demands and expectations of other churches or risk exclusion from the Communion.

Critics of the proposed Anglican Covenant, including members of the new Coalition, believe that it will fundamentally alter the nature of historic Anglicanism in several ways, including the narrowing of theological views deemed acceptable, the erosion of the freedom of the member churches to govern themselves, and the concentration of authority in the hands of a small number of bishops. Two English groups, Inclusive Church and Modern Church, ran anti-Covenant advertisements in last week’s Church Times aiming to make more members of the Church of England aware of the dangers of the proposed Anglican Covenant.

"If the Anglican Communion has a problem, this is not the solution,” according to former Bishop of Worcester Peter Selby. “Whether those who originated the Covenant intended it or not, it is already, and will become even more, a basis for a litigious Communion from which some will seek to exclude others."

The launch of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition website coincides with the commemoration of the sixteenth century theologian Richard Hooker. “Hooker taught us that God’s gifts of scripture, tradition and reason will guide us to new insights in every age,” according to the Canadian priest and canon law expert, the Revd. Canon Alan Perry. “The proposed Anglican Covenant would freeze Anglican theology and Anglican polity at a particular moment. Anglican polity rejected control by foreign bishops nearly 500 years ago. The proposed Anglican Covenant reinstates it.”

The No Anglican Covenant Coalition began in late October with a series of informal email conversations among several international Anglican bloggers concerned that the Covenant was being rushed through the approval process before most Anglicans had any opportunity to learn how the proposed new structures would affect them.

More on Richard Hooker.

Prayer: 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. Amen.

A few hours and counting until ...

2010-11-01T20:38:00.003-06:00

Religious illiteracy and the literate irreligious

2010-09-28T14:05:00.005-06:00

It comes as no shock to learn that on a recent quiz designed by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, atheists and agnostics are the most learned in the topic of religion. Not to say that it should be that way necessarily; only that it is; and that I find nothing particularly jarring at this news.

From Tuesday's Gray Lady:

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.
“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

Of course, knowing the relevant facts is one thing. Understanding the relevance of those facts is quite another. Still...

HuffPo's Kenneth C. Davis reckons that

... the "Good Book" fits Mark Twain's definition of a classic: "A book which people praise but never read."
Most people continue to rely upon what they hear from preachers and politicians. Often it is misquoted or taken out of context. Or they remember what they distilled from the Hollywood version of the Bible. The internet has, in many ways, just made matters worse.
The very serious problem that the Pew Forum survey underscores is that there are a lot of people out there making stark judgments about matters like religion about which they are clueless. And when it comes to Americans doing very bad things based on their beliefs, the results can be deadly.

Well, yes. But...

In May 2009, I moved to a part of the U.S. over which mainstream Christianity still holds sway and predominance. I moved from a part of the U.S. in which Christianity is largely regarded as a logical set of ethical exhortations built upon an illogical and novel form of mythology. In other words, I think I was regarded as more of a professional mythologist than anything else, whereas a collar and a title tend to mean more in the place in which I currently work and live.

In a technical sense, the move was a logical decision for me, since I'm a pastor and it's easier to build up and maintain a congregation here than it was there. But when I was "there," I was keenly aware that even if the communal aspects of religion were not regularly practiced by the majority with forthright regularity, at least the facts of religion had been turned over, examined thoroughly, and perhaps even seriously flirted with before being judged as not worthy of the time the average man or woman had to give them. (They may have even tried church but found it to be - spoiler alert! - boring. or irrelevant. or shallow.) In other words, folks knew very well what it was they were walking away from in order to go skiing, and did not necessarily abandon it in their hearts. (So be careful about that distinction before interpreting the results of any survey to claim that "a supposedly Christian nation is in fact godless.")

In that place, one's convictions and opinions about religion were a pastiche drawn from the smorgasbord of "All Religions Are Pretty Much the Same." One was free to infer from each tradition some usable portion and let the rest go, and all the scoops of this and that heaped together on the plate made a delicious meal.

The downside, of course, is that with ultimate freedom can come a lack of obligation, and I left that place sensing many congregations mere headed for a season of hand-wringing, lower attendance, financial worry, and, maybe, merger.

So then - this quiz. It presents more pause than problem for me, though it does seem to suggest the time is nigh for substantive engagement with the Christian faith and lore at a significant depth. It's time - past time, really - for genuine, unapologetic catechesis to take hold.

It's also time to finally put to rest our belief that you can be a Christian and not be expected to pay some kind of price for it. The saints on earth must be restive, never quite satisfied, always reaching for some new spiritual and intellectual territory, and working like the dickens to come to grips with what's already been given to us as heritage.

9/11, Loss, and Bad Shepherds

2010-09-13T09:56:00.002-06:00

SERMON FOR YEAR C, PROPER 19
BY THE REV. TOREY LIGHTCAP
SAINT THOMAS’ EPISCOPAL CHURCH
SEPTEMBER 12, 2010
LUKE 15:1-10
“LOST”

Dear Friends,

I write to you today from my bed – no place to write, I tell you,
And no good place to have been confined for the past several days.
I’m sick, and my doctor said if I came out to be with you today
I’d risk putting other people’s health in jeopardy.
Besides which, the middle of my throat feels like a plume of fire –
Not a good condition for a preacher.
So here I am; you know where I am now.

What I want to know is, Where we you nine years ago yesterday?

I was in Austin, Texas, waiting for the first real day of seminary classes to start.
We had done our preliminary coursework called August Course,
Presumably to weed out the ones incapable of working at a graduate level,
Though I don’t recall anyone flunking out.
Many of us from other parts of the country had been trying to cope
With the heat in Central Texas.
It took time to develop a routine, for our spouses to find jobs, et cetera.
At any rate, we now had our books and we were ready to go.

I was in an auditorium on campus that Tuesday morning, and one of my classmates,
Who among other things had flown helicopters in the Army,
Took a seat near me.
He said, “Did you hear about the World Trade towers?”
I said no I hadn’t.
He said, “Sounds like an airplane crashed into one of them.”
This didn’t take long to sink in,
Because I thought I was aware of such things –
Small-scale things:
A two-man prop plane had flown into one of the class buildings
At my old alma mater in the early ’70s,
And then, too, I remembered that a B-25 had accidentally flown
Into the Empire State Building in the 1940s, killing 14.
In other words, I had a very narrow slot in my brain for all this.
Such events did not cause mass-casualties,
The buildings in question were always salvageable,
And the whole thing must have been an accident.

“Wow,” I said, remembering the photograph of the wreckage of that two-seater
As it was being torn out of the side of Shawnee Hall,
“What a terrible accident.”

