Desert's Child

S**t diocesan and parish communicators think, but don't say

2012-01-17T16:22:00.000-06:00

Not that I personally have EVER thought any of these things . . .

Actually, bishop, just because you have an IT person does not mean you have a communicator on staff. It means you have an IT person on staff.

You don't "do email" or check the web site because it takes too much of your time, so you want me to stop what I'm doing to give you all the updates on what's going on in the parish/diocese? Seriously?

For the 500th time to a reporter "No, it's not the Episcopalian Church, It's the Episcopal Church. And people who go there are Episcopalians, not Episcopals."

Yes, all that information was in the most recent E-Newsletter, to which you subscribe, and no, I don't have time to read it to you.

Seriously. How long can it take the bishop/rector/senior warden to write a 300-word piece for the newsletter?

No, I didn't post the information about your organization's yard sale because you didn't send it to me. I am good, but reading minds is something I haven't yet mastered.

Yes, I DO want to know who was elected to the vestry at the annual parish meeting. That's why I sent you an email that said, "Please send me the names of those elected to the vestry at the annual parish meeting."

Yes, I know your son is not included in the video of the youth activities at convention.That's because he wasn't there. Yes, I'm sure of that. And no, I don't have any idea why he would tell you he was there if he really wasn't. (But I can guess.)

No, I wasn't at your parish's recent men's chili cook off because I was with the bishop at his visitation to St. Swithin's. I'm sorry but I have not yet mastered bilocation.

Yes, I did see the story on the web site about the bishop's recent trip to your parish. I wrote it.

Where do you find the bishop's schedule on the web site? Click on the tab that says "bishop's schedule."

Yes, I saw the front page story in the newspaper about the Presbyterians who went on a mission trip to Haiti and got trapped in a landslide and had to dig themselves out with spoons, and while I love our parish's ministry to the food bank, no, I cannot make the newspaper do a similar story about it.

No, you are not required to give me your email address, but if you want me to sign you up for emailed news updates from the diocese, it would be very helpful.

Yes, I will be glad to create all that delightful new content for the web site as soon as I dig myself out from under the last pile of work you put on my desk.

Where on the web site do you find the report on diocesan convention? Click on the tab that says "Report on diocesan convention."

Tell me you are not seriously suggesting we buy an ad in the Yellow Pages.

Yes, I really do believe that if our church can't be Googled, we don't exist.

Yes, you do need to update your parish web site. It's January. Most people aren't looking for the Vacation Bible School schedule right now.

Yes, I see you have a smart phone. I'm still not going to give you administrative rights to the diocesan Facebook page.

No, we will not live Tweet your annual parish meeting.

Yes, if you put titles in front of all the names of clergy, you have to put titles in front of all the names of laypeople. Yes. You do.

Yes, I did change the story you submttted. It's called "editing."
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I know I can count on my sister and brother communicators to add to this.

2012-01-14T15:50:00.000-06:00

So here is another wonderful offering from the Rev. Bruce Coggin, good friend and now interim at Trinity, Fort Worth. Read and enjoy.

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A Sermon Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Fort Worth, Texas

Holy Name 2012

Happy New Year! I’m mighty proud of you for coming to church on New Year’s Day in a yearwhen the calendar has us all about two bubbles off plumb. And I’m also particularly happy to see youthis day, since it’s my first “official” day as . . . well, doorkeeper, Iguess, until Trinity has a new rector, something your Succession Commission isworking hard on.

I’m also particularly happy to see you this morning,because today we’re doing something really rare in terms of our liturgicallife. Today is the Feast of the HolyName, the day Jesus got his name, one week after Christmas, and usually it’skept—if it’s kept at all—at a weekday Mass with the celebrant and the altarguild and the Four Sainted Dames who go to weekday Mass.

But this time Christmas came on Sunday, something thathappens only about every time the dragon flies, so this year instead ofcelebrating Christmas I, we get Holy Name today; and all over the world, liturgicalchurches like ours get the opportunity to pray and think about and respond tothat moment in the Lord’s life. Thelessons are about naming—God blesses and thus marks his people, Jesus gets hisname (almost in a footnote!), and Paul assures us that we are God’s childrenand bear his name. In that light, then,I want us to spend some time this morning pondering Jesus’ holy name, thennames and naming in general, and I want us to think about God’s notions about thenames you and I bear, about the name he’s given us, and what that means in theway we live the rest of this and every new year.

First, there’s the name of Jesus. The story says that Gabriel revealed it toMary at the Annunciation, so God evidently had some notions about the child thevirgin would conceive and bear. He getsit exactly one week after his birth like the law requires, since theevangelists insisted he met every requirement to be messiah. And notice this about the name Jesus: it’s mighty rare in the Bible. Hardly shows up anywhere else. I mean there are Samuels and Nathans andJacobs and Johns and all the rest—but hardly another Jesus anywhere. There’s Jesus ben Sirach in the apocrypha,but you just don’t find many Jesuses in the Bible. The angel also talked of some of God’snotions about the child. Jesus would begreat and bring great good to God’s people, which is a considerable notion initself—and about as much a glimpse of the Father’s mind as we get.

Among us, here in Fort Worth today, the name of Jesus iscertainly . . . well . . . holy. Weknow, we’re taught at our mother’s knees and everywhere else, that Jesus issomething special, a name we don’t use lightly. Or better not. I can tell you,when I was maybe ten, eleven years old and learning to express myself . . .colorfully? . . . I got slapped right away from the table at my GrandmotherCoggin’s house for using it flippantly. She was a Tennessee Methodist and not prepared to put up with a bit ofthat. Of course, in Mexico that didn’twork. I mean there are men—andwomen—named Jesús all over the place. But it comes right home to you north of the border. I live over on the east side of town where alot of people came from Mexico, and one day I was driving down Ayers to thegrocery store and saw a sign in a yard: Housefor sale. Dial 817 dit dot dit dotdit. Ask for Jesus. Well, now! That’ll catch your eye. At leastaround here, though a lot of us profane it, most folks have a very acute notionthat Jesus is a holy name, a name set apart, connected straight with God. Don’t mess with it.

How about our names, my name, your names? We don’t get to choose them, you know, unlesswe do it as adults. Somebody else namesus, and usually the names we get include notions, like God’s notions about hisson. I know my parents named me Brucefor my mother’s first cousin who died horribly. Aunt Ada asked my mother to name her first son Bruce, so I gotthat. And I’m Wayne after my father. It didn’t occur to me for decades that BruceWayne is Batman’s name, for Pete’s sake. My students in Mexico all called me Doctor Batmán! A little gift with my name fifty years in thecoming. But from time to time, I recallthe notions my name includes.

We don’t get to choose our family names either, at leastmen don’t ordinarily, and they carry a load too. Bishop Pope said his mother always cautionedhim to “remember who you are” and by that meant the family’s Good Name. There are times I wish he’d remembered it alittle less! But you get the point. The family name has content. We say, “Oh, that’s just the way thoseLedbetters are!” or “That’s just the Randolph in him.” Names have baggage.

What about naming? If you’ve ever named a child—even a pet—you know what I mean. When I was an undergraduate in Austin—Ididn’t go to this little four-year college across the street; you’ll just haveto forgive me—I had a friend with a girlfriend named Ginna. Ginna. I just loved that name, liked the way it sounded in my head, swore if Iever had a daughter, she’d be Ginna. Asit turned out the mother of my children had a best friend named Virginia, so mydaughter is Virginia for that friend and Kathryn for my mother-in-law—but to meshe’s Ginna. I had notions about herwhen she was tiny, and as often happens, they haven’t exactly turned out. She’s made her own life and has the usualwoes and wonders, but she’s still my Ginna and I love her so much I can hardlystand it, always will. Just say Ginna,and my heart fills up. My other kids’names are just as loaded.

