How the Holocaust broke the Western Mind – Searching for the Rule of God after Belzec

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It was a minor concentration camp, Belzec in Poland, where somewhere between five to six hundred thousand Jews were murdered, plus another twenty or thirty thousand Gypsies.  The numbers are still overwhelming seventy years on.  And these are the smaller numbers.  The Revelation of the Holocaust broke the Western Mind.

The word choice is important to my point.  It was not the murders that broke us, it was their revelation through the still young media of film.  It was not mere murder either, it was the religious nature of the Nazi Party and their cause.  It was the collusion of the church and our religiously decorated prejudices.  It was the Revelation of their sacrifice of people who were no longer a label in gray tones on the movie screens of the Western world.  On grainy black and white film the emaciated Jews and Gypsies and prisoners of war were reduced to just being human persons.

The Western Mind is not unique in categorizing human beings and their worth according to labels.  We are not the first or worst sinners of history.  But the Revelation of the Holocaust, the unveiling of our inhumanity, destroyed that system for the collective mindset of the West.  We still have not come back to equilibrium.  We are still healing from the break of seventy years ago.

Look at how we are still gathering in the streets of St. Louis and arguing over the pay of women in the work world.  The Western Mind likes to see itself as Christianized.  In many ways the influence of Christianity on the Western Mind is indisputable.  But the sin, that deep brokenness at the level of our being, undercuts any hope of the Rule of God working at large time and time again.  The Jesus of our theology bows to the prejudices of our cultures again and again.  So we are still trying to work out what it means to live as human beings with other human beings who are different from us and worth the same love and peace.

Jesus [an Israelite of Galilee it is worth pointing out] taught and modeled that everyone had worth before the God of Creation that he called Abba, “Daddy.”  The Gospels repeatedly tell of him crossing the cultural lines of his day to proclaim and embody the Rule of God.  His prejudices were Galilean Israelite prejudices, and yet he is portrayed in the text as moving past them to proclaim a different day of the Lord’s favor for all people.  He pointed out that the prophets had gone to the Gentiles before, and then he went out healing and proclaiming the gospel to Syro-phoenicians and Samaritans and even centurions, the American Marines of his day.  Acts continues this story in the early church’s apostles and their communities.  The letters of the New Testament proclaim again and again that the old boundaries are no longer meritorious in the unity found in Christ.

The church has often turned the spread of the gospel into a weapon in the arsenal of violence, oppression, and especially colonization.  But that was never the call of the church.  We were called to proclaim the gospel to every human being, making disciples of the way of Jesus.  That way is laid out in the Gospels as non-violent: loving, forgiving, healing, and bringing reconciliation and peace.  It has often been taken by those who would use it for violence and turned into another covering for the Third Reich with the church’s blessing.  (Not the whole church maybe, but the majority.)

As an American Christian, I cannot ignore that many here supported Nazism and the violent anti-Semitism and race hatred that was passed from hand to mouth as a cultural norm.  We did not get involved in the war because of the deep divides in our country; we did not rise up against the Axis of Evil until we were hit in Pearl Harbor.

The thing that haunts me is the support for the ideas and prejudices of Nazism and the various forms of hatred and evil that it embodied by religious people.  We are not a pure people, even as Christians.  We are in constant need of being changed, of repentance.

Those images flickering out of the rubble of Europe, our cultural mother, of human beings destroyed and still living and piled up in mountains of sin were apocalyptic.   The Holocaust is an offensive word for it; the sacrifice that is burned as an offering is not the image we want to hold up.  In the Revelation of John the Lamb appears announced as the Root of Jesse, the lion of Judah, and is described as “slaughtered” in my usual translation, but in Greek is “standing as if beaten to death.”  It is isn’t a sacrificial word. But the truth is that the Jews and others were destroyed, sacrificed by the Western World time and time again to a god that is not recognizable in Jesus.  That god is the god of hatred and prejudice, but it is also the god of valuation, setting one good above another.  Sadly it is often the true god of religion.

I worry that we have brought back that god when we talk about American interests leading us to war again.  I worry that we have not learned anything at all.

The Western Mind was broken seventy years ago as the “other” became a human being, because without the detailed Retina screen I carry around now in my pocket, we couldn’t tell if the people on the movie screen was a Jew or a POW or a Gypsy or just some kid from Yonkers.  We had to face that devastation without the labels that justify our violence.  We were forced to make the leap that every human being is worth the full worth that we have, whatever label either of us wears.

We are still working that out.  I think that is what opened up race, geographical, and gender bias and violence to our ethical reflection.  As a religious people we could not go back to a pre-Belzec world, could we?  We still carry around prejudices and a tendency toward violence, but we could no longer call that good or godly, could we?  We did in Selma and Ulster.  We did in more subtle ways with our responses or lack of responses to Sudan, Rwanda, Detroit and Syria.

But we have also made huge strides, acknowledging our common humanity and often our sins, even the ones of omission. I am encouraged by the Israel Palestinian struggle of our day.  I am not always sure that the lessons of those first Russian newsreels have made an impact, and then someone moves toward peace from an unexpected place.  A Jewish doctor decries the death of Palestinian children.  Marines rebuild the sewers of Ramallah.  Small vital signs that the Rule of God peak through even in the midst of violent death.

The Rule of God is based in two important concepts.  One, the rule means area of control, care, and provision, along with order and law must be the peace of provision and reconciliation. What is not under the rule of God?  Two, that the God of Creation loves every human being and wants their return to relationship, to love, humanity, and peace.  This return to God must include a return to peace with God’s children.  This God and the Rule embodied in Jesus have always been in danger of being taken over by the violent without and the violence within.

It is this Rule which salts my tears seventy years after Belzec reading about the utter loss and destruction of God’s sons and daughters in a small Polish town so far removed from right now.  It is this Rule that I see when I look into the face of the woman or man or child on the news or across the cafe.  God-breathed clay brought to life and wonderful, worthy of love and peace, that is the visage of every human face.