Tim looked at me in a way that suggested I had a lot to learn.
“No,” he said flatly. “That’s protected air space.
Planes can’t fly anywhere near those towers. It’s no accident.”

Then the lights dimmed in the auditorium and the dean of the seminary stepped out,
And he was filled with emotion;
A look of pure shock was written across his face.
Believe me when I say that this, too, seemed more or less normal to me;
He had suffered a stroke sometime before I enrolled,
And I had been told that in the process of his brain repairing itself,
He was relearning how to handle moods and feelings.
It wasn’t how he looked that woke me up: It was what he said, with tears on his face:
“Let’s pray for all those hurt and killed today in the plane crash in New York City.”

A few minutes later, a student named Darrell huffed into the auditorium.
He said, “They just hit the second tower.”
And then I understood: No accident.

The rest of the day, of course, was a complete loss as far as school would be concerned.
There were tears and numbness, a palpable feeling
Of no one really having anything to say that would help,
Just honoring the silence and dealing with the tension; prayers and more prayers.
There was speculation floating around that the City of Austin,
Being home to the nation’s largest capitol building
And just down the road from a major military munitions site,
Might be another target.
Danger in the skies. Looking up, looking over my shoulder. Paranoia.

How to explain it?
A profound sense of shifting, tectonic shifting, of the earth moving –
As though nothing could ever be the same from this moment forward,
Though we didn’t quite know how.
A feeling of being between things,
Of the vague, dreadful emptiness that comes from being between things,
Neither here nor there,
And no way to fill it.

My own tears did not come until the middle of that night,
And I have to say that they’re spilling down my cheeks right now as I write this…

I recall so clearly sitting in our seminary chapel at about three in the morning,
And it finally hitting me: 3,000 was not just an estimated number of casualties,
Not a number of convenience,
But each digit in that chain stood for a real person.
Three thousand lives, three thousand histories, three thousand family connections,
Three thousand sets of hopes and dreams and ways of seeing the world.
All gone.

That was the quiet desperation I knew in the chapel of our seminary,
A big room which was lit by just one candle that night.
I wept by the light of it, ashamed of what someone might think if they happened past.
(I’m happy to say I no longer care; sometimes you just have to weep.)

I don’t know if you remember, but it was at about that time of the night
That the media became comfortable with using the words terrorists and terrorism,
Jihad and Islamic extremism,
As shorthand for what had brought all this into being.

At this point, I have another question to ask you:
What do you think is meant by this teaching of Jesus –
These parables about things that are lost being found?

It seems that the chief characteristic of divine love is that here it is extravagant, right?
That God’s love for us in Christ is just over-the-top extravagant next to the fickleness
Of the Pharisees and scribes, the purported guardians of the faith.
Even the way Jesus poses the question –
Who wouldn’t leave ninety-nine sheep in the wild and go after the one stray?
Or, again, Who wouldn’t sweep out an entire house in search of one small coin? –
Even the way he poses the question tells us
How absurd and excessive is this love because, of course, not many would.
He has been telling us, and we have been hearing these past weeks,
What it costs to follow him.
We should consider ourselves well informed.

Now he uses these parables of God’s extravagant love for us to build up
To the Parable of the Prodigal Son – the ultimate Scriptural example
Of going into party mode because a Lost Thing has been found.
That’s what immediately follows these passages –
But you know what?
In our lectionary cycle, we won’t hear that parable read again in our midst on a Sunday
Until the Fourth Sunday of Lent, in the early Spring of 2013.
And so these parables, which we dare not read by themselves without the Prodigal,
Have been left by themselves without the Prodigal:
Appetizers, with no main course to follow!

When I hear these parables,
And especially when I think on the tale of the Prodigal Son which follows them,
I think of them as part of the basis of the law for Christians:
That to consider ourselves Christian, we must be willing to risk misunderstanding
And lowered social standing
In order to go after one lost sheep.

That’s what’s at risk here.
It won’t make us rich or famous or the most popular congregation in town,
But it will make us faithful to our baptismal vows.

It takes us back to those words, doesn’t it?
It takes us back to terror and terrorism, to holy war and extremism.
It takes us to the news this week, and to a rising tide of unnecessary misunderstanding.

When any religious shepherd sets his flock down into the wild
And teaches them that it’s okay to despise the sheep who are not like them,
That’s religious extremism, plain and simple,
And those sheep in his care should all be considered lost, though they huddle together.

When that same shepherd comes driving bargains
About burning things precious to those other flocks
Merely to be incendiary, gain attention, and get what he wants,
Though it puts an already tense world at further peril,
That shepherd should be considered to have failed his task and his flock
Because he has succumbed to a holy war of his own believing and making.

Pastor Terry Jones of the ironically named Dove World Outreach Center in Florida,
Who draped himself in the cross this week as he threatened to burn the Koran,
Utterly failed the shepherd’s test
And soon enough, he will find himself to be just as lost
As any of the ones he has purported to shepherd.
He, too, will need finding, correction, repentance, and love.
But first he will have to come to his senses,
And who knows, dear friends, how long that will take?

Even so, he is too easy a target:
He’s the product of a society that thinks with its emotions,
And of a religious heritage that insists on being right as the most important thing.
It was we, his fellow Christian shepherds and sheep,
Who had to come forward and say to him:
Do not kill, and do not add fire to killing …
We had to remind him, What would Jesus do? …
Every faith has a holy book …
This is America …
We had to remind Mr. Jones, because we needed to remind ourselves,
How that beautiful American poet Langston Hughes wrote in 1949:

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my own two feet
And own the land…

I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

We had to remind Mr. Jones, because we needed to remind ourselves,
The words of the playwright Henrich Heine:
“Where they burn books, so too in the end will they burn human beings.”

And we came to see, again, how things are corrupted.
We had occasion, again, to appreciate that “an eye for an eye” makes the world blind.

If books are burned and towers continue to fall
And wars are waged and wrong passions enflamed,
Then we will not last much longer,
And our mission as Christians will have died only partially fulfilled.

But if we heed this image of finding what has been lost
And recognize that doing it will come at some great cost to us,
Then we’ll be doing “the work we’ve been given to do.”

Brothers and sisters, this bed of mine has not been the best place, though not the worst,
From which to watch the world go by.
It’s certainly not the place a shepherd of any kind wants to be for long.
Pray for this feeble throat of mine, and for infection to go away;
And I’ll look to greet you soon.