It’s also important that names be right. Sometimes things, even people, get the wrongname. I teach a Faulkner story in whicha family has lived in the same great white plantation house for over a century,and the men heirs are named John and Bayard and John and Bayard from generationto generation until the last Bayard married a dadgummed Yankee carpetbaggergirl whose maiden name was Benbow, and that woman named the heir to the placeBenbow. Benbow! Everybody called him that except the ninetyyear old grande dame who lived in a wheelchair in the library, and she calledhim Johnny. She knew what his name shouldhave been. In that connection I think ofAbram and Sarai getting their names changed to Abraham and Sarah inGenesis. Evidently it wouldn’t do forthem to have Arabic names, so they got retrofitted with proper Hebrew monikers.

Sometimes people reject their names. I teach another story, Flannery O’Connor, inwhich a mother, an optimistic woman named Hopewell, has notions about herdaughter and names her Joy. Well, Joygrows up and goes to college and studies philosophy and learns that life ismeaningless and horrible, so she goes to court and changes her name toHulga. Hulga! The ugliest name she could think of. She knew who she thought she was. It was mighty hard on that mother,though. All her notions right out thewindow.

What about calling names? At times we use names as weapons. There are a good many names I’m familiar with that can get your teethknocked down your throat if you use them wrong. Oh, we have many, many of those in our arsenal. Even my youngest grandson Danny spotsthem. When he’s at some familygathering, and one of the adults uses some vivid language, his eyes pop rightopen: “That’s a ba-a-a-ad word!” Even little children know. Names are not just handles. They’re complex engines of emotion and power.

Well, enough about the way we name. Let’s think about God’s notions about you andyour name, because I think he’s got some. I figure just about everybody in the house was baptized at some point inthe past. Some of us can remember ourbaptisms. I remember mine. I was eight or nine and already had my names. Others were baptized as infants and,depending on where that happened, you got the Fred or the Mary or the George orthe Linda you go by at the very least. If you were baptized Roman Catholic or in some fine High Church parishof ours, you also might have gotten a saint’s name—St. Kentigern or St.Etheldreda or some other worthy—and that saint’s day is your name day. The Freds and Marys are about your parents’notions, the saints’ names about some priest’s notions. Have you forgotten that, along with parentsand ministers, you were ushered through those waters of baptism by none otherthan God? God parented you then just asmuch as any of the others, and God gave you a name too: Jesus. You are born, after all into Christ—let’s call him Jesus—and you bearhis sign and name the rest of your life and forever. Consider that. You’re named Jesus.

Another thing from Mexico. People with the same name—two men named Juan,two women named María—have a word for each other: tocayo, tocaya. That way they avoid having to use their ownnames with each other. Well, every oneof us is tocayo with Jesus, because that’s our name too. Think of it. God has notions about you, and they are a whole lot like the notions hehas about Jesus. God also knew that,unlike Jesus who alone ever fulfilled his heavenly father’s notions entirely,you and I are not up to living into those notions a lot of the time. Children often don’t meet their parents’cherished notions. You know. If you’re anything like me, and I think youare, you drop the ball all the time. Isure do. That’s why God gave us Jesuswhen he renamed us. He knew we’d needhelp.

Consider this about your Jesus name. One of the promises we make—and will repeatright here next Sunday—is to seek and serve Jesus in everyone we meet. That means serving ourselves in a way, and Iknow I find Christ in you and others all the time. Maybe you don’t need my service. Maybe we just need to recognize each otherand strenthen and encourage. But when wesee the needy, rejected, despised, outcast Jesus in others, we had best getcracking to fulfill those Matthew Twenty-Five notions—feed, clothe, comfort,love, all that. And what about peopleseeing Jesus in us? In you? Do your fellow Jesus tocayos recognizeyou as one of the family? Likely theydo. I mean, you’re here. But what about people who have heard of Jesusand don’t like what they hear? Whatabout people who have no notions about Jesus at all? Do they see something in you, your Jesus,that somehow stops them, makes them wonder, “Who is that who seems somehow . .. different, blessed?” Do I, do you, dowe, does Trinity Church remember day in and day out that we who bear the nameof Jesus are the light God’s notions have set for the rest of the world? Do we bear that light? Each of us, all of us?

Well, those are some things to think about the rest ofthe year. You may be a little surprisedto think of yourself as Jesus, but that’s exactly God’s notion about you and meand all God’s chillen. We’re all in thatfamily the way God see us, his notion. Our job this day and every day is to remember who we are, whose name weclaim, whose name saves us, and then to find ourselves, yourself, myself, ineverybody we meet. I mean, God’s notionis that we’re all one blessed family. It’s our destiny to pray and work to make that a living reality.

Happy New Year! Happy Name Day!

Amen.

Herman Cain -- questions not being asked

2011-11-08T15:24:00.002-06:00

Here is this week's question for the Texas Faith blog in the Dallas Morning News. I am a member of the Texas Faith panel. Below the question is my response.
You can read responses from the rest of the panel here.

Question: As you know, Herman Cainfaces allegations that he sexually harassed female employees during his time atthe National Restaurant Association. The Republican fervently denies thecharges, although there are reports that settlements have been made in these cases.Cain’s story about those settlements continues to evolve.

As this story unfolds, Iwould like to hear you talk about the obligation of the women in this episode.It is natural that they would want to avoid a media firestorm. But don’t theyhave a moral obligation to step forward and tell their side of the story, like former NRA employee Sharon Bialek did on Monday?

If nothing happened,shouldn’t they be explicit about that? But if something did happen, shouldn’tthey provide details? After all, Americans are trying to evaluate the campaignof a rising presidential front-runner who says he did no wrong.

My reply:

After hearing theexplicit details of Sharon Bialek's accusation, seems to me the bigger questionhere is: "Do men have a moral obligation to treat women like valued humanbeings made in the image of God instead of as sex objects who exist solely fortheir sexual gratification?" This seems especially pertinent when the maninvolved claims Christian values.

That question neverseems to come up in discussions like this. Instead, the questions focus on thewomen. And they can't win, because the usual media take on women who call outpowerful men on their behavior is a simple one -- women lie.

Nearly all the mediaminimize what women say happen in events like this. Bill Clinton's campaigncalled such accusations "bimbo eruptions," a phrase picked up quicklyin the media. In more than one report in the wake of Bialek's explicitdescription, Cain is being referred to as a "skirt-chaser." What Bialekdescribed is the action of a sexual predator, not a "skirt-chaser."

The collective beliefseems to be that any woman who is sexually harassed must have done SOMETHING tomake the poor innocent guy think she wanted it. Apparently many Americansagree, given Herman Cain's jump in money raised since the allegations surfacedand the dismissive if not outright hostile tone toward the women in letters tothe editor in various newspapers, including the Dallas Morning News.

Our culture, like manyin the world, holds women responsible for the sexual behavior of men. The catchis that men get to determine what constitutes seductive behavior on the part ofwomen. For some men all it seems to take is breathing while female.

It is interesting howthis cultural bias has persisted, because at its heart it is deeply insultingto men. It portrays men as creatures completely helpless to resist anythingthey deem tempting. Not exactly a quality to be desired in a leader, is it? Butthat's not how it's seen, because it's part of the Old Boys Club Code --guys get a pass for making a pass. Hey, it just proves he's a lustyall-American guy. However, Cain is very lucky, becausethis pass is extended to black men only if they are allied withrich and powerful white men.

So here are some otherquestions that have not been asked:

Do men who witnessinappropriate behavior of a supervisor (in this case a CEO) towardemployees have an obligation to speak up when that supervisor runs forpresident of the United States?
Why don't womencandidates of either party seem to have a problem with men making accusationsof improper sexual advances like this? And if one did, how do you think she'dbe treated by the public and the media?
And whyaren’t these questions deemed worth exploring?

Coming Out

2011-10-11T16:19:00.000-05:00

          title="Wordle: Coming Out Day">

This piece of Wordle.net art was created using the paragraph below, which I posted on Facebook today.

Today is National Coming Out Day, so I am comingout as a straight woman who loves and is loved by many gay, lesbian, bisexualand transgendered people. To those who are out, I say I am awed by your courageand sense of hope. To those who aren't out, I say be where you need to be, butknow there are many of us who have your back.