After Belzec there is no label that can hide that face.  I still believe in sin and lament my own and other human sins daily, but I believe there is a way to live  beyond sin, that values that child of God across the world or across the cafe.  It is the way of Jesus, of peace and forgiveness, of healing and love.

It is hard to know what should have been done seven decades ago in the face of such violence.  It is hard to know what to do today in the face of the violence we face daily.  But it begins in remembrance and prayer for there to be on earth a way that is as it is in heaven.  It begins here in this little cafe in Michigan, or it will remain in heaven while we slip again towards hell on earth.

If my Jewish brother is less human than I am, then Jesus is less than I believe and I have no hope.

If the gospel is not for the Palestinian woman, then it isn’t for me.

I cannot sing Amazing Grace for myself alone.

No, I am not an ex-Baptist. I am a Episcopal Christian.

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No longer post-evangelical. Episcopal life after the life after being Baptist. A birthday meditation.

I grew up Southern Baptist, but I am no longer an ex-Southern Baptist. My turn away from my turn began when in an interview with my then bishop-to-be Robert Shahan said, “Make sure you bring the gifts of your Baptist life to the Episcopal Church, your love of salvation and personal relationship with Christ.” It was not what I expected to hear.

Leaving the Southern Baptist life was tied up in a number of decisions; much like becoming vegetarian, it was something that was more emergent than a breaking point. The social issues and the salvation message (without much beyond it), the Bible as fourth person of the trinity, all of it was there, and I had had a conversion about women in ministry [not much of a leap beyond the women of my family.] But it wasn’t any one of these things or even the culmination of them that led me to leave.

Sometimes I say it was the liturgy, and I suppose in a real way it was; but it wasn’t just the liturgy. I was looking for a way of embodying the teachings of Jesus, a lived community salvation. What I found was the ascetic theology of the Book of Common Prayer. It was these things too, and it was something else.

It felt right. Which is not what I want to write. I want to say that it was this great theological or worshipful ideal that arose out some depth of study and worship. And it was, but it was also this internal place of feeling in my bones the things I had hoped for in those hours in that tiny apartment at Grand Canyon between worship services, classes, and a handful of jobs reading all those books alongside the Bible and trying to imagine what the community of God would look like at worship.

I am not sure after the last twenty years if I have really found what I set out after in college, at least not as a repeatable form, but there are these moments where the Spirit slips into our hearts, and the worship just lifts up into praise and intimacy, drunken joy and transformation. Sometimes that is Sunday mornings, and sometimes it is the simple eucharist on Wednesdays, and sometimes it is sitting around the table in my office where my work gets smaller and infinitely more detailed.

O Wisdom! The Spirit comes dancing in and whisks away the dust and crud of build up that clings to us in our daily lives. She takes these tired hands and goes swinging through in time to the angels lift of praise. She comes with light and lights, and the dance is so much more and so much less than liturgy. It is worship and praise, tears and joy, laughter and love, intimacy and reverence. It is repentance and coming home. It is the slake of thirst of that first drink in the desert. It is touch of God.

On those days, you can watch God work like wind twisting trees. Sure, there is almost always wind to the attentive finger in the air, and trees never really sit still, being living things. But when you have watched the leaves of fall in Michigan go dancing, you can’t compare the everyday with the manifestation of the Day at all.

Back to what I left. When I left the Baptist church, I was leaving a way of being Christian. It didn’t fit. And I had been ridiculed a couple of times for not being the right size. I was persecuted. If I can make that awesome word small and tiny and not have it stand in the same way it does for those who really suffer harm and danger, then I can say I was persecuted. When I think of North India and Syria and the Christians of Iraq, I should say, I was talked about impolitely. I was ribbed. I was teased. I felt persecuted when I was too young to know what suffering entails. Mostly I was loved and supported by the people who packed my bags.

I left looking for a place to be the kind of Christian I hoped I was. I left looking for worship that embodied the teachings of Jesus my Lord. I found the cathedral in Phoenix and the women who led her, Trinity. Rebecca and Veronica embodied something about the mystical body of Christ; with them I could bow. The people were raw and holy without any pretense of being good at being a church. As an institution they were living in ruins. They were faithful and hopeful and honest and kind, but they were not successful and hadn’t been for a long time. I was one of a very few under forty. Truly I was one of a few, period.

Later it would grow. Later it would become the community and institutions that it is now, but twenty years ago, it was a remnant in the ruins of past success. And among those ruins I found a people, and in their honest participation in a liturgy that was bigger than any of us, I joined with adults in the life of the Church. I found a voice and a calling there. It was there that Bishop Shahan told me not to leave behind the heritage of Scripture and relationship. He even hired me to teach youth and young adult ministry and confirmed and ordained me.

I had left behind a church in transition, a denomination that continues to grow and evolve, though they don’t like that word particularly. Many of my cohort stayed to live beautiful and fruitful Christian lives. Many of my friends became Emergent Christians, founding hip communities and doing amazing things, living the life of God in new and exciting ways. They became part of the revolution that is always going on in the evangelical church. I went backwards crawling back through revivals and revivalism, Methodism and evangelical Anglicanism, looking for a pure sacrament. I left the post-modern and found myself pre-modern.

I was looking for authentic worship, rooted in history. I was looking for the upper room and freshly broken bread. I wanted to get as close to Christ as I possibly could. I crawled into the liturgy of the church and discovered how broken the body can be. I discovered with the rest of my generation and probably yours that the church is always happening right now.

There is no pure sacrament, because it is always a sign held by human hands. God moves through us like trees, and we twist and fall. But our fall is only the chance for the Spirit to take us dancing again. When the dance is over we become part of the landscape, the long geological work of redeeming a world that is fallen and free, but still formed like river clay and breathed by the One who loved it and loves it still. We are always breathed creatures.