Let us pray.
Lord, you teach us to find lost things. You teach us this because you say it is in your very nature to do so. Reach into our hearts and make room for yourself: after all, we can’t use all this hatred and prejudice. That gone, may we love you more for such instruction; and may we love one another enough to call each other into account. In the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Good Shepherd, we pray. Amen.

Quote of the Year

2010-08-20T10:14:00.001-06:00

A young friend went to church close to my home a few weeks ago - the first time since her baptism over twenty years ago. She told me that she will not go again and handed me a list which read: "You are asking me to change the way I speak, the sort of music I enjoy, the length of time I usually listen to a speaker, the type of people I mix with, my body temperature, the type of chair I sit on, the type of clothes I am used to seeing people wear, my sense of humor. You expect me to know when to stand, sit and kneel and the answer to prayers I have never heard. I am prepared to change but there was nowhere I could connect any part of my life with that service." -- Anne Lehanne, Rochester Diocesan newspaper, quoted in Richard Giles' Re-Pitching the Tent: Reordering the Church Building for Worship and Mission

Letter of Confession

2010-08-18T15:20:00.002-06:00

Dear Red Car,

Greetings.

I don't know you, you don't know me. Well ... probably we don't know each other. Statistically, I mean - what are the chances?

That being the case, I wish to apologize to you in this public space for pulling my car out in front of yours. There were so many other cars in the way, as you may recall, that even though I was inching forward and craning to see as I pulled out of the hospital parking lot, I simply missed seeing you. Again - sorry for that.

I'd eaten a late lunch. Maybe my blood sugar was off or something.

This morning, I officiated a burial. When we encountered one another, I'd just emerged from the hospital after placing the blessing of the church upon the forehead of a good, good man who lay dying. So I was a little distracted.

It didn't help much that you did what you did in response, but I'm told that the heart of my religious faith is found in not returning violence for violence. In fact, out of an instinct for self-preservation, I didn't say or do anything to acknowledge you - even the most innocent gesture might have been misinterpreted.

They say confession is good, so I've gotten out my part. I have even attempted to avoid the employment of a passive-aggressive tone, but what are the chances of having successfully dodged it altogether? I only hope that the rage I saw coming from you today isn't directed at people who don't have the protection of their cars around them.

In sum, I'm trying hard. And I'll look even harder next time.

Yours,

Purple Car, Black Shirt, White Collar

Holding So Much Paper in Worship

2010-08-03T05:57:00.003-06:00

In today's Daily Office reading from Acts, I was told of a man who was taken by the hand and raised up; whose feet and ankles were made strong; and who jumped up and was led into the temple, "walking and leaping and praising God."

Then I had occasion to see a few photos of a worship service in an Episcopal congregation, and I noticed what at first might seem to be a fundamental disconnect between the substance of the Acts reading and my own experience of worship in an Anglican setting.

In the photos, all were standing up with heads inclined, noses pointed into books and service leaflets, spinning words and musical notes into prayers and praises. Although it's a scene I have witnessed over and over, it seemed at one remove to be some kind of mass hypnosis or group narcolepsy.

I wondered,

How can we walk and leap and praise God

When we have all these fumbly books to manage and refer to?

We're a curious lot, The Episcopal Church. Asked what we believe, we point (often and all too tragically in total silence) to the Bible, and (sometimes, with eagerness) to the Book of Common Prayer. We place our hands on the Prayer Book just so, and we say what we were taught to say by our priests and liturgy professors, which is that the theology of Anglicanism in America is contained in the book. In its shape and heft, and in the way it carves out an understanding of the purposes and forms of worship, it is, itself, a kind of credal thing expressing the human struggle to articulate a life grounded in God as God is known in Jesus whom we call Christ.

It's a profound reality in a way, a symbol of our trust that in an age of primal smorgasboard religion we allow ourselves to be led into the experience by a view toward wholeness.

I ween it's an old argument, but after 17 years in The Episcopal Church I know it to be true: the book is no stumbling block. Quite the contrary. It only looks like it.

So we don't have a book problem - not so long as we have a good chiropractor who can adjust us on a Monday. However, the death of the publishing industry, as a class of thought, should want to give us pause.

No, what we've got here is a failure to communicate; we have a PR problem. Episcopal worship only looks stuffy and wordy; the reality is nothing like the perception.

Of course, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and there's the issue.

So worship must be lively - not Barnum-and-Bailey-lively, mind you; just ... naturally vivacious. Inherently filled with the spirit of a people who, though their feet may shuffle, are nevertheless full up with walking and leaping and praising God.

Innocence - A Sermon for Baptism, Year C, Proper 10

2010-07-13T09:15:00.002-06:00

Sermon for Year C, Proper 10

By The rev. Torey Lightcap

Saint Thomas’ Episcopal Church

July 11, 2010

Luke 10:25-37

“Innocence”

We have a baptism to be accomplished this morning.

This will be my first time, but God willing maybe not the last,

To officiate the sacrament of baptism for someone whose name I happen to share.

His name is Torrey (!), and he’s one of Chuck and Jason’s wonderful brood of five.

I wonder what we might hear in these words of Christ today

That will refresh and bless and challenge us

On the day in which we remember our baptismal vows …

On the day in which one of us is baptised.

The lesson that confronts us this morning –

This parable of hospitality given to a stranger who desperately needs it,

From the last person you’d expect to do so –

This lesson will cost us the price of our innocence.

We hand over our innocence starting very early in life.

To begin with, we don’t always get changed or fed or burped right away.

Then we slam a finger in a door or pet a dog who doesn’t want to be bothered,

Or we get too close to a stove.

That’s the first shot of pain – the first trading of innocence for knowledge –

And it is traumatic, but pretty tame compared to the first time we learn

That people sometimes do fall into the hands of robbers

(Or that robbers even exist at all),

And that life is generally far from perfect, or that we can’t have everything we want.

That, I suppose, is what you’d call learning to see things for what they are,

And it hurts at the time, but, again, by comparison, fairly tame.

There is more hurt – far more hurt, usually – waiting past that point to be discovered.

We learn that people can be selfish, small, conceited.

We learn that these traits can be dressed up and used to make one’s way in the world:

The way we respond to our families-of-origin,

The way we go about making a living,

The way we feel about God;

And we hand over a little more of our innocence.

We learn that societies thrive on making scapegoats –

That just about every situation with a chance for success

Seems to call for unequal sacrifice –

And we expend a little more of our innocence.

We learn that it’s easier to stereotype than pay attention –

That people can be slotted into easy categories based on superficial characteristics,

And that’s more of our innocence, although that price is often quite high.