The Simon Chronicles continue

2011-09-20T20:38:00.001-05:00

It's been a while since I've had time to do any blogging. I mean, my life is incredibly busy, given that I have to supervise my Chief of Staff, her assistant, AND the dogs. It's a wonder I manage to work in my 20 hours of sleep every day and still keep my paw on top of things around here.

My Chief of Staff is always taking pictures of me, of course. Who could resist me?

Here I am in my normal handsome self.

Here I am in my spooky version.

Freaks humans out when cats' eyes do that.

Why do you think we do it?

Here are my dogs, keeping watch from inside the house while my Chief of Staff reads the newspaper and drinks her morning coffee.

And here they are, keeping watch on the front deck. Like they could scare anybody. Oh please.

Here I am supervising Ms. Wiggles and Toby.

Sometimes I amaze myself with how patient I am with those human kittens my Chief of Staff adores.

They always seem to want to touch me. Sigh. I AM irresistible.

Catching a quick nap on the floor next to my Chief of Staff's desk. She's "working."

She does not like it when I leap onto the roof. I can't imagine why. It's not like I'm going to fall. I'm a CAT, for heaven's sake.

I DO enjoy teasing her, though.

This is my buddy Mike. He's getting old and can't hear very well, but I still like to hang out with him. He's a border collie, which means he is almost as smart as a cat.

This is one of my favorite places to hang out. I can see what's happening inside the house . . .

and outside in the garden. Have to keep a close eye on the birds and squirrels.

I do work, though. Here I am inspecting the new bench in the Chapel Garden. Looks like my Chief of Staff has created another great place for me to take a nap.

And here I am occupying the exact middle of the couch -- keeps the dogs on the floor.

I like my basket too. It's up high, where little boys and silly dogs can't bother me.

My bowl is here too, so I don't even have to get all the way out of bed to eat. Nice, huh?

Don't tell my Chief of Staff, but my favorite place of all to sleep is at her feet.

I have to inspect the bathtub occasionally.

And take a bath in it. That's what it is for, right?

I figure if people are going to leave water in such convenient places, I am going to drink it.

Sometimes I day dream by the window.

And sometimes I dream on the dogs' beds.

And now that Mike is older, he sleeps almost as much as I do.

I like the big round window -- makes a great place from which to monitor the garden in air-conditioned comfort.

I helped my Chief of Staff clean out a storage area.

There were tubs and interesting boxes EVERYWHERE!

And a mirror big enough to capture my splendid self.

Well enough of all this. It's time for another nap.

Relic

2011-09-13T06:58:00.001-05:00

Early Sunday morning, I met my daughter, son-in-law and two grandsons on the plaza between the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History and the Cowgirl Hall of Fame.

We were there for the opening of the exhibit 9/11 Tribute on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary of that unforgettable day. The Museum of Science and History was chosen to receive the largest artifact in Texas from the World Trade Center -- a full facade panel that once supported the three floors (101 -103) of the North Tower, located two stories above the center of the impact zone.

Prior to the opening of the exhibit, the community gathered to honor those who perished that day as well as those who lived on, carrying that unfathomable loss forward in time with them for the rest of their lives. We remembered men, women and children who died that day simply because they boarded a plane or went to work. We remembered the first responders who ran toward the peril as others were fleeing it.

As we waited for the program to begin, we talked with my grandsons, ages 9 and 7. The oldest had been in his mother's womb on September 11, 2001.

She and I told them how she had called me and Gayland, awakening us in a hotel in Las Vegas where Gayland was attending a conference.

As soon as she heard my voice, she burst into tears. I couldn't understand what she was saying and was terrified that something had happened to the baby or to Michael, her husband. I could not imagine what else could have so devastated her.

She finally was able to gasp out, "They've attacked the World Trade Center. Turn on the TV right now."

I told that to Gayland, and he got up and did so while I asked her, "Are you OK? Is Mike OK?""

"Yes, yes," she said, "Turn on the TV. Call me later."

So I hung up and we watched in horror as the second tower collapsed. It was as if our brains could not process what we were seeing. We reached for each other's hands and just held on to one another as we listened to the news that is so sadly familiar to us all now. We rented a car that day and started for home. I could not rest until I was holding my child in my arms.

As we told the boys this story, we had our arms around them. All over the plaza parents and grandparents were holding onto children and grandchildren, the already precious made even more so by the date's reminder of how fragile life is.

Then we watched the Fort Worth Police's Mounted Patrol Unit arrive and line up. The boys love those horses and always make a point to greet them when we encounter them. To see all of them lined up was a special treat.

After the formal program was over, the large crowd began making its way into the building to see the beam, which is displayed in the museum's atrium until the outdoor memorial is completed. As the line moved slowly and steadily toward the entrance, we walked past the statue of Sacajawea, her face turned to the rising sun, her baby on her back. Gavin thinks her name sounds funny, but he assured me he knows who she is -- "She showed the men the way west."

Just inside the door was the model of what the completed exhibit will look like.

Inside the atrium, the words "Bent, but not broken" are painted on the wall above the beam.

I talked with Van Roman, president of the museum, and he said the reason they displayed it horizontally instead of vertically is that people want to get close to it, touch it, always with reverence. He and his staff, and apparently most of the members of the public viewing it are very much aware that microscopic human remains might still reside on the beam.

Watching people encounter it on Sunday made it clear that this twisted beam has become a sacred relic, transformed by fire and the death of innocents into a holy thing.

Pray for peace.

Speaking of forgiveness on September 11

2011-09-12T19:31:00.002-05:00

Once again I am pleased to host a sermon by my good friend Bruce Coggin. Enjoy.

ASermon

Preachedat Trinity Church, Fort Worth

September11, 2011

The Rev. Bruce Coggin

I’mmighty grateful to Fr. Wright for the opportunity preach to you this morning—orI think I am. I’m away a lot ofthe time, sowing and reaping in other parts of the vineyard, and I’m alwayshappy to be with you just to pray; but it’s special to get to preach to thiscongregation, so I readily accepted his offer.

ThenI had a look at the lessons for today and began to wonder . . . Here we are commemorating the attack on ourcountry that happened ten years ago this day, and the lessons are all about . .. forgiveness. That’s a conundrum, toput it gently. But he asked, and I saidyes, so let’s see how we do.

Youwon’t find a stauncher defender of the separation of church and state, but there’sno way on earth what we’re doing here today is not part of a great nationalcommemoration of a great calamity. Eventhe Star-Telegram had a leader, FW Clergy Looking for Words for 9/11Services. I checked the article tosee if there were some, but no such luck! This is the anniversary of one of those days people mark time with. When I was a baby, it was Pearl Harbor Day,then maybe V-E Day or V-J Day. Wherewere you when . . . ? Then the dayPresident Kennedy was shot, then maybe when Challenger blew up. Now it’s September Eleventh. (I think 9/11 is kinda tacky. We don’t call the Fourth of July 7/4! Anyway.)

Ihope that today, though the eucharist is a joyous thanksgiving—and this will bea joyous one—I hope that you’ll remember that at the very beating heart of ourjoyous gathering is a solemn, aching hurt, brought on by the cowardly attack oninnocent people that happened ten years ago today. I’ve been told that the men flying thoseplanes weren’t cowards. Why, after all,they flew right into those buildings! Yeah, right. Those men went up ina flash. They didn’t have to decide tojump off that collapsing building. Theydidn’t have to watch the fire come after them, choke on the smoke. They were cowards. But, oh, the people who faced it! I hope in your prayers you’ll hold up thesouls of all those who died—although they’re now in Abraham’s bosom and prayingfor us, better off than we are. I hopeyou’ll hold up all those who didn’t die but still lost so much, whose liveswere changed forever on that day, those who lost husbands and wives and mothersand fathers and children and and and. Alot of them aren’t healed yet, may never be. Pray for them. And for the brave,the unimaginably courageous fire fighters and police and medics and nurses andother responders who, God knows how, raced up those stairs straight into themaw of Hell. Pray too for this wholenation, still not healed, many of us still angry and thirsty for revenge. And as the Prayer Book teaches us, pray forour enemies that God may turn their hearts and give them better minds. All that pain is part of our offering today,a solemn lesion at the center to our joyous thanksgiving. Hold that up to God today.