And sometimes that Breath breathes in our liturgies so strongly I want to call people to the altar, to tell them the stories of the Bible like a parent on a car trip telling childhood hijinks to those we tell to be better than us, and I want to break bread for the world. No I am not a post-evangelical. I am not a former Southern Baptist. I am a part of the broken body of the world, for the world. I am a part of the body of Christ, redeemed and gone dancing.

I am an Episcopal priest, a member of the Anglican communion, if one can be, and I keep the Offices and could no more give up the eucharist than my pen, and I still lament that my people don’t love Scripture, but am glad they don’t worship it. I live a sacramental life, if you can accept that no sacrament is pure, and I am held up by the Body of Christ, in robes and no robes, carrying leather Bibles and Books of Common Prayer in hands still dirty from the clay of the River of Life.

I am still baptized if not Baptist. I didn’t get far in my leaving. I just went backwards. I am not not a Baptist anymore. I am evangelical and Anglican, catholic and praying and Biblical, imperfect and still looking for a pure sacrament.  I still read the Bible and I love Jesus; and we should go dancing sometime, but I don’t dance.

A Sane Prayer Life – Advice Along the Way

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A Sane Prayer Life

Prayer is one of the most intimate things a person can do, but it is surprising how many people report having a sane prayer life. Rarely do I have people report praying crazy things.  People are usually humble and patient, even if frustrated or even devastated by their situation.  They are rational even in irrational times.  I have a theory that a solid prayer life keeps you sane.

That is not necessarily the popular opinion of atheists, but among the things you can learn online, 55% of Americans pray daily according to a 2013 Pew Research poll.  In our tradition, Anglican/Episcopal Christian, we stress daily prayer as a formal part of  our formation and prayer life.

The Daily Office is not the same thing as a quiet time or devotional, though those traditions within Methodist and Evangelical traditions in the United States probably developed out of it.  The Daily Office is a whole church version of the monastic, specifically Benedictine, opus Dei, or work of God.  Benedict saw the monastic offices, regular and regulated sessions of prayer, as the praise of the faithful being intentionally ordered to be both realistic and keepable in a normal balanced life, even if one that is dedicated and set aside to God in the desert communities of the sixth century.

The English Reformers, led by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, distilled the hours to the Morning and Evening Offices that we call Morning and Evening Prayer.  Later the church brought back into the Book of Common Prayer noontime and the late night Compline offices, pretty much as directed by the Rule of Benedict.

The Offices are kept pretty strictly, without much innovation.  Martin Thornton, English priest writing about fifty years ago, saw the Office as part of a trinitarian prayer life, being dedicated to the God the Father.  In keeping the Offices as proscribed we are submitting to the praise of the universal Church.  This is part of a sane life, as Thornton points out, that is balanced between submitting to the Church universal in the Office and to the local community in the Eucharist.  He also points out that sanity is not found only in submission, but in submission and freedom.

We are free in our tradition to pray as the Spirit leads in an ongoing way.  We are invoked to prayer in the Book of Common Prayer but not told how to pray throughout the day.  Granted, our BCP has prayers in it, but I would suggest that sanity in freedom should involve some devout and holy experiment.  You should pray as the Spirit leads in whatever way is fitting.

I am an INFP, a Five on the Enneagram, and a Mystic according to the Myers-Briggs type indicator, Enneagram, and Urban Holmes’s Spirituality for Ministry.  All of that is to say that my needle is set to quiet, introspective prayer.  I need silence everyday and often daily.  I retreat to quiet places constantly.  But sometimes in prayer, I cry out, clench my fists, and even feel led to dance.  I let music take me along to emotional places I don’t go without guidance.  I try to extend my prayer life with a little time, after the Bible and silence that is.

Gil Stafford taught me this twenty years ago.  Gil was my first spiritual director, and in a meeting one day in his office as then baseball coach at Grand Canyon University, we were catching up when he told me about deciding not to journal as part of his daily prayer.  He had been journalling for a long time and realized that it had become dry and not very prayerful, so he was setting it aside for a while.  I was blown away, even though he wasn’t teaching me per se, he was just sharing himself.  But it modeling a kind of freedom that I just didn’t have at eighteen, even though there was no formal constraint.

Sanity admits to the reality of areas of life where we submit to others and find freedom in doing so.  I often think people who complain about the weather are wasting their time, but people who complain about their own life are not dealing with reality very well.  Okay, that includes me often enough, but I don’t always deal well with reality either.  We submit and find life, but we also must find the areas of our life where we do have dominion or power and enjoy those areas as well, taking control of them and playing in them.

Where Martin Thornton says we must experiment reverently, I would say we must learn to play in prayer.  We have to learn to trust God’s goodness and mercy and forgiveness enough to approach in prayer in the ways we are led to.  We may fail in prayer.  I have.  I have also failed in communicating with my wife and kids and friends.  They don’t cut me off, and how much more compassionate is my Abba?

We need places in prayer that we keep faithfully.  Maybe that is Scripture or the Offices, but find a place to bow.  Then play with all you have.  God wants nothing less.

Blessing God while Cussing

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Prayer is a crazy business.  I am a professional, but like most professionals hired to teach others I often forget to teach the way beneath the techniques.

Prayer is a crazy business because it is talking to God.  God!  It is always an act of faith, even the foxhole blurts and the beggars blessings.  We act in faith when we lean into God, but religious people are always in danger of saying stuff that sounds like prayer but isn’t.  You know what I mean.  The pastor’s prayer that is really a reiteration of the sermon.  The holy aunt’s grace that is more of a rubbing in the face of her own holy righteousness.

To cuss is to use impolite words.  I separate cussing from cursing.  To cuss is sometimes an act of impolite honesty, and sometimes just plain rude or inappropriate.  I am not suggesting you take it up.  But to curse is to will harm or evil upon another.  It is the opposite of blessing.  To bless is to invoke the manifestation of God and God’s will to good for another person.  It is a profound act of healing and faith.  I do suggest you take it up.