This pattern goes on and on,

Little by little, lot by lot, giving away our innocence,

So that by the time we are adults,

We find ourselves completely ensconced in that system –

That economy whereby we trade innocence for information.

We find, often, that it’s easier to work within the confines of that system,

And to make our own demands of our children’s innocence,

Because sooner or later, we say, they’re gonna have to figure out

That this is how life works anyway,

And who would we rather they learn it from;

And much as it hurts, we may as well help them along with it now,

So they don’t get taken in later

By some more complicated and painful confidence scam down the road

And end up cashing in all their innocence

In one crashing moment of terrible pain.

And so it goes, and so it goes.

We begin life with a seemingly infinite capacity for wonder and awe;

Everything is fresh and new, and people appear to us as basically good.

Then, life.

In the end, we know about how things work,

And we become wise.

But at what price?

That’s quite a challenge.

I hear this in the background of our service of baptism today – of every child baptism.

People think it’s cute that we baptise children.

We get ‘em all dressed up, and we quote the Christ:

Suffer the little children to come unto me.

And we take the photos and we cut the cake.

All very well, all very good.

But it’s the beginning – only the beginning of the Christian life.

The great scandal is that if we say we belong to Christ –

And all who have been baptised find themselves in this position,

Unless they renounce their baptism –

If we say we belong to Christ,

Then we have the obligation to do what Jesus says we must do:

When confronted with the fact of pain in the world,

Violence in the world, scapegoating in the world,

Separation from God showing up in the world as sins, both individual and corporate –

When confronted with pain,

We intercede.

I don’t want you to think that means that I expect you

To turn in your 401K and live among lepers,

Although some are given the freedom to do so, and indeed some should,

And indeed many of us should for at least a time,

So that we know what pain really looks like and see how Jesus is crucified still

On the altar of greed and disease.

That is for some.

But by and large, most of us are figuring out how to live our lives and raise our families –

Figuring it out as we go along.

We see Mother Teresa – that beautiful icon of the compassion of God –

And we think,

I just don’t have it in me to be that good or that wise for that long.

And so we stop. Sort of stop stretching, right about there,

Right at about Mother Teresa,

When we imagine we can never measure up.

And because we imagine we can never measure up,

We become contented with pain rather than intercede.

Yet we’ve sworn to try, to do the best we can with what we have.

My dear friends – my brothers and sisters in Christ –

By our baptism, we have sworn an oath, or had one sworn for us.

It’s an unforgettable oath made before God and in the presence of one another

In the midst of an invocation to the Holy Spirit

To come and trouble the waters of baptism

And seal us up in the name of Christ – marked as his own, for ever.

It’s an oath that comes at the cost of our innocence.

And in just a moment we’ll swear it again.

In it, you will be asked if you will

“Uphold the dignity and freedom of every human person”

And “[love] your neighbor as yourself.”

This isn’t lofty rhetoric designed to make us feel good;

It’s the contract our lives become because we now belong to Christ.

In here, it’s seen as ritual action;

In the altar of the world, it’s tangible action.

You’re not called to be Superman or Wonder Woman;

You’re only asked to do what you can, keeping in mind this Samaritan

Who chose compassion over efficiency.

Only let’s not sell ourselves short.

Not even Mother Teresa completely measured up to Jesus.

It was she herself who said,

“God doesn’t require us to succeed; he only requires that you try.”

Yes. And what we can do, with Christ, and in Christ, and for Christ,

Is unfathomably deep and immeasurably good.

Let us pray.

Gracious and loving God, in this act of baptism, you call us to your self (not just one of us today, but all of us), that we might be fully alive in you, with your name clearly marked upon us. We pray to be enabled by your grace to take seriously all the promises we make this day, and then do them. Help us, too, to look to Christ to show us the gravity of your love for us. It is in his name that we make our prayer. Amen.

Funeral for a Friend: My Note to The Living Church

2010-07-12T19:54:00.005-06:00

Tonight I was going through the mail and found a come-on subscription-renewal notice from The Living Church. They said I could have it mailed ($45) or get it online (PDF, $25) for a year. A two-year subscription in the mail would come at the deeply discounted price of $85. (That's a whopping 5.6% markdown - or, if you like, about a dime per issue.)

I folded the notice so the blank side would be exposed, and on that square I wrote:

Dear Living Church,

I have watched as you cast your lot, and as your writer, advertiser, and subscriber base gradually defected and your product became less and less. No one is sorrier than I. My congregation will continue to subscribe to your other products, but the news in our house will go on without you. No more subscription-renewal notices are needed.

Thank you.

This is a poor publication that used to be a source in our house for conversation, debate, and information. It has long since desiccated beyond any discernible use, and is coolly received, quickly thumbed through, and all too easily dispatched to the recycling bin.

For years we knew TLC probably entertained, on that famed spectrum, a rightward sensibility; but that didn't keep it out of the fight. Now it has succumbed to the ideological factionalism of the same party of four (who know who they are), and is, at best, an in-house woolgathering device. Predictably, it arrives thinner and thinner each time, having us imagine we'll enjoy reading about news we've known for weeks or see a job listing for the rectorship of a church in a diocese that's left the conversation table.

I miss the robustness of this instrument; I miss its former ethos of many-facets-of-one-truth. I miss following the conversations as they unfolded, and peeking at the job listings (you know, just to see). I miss everything that once made TLC more than worth the cost of admission.

The thought of taking bread off the tables of the employees of The Living Church is so disheartening, but I fear committing anything else out of my penny-pinched rector's education account might only encourage the effort to further dissociate this news organ from The Episcopal Church. And this after well more than a century.

Very sorry indeed.

---

NEXT DAY THOUGHT: Today I read Douglas LeBlanc's excellent coverage in The Living Church online concerning the Bishop Davis situation out of Northwestern Pennsylvania. More of this sort of thing is what could help resurrect this very worthy project.

Sermon for July 4, 2010: 'Despair'

2010-07-04T11:34:00.000-06:00

Sermon for Year C, Proper 9

By The rev. Torey Lightcap

Saint Thomas’ Episcopal Church

July 4, 2010

Luke 10:1-11,16-20

“Despair”

By now at this point of the Gospel According to Luke,

Jesus has “set his face” toward Jerusalem.

Key idea.

Remember that the gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles

Are but two halves of the same book by the same author.

In Luke, the Good News, embodied in Jesus, must travel to Jerusaelem,

So that in Acts, that News can be preached widely abroad.

Luke is aware of how social movements work:

They begin with something being told consistently, some message;

Then they reach a symbolic moment where they expand exponentially –

Then all these branches take off and travel organically through society,

Where they eventually find their own symbolic moment, and they blossom, too,

And before you know it, the movement is spreading itself.