Now. Having said that, I need to preach aboutforgiveness. That’s a big order, so prayfor me too.

Idon’t know if it’s just ironic circumstance or maybe even the work of the HolySpirit that on the day we remember a great sin that all over this countryEpiscopalians and Catholics and Lutherans and Methodists and Presbyterians andDisciples and just lots of others are hearing God’s word aboutforgiveness. The Old Testament lessonfrom Exodus, the Red Sea story, speaks of people freed from the toils of awicked power from whose grip only by an act of God, divine intervention, couldloose. That action is recalled in thefirst words of the thanksgiving over the water at Holy Baptism, the sacramentof forgiveness, the sign that we too are freed from a wicked power by a divineact, by God’s own eternal overcoming mercy. And in the gospel lesson, Jesus doubles down on what he said to St.Peter in the gospel two weeks ago and last week to all the disciples, toyou: what you bind on earth is loosed inHeaven; what you loose on earth is loosed in Heaven. Three Sundays in a row and counting. It’ll come up again. The Word could hardly be more insistent. We need forgiveness on both ends of thestick, giving and receiving. And the twoseem inextricably laced together.

Beyondthat insistence, the very prayer that identifies us as the Lord’s people, theone everybody can say, asks God to forgive us as we forgive others. Give and get; get and give. Consider: the very fact that we mention forgiveness is a confession, an admissionthat there’s something wrong with us, that without a divine action we can neverbe whole, never attain the Kingdom prepared for us from before the foundationswere laid. That’s a sweeping admission.

Thinkof it this way. Take puppies. What is cuter, more fun, sweeter, moreoogledy-googledy wonderful than a puppy! I mean, I’m a cat lover and I love kittens, but they’re hardly even init up aside of puppies! Well,what happens to puppies? They grow upand dig in flower beds and chase cars and do a good many more equallyunattractive things. Next takebabies. Lord, babies rule theworld! Everybody with a drop of heartand soul loves babies, and nothing gets the oohs and aahs goingin a church quicker than baptizing a baby. We baptized my last grandson right back there in that font, and it was yummybeyond description. Well, what happensto babies? They grow up to be just likeyou and me. Fact is, we can’t help it. We need help, and it’s gotta come fromGod.

Forgivenessis a word we often use fairly lightly, like when a favorite dog, say, roots upthat flower bed. The gardener almostalways says, “Oh, but I forgave him. He’s such a good boy!” Andthat’s the end of it. The dog’s moreimportant than the uprooted nasturtiums. The flower bed, by the way, stays dug up until somebody redoes it. Or a good friends visits, and you’re showinghim that beautiful new vase or some other wondrous object you just got, anddadgum! He drops it and it busts. Well, of course, you forgive him, maybe withtight jaws, but you do forgive him. The friendship is more important than the doodad. The vase stays busted nonetheless. Lots of examples offer themselves, but youget the point. We use the word so muchwe’re often in danger of forgetting how serious a matter forgiveness is.

Justas often we’re tempted to think of forgiveness in caricature. I grew up in a bigoted little town about anhour from here, where we didn’t have no dadgum kathlicks! They all lived up north in the county and hadEye-talian names and raised grapes and made wine! We all knew, and said smugly, they could justsin all week long and then go confess to a priest and be good as new! Of course, it was unfair and ignorant, butit’s a risk you run when you reduce forgiveness to merely righting the balance. You been puttin’ too much over here in thebad side, so you gotta put some in the good side for a while to even it allup. Forgiveness is more than a guiltmanagement system.

Andwe’ve got plenty of things masquerading as forgiveness these days, too. Far be it from me to take away from thegenius of the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve step program, but it has spawned awhole litter of twelve step programs I’ve had experience of—and at least oneI’ve been the victim of—that like to “rethink” the past, go back through yourmisfortunes, laying blame for this here and blame for that there, and when youcome out the other end, why, you didn’t do anything bad at all! Not.

Nowthat I’m old enough to have a history, maybe a too colorful one at that, Ithink I’ve learned something about the past. You know I’m an English teacher, and one who’s taught me about the pastis Faulkner. In his Nobel Prize speechhe noted that the dead past is not dead, in fact is not even past, and thewhole corpus of his writing shows how both the sins and the virtues of the OldSouth live right on in the New South. Another thing I think I know about the past, especially the badpast: you can’t make it unhappen. You did it. I did it. We did it. It hurt. It caused damage. It washorrible. We cannot undo it. But we can overcome it. With forgiveness.

Atthis point, I think we have to do a little theology. That word scares some people, but don’t makefor the door. Theology is the attempt—attempt—toarticulate our experience of the mystery of God, and it’s not definition. God cannot be defined, limited. Words can only try to open a way into themystery. They never capture it entirely,though it captures us and our words. So don’t be scared. I don’t knowhow many of you watch Chris Matthews’ TV show Hardball—if you do you’rea Democrat, and I know the house is right down the middle today, but I think weall love the country, we love our home—where they talk about politics,but I like to say to a congregation, “Let’s play Godball!” Let’s try to talk about God.

Seemsto me everything always comes back to the question, What is God up to? What does God want? What does God want me to do? What is God’s will, or as some say, God’splan? If you were here a few Sundays agoat the Adult Forum, you know me on God as planner. It’s not a way I can think about God, andit’s not original with me. In seminaryback in the last millennium, I listened to a conversation between one of thefaculty and a student who’d asked, “But, Dr. Casserley, don’t you think God hasa plan?” Dr. Casserley was a cockney anda lot of fun to mimic, but not today. Hesaid, “I don’t know if God has plans. Ido know that God has loves; and if God has a plan, it’s to incarnate that lovein you and me and through you and me to show that love to the world.” God’s plan, according to Dr. Casserley, isfor us to be a light to others, a sign that God is love, self-sacrificing,forgiving, merciful, overcoming love. That’s a tall enough order, seems to me, all by itself, no need to goany farther; and the working out of that order in our lives is the story of ourjourney with God and to God. The samewith God’s will. God is eternal, notwhimsical, not capricious. His will isalways to love and incarnate that love in us (and who knows where else?), and livingaccording to that will is not such much “bringing in the Kingdom” as it isliving and trying to love and waiting to see the Kingdom revealed inus. At times we live that way,gloriously, joyously, and great wonders are revealed. At others, though, we bind right up, hangingonto hurts and offenses and injustices, even get to likin’ it. In either case, it’s not God holding up thegame; it’s us.

Anotherway to get at it is to remember that God and God’s will are eternal, notephemeral, not reactive. We don’t sitand wait for God to do something; rather we strive to get in synch with God’swill. The phrase whatever you bind,whatever you loose, might lead us to imagine the heavenly scorekeeperswaiting for us to cross the goal line before they change the record. I think that’s backside front. God’s vision of you is eternal; forgivenessis one of God’s root attributes, changeth not. When you bind on earth, your link to God is blocked; when you loose,it’s open again. God isforgiveness; we must practice it. God gives us the model in Jesus who forgave, comforted and consoled,healed, invited, loved. Even thesoldiers who nailed him up, who were really just doing their job and did notask his forgiveness, he forgave. “Theydon’t know what they’re doing.” We oftendon’t know either. We’re either weak ordumb or wicked, or maybe it was just the fatal shake of the potter’s hand. It seems, nevertheless, crystal clear thatnot to forgive and not to accept forgiveness is to block the stairway to Heaven.

Sonow, that’s about enough speculative theology. Now some practical theology. Howdoes forgiveness work then in your life and mine? How do we make it a habit? How do we do it when we do not even wantto? Somebody in this congregation askedme that just today.