But my point today is to bless while you are still pushed to the point of cussing.

I want to talk about cussing prayers.  The angry, hurt, desperate prayers that don’t usually make it into church.  The prayers that come when the news rips out an organ and drops the floor beneath you.  The aching prayers that define us and often leave us feeling guilty or blasphemous.

Have you ever prayed like that?  I have.  I still do.  Often as a priest I want the freedom to just lay out exactly what I feel in four-letter words, but I am learning to communicate with more care.  (Honestly, I have worked on that more because I have children than because of my collar.  I would just cuss if it weren’t for the responsibility to raise children who can function better than their father.)

The door closes, and the doctor frowns.  When the words have dropped and you cry out, it is too late to tell you what I want to say right now.  God loves you and wants those prayers.  God is not distant.  God is not perfect in the immutable, unchangeable way that so many armchair theologians pronounce.  They are wrong.  God is in there with you, in the ache and the cold hospital room.  God is in the gutter and the leather-accented office suite.

We have taken “God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow” meaning faithful to promises, and we have let bad Roman neo-Platonism come creeping into Christian theology.   God is not unchangeable.  To say that God is immutable is to rip out some pretty significant pages of the Bible.

The people around their golden calf better rejoice that God can change, and at the prayers of Moses who had already by that point argued with God at the bush and hit the rock in anger.  God turns aside so easily from wrath that one begins to wonder why the bluster.  Now like Jonah you can sit under your withering plant or you can join Jesus on the side of grace.

God is a lot of things in the Bible, but thin-skinned isn’t one of them.  God doesn’t have skin at all, except Jesus and the Spirit-people of baptism and eucharist.  We incarnate God.  It is true, read John.  So then why do we think that God can’t handle our prayers and our cussing?

I suggest you try it out.  Let God have it, all of it.  It is one of the greatest acts of faith there is.  God is with you wherever you are.  If you trust that, cry out.  God will hold you.  God has reached out time and time again in Scripture, not usually to fed the things of this life, but to lead us through death into life.  God often is closest in the darkest times of our lives, but we are trained only that God is light and don’t look into the deep inky loneliness for the those smoldering eyes of love.

Too bad.  So often I have found God almost unbearably close in chalk-green rooms still echoing with the doctor’s worse.  And often people don’t realize how close God is because we are taught that God comes to sanctuaries and Aunt Holy’s living room full of saints and saccharine.  The faithful know otherwise, but they often don’t have words for that moment that sound religious.

It’s too bad.  The Bible is full of them.  Psalm 23 and . . . okay the Psalms.  David, Moses, and the Cross.  Paul and the letters all teach us that God is more than able to handle your cuss words.  Bless God with cuss words still in your mouth.  It is powerful practice.

You don’t need to go out and find a reason to cuss.  The world will give you plenty of encouragement.  But while you are still there, bless God and pray.  You will find yourself a little more human and your God a little more intimate.

Gratitude and the Way: Roadwork

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Whitby Summer 2014 by DPR+

Whitby Summer 2014 by DPR+

Ingrate.  Everything I have is given by someone else.  Everything I have is borrowed.  Everything I have belongs to God.  There is this simple truth in my life that I stumble over sometimes and end up in tears of gratitude.

I am an ingrate.  I am ungrateful most of the time, not because I think I earned anything or have some great accomplishments, but because I just don’t pay attention enough.

My life is carried by others.  I can’t weave sheets or make a shirt or build a road. I don’t even keep my own calendar.  I am so deeply connected to all these amazing human beings who do these incredible things.  Could I do any of them? Yes, maybe.  But could I do them and still do what I do well?  Not a chance.

My life is this wondrous dance with a few million people, most of whom are invisible to me.  We live in webs of relationship.

Even the sparrow is not removed from me.  Her health is mine.  She makes her home beside the altar because she is as much a part of the will and love of God as I am.

I carry around this truth in my pocket and run my hands over it sometimes in wonder.  I was watching the workmen on Front cutting the asphalt for another dig into the underbelly of our small metropolis, and awe overtook me.  These sons of God, these bored and distracted fathers and brothers were waking up and focussing to do something that makes me marvel.

These men were taking care of the rest of us with their care around power and gas, water and road.  They were priests to the mysteries that lie under our feet.

What of the dental assistant or the nurse, the veterinarian, the police officer, the woman in labor?  The world is full of the children of God working together at this wondrous creation.  We bend like fields of wheat under the wind of God.  We bow to one another in acts so small as to escape notice, but in the whole we make the world.

The righteous choose to walk awake into fields of harvest with gratitude, to honor the world by choosing to bless rather than curse, to attend to our holy work, whatever it is, bowing to God in simple acts of love at the shovel or the pick, the needle or the push of the body against the infant.

We are creators like our abba Creator choosing to build up or destroy.  Oh, my brothers and sisters, we have to choose.  We have to wake up to the ties that hold us, or we will strangle the weaker among us, we will suffocate the helpless, we will struggle against the web or go slack, and both increase the work of those around us.

Care of life, care of the little interactions, moving with grace among the creation, this makes us human.  We can begin in such small ways, like the men at the corner waking up to attention, doing their job with care and focus.  Going the extra mile comes easy when we choose the first one as an act of humanity rather than slavery.

We begin with the choice.  Paul addresses slaves and urges them to choose their life, which we have used and misused as owners of slaves.  But if we read this as the slaves, we are addressed as human beings.  We choose, and so we take on our dominion of the first corner of creation given into our care, our selves.  We choose and then the owner becomes a partner in life, and the hierarchy we both hold and resent disappears.

It becomes a prop for an old play left over after the crowd leaves.  A relic is all that remains of the old world and its acting.  The reality of the Rule has come and left the old play abandoned for the farce it was.  We are not slaves or owners, we are human beings bowing to each other.