This is part of what the Jesus of Luke has in mind.

It is why he’s set his face toward Jerusalem to begin with.

He’s bearing a message of peace and love

That will take him to Jerusalem for its symbolic moment –

The symbolic moment of all history.

Last week we heard some exhortations from him

About not getting bogged down in the process, and of being aware of the cost:

Let the dead take care of themselves; follow me immediately or you’re not worthy.

Now we might imagine that some have heard all these danger-filled admonitions

And decided to follow him anyway,

And so having some idea of what exists on the road ahead

He sends these messengers to bring his calling card,

Out to “every town and place where he himself intend[s] to go,”

Just as John the Baptist has done for him,

After the fashion of Isaiah – one of the greatest prophets in the mind of Luke:

Isaiah, who wrote,

Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill made low;

Straighten up whatever’s crooked; smooth out the rough ways;

And all flesh will see the salvation of God.

In preparation for the journey of these volunteers, a little instruction:

Don’t take any traveling gear, and don’t speak to anyone on the road,

Or you’ll be vulnerable to thieves or be otherwise delayed.

Go directly to your destination, and stay there; don’t move around.

Eat what people give you to eat; don’t fuss.

Cure the sick.

And if you’re not welcomed to the places where you go, move on.

They’re told that whether or not they are successful, either way, they are still to declare

That the Kingdom of God has come near.

Nowadays, the situation has become clouded.

This is part of what happens when we aren’t clear about where we’re going

Or whose Kingdom we preach;

It’s what happens when we lose the thread of “preparing the way”

For God to enter and act, in “every place” where God intends to be. (All places.)

I am particularly aware of this tension of “Whose Kingdom Is It Anyway?”

On a day in which we together celebrate our collective freedom

To do things like assemble as we please, worship as we choose,

And speak as we feel called.

It’s as though everything’s been thrown in a great big blender, isn’t it?

Whose kingdom has come near?

Is it the Kingdom of God or the kingdom of the market?

It certainly feels to me on some days

That I live in the kingdom of GE and BP and AT&T and P&G and Mickey-D.

(You can almost see the oil spilling out of that pipe in the Gulf

When you hear the words of Paul: Do not be deceived; you reap whatever you sow.)

Whose flag flies this day?

The banner of Christ, or Old Glory, or the banner of Big Oil?

The ranks of Christians serving the helpless in the name of God,

Or bottom lines and cut-throat competition?

The mind becomes cluttered, the picture muddled.

How is a thoughtful Christian living in America supposed to use his freedoms wisely?

I hope you don’t hear this as some passing pot-shot.

I have my bona fides.

I am an Eagle Scout whose birthday is July 4^th,

And I make an awesome apple pie,

So I believe my credentials are in order.

I can’t stand in a parade procession and see the flag go by without getting misty.

And if I really sit and listen to someone who took fire speak on what it has required

To keep even something as basic as the freedom of speech intact,

My heart goes numb at the thought of all who have ever died preserving it.

… Only I am, first, a child of God –

A child of God who believes, first,

In the perfect freedom of servitude to Christ and his message;

And a child of God who surveys the current scene with genuine wonderment

And, sometimes, not a little despair.

I despair that my legacy to my children looks to be a planet

That can’t be farmed or sustained because it might become too hot and overcrowded;

I despair that we seem oddly resigned to oil pouring onto our shores,

And that we as a country seem so easily distracted from that fact.

(And I’m one, I confess.) Or the facts of New Orleans, Haiti, and so on.

I despair the era of the all-too-comfortable, the all-too-expected public apology

For what he did and for how it let down his team, or his political party,

And the attendant lack of justice.

I despair the booze and the drugs that infect this neighborhood behind closed doors –

Doors closed long enough to make a month’s rent, and then you’re out.

I despair the silent yet palpable unease and disquiet of a neighborhood

That’s undergoing major change.

I despair that the Kingdom of God is too easily confused

With a political and psychological frame of reference that uses Jesus for its own ends,

With no eye for casting his real message widely abroad.

I despair that many have elected to run off rather than change that fact,

That our churches by and large are emptying out,

And that people are walking away from something

That has sustained culture for millenia,

While thinking they’ll find the answers to life’s questions

In an odd mixture of quests of personal fulfillment and chemicals.

I despair the phenomenon of “I’m spiritual but not religious,”

Which is a nice way of saying what church isn’t doing for me,

Or how the church has hurt me;

And I despair how that very phenomenon

Has just about drained mainline Protestantism of its lifeblood.

I despair for the man at Saturday in the Park who shook his fist at the street preacher

And declared that Jesus hadn’t done nothin’ for him,

And I despair the street preacher who bastardized the word of God

And looked down his nose, his heart so filled with judgment that it had no room to love,

To hold the other man in such disregard.

I despair that institutions of higher learning have traded their credentials

And allowed themselves to become repositories of technical knowledge,

Where passion is disdained as suspicious and too easily trained away.

I despair that so much of what I eat is genetically modified and overly refined –

Some crushed-up and recolored and mold-formed version of food.

I despair mudslides and sinkholes and tornadoes and blizzards,

All taking place where you’d least expect to see them,

And at the wrong time of year.

I despair the threat of rising tides and flooded coastlands.

… Is that it? Is that everything? Is our conscience clean now? …

Have we spoken in full? Is the list done?

It is into this despair, this hopelessness, this demoralized, resigned pessimism,

That Jesus steps.

And – please note – not for a minute does he offer to take what is bad and make it good.

He never said,

Come unto me and I will turn your rotten circumstances into preferable ones.

Rather, he came only to make the dead alive.

When we see and understand that not only does sin exist everywhere else –

It exists right here, in dead little me and in dead little you –

When we see and understand that,

Then we can take his offer for life seriously,

And work from it to change things.

When we see and understand our despair for what it is –

The worry of the moment, rooted in reality, but despair nonetheless –

When we see and understand that,

Then we can take up Jesus on his offer of life,

And find the place within ourselves that is still capable of the most realistic hope.

When we see and understand that things are far from perfect

And the Banner of the Kingdom of Heaven is obscured by all these other things –

When we see and understand and confess that,

Then oddly enough, finally God has room to get in and work,

And we will see the world differently –

That we are not chained to this doomed earth merely to die here,

But to run on to all those places here where Jesus himself intends to go.

Having done that, the Kingdom of God will have come near.

For surely, brothers and sisters, as surely as there is a Kingdom to proclaim,

So it falls to us now to do.