I’mgonna tell you a story about me and leave out all the details I can to protectthe guilty, me included. Once a persondid me a great mischief, a great offense, the kind of thing people sometimesget killed over. I got a letter askingfor my forgiveness to which I snarled back, “I’ve forgiven you, but the nextplace I want to see you is in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Which meant I had not forgiven. Time and tide separated us, though we wereaware of each other’s movements to some extent, and after a while I figured Iwas going to get my wish and forget about it. But. Not. Quite. Something was bound in earth that put a kink in my place in Heaven. Curiously enough, the next place we met wasface to face and at a church doodah, in front of other people. My enemy says to me, “I think this must be aGod thing.” What was I to do? Run away? And I learned next that my enemy was dying and that fairly soon, and Iwas who was wanted to do the laying away. I remember thinking, “God, this is over the line!” But somehow that tiny opening was all theHoly Spirit needed, because, by golly, I did it. Teeth gritted, but I did it. And you know what? I can hardly tell you how lifted I felt afterthat, not that I was such a great guy but rather that somehow all that load ofjunk was off my back. Give God theglory.

Nowyou. Some of you here have knownforgiveness from both ends, I don’t doubt, and God bless it to you. Some of you also may be doing some bindingright now, may have had it on your gut a long time, wish you could get rid ofit but then maybe not. Well, believe me,if you’ve got grudges, you’ve gotta get rid of them. Bearing grudges will kill ya quicker than creamgravy! When your spiritual bowels arebound, you’re standing in the need of prayer. A way to start, even if you don’t want to forgive, even if you’re afraidof what you’ll lose if you do, is to pray to want to. Ask God to help you want to. That’s all. That may be, very likely will be, all the Holy Spirit needs, just alittle opening where a little love . . . just a little love . . . canget through. After that, God’s love willeventually flood through, raging and roaring like the Red Sea waters, and healand overcome and make you whole again. Orat least a lot wholer than ya were totin’ around a lot of old, nursedwounds. It can be scary, it may be rightpainful, but, oh, what a relief it is!! You don’t have to wait to be asked. You can get back in line all by yourself, and let God deal with thedetails. Vengeance is mine is justanother way of saying it’s none of our business. And it’s likely not vengeance either, sinceGod brings heavenly good from our worldly bads. Well, I recommend it to you.

Beyondthat then, this day in our prayers—this day when we hold up in a kind ofspluttering indignation a great great sin—in your prayers, pray for thegrace of forgiveness, for our creator God’s overcoming, overpowering,overwhelming love to flood us and through us and out into the world. Yes, even the likes of you and me, we canpray that way. It’s God’s plan, God’swill. And pray that God the Holy Spiritwill go before and behind us to nudge and shove and drag us into the narrowplaces of our souls and there find just enough space to wing through tovictory. Above all pray to the LordJesus, who wept over our warring madness, pray to the sacred heart of hiscompassion, that we may find the courage to follow him and lay our burdens atthe foot of the cross upon which all glorious hangs our only healing. Come, Prince of Peace. Make us whole!

Susan testifies!!! You go, girl!

2011-05-11T20:56:00.000-05:00

My sister in spirit, the Rev. Susan Russell, has written a blog I think needs to be widely disseminated.

It is entitled "Testify" and here's an excerpt:

Whether you call it the road to Zion, to wholeness or to "thy kingdom come" it is unarguably a long and winding one. But it's the road we've been called to to journey -- as individuals and as a community of faith -- as we follow the One who went before us. And last Sunday our friend and former-All Saints colleague Maggie Cunningham was in the pulpit and gave us this great beginning to a wonderful sermon with some fascinating food for thought as we make that journey together:

The [Road to Emmaus] gospel concludes with the two disciples returning to Jerusalem where they find the eleven and others exclaiming excitedly, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” They have no doubt about the veracity of Simon Peter’s report – but it is a different story in the verses immediately preceding our section of the gospel.

There, we are told that “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the other women with them” had gone to the tomb first, found it empty, and heard two men (presumably angels) say to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen.” The response of the eleven to this report was predictable: “These words seemed to them an idle tale and they did not believe them.”

In the first century, the testimony of women was not only inadmissible – it was impossible. The words testimony, testify and testament are etymologically related to the word testicle. In the ancient Near East, a man would grab his testicles when swearing a solemn oath. Lacking the necessary equipment, women were incapable of testifying.

As fascinating and amusing as this information is, it would be more so if that belief system behind it had completely disappeared – but that is a topic for another day.

Read it all here.

Happy Lent

2011-03-16T14:41:00.003-05:00

This is another in the occasional series I post of sermons by my friend, the Rev. Bruce Coggin. Bruce is a retired priest of the diocese who does heroic service taking care of two congregations whose buildings are still in the control of our former bishop, a circumstance which has caused them to be very creative about worship space and ministry. This past Sunday, however, Bruce preached at all four services at Trinity, Fort Worth. Two of his own grown children and their spouses and children were in the congregation, an added joy to the day.

And the photo? That's the absolutely shameless Mexican Plum abloom right now in my garden. Bruce and I were admiring it just yesterday.

---------------------------

A Sermon

preached at Trinity Church, Fort Worth

Lent I, 2011

Happy Lent!

Does that surprise you? Well, I promise you, this is really a happy moment for me, a chance to be back with this family I get to see so rarely, since I'm still back and forth between Wichita Falls and Hillsboro most of the time. So I am particularly grateful to Fr. Wright for inviting me to preach today--and doubly so because it's the first Sunday of Lent, a great Sunday for preachers. And before we're through, I hope you'll have some reason to think of Lent as . . . well . . . a surprisingly enjoyable time.

Of course, it’s a challenge to preach to this house, especially today. I look out and see two of my children and their families, and I can see no fewer than four other priests among you; so the pressure’s pretty considerable. Aside from that, it’s the first Sunday of Lent, and how many first Sunday of Lent sermons have you listened to by now? I mean, you know all about Lent, don’t you? It’s that time of the year when our mother the church asks us to consider—pray about, read about, hear about, do about—all that in our lives which leads us to be less than God created us to be, to fail of our mission to glorify God by serving others and letting the divine light of Christ shine through us. You know what I’m talking about. We call it sin, and depending on our level of psychological sophistication, we can explore that pretty dispassionately—but we all know it’s real. I’m talking about the ways we behave, the things we do that get us off track, that “separate us from God,” the stuff we do out of foolishness or weakness or ignorance or even when we knowingly and willingly cooperate with that which we call evil—another reality we can discuss intellectually but which we all know is real.

So the church is wise to turn our attention to all that, and she offers us a whole batch of traditional tools for doing it: we give something up, take something on, come to church without fail, read the Bible, go to a class, pray the Stations of the Cross, and especially we try to feel really sorry about all the stuff we’ve been doing all the rest of the year we know we shouldn’t. It’s all supposed to be a kind of spiritual calisthenics to pump up our will power to resist the devil and all his pomps, to make us able to resist temptation. And all that’s good, and I commend it to you, and I hope God blesses your every act of spiritual discipline to you this Lent and every Lent. But, y’know? The degree of seriousness with which people take all that, I find, varies. Years ago in a little parish somewhere else in this diocese, I asked the senior warden what he’d given up for Lent, and he came back with, “Oysters.” Mercy. I used to give up cuff links with stones in them. Oh, the agony!

But though I am for all that, the fact is that the religious practices with which we at least ostensibly honor God each Lent can, if we’re not careful, turn into a distraction, a way to avoid taking a hard look at some of the more intractable problems within us that lead us to fail of our mission, to be less than God created us to be, to sin. I mean, look: my experience is that no matter how rigorous a Lent I keep, I’m still putty in the tempter’s hands most of the time. Lifting spiritual weights doesn’t seem to give me great spiritual abs. My suspicion is that there’s a lot more going on in me, in us, than just learning not to go to the picture show on Sundays or stay up late smokin’ cigarettes and playing cards or chasing after wine, wimmin, and song. I mean, look at the Bible lessons today, especially the Old Testament and the gospel lesson. Those are two of the greatest temptation stories ever told, and there’s nothing chintzy about the temptations there, nothing tawdry about getting another bath tub and buying some of those little pills. It’s serious stuff, high dollar temptation with everything at risk.