Wake up, O leaders and servants, we all wash each others feet as we live well into our lives, and our feet are washed by our savior in so many different colored hands.  The Rule of God has come, and God is the only one to stand above as the first Creator, the ongoing Weaver who runs the loom of creation through our lives like a breath over our fields of harvest, and we bow or break.

Your life and mine are one.  The Spirit, that breath of God, makes us one as we awake to the real world of life and salvation, to our heritage as Creator’s children, Jesus followers, healers and forgiveness bearers.  The world waits for us to realize that the men at the corner are our brothers, the world is in our care, and we are bound to love.

Why Your Funeral Should be at the Church

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and what the Church’s Job Is

This past week we buried a family member; this week we will continue to bury the homeless and homely, the rich and the wonderful saints of God.  I have done and do funerals as part of my work as a priest, but occasionally as a family member or friend I sit in the pews, and this shifts my perception.  This week left me rung like an iron bell.

This week left me sure that a good explanation of what we are doing in a funeral and why you should have one in a church are necessary, not least because we gave a Christian burial to someone who was never really a Christian, but a good human being, and I am not sure anyone there really could say why we were there.

from Whitby Abbey

from Whitby Abbey

The Exposition (Where the author takes a long time to lay the groundwork for something more interesting.)

Jesus was the Son of God, according to what we believe, right? So he comes to inaugurate and announce the coming of the Kingdom of God, or Rule of God.  That Rule is already present in heaven, hence why we pray, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  It is the will of God lived out.

What is the will of God? That we live as we were intended from the beginning of Creation, as God’s image bearers, the children of God.  We were to incarnate the love and care of God for the creation, and one another in companionship.  That went wrong right from the beginning, as the nightly news attests, it still goes wrong.

We are made to be God’s stewards of creation.  We were made for companionship and cooperation.  But we go grasping after power and knowledge.  This is clearly part of our nature.  The story may be Scripture but it is also an accurate description of the human condition and growth.  And just like in the Bible, we are not forsaken as we leave the Garden, but we have to find new ways of relating to God and each other.  Law is introduced after failure.

Law is supposed to reveal a larger picture, a vision of God, humanity and creation.  But we get stuck.  We have to be born again, in Jesus’ words from John.  We have to begin again in relationship to God, our separation forgiven and redeemed, set free from the bondages we inherit.  As we get set free, we become full human beings.

I grew up with the need for salvation, but not much beyond that.  This is the interesting part to me.  We get set free, or brought up in freedom if we are blessed enough to be brought up inside the Rule of God.  We get to begin again in new relationship with God.  Now we are not newborns.  We begin again with our now shaped brains and bodies, souls and habits.  We have to learn how to live as human beings in relationship to God.  We have to learn how to take care of the creation and how to love each other.

It is sad that after almost two thousand years, we still get so inspired by Paul’s and Peter’s and James’s letters.  You would think that we would keep growing up, but that too is part of the story.  In those letters we learn how they taught these new people to live into this new reality.

The Rule of God is a way of talking about the reality that God’s way is revealed in Jesus.  God’s character is love and care, and God’s vision is a healthy creation and humanity that lives in right relationship to each other.  You can see this in the Law of the Hebrew scriptures that we call the Old Testament.

The idea of God’s Rule came to be located then in the Temple in Jerusalem. That created the classical problem of the location becoming the point, rather than the reality the location represents.

So Jesus is said to be the new Temple, see the anonymous letter to the Hebrews.  He brokers God’s forgiveness and blessing, healing and restoration in his miracles.  He incarnates God as the Temple had.  The Spirit descends on him at his baptism, just as the presence of God had on the Temple.

The Gospels then have Jesus breathe on his disciples (John) passing the Spirit on to them, or sending his Spirit on them (Luke), or appearing to them to give them his blessing and authority (Matthew) telling them to go and make disciples, baptizing them into the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This authority is sometimes called the name or the peace of Jesus or his disciples.

The disciples become the temple: brokers of forgiveness, blessing, healing and redemption.  This is the most missed turn in the New Testament by believers.  We are supposed to do what Jesus did.  Every Gospel, every letter, every thing in the New Covenant is leading to this.  As a restored humanity, we become Jesus’ body in the world.  We incarnate God.

Paul puts this beautifully in one of the passages from Romans that we read at funerals. “The world waits in eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” In the New Testament, there is no ordained priesthood.  The word that gets appropriated as “priest” in our tradition is really presbyter or “elder.”  The priest or high priest refers to Jesus and then to the church community.

We are a royal priesthood: royal because we are God’s children and heirs, priesthood because now we stand between God and humanity.  We represent God to the world and the world to God.

The Point (Where if one knows the author’s theology well, one should begin to read with some attention again.)

So it is appropriate and right for the church to bury people as an act of offering their life to the God who will receive them.  As the priesthood, we are to love as God loves and embody the grace (forgiving and redeeming love that is not earned) to the world, especially at the moments of life and death.

We should be crying out to God for grace and mercy, as the prayers of our services do, and we should be crying out to the families and friends of the deceased to not wait to receive this grace and mercy because it is available right now.  Be set free and born new to begin again and join in the freedom and life of the believer!  But also, O God, receive a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming.

I sat in the pew this week and was a little put off that the priest in charge had chosen to wear purple-black velvet vestments, a shroud of mourning worship.  But I was also shocked that he buried the deceased as a Christian, when his life was never put under the Rule of God.  There was appropriate mourning for a life cut short by bondage and addiction to drugs.  There was appropriate celebration of the signs of his humanity, a loving kindness from the depths of his being.

The priest proclaimed both mourning and hope in his sermon.  I was impressed by his willingness to tell the truth in front of people who don’t love truth.