May the name of God be praised.

Ash Wednesday Sermon: "Rain"

2010-02-17T15:15:00.001-07:00

Sermon for Year C, Ash Wednesday

Joel 2:1-2,12-17; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

Saint Thomas’ Episcopal Church

February 17, 2010

“Rain”

A few days ago, I issued a challenge for us all to more deeply consider

What it is that keeps us in a place of intimacy with God, or what gets us there.

Today I want us to consider the reverse:

What it is that keeps us from intimacy with God.

I said last Sunday that intimacy is the lived desire to both know and be known –

For the purposes of mutuality and continuous, deepening evolution in a relationship.

That may not be the very definition of “intimacy” according to Webster or Hoyle,

But it’s surely the point: to know God in Christ, and be known.

Remember, “You can’t get close enough to someone you love.”

And God is using everything possible to get our attention, to get close to us,

So that we might only see how very much we are loved already,

And how much God desires for us to respond to that love –

Not with intellectual declarations,

Not with our church-going,

Not with the religious obsession with being right in our doctrine …

But in opening our hearts, in loving God back, in knowing God “back” –

Practicing not a religious system, but a relationship.

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

I really think it can be.

Today something amazing begins. Lent begins.

A thousand years ago, Ash Wednesday arose

Because individual penitence in Rome fell out of popularity,

And in some genius move, the church managed to recapture it

For use by the whole congregation.

The cruciform ash mark on the forehead symbolized one’s participation

In a season of fasting and penitence prior to Easter, and it still does.

Somehow, in a millennium, we never lost it;

And today we say, It’s as much about the chance to love God back, to know God back,

To open our hearts to God without defense or pretention …

As it is a chance to weep over whatever holds us from that glorious vision.

It’s as much a chance to stop and be transformed

As it is to hear the words of a beautiful promise that sounds more like a threat:

We are mortal, we are finite, We are dust and to dust we shall return.

Pulvis es, the old Catholic rite went, in pulverem reverteris.

See, it falls on the ear like a dirge or a menace – the spectacle and specter of death.

But those ashes have a positive value,

Though we might have to twist our minds round a bit to see that.

In some Christian traditions, just for instance,

We see ashed used in the dedication of new worship spaces.

Even better: the priests of the Muisca nation, in pre-colonial Colombia,

Used to sprinkle ashes on their mountain-tops as part of their rain-making ceremonies.

Can you imagine?

Ashes – the preeminent symbol of dryness and death – employed to make rain.

So today these ashes will come onto our bodies,

Be smeared onto the most visible and public part of us (the tops of our mountains?),

And a question will be smudged onto our heads:

To know God; to love God; to open your heart … What keeps you from that?

What’s holding back the rain?

Very likely the answer is completely self-evident;

You knew the answer to an unasked question before the sermon started.

You had your answer, and I had mine.

We don’t have to go rooting around;

I don’t need to make a list, and if I did, we might be tempted to change answers

To something more defensible or palatable.

The simple fact is that the naming of the sin of what we do or do not do

Should not be watered down – not today.

We have to see it, name it, own it, lament it, confess it,

Nail it to the cross that lingers six weeks down the road;

Tear our clothes over it; cry ourselves to sleep because of it.

All true.

And yet we will sing a song on Sunday that contains the line:

“To rend the soul, such grief is not Lent’s goal.”

Dear friends, we have to be honest about how we’re living and how it is or isn’t working;

How it is or isn’t serving the purpose of intimacy with God through Christ Jesus.

We have been set this singular task:

To take the small number of ashes on our foreheads and to somehow sink into their depths

And find that place where penitence turns into peace, and peace into dancing

Because we find, surprise of surprises, that forgiveness is already a fact.

Now, it’s a danger, it’s a thin line for a Christian to walk:

Between pointless wallowing and cheap grace.

Nevertheless, it’s the line the faithful are all called to toe when it comes to this season.

So give up what doesn’t serve the purpose of intimacy with God this Lent –

Whatever blocks your heart;

And add what does serve the purpose of intimacy with God.

Don’t do what doesn’t help. Do what does. Do bother with all the specifics.

But mostly, just let those ashes go to work;

Let God’s great restoration project get a purchase in you,

And turn you – the true meaning of repent – turn you,

In the direction you need to face;

So that walking out of the grave with Christ on Easter,

We might know why we ever had to go into it today.

Last night, we couldn’t get the palms to burn with great ease.

We went out into the chill where it was dark and the prayer sheets were hard to see.

A committee, a gaggle of us, prayed over the palms and worked to get the initial burn going,

And then a subcommittee stayed on,

And before I knew it,

I was down on my knees, earning my salt as a priest,

Blowing the cinders around and choking down smoke, marinating in smoke.

At last, we brought the ashes inside.

(I’m sure I smelled like I’d just been out camping for a week.)

And I thought, as I toted this little metal canister around,

Of the ancient priests of the Temple – expert butchers –

Who clocked out of their shifts and went home covered in the blood of sacrifice.

Then I went home and put my clothes in the washer and showered

And blew my nose and wiped my eyes

And the soot was endless.

I thought I was in a Charles Dickens novel.

And then I turned on the television and watched a show

About a person who was able to turn into a column of smoke whenever he wanted.

These symbols weren’t lost on me; they just kept stacking up.

Ash on the mountain-top. A rain’s coming.

We stand helpless before God in Lent, come to the pinnacle because we long to see Jesus,

And we’re covered head to toe in the ashen, gray powder of our repentance.

Remain here with me.

There are clouds gathering on the furthest horizon,

And a rain beating in them to slake the thirstiest soul.

Amen; may it be so.

"Cups" - Sermon for January 17th

2010-01-20T15:28:00.002-07:00

Sermon for Year C, Second Sunday After the Epiphany

John 2:1-11

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

Saint Thomas’ Episcopal Church

January 17, 2010

“Cups”

The gospel lesson with which we have just been comforted

(And are soon to be afflicted)

Teaches us of the inescapable and immeasurable grace of God

As realized in the miraculous work of Jesus Christ.

In his gospel, John makes this the “first” miracle of Jesus,

And the Greek of it means to have us understand that the conversion of water into wine

Isn’t so much the first-in-sequence of his miracles,

As it is “the beginning” of something great that will soon follow on.

This is not “the first” miracle, in and of itself; it’s only … a taste.

As always, the miracles of Jesus seem to exist

In order to point not to the miracles themselves,

But to the one who is performing them.

In the gospels, Jesus is for ever doing miracles and getting people’s attention,

And then, when he has a captive audience, teaching them about the Kingdom.