In the Garden of Eden, you recall, God gave Adam and Eve absolutely everything they needed, a perfect world—daily communion with God, no sickness, no death, all the world at their feet—so naturally they responded with a “Yes but.” And sensing an opportunity, along comes the old slithergadee and sidles up to Eve and gives her a line about the apples (the knowledge of good and evil), how she could whomp up an apple tart with those that would knock her husband’s socks off! (Did ya notice, by the way, he’s her husband? I don’t remember them getting married.) And, of course, she’s a pushover, as is he for the tart. In the textbooks on moral theology, there are whole chapters about the various moral steps between first temptation and the willing entry into the occasion for sin. Not with Eve. Nossiree. She’s right in there—just like most of us, certainly me. Temptation to action, theory to practice, one straight shot. Oh, I know that story’s true, because it’s mine—and if you’re anything like me, and I think you are, it’s yours too.

Not so in the gospel story. This critical moment in the story of Jesus comes right after his baptism. When I was rector of Cleburne some years back, it dawned on me that when we baptized somebody on Sunday morning, I could count on lunch at the Country Club, because that’s where we went straight from the font. Not Jesus. When he was baptized, he headed out into the desert, the metaphorical equivalent of that little room down inside you where nobody but you and God can go, where you can’t lie because you know you’re lying. He goes out to face temptation, the chance to fail of his mission from God, the chance to do less, to be less. And this time the old slithergadee doesn’t even come in disguise. Jesus knows him. And the opportunities he offers Jesus aren’t any thirty-nine cent stuff but rather real possibilities, ways Jesus could have taken to do, to be something other than God created him to do, to be, the incarnation of divinity.

First, the devil suggests a cheap stunt, to do trick religion, sensation religion, show-biz religion. And Jesus could have done that. Lord knows, trick religion works. People eat it up, and it can make you a whole bucket of money, get you a nice place out in the country near Azle and a private plane and a landing strip! What I mean. We know plenty about that today, but Jesus rejected it out of hand. Next we’re up on the temple and talking about jumping off to see if God means what he says, to which Jesus points out the folly of playing gotcha with God. Finally the devil plays his last card, his grossest offer of all: all this gorgeous stuff, the world and all its joys, they are mine, and I will give them to you if you’ll just play on my team! And Jesus says the equivalent of, “Buzz off, Buster, ya bother me!”

Now, do you think it took Jesus all those forty days of fasting to get his will power all reared back and pumped up and flexed to meet the devil’s challenge? Do you think it took a great act of moral fortitude for him to send Satan packing? I don’t. I mean, I don’t think he had to think twice. I think he finessed all the devil’s cunning, not by what we’d call second nature, but by his first nature. I mean, for Pete’s sake, his nature was, is, one with God’s nature, so all the tinsel the devil offered him looked downright tacky, and he recognized it at once. “You’re offering me what? Fuhgeddaboutit!”

Seems to me there’s something a lot bigger going on that Jesus Just Saying No to the tempter. I think he’s checking himself, seeing if he’s still on track, seeing if the various options to doing and being what God created him to do and be can pull him off his mission, off track, out of line. And when he makes himself vulnerable—forty days and nights without food, and I’ll do anything you ask, believe me!—he finds out that the so-called temptations are hardly worth thinking about. I don’t think it was will power at all. I think it was just his sense of himself as God’s servant.

Well, that’s how Jesus handled temptation. But how does it work for you, for me, for us? How do you conceive of temptation in your own case? What do you think is going on? I know that a lot of people—including me when I was growing up—have a notion of God sitting somewhere before a vast screen with a dot, a pip, for each and every one of us, watching to see somehow that we all get “tested,” to run something tempting and (usually) salacious in front of us just to see if we’ll trip up and break a rule. I know people think that way, because they tell me they do. But isn’t it pretty unappealing? Lord, when I was a kid growing up I loved to go spend the summers with my Coggin grandparents in Brownwood. And since we didn’t have no teevee, we sat in the evenings out on the front porch and talked about everything under the sun. My father’s brother, Uncle Shorty, was not particularly pious, but I remember when I said something about things in the Bible that didn’t make a lot of sense, didn’t add up, he cackled, “God just put that in there to fool ya!” Well, don’t know about you, but the notion of God somehow laying land mines for us, little traps for us to fall into along the way, just doesn’t add up for me. Can’t conceive of that. God is either always loving and caring or he’s always whimsical and sneaky, but he’s not both. I think we’ve got to find a better way to think about what we call temptation.

I like to think of temptation as an opportunity to test the system, a signal that there’s something wrong, static in the transmission, something out of alignment that makes the machine rattle and buck and veer in ways that eventually add up to a clear signal that I need to wake up and smell the rubber burning. A wheel out of alignment not only makes the ride rough; it’ll ruin your tire. When I notice my behavior going way out of the ordinary, especially if I like it, I’ve learned to run a test pattern and see what’s going on inside me.

I don’t always do very well. Ordinarily, the tempter has to do little more than wink, and I’m snagged. And I don’t reckon I’ll ever get there, as it were, but I do think I’m learning as time goes on. One sin I’ve had a lot of trouble with all my life is anger. Now, I don’t think anger is really a sin. It’s an emotion, just surges up from our innards any time we’re scared and perceive our sovereign will challenged. Anger’s not a sin, but the ways we react to anger can be profoundly sinful. And for a great deal of my life, I liked it. I mean, ever since I was really little, I liked it. It made me feel powerful (which was a delusion), it made me think I was in control (another delusion), it made me think I was winning against whatever, whomever crossed me (yet another delusion). I lived right into it, worked myself up into a real good dudgeon, got all puffed up. My Grandmother Yeager used to laugh and tell me I looked like a pouter pigeon! Well, after about half a century of that, somehow, God knows how, it dawned on me how really dumb that was and, somewhat later, how really profoundly sinful. It’s not over. I still have a hair trigger anger gun, and there are times I live right on into it, sometimes for days at a time. And finally when I’ve made myself downright sick, I figure out that I’m acting like Hell and creating a lot of Hell for myself and lots of other people. And then, finally, I have learned to stop and check my alignment. I ask myself, “What’s the matter with you? What are you not seeing? What gift is in front of you that you’re missing? What cheap something has got your eye off the ball? Look at the hurt you’re doing yourself and others. What on earth do you think you’re doing? Who on earth do you think you are?” And sometimes I get clarity, not through an act of will but through . . . well, the way I pray. I fail a lot, but over time I think God’s making some progress with me.

I look at temptation and giving in to temptation not so much as a pop quiz from a whimsical schoolmaster divinity but rather as clear evidence that somehow God the Holy Spirit is sending me danger signals, not so I’ll pump my pitiful will up to resist some bad but rather so I’ll get my head and heart back on straight, remember who I am and why I’m here and what God hopes for me, expects from me, promises me, has given me. You see, I believe our salvation, our destiny in God, does not depend on us, is an absolute gift from God. We look at Jesus and through his transfigured face we see God and, like John says, we either turn to it or away from it; and once we’ve turned to it, repented, then the splendor of God shines through Jesus and into us and through us, and God the Holy Spirit, like some kind of tractor beam, just draws us in like a trout on a Minnesota wiggler. When I am tempted and am cooperating with the tempter—a metaphor for fooling with stuff that might be titillating or gratifying or otherwise rewarding for a moment but that in the long run is utterly contrary to my calling to live in and from God’s always loving, always caring, always self-sacrificing nature—when I am in that mode, the Holy Spirit never fails to send those signals, delightful at first perhaps but afterward excruciating. I’ve come to see temptation not so much as a test of my will but of my alignment. My will, shoot, I know all too well about that weak member. But when I recognize temptation, I know the correction has already begun—and I’m grateful for that.

So Happy Lent! This is the season in which we remember poignantly that we have an eternal calling, a divine destiny to which God called us before the foundations of the earth were laid. And we use Lent to call ourselves back to taw, to check our alignment, to remember that we are caught up in the divine love that means to draw us to the light of Christ in Jesus, into the beam of the Holy Spirit’s love that will eventually bring us all into God’s splendor where we’ll spend eternity. Lord, with all that given to us in full measure, what could the devil offer that would be even vaguely “tempting”? I mean, when we’re seeing straight and praying straight, we can look at just about anything that wants to take us off course and say, lightheartedly like Jesus did, “What? That stuff? You’ve got to be kidding! What would I do with that mess when I’ve got God?”