But that is why we have funerals.  We offer our lives and our loved ones up to the God who made them, loved them, and loves them.  A God of mercy, grace, and forgiveness.  But we are remiss when we don’t offer people that grace and love in this life, before they die.  So the funeral has to be both worship and an act of love, even when love demands that we tell the truth.

You should have a funeral.  It is not an act of hubris but humility.  Our lives get placed under the story of creation, fall, and redemption.  We get held up to the one who made us, loves us, and before whom we will all stand one day, for judgement and a meal (see Isaiah and Revelation).

Your funeral should be at the church.  We are the people of God, even if we suck at it, which we do pretty often.  God set us free and made us new, but God still left us human beings.   We will probably mess something up.  But we will stand with your loved ones and hold them up and love them, no matter what.  We will love you too, in our imperfect way.  And we will offer your life to God.

I hope you don’t wait until the last day or later to run to grace and mercy, forgiveness and healing.  If you do we will be waiting with open arms and really good music.  But oh that you would find grace and mercy now.

It takes a while to unlearn the habits of a lifetime, many of us exhibit this in clear ways.  We are all still working out issues.  That is why we make such vows in our baptism.  It takes work to live in the church with other Christians.  But we are a committed lot.  We are still, after two thousand years, working out all that loving God, our neighbor, and our selves means, much less caring for the creation.  But we keep at it.  Join us.  We need you.

The Rule of God is your home.  You were born to be God’s child.  Everyone comes home eventually.  Don’t wait.

Take your place at the table, and taste the feast today.  Think about it.  God loves you and wants you to be the you that you are.  God knows you.  And God loves you.  This was Jesus’s message, and now it is ours.

A Simple Anthropology – or – What is a Human Being?

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We are burying a lot of people these days, and I just wanted to articulate something really simple.  There is enough fire these days burning away dross across the church, around the world, and here at home.

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A human being is God-breathed creation, bears the image of God, and is created to be steward of creation.  We are the only creature said to be breathed by God, we carry the divine breath, but we are also river clay, a creation ourselves.  We are made to tend to creation, to rule over it.  This sounds like power and authority to destroy, but it really means that the Master of the House has put us in charge of tending and caring for the house as the Master would.  We know how God would tend the house by listening to the breath of God within us, the Holy Spirit, literally the Divine Breath or Wind in both Greek and Hebrew.  Our original job as humanity was to name and tend.

We are male and female.  We need both to bear the image of God.  We are not simple, and we need each other.  We need companionship.

We have failed.  All of us have failed.  We have failed to tend and care for creation and each other (part of creation as we are). We have not stayed in our place or lived up to our calling.  Humility is honesty about ourselves and others.  We have failed.

We are forgiven.  “While we were still sinners . . .” is how brother Paul put it, Jesus died for us, taking on himself the sin of the world in Jerusalem.  We were set free and forgiven at the cross.  Jesus took upon himself the sin and was slaughtered.  We take him in bread and wine like our passover every week, but the cross was reality before we came to realize it.  To be a human being is to be forgiven and set free.

We sell our free and forgiven selves into all kinds of slavery.  We are subjugated from birth sometimes, and we take on shackles throughout our lives.  But we are born free and meant to be free.

We are responsible to the Rule of God.  In Jesus the Rule of God has come to us.  We can live as the sons and daughters of God, bearing God’s image, and taking up our role as human beings when we return to the Holy Spirit and the Way, as the early church put it.  We have to let the Spirit of God teach us, remind us, and reshape us.  We follow Jesus and his teachings.

We are a royal priesthood.  As a royal (children of God) priesthood (representing God’s Rule of love, forgiveness, and wholeness of creation) we work to heal, set free, and tend to the creation and humanity.  We do this on the personal, the local, and the global level, but it begins in the heart.

We turn to the image of God and bow with our whole lives.  Our life becomes a life of reverence when we realize our calling.  I am honored to stand week after week naming the ways God’s breath has marked life after life as a priest.

This week is marked by grief as we grieve a life cut short by slavery to substance, no less holy or forgiven, but so much less free than it could have been.  It takes work to honestly name.

I ask your prayers and want to thank those of you who work to set free the bound, to heal the sick, to tend this wonderful dancing exhale of God we live in.  I love you all and ask your patience as we weep and turn aside.  I will pick up my tools again and join the work in a minute, but I need this moment to grieve and wipe the tears of my wife and family.

Why I Think You Should Join a Church

/ daniel p. richards / 2 Comments

What is the church for?

I lead a parish and deanery, I work (overwork) for the institution, and I have for most of the last twenty years (I had a year off in 1998.)  I am an insider.  So I get naturally defensive when people say they are spiritual but not religious or Christian but don’t attend.

But I also get it, time is precious.  Why am I giving up the most precious resource I have for an hour or more a week? In a world like ours, with so many things competing for our time, with kids and work and activities, something that is going to ask for more has to have a purpose.  I get it.

The problem is that the church is inherently made up of people who assume that its importance is obvious and agreed to: people like me.  But as soon as I typed that first question I stopped.  I have a particular way of talking about this, and there is no short way around the question.

Jesus probably wasn’t intending to create a diocesan structure made up of parishes with a clergy person and committees and mission statements, much less a national church or pope.  So why do we have all of that and why should you join it?

First off, I think Jesus was inaugurating a reality, what he called the kingdom of God, which is the way things are but do not appear to be currently.  This reality is based in who God is, what God intends, who we are, and who we are to be in relationship to God, the world, and each other.

These things about the kingdom of God are true now, even though they are not obvious; that is why I am calling it a reality.  God is abba now.  He is loving and compassionate and made the world in love.  It is a complex world in which we have a role as God’s children and stewards, the caretakers of God’s creation.  We failed to live in our boundaries right from the beginning.  Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is an analogy that we still make true on a daily basis.