Look here! Look! he says. I have something to tell you.

Only now he has no need of words for them.

It is the steward who remarks to the bridegroom, “You have kept the good wine until now.”

I can imagine all this being said with a cocked head and a quizzical expression.

Friend, why would you give us the good wine

When we’re not fit to know it’s any good?

Why pour out a fine wine when the people are too snockered

To know the difference?

And why so much of it? Why so much fine wine?

How could we stand it? How could we ever hope to drink it all?

We hear the story and we think, Well, six jars’ worth: how much could that really be?

Maybe 150 gallons!

That’s 2,400 cups’ worth!

And that’s an awful lot of wine.

Can you imagine being a guest of this wedding party?

When the host invited you to come, he asked you to bring along one stone jar

That could be filled with water for purification rites

(This is a wedding, after all, and what house has six of these things laying around?);

So you happily obliged, but now you find that your jar has been sullied by this wine.

What a pain in the neck!

To get this jar back into sacramental shape will mean scrubbing it down,

Working hard at all the little crevices, washing it out multiple times,

And then, probably, taking it to a priest to have it reconsecrated.

And that priest – make no mistake –

Will do the white glove test before he signs off on that jar to bless it.

It will be absolutely imperative that not a drop of wine remain in that jar.

Now, please don’t get to thinking that this is some historical artifact.

Because it is precisely what we do.

We are the wedding guest who has to haul that jar all the way back home,

And who is thinking the whole time of how much work it’s going to take

Before it can ever be used again.

We thought the miracle failed to consider our feelings when it happened,

And we are the ones who will be left to deal with it afterwards.

This single guy, this itinerant Jesus knows nothing of being a householder;

He isn’t the one who’s going to have to haul out the brushes,

And he’s the one who did it.

Oh well. Scrub, scrub.

How we miss the point!

How we miss the point by a mile when it’s staring right at us –

All 2,400 cups’ worth of the point.

In Jesus, God is now actively doing a new thing in the world –

A new thing, an improbable thing. Dare I say, an odd thing.

Something that doesn’t fit in with our neat preconceptions

Of what faith is and how it works;

Or at least not of the part of keeping the faith that’s determined by keeping the rules.

Here is grace – good wine flowing forth in superabundance:

Yes, certainly prefiguring the mysteries of the eucharist – Jesus’ gift to us –

But also what that eucharist stands for:

God’s endless table of fellowship, meant for us, and for all.

There’s a story I like by Garrison Keillor where at the end,

Garrison’s grandfather and Elvis Presley are in heaven,

And if I remember right, they’re playing checkers and drinking coffee,

Having simple conversation with each other about how good the coffee is.

I love that.

I love it because it expresses the essence of heaven to me.

I pray most earnestly that Heaven, whatever else it may be,

Won’t consist of going to church too much.

And I pray all the more that if it does,

I can sit in the pew, and hear others’ voices, and we can at least have pie afterwards.

Your mileage on this may certainly vary.

But heaven, to me, is finally having the time to settle in and get to know you

So that I can no longer grasp you by all the convenient labels and handles

That I’ve set up for me to be able to deal with you.

Heaven, to me, is good food and drink in endless supply –

Not for the sake of gluttony, not for my sake, but for the sake of us, of all of us.

Heaven is an end to all the distractions and to all the excuses for not being joyous,

Where we can laugh and talk and sing together, or just be quiet together,

And maybe help put things right

And give all the glory of it to the God who animates and loves everything.

It may come across as some kind of impertinent talk

To describe heaven as an endless banquet

On a morning when just 3,500 miles from here, there is massive devastation and loss of life.

In Haiti today, more are waking up to the fact of death and destruction,

To the sure knowledge that their lives will never be the same.

More are failing to wake up; more are accounted among the dead.

To us benumbed by always seeing violence and pain on TV,

It’s tempting to instead turn, and imagine our little heaven.

It’s difficult to see so much terrible and pointless and accidental bloodshed –

Difficult … to see heaven from the crumbling streets of Port au Prince.

Yet we are called, I think, to do just that.

Not to be flippant or unrealistic,

But to say, because of that, that we embrace this; we change this.

Because of what is yet to be, we embrace What Is, and Who Is, and Who’s Hurting,

And try to amend What’s Wrong.

Because we want to feast together as sister and brother, as parents and children,

As the dead to living,

As the Whole of the Family of God gone before and yet to be …

Therefore, we intercede.

Because you matter to me and I to you, I make intercession,

And I pray for the day when we can sup together.

I give to you; I pray for you; I sacrifice and sweat and endure pain for you;

I wait by the window impatiently for you,

And when I see you at last coming down the road,

I run to greet you;

And only then, when I look into your eyes, do I see that I greet myself;

And only then, when I understand that we are one, will I truly understand Christ;

And only then – and not a moment before – will we ever apprehend the joys of heaven.

That was similar to the dream, the vision, of Martin Luther King, Jr.,

Who in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail wrote to anyone who would read it.

He wrote,

“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states.

I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea.”

I wonder if we can hear this;

I wonder if we can be open to a heaven that’s as wide as Dr. King’s … I just wonder.

There is so much good wine, more than it is possible to ever consume.

Instead … out of fear, out of restlessness, out of my own frame of reference,

I am like that wedding guest who withholds his joy

And attends to the keeping of his religious duties.

Yet I also find myself in private agreement with the steward,

Who stood baffled, honestly,

Scratching his head, and saying, What a great mystery this is!

In the presence of sacred mystery there’s no other posture, no other attitude that counts

Quite like wonder.

My Lord and my God! A taste of heaven!

I can’t explain Pat Robertsons’ remarks this week in any other way that makes sense,

Saying that Haiti is cursed because it made a deal with the devil.

Brother Robertson must have run out of wonder;

He must not be capable of seeing God at work in the midst of a huge natural disaster

(Which is what it was).

He calls himself a Christian, and I do not doubt his faith, but his heaven is far too narrow.

The Book of Wisdom teaches that

“The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,

And no torment will ever touch them.

In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died,

And their departure was thought to be an affliction,

And their going from us to be their destruction;

But they are at peace.

For though in the sight of men they were punished,

Their hope is full of immortality….

In the time of their visitation they will shine forth,

And will run like sparks through the stubble.”[1]

I wonder if we can hear this;

I wonder if we can be open to a heaven as wide as the Bible’s … I just wonder.

There is so much good wine, more than it is possible to ever consume.

I’m speaking to you, Lillian Caroline Freese, you who are about to be baptised

Into the Whole Family of God.