Happy Lent!

Happy face

2011-02-27T13:24:00.001-06:00

If you are having a bad day, just look at this face. Have you ever seen anyone happier over a bunch of flowers?

I plan to refer to this frequently. Thanks to my nephew's husband for pointing this out.

Women or the State?

2011-02-26T10:25:00.006-06:00

Who will control women's reproductive lives? Women themselves, or the State?

Republicans want the government to be in control. Planned Parenthood wants women to be in control.

Here's what Planned Parenthood is doing to help women.

The United States has one of the highest teen birth rates in the Western world, and North Texas has the most repeat births to teens in the United States.

Planned Parenthood of North Texas if the only nonprofit network provider of family planning services in Tarrant County.

Texas has the highest rate of uninsured people in the United States. Approximately one million Texas women have no access to reproductive health services, including Pap smears.

Planned Parenthood of North Texas provides vital preventive healthcare -- birth control, family planning counsel, well=woman exams and more -- for its patients, most of whom have no insurance or not enough.

Children of teen mothers are more likely to be born prematurely and at low birth weight, and twice as likely to suffer abuse and neglect. Texas has the 44th lowest rate of women receiving prenatal care.

Planned Parenthood of North Texas uses medically accurate sexuality information -- providing health information and outreach programs to prevent unintended pregnancies and protect maternal-child health.

About 10,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with cervical cancer annually and 4,000 of those die of the disease, which is the second leading cause of cancer deaths to women worldwide.

Planned Parenthood North Texas performs more life-saving cervical cancer screenings than any Texas healthcare provider.

Abortions comprise only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood-provided services nationwide. Eighty-two percent of their clients receive services to prevent unplanned pregnancies, services that help prevent 621,000 unplanned pregnancies. Other services included Pap smears and breast exams as well as tests to detect sexually transmitted diseases and treatment if needed.

The bottom line?

Planned Parenthood works to give women control over their reproductive decisions. And that's what makes it anathema to Republicans, who want to cut all funding for the organization.

Republicans say abortion is a "forever decision with forever consequences."

Well, so is an unplanned pregnancy -- even more so now that Republicans are cutting health care for children, education for children, food stamps for children, and on and on.

So speak up, women. Your right to control of your own body is at stake here.

While I wasn't looking

2011-02-22T17:51:00.004-06:00

While I was busy at Executive Council, my garden was busy too. When I left home for the meeting, things looked pretty brown and barren around here in the wake of all that cold weather. But while I wasn't looking, Spring's scouts arrived.

The snowdrops were what I spotted first. Their spiky leaves had been frozen to mush by the Arctic weather of a couple of weeks ago. And yet, this week, tiny white and green blossoms reared their teensy lovelinesses above the browned leaves and brought tears to my eyes. Such valiant little beauties deserve applause!

Many of the leaves on the ancient winter honeysuckle were blasted by the frigid weather and left looking as crisped as if they had been singed by a fire. I worried that we had lost all the just-budding blooms. But oh me of little faith. This strong grande dame made use of this last week of warm weather to put out a whole new generation of tiny white blossoms that sent sweetness wafting through the garden like whispers of young love.

And her friend the Japonica was not to be outdone. She is steadily covering herself with red blossoms that will begin opening tomorrow I am sure.

The Lenten Roses laugh at these two laggards. They began blooming just prior to the arrival of the Arctic weather and haven't stopped since.

And now the daffodils are joining the list of blooming gifts -- God's grace notes as we await the turning of the season.

Go God.

Dwight Eisenhower on organized labor

2011-02-21T18:20:00.003-06:00

Telephone Broadcast to the AFL-CIO Merger Meeting in New York City.
December 5, 1955

"You of organized labor and those who have gone before you in the union movement have helped make a unique contribution to the general welfare of the Republic--the development of the American philosophy of labor. This philosophy, if adopted globally, could bring about a world, prosperous, at peace, sharing the fruits of the earth with justice to all men. It would raise to freedom and prosperity hundreds of millions of men and women--and their children--who toil in slavery behind the Curtain.

"One principle of this philosophy is: the ultimate values of mankind are spiritual; these values include liberty, human dignity, opportunity and equal rights and justice.

"Workers want recognition as human beings and as individuals-before everything else. They want a job that gives them a feeling of satisfaction and self-expression. Good wages, respectable working conditions, reasonable hours, protection of status and security; these constitute the necessary foundations on which you build to reach your higher aims.

"Moreover, we cannot be satisfied with welfare in the aggregate; if any group or section of citizens is denied its fair place in the common prosperity, all others among us are thereby

endangered."

Read it all here

More on Wisconsin

2011-02-21T14:03:00.002-06:00

Here's some more information:

Read 12 things you need to know about the uprising in Wisconsin here

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and Paul Krugman here.

For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

Some background: Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away.

In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

--------------------------

And that last point is the most important one -- without unions, there will be no countervailing power against that of corporations and yes, even government.

Yes, some unions need reform, but doing away with them would be much worse than most people can imagine. Remember, unions are the folks who brought you the weekend -- and safer work places -- and child labor laws . . .

And even Walker isn't opposed to all unions -- note that the unions that supported him financially are given exceptions in this bill.

Two quotes

2011-02-19T17:30:00.003-06:00

Here are two quotes that I think sum things up nicely.

My daughter was following the debate in the Texas Lege this week as Republicans try to force Texas women seeking an abortion to have a sonogram and to listen to the heartbeat. She texted me the following comment, which I think is best summation I have ever heard of the Republicans' war on women.

State Senator from San Antonio to Sen. Dan Patrick on the Senate floor this week:

Leticia Van de Putte: "I imagine you have the votes to suspend or you wouldn't be bringing it up. It is our responsibility to protect that child once that child's born too. When we start debating a budget, let's make sure we don't cut 100,000 vaccines. Let's make sure we've got health insurance. We seem to worship what we cannot see, but as soon as that baby's born, oh no, we don't want to be intrusive. Texas is going to shrink government until it fits in a woman's uterus."

-----------------------------------------------------------

And another, on the Republicans' war on the middle class:

Joshua Holland from AlterNet:

"The Right has made great political progress getting Americans to ask the question: "How come that guy’s getting what I don’t have?" It’s the crux of the politics of grievance. Progressives need to get Americans to ask a different question: "What’s keeping me from getting what that guy has?" At least part of the answer is the Right’s decades-long assault on private sector workers’ ability to organize, and the latest battle is being waged in Wisconsin."

Holland is right on target.

Wisconsin had a surplus before the Republican gov cut taxes for businesses. The employees union didn't cause this crisis -- the tax cuts did.

When will middle to lower class Americans get a clue that the Republicans do NOT have our best interests at heart?

Shelter

2011-02-17T06:51:00.003-06:00

Sermon given at the Executive Council meeting in Fort Worth

February 16, 2011

Sirach 34:14-19

Psalm 94:2-15

Romans 14:10-13

Luke 14:15-24

*****************

When I made my first trip to Israel with Gayland soon after we were married, I was immediately struck by two things:

One was how scripture and geography slammed together for me – as we drove “up to Jerusalem” from the Tel Aviv Airport, we came over a rise and saw above us the white stones of Jerusalem shining in the light of an enormous full moon.

It was indeed a shining city on a hill.

The other was how much it all looked like West Texas.

There was the same rugged landscape, the same scrubby brush, the same austere beauty, even, I would swear, the same sheep. As a West Texas girl, it made me feel a new identification with the folks I met in scripture.

So when we read in Sirach:

. . . The eyes of the LORD are upon those who love him; he is their mighty shield and strong support, A shelter from the heat, a shade from the noonday sun, a guard against stumbling, a help against falling . . .

let me tell you, having grown up where it can be 110 in the shade, I know how lovely is a shelter from the heat, a shade from the noonday sun, a guard against stumbling in a rugged desert land, where the heat can kill you and a fall can bring you face to face with a scorpion or an angry rattlesnake.