Jesus talks about humanity in terms of being God’s children.  This Hebrew concept still lives in our current language.  When my dad says that I am my mother’s son, he is saying that I have her character.  When Jesus tells us to live as God’s children, he is telling us to have God’s character, and then he carefully teaches what that character is.  We read about forgiveness and get stuck on needing forgiveness, but Jesus focusses in the Gospels on us being forgiving, on us forgiving other people’s sins.

We were to wake up to our reality, be born again into the reality of God’s abbaness (I made that up), our status as God’s children in Jesus, and that we have God’s Spirit dwelling in us, as Paul focusses on, teaching us, giving us life, and enabling us to embody God’s rule of love and compassion.  In this way we take on our full humanity as it was intended, mature human beings taking care of the world and living in peace and love with each other.

This work sounds soft in the face of violence, oppression, racism, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation.  But it is courageous and brave, honorable work. It is human.   It is the natural state of the whole and healthy human being.  This is obvious to all, even if rarely experienced.

So if this is the reality that Jesus inaugurated and taught and made real in his death and resurrection, taking away the consequences of our failure and revealing God’s love and forgiveness in his sacrificial death and bringing new life in his resurrection, then why the church?

Couldn’t we just live into that reality on our own? I think we probably can, but I cannot sustain it very long by myself.  I need a community to hold and mold me.  I need to be taught the teachings of Jesus and the Bible and our tradition.  I need to be told about the world that I can’t always see.  I need to be supported in the mad trust in a reality that seems at odds with the messages of my culture.  I need to be with other people who believe and who love that way.

And I want a place where I am treated that way, as a human being.  Not a consumer or merchandise.  Not a supporter or an enemy.  Not a machine or an idea.  Not an animal or a plant.

I completely understand that church has failed to be that for many people.  But I have hope.  And I am doing my part.  Jesus told religious people, the chief priests and elders in the temple, that the tax collectors and prostitutes were going into the kingdom of his Abba ahead of them.  That’s still true, I guess.  At least I know I have tasted that kind of love and reality in some strange places, like bars and back rooms with disaffected people.  But I so often get little tastes at church, where I put myself in the way of grace with a whole lot of people who are very, very different from me and find myself at home in the house of God with my family.

And like my own family, I get all kinds of frustrated and angry, but I also get loved and helped out, reminded and remade, and I am doing my part.  I am not just a recipient in church, I am a participant.  I am making the place along with a whole lot of really cool people who are not like me but not so very different either.

So yes, I think you should join a church and help to make it.  Help make it a little more like God’s house, full of human beings in our infinitude of graces and failures, care-taking creation and each other into a more holy human divine house of love.

Crawling Up Next to God: Prayer 101

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How to Pray.  First off, let’s begin with a simple description.  Prayer is communicating with God.  So it is important to me as your priest (for the length you read this piece anyway) that you know who God is.  I believe in the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.  That God he called Abba, “daddy,” and spent a great deal of his teaching on his character as a loving, compassionate, healing, forgiving, who had a vision for “his” children.  We call that vision “the kingdom of God” where we love, care, heal, forgive, and live with each other in peace.  Oh, yeah, and care for the Creation.  We are made for this.

Now, my understanding for this is hugely shaped by my kids.  I love them and have hopes for them, and I want them to come and be with me, to talk to me, to be respectful and honest, to bring me their whole selves, and to grow.  I want them to live into my hopes for them, but that is not all of our relationships.

So how can this image help you pray?

  • First off, just be with God.  Pay attention to the fact that God is present.  How do you hug a Spirit?
  • Second, bring your self and your stuff.  God can deal with you in your pettiness and your world changing awesomeness. Read the Psalms and other prayers of the Bible. They are full of petty whining and greatness.
  • Third, be reverent which is just respect for the divine.  I would extend this outward from prayer.  Be reverent about the name of God and God’s children.  Human beings are holy (even if they don’t always live into it.)  Your prayers should be deeply reverent of God, human beings, and the Creation.  Just like my kids get my best when they speak carefully of others.
  • Fourth, just be with God.  Let yourself be loved too.  Too few of us are practiced at being loved.  Most people don’t know how great God’s love is.  It gets relegated to an idea (the cross or salvation or some creed.)  But the God I know and worship in Jesus is wildly in love with you.  Yep.  Even though you are weird and broken and tattooed or have those odd-looking chicken legs.  You know God knows those legs and loves them as surely as I love my children’s quirks and beautiful idiosyncrasies.

God wants you to hang out.  I miss my kids when they are off being themselves in other rooms.

Now, I am not a great dad.  I have issues with control and self-centeredness.  I embarrass my beloved family too much to even capture here.  But I want the best for them.  I want their wholeness, and I want my children to be responsible and free, loving and kind and good.  And I want them to share that part of them too.

I want to hear their stories and heal their hurts.  I want to let them handle what they can and defend them to no end.  And I am a mediocre dad.  Imagine what God must be like, loving and balancing love for seven billion of us.  Disappointed and hopeful, tearful and laughing.

So crawl up next to God and bring your whole self.  That is the essence of prayer.

Freedom in Servanthood – Finding the Right Kind of Bondage

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The Bible has a number of paradoxes that cut right through the heart of our age.  I am always preparing to preach somewhere, which I love.  But I mostly preach in short form and don’t always get time to work out the more subtle paradoxes that show up. That and it isn’t okay to talk about BDSM at church.

So there is a culture of bondage in the world that doesn’t have very much to do with church.  Google search when the kids aren’t around.  People tie up their sexual partners and sometimes hurt them for pleasure.  This sadomasochistic relationship has been brought into pop culture more or less obviously by the Fifty Shades of Grey series of books.  They were so popular that these lit-porn books were being read on subways in the newspaper at least.  I did see women reading them in cars waiting to pick up kids at school and on a couple of planes.

Now, bondage isn’t a new phenomenon.  It has floated just below the surface of our porn culture for a long time.  It is one of those dark fantasies that no one admits in polite culture, and certainly not to a priest!  Yet the domination and submission game is well known in relationships where there is little leather.  Many couples play out this dynamic on more subtle levels.