Can you imagine, Lillian, looking into the starkest tragedy,

Bringing with it fear and despair,

Yet knowing at precisely the same time that in all of God’s economy, nothing is cast away?

Can you imagine how saving that would be?

I’m speaking to you, Mandy and Brandon, Lillian’s parents,

And to Jessica and Beau, her godparents,

And to Pat, her grandmother (who is not deacon in this service – just Grandma),

And to all who will make promises on Lillian’s behalf today,

And hold them for her, and shape her in them, until she is old enough to decide for herself.

Can you who live in a world of sometimes unspeakable tragedy

Dare to hear the words of Jesus spoken after he broke bread for thousands:

“Gather up the crumbs left over, that nothing may be lost.”[2]

I’m speaking to you, this congregation, and I’m screaming it to myself,

And to anyone with ears to hear the Gospel of Matthew:

That even the very hairs of your head are numbered;

Not to fear what kills the body but can’t kill the soul.[3]

That’s certainly one of the first things we learn when we live a life in Christ,

But it’s not the first-in-sequence; it’s the beginning;

It’s the opening taste of an unending feast.

It seems only right that after this baptism,

We will pass a wide plate before one another,

And ask what seems fit to give to the people of Haiti –

God’s chosen and blessed and beloved people, we and they.

Giving of ourselves into tragedy because we take our baptism so seriously

Is like standing with the steward, scratching our heads.

How many cups’ worth of wine there are!

How open are the doors of heaven!

How much are we loved!

So come, Lillian. Come into this mystery.

Stand with us in awe and wonder;

Take your place among the saints of earth;

And do not withhold your gift.

[1] Wisdom 3:1-4,7

[2] John 6:12

[3] Matt. 10:30 and 28, respectively

'Avatar' Math

2010-01-06T22:17:00.003-07:00

I just now heard Sigourney Weaver tell David Letterman that each frame of 'Avatar' was slaved over for 47 hours by digital producers, artists, and compositors. If that's true, then this is how it breaks down.

Total runtime = 160 minutes

multiplied by

Number of seconds per minute = 60 seconds

multiplied by

Number of frames per second = 24 frames/second

equals

Total number of frames = 230,400 frames

mutliplied by

47 hours of work per frame = 10,828,800 person-hours expended

That's the same as working every second of every day for 14 months straight! (In reality, the film occupied 800 artists for a couple of years.)

Of course, I'm sure the number of 47 hours per frame was decided using a completely different set of criteria. Still, you wonder how editors John Refoua, Stephen E. Rivkin, and Cameron himself could orphan anything that had had that much love poured into it.

The film is stunning to look at and listen to in every conceivable way; alas, it is so in love with itself that it's awash in its own jingoism. So it's too bad that with all it has going for it, it still doesn't have anything to say.

Christmas Eve Sermon, 12/24/2009

2009-12-24T22:50:00.000-07:00

Sermon for Year C, Christmas Eve (Nativity of Our Lord)

Luke 2:1-20

By Torey Lightcap

Saint Thomas’ Episcopal Church

December 24, 2009

“Welcome”

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

To you who have polished these pews with your prayers these many years –

The membership roll, stalwarts and holdouts: Hello.

To you who doubt and pine and wonder where to place your pain on a night like this,

Welcome.

To you who look up at a sky choked with snow and see beyond it to the stars,

Because you just can’t help but be happy, it’s just in your bones:

Hello, and Welcome.

To those who’ve come, though they don’t know why … Hello, and Welcome.

To everyone hog-tied and dragged in through the door, Welcome.

To those bound to tradition, or, perhaps more precisely,

The tradition of your ancestors – ideas that may now seem like such a dim prospect:

Hello, and know that you, too, are always, always welcome.

To those who seek mystery or certitude, or just a better question in life to be about:

Welcome.

To young and old and middle-aged:

Whatever your beliefs, whatever your heart tells you is right:

To every last one here,

And to those of us with the gall to imagine we should ever go first:

Without apology, and without exception – Welcome this holy night.

As the sun leaves us and the wind locks us in this house for a little while,

We join together tonight to take our turn in the turning world

Gazing into something which is both physical and real,

And beyond our capacity to describe.

It is, in one sense, a very great scandal that God should choose

A little boy – a baby! – in some cave somewhere – in which to be seen,

In a time and in a place to which we can point on a map or a calendar.

It’s as outrageous as it is sublime.

The stink and spittle of animals; the blood of birth; dirt floors, uncertainty, terrible humility.

We live in an age in which it seems that God is, whatever God is to you –

You get to describe God, and no one, it would appear, can argue with you.

Except that this child is now before us:

A specific, tangible, incarnate, particular Thing,

With a pulse and a need for food and the bond of his mother.

And we gather and we watch, and we say to him, in terrible humility:

Welcome, O Child of God.

I’d like to ask you to do something that may just be slightly embarrassing.

Turn to someone – someone you know, someone you don’t, doesn’t matter –

And say to him or her, Welcome, O Child of God.

What does that feel like?

A little silly, maybe? A bit of formal grandiosity on such a cold night?

Maybe it doesn’t comport too well with Midwestern values

To look into the eyes of another and suggest, on Christmas Eve no less,

That he or she is a Child of God.

(I’ve only lived here a little while; you’ll have to forgive me.)

However – and I say this with every ounce of sincerity befitting this pulpit –

It is a fact …

You are the icon through which God sees the world.

You are the hope of the world.

You are loved unconditionally, with every last flaw,

As a Child of God living in a world that may or may not have taught you love.

It’s a fact.

You couldn’t change it if you wanted to.

That love will never break, never outdistance you.

You are the emblem of the Most High.

And if this Child we celebrate – the Living Lord Jesus – is anything,

He is the token of that fact.

He is the articulation of that love,

The speaking-forth of that Word that gives breath to all living things.

He will live and die as one of us, reconciling the world to himself.

He will teach the masters and eat with the lowest of the low.

He will place his hands in the most scandalous of places to heal the infirmities of his day.

He will challenge and build up and restore and break down.

He will be whispered over and betrayed.

He will descend into death in terrible humility, and ascend in even greater humility.

He is the token, the Son of God who lives to demonstrate that we are Children of God.

He is unbreakable love, broken out over us.

His hand is upon you; his birth a reminder of what always was, what always will be.

Can’t quite get your head around it? Welcome. I stand with you.

So we say to him, Welcome, O Child of God.

And we say to one another, Welcome, O Child of God.

We totter on the edge of deep mystery on a wintry night.

Don’t try to explain it; just … enjoy it.

Come, let us adore him.