I am struck that so much of the literature around bdsm (bondage submission sadomasochism) talks about the submissive finding freedom.  This parallels one of the central paradoxes of Christianity.

Freedom is the root of the word redemption.  The whole concept of redemption or to be redeemed is to be set free from bondage or slavery.  The Greek word “doulos” means slave or servant or deacon.  The word is extremely common in the New Testament appearing 127 times (Strong’s number 1401).  It is a title applied to oneself (Paul and Peter) and to others.  We are said to find our freedom in becoming servants to Jesus.

We have been set free by the cross and yet are to put ourselves in bondage to Christ.  Now clearly this is two very different ideas about bondage.  Fear not, dear reader.  I don’t think you need ropes to explore your freedom!  I think rather that many of us are looking for our freedom by doing whatever we want.  That is the cultural promise of freedom.

“Let it Go” is a popular song because it captures that adolescent search for freedom by shedding the clothes of your culture and family and wearing a miniskirt and bustier with highlights and cleavage to match.  This message is really deeply embedded in our media and our thinking.  “If only I could . . .” lies behind many fantasies and adulteries.  We go looking for the freedom we have already.

The problem is not our ability to choose.  Any of us could choose at any moment to go out and do just about anything these days, at least in America.  We are basically free.  The problem is not our number of choices.  The problem is our frustration with the choices we have made.  The problem is our frustration the outcomes our choices have given us, because one choice inevitably leads to another until we are forty looking at a life we feel like we didn’t choose.

On the other hand, the masochist goes deeply down into that powerless place and accepts it.  In that acceptance they find freedom.  Humiliation and pain are often a central part of the experience.  It is hard to not read that and hear Paul and the Acts of the Apostles in the background, the celebrations of sufferings and beatings.  So what is the difference?

There is first of all that when we place ourselves into the hands of God, we are not blindly putting ourselves in bondage to another human, a fallen creature who has both the capacity for love and violence.  We are told repeatedly in the Scriptures that we are safe in God’s hands, that we are loved, held, healed, made whole, safe.

Here it may be helpful to call up the images of the mothering nurturing God that are throughout the Bible.  But even in the male images of the New Testament there is a clear consistency about the nature of God. Jesus depicts God as Abba and then spends a great deal of teaching what that means, loving, merciful, compassionate.  Strong, powerful, even angry, but always in a protective way, endlessly forgiving wrong.  That means relinquishing our images of revenge and punishment.  The New Testament actually spells out that we are to give up our revenge and punishment fantasies.

The image of the bondage relationship is an image of the brokenness of humanity in flesh.  It is a depiction of bad theology, a God who is violent and punishing and a humanity whose job is to learn to submit to violence and control.

The image of the New Testament relationship between God and us is a God who is loving and healing and a humanity whose job is to submit to love and own the responsibilities of freedom and stewardship of the earth and each other, or to put it another way to embrace our full redeemed humanity.

I am deeply saddened by both Fifty Shades of Grey and “Frozen.”  Both portray a deeply flawed search for a controlling masculinity and submissive femininity that destroys the image of God we were created to bear.  We are called to be strong responsible men and women who are in relationships of mutual care, healing, and redemption.  Our freedom is meant to be responsible and allow us to love and heal others, to set them free.

You can’t set someone free with bondage.  Neither personally or nationally does that work.  It is bad theology, bad psychology, and horrible foreign policy.  There are times when we give up our freedom because we commit crimes.  But the longing of the human heart is to be free and responsible.  I do think there is hope in “Frozen” in that the sisters learn to love and rule their inherited kingdom.

I have hope that our culture that worships freedom can learn to love responsibly, but right now we are still singing “Let it Go” right now and trying to bind that which we can’t control.  We still see responsibilities as limiting our freedoms, personally and politically.  We don’t seem to understand the call to be children of God, who are loved and called to love, provided for and called to provide for others, whole and free by a grace that is not our own doing.

That is the bondage here.  We bind ourselves to others in responsibility to love, just as Jesus took up the cross to bear the sins of Jerusalem and the world.  We bind ourselves to our obligations, but in them we find a freedom and wholeness in identity.  It seems vital that this be a choice.  God never forces us, never ties us up, never beats us into submission.  We choose to be adult children of God who love as we are loved.

The image of this I have after looking at the Fifty Shades culture is of Tiny Hands International, a ministry that my wife and I support.  They do work around addressing sex trafficking and have orphanages in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh.  The story of men and women going into brothels and stopping traffickers at the borders to set free these girls and boys, women and men in very real and destructive bondage never fails to awaken my heart to hope and humanity, even as their reality breaks it.  Freedom and responsibility.

Tiny Hands does more than just set them free, but works to provide a life, a home, and a living for these human beings to help them get to the place where they can be fully free and responsible.  These commitments take years sometimes to live out.  I am proud that my wife, really, has kept us committed to one little girl who is not so little anymore for more than seven years.  This young woman is part of my children’s prayer life and our financial life, though we have never met and only seen each other in pictures and letters.

Her life is deeply tied up in ours, and the work of Tiny Hands and that small tie of financial commitment has meant more to my own and my family’s freedom and humanity than I can ever relate.

As a pastor and priest, I am deeply concerned about how our bad theology and search for freedom is destroying our humanity in Christ.  I am concerned as a father about what those desiccated images of masculinity and femininity can mean for my children and for those victims of violence and sexual abuse around the world.  I am concerned how my own choices have bound me and sometimes even set me more fully free.

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Don’t worry, I don’t have Tillich’s drawer full of secrets anywhere! The articles about this subculture have been very open in psychological journals and Time magazine since the Fifty Shades books and now movie have gone mainstream.  There are lots of articles without pictures out there!  But as Uncle George says, “There’s more ways to tell who fell in the drink than falling in there yourself, I think.”