And as for Romans --

¹³ Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister.

When your nearest neighbor is 60 or more miles away on the next ranch, you aren’t much into judging them or making things harder for them. The big spaces of West Texas and its sparse population have bred into the people there an abiding faith in the vastness of God’s mercy, a deep-seated pragmatism about the nature of humanity, and an innate sense of justice.

Yes, they are for the most part a conservative bunch, but it is the conservatism of those who work the land, not the pinched conservatism of those who worry that there’s not enough to go around – not enough money, not enough food, most of all, not enough of God’s love. That last is the worse, of course, because if you think there are limits to God’s love, you have to work very hard at keeping out all those other people who might get your share.

West Texans learned long ago – they had to survive – that there will be enough for everyone if we share, IF we pool resources, IF we help one another out, IF we respond when others call us for help. Because when we need help, it doesn’t matter if your neighbor is black or brown, or gay, or an illegal worker, or even a Baptist. What matters is that they show up, and help.

And as for turning out for the feast -- you can count on West Texans to not only show up but to bring spit-roasted cabrito, cole slaw, potato salad, tamales, rice and beans, and gallons of iced tea, sweetened and unsweetened.

In Iraan, the tiny town in which I grew up, every mom in town knew that names of every kid in town AND that of their dog. In the summers my brothers and I would run out of the house in the morning – with mom yelling after us – “Did you grow up in a barn? Shut the door!” -- and be gone until we were called in for the evening meal.

We’d ride our bikes, go swimming in the Pecos River – when there was water in it -- play sandlot ball – we’d surge from one end of the little town to another and up to the hills outside of town. Sometimes all us kids might wash up at our house for lunch, or at someone else’s house. Wherever we ended up, the mom of the house would feed us all. Without question, every kid was welcomed, every kid was fed – and the dogs were given water and a treat.

These good women, most of whom were hard shelled Baptists who had more than a faint distrust of the four Sherrod kids’ Catholic faith But they never discriminated when it came to feeding us. We were kids, we were hungry, we were welcome.

These same good women would turn out for dinners at the local community center even when they were sponsored by the Catholics. They knew one might turn down such an invitation only If you were on your death bed. If you didn’t show up more than once, you risked finding yourself left out of other community events. These folks know the value of relationships. Showing up to show support for one another means a LOT in these small towns.

These experiences taught me more about welcoming folks to the feast than almost anything else in my life and have served me well in recent years.

It is very meet and right that these readings should arrive on our calendars as we do our work here in the Diocese of Fort Worth, for they speak to the survival tools we have used through the last few years, especially the last two years when Episcopalians have been split one from the other by decisions made by our former leaders. And believe me, there were days when it looked darker than midnight under a skillet.

Faced with the loss of sisters and brothers and of beloved church homes, we turned to God and to each other.

We have prayed together, played together and shared meals – at THIS table and at many many other shared tables – at pot lucks, and diocesan picnics, at Lenten suppers, at meals in each other’s homes, gardens, barns, and backyards.

These readings speak of the food that has sustained us – the grace, shield and hope of God’s unlimited love, the delight of inviting others to the feast to which we’ve been invited, the challenge of creating a healthy welcoming diocese out of the remnants of a diocese founded in anger and fed on dissatisfaction, dysfunction and disinformation.

Most of all they speak to the job that faces not just us in this diocese, but all of us on this Council – that of reconciliation and renewal.

How do we in this diocese welcome back those who sat in silence while many of us were called terrible names, subjected to public shaming, asked – or told – to leave our church homes because we are “not real Christians?”

Believe me, while our heads may agree with our bishop that we should offer them prodigious welcome, still raw broken hearts aren’t so sure. I suspect that’s the case with some in this room too.

How do all of us reach out to those who reject the invitation to the feast, who indeed claim that the feast is poisoned – not just here in this diocese but in the wider communion?

Well, one thing’s for sure. We can’t do it on our own. As the people of West Texas know so well, we will only do it with God’s help and that of one another.

We will do it by remembering what we heard today – that they who fear the LORD are never alarmed, never afraid; for the LORD is their hope.

We will do it by remembering that we are not to judge our brother or sister^[a]? Or treat them with contempt?

We will do it – as Bishop Katharine said last night – by turning to one another as the beloved.

Most of all we do it by reminding ourselves and them of God’s unlimited love to which all are welcome and of which all are invited to partake.

For Bishop Ohl is right -- we must offer them prodigious welcome, as God has prodigiously welcomed us so often in our own lives.

Amen.

Sermon given at the Executive Council meeting in Fort Worth, February 16, 2011

It gets better

2010-10-15T13:18:00.002-05:00

Today, I am very proud of my church, The Episcopal Church, and of my city, Fort Worth because leaders in the church and in my city have spoken out to tell hurting young people that "It Gets Better."

In the face of recent suicides, it is more important than ever that the voices of church leaders be heard to counter those who would use the Bible as a weapon against young fragile people. And it is important for secular leaders to speak up as well,

So I give thanks to Bishop Gene Robinson, to the bishops of the Diocese of Los Angeles, and to the Rev. Susan Russell, just a few of those in The Episcopal Church who have spoken out. And I give thanks for City Councilman Joel Burns, an old friend, who made himself emotionally and politically vulnerable in order to reach out to suffering young people.

Pray for
Tyler Clementi, 18-year-old Rutgers University student
Asher Brown, 13, of Houston, Texas
Seth Walsh, 13, of Tehachapi, California
Billy Lucas, 15, of Greensburg, Indiana
Raymond Chase, 19, of Providence, Rhode Island
Caleb Nolt, 14, of Ft. Wayne, Indiana
Justin Aaberg, 15, of Anoka, Minnesota.

And watch the videos below. I believe this is what God calls all of us to do.

Bishop Gene Robinson

The Rev. Susan Russell

The Bishops of Los Angeles

City Councilman Joel Burns

Go. Read. Pray.

2010-10-11T17:36:00.001-05:00

Please go read what the Rev. Michael Hopkins said in his sermon on Sunday.

It is at this link.

http://fromgloryintoglory.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-let-samaritan-lepers-in.html

Go. Read. Pray.

Missing part of one wing

2010-10-09T17:04:00.015-05:00

I miss Mom every day, but I miss her most on Sundays.

Sundays were when I had more time to spend with her, to have a leisurely lunch after church, and maybe take a drive through the prettiest neighborhoods of the city, or out in the countryside.

Mom loved riding in the car. She talked with me more, engaged with me more, when we were in the car together. I think this was a legacy of the necessarily long car drives she and my dad made on a regular basis out in West Texas. Iraan, the tiny town in which we lived, was -- as everyone joked -- 300 miles from EVERYWHERE.

Highway near Iraan

It took nearly a two-day drive just to get out of the state of Texas. So my busy parents found this time in the car as precious space in which they could talk, undisturbed except by the necessity to admonish the four of us squirreling around in the back seat to quiet down or -- ultimate threat -- "I will have to stop this car!"

On our drives, Mom would comment on the clouds -- Texas has fantastic cloudscapes -- or on the flowers in someone's yard. She loved hearing about my garden, so every Saturday, I would walk the garden making mental notes of things to tell her about at our Sunday lunch. She especially loved hearing about the plants that I had moved from her garden. If she were still here, tomorrow I'd be telling her about the pink plumeria that finally bloomed after three years and showing her the photos I took with my phone.

The only thing she loved hearing about more than the garden was news about Daniella, or about her great-grandsons, Curran and Gavin. As she did with all her great-grandchildren, she thought they were perfect and among the most intelligent beings on the planet.

On our drives she would talk to me about things she had read, or been thinking about. These were precious times to me, because as she got more frail, she got quieter, less inclined than ever to join into the boisterous conversation that characterizes our family gatherings. She was never one to talk a lot, so when she did, we all listened, because it was always a pithy, cogent observation. She didn't miss a thing.

It was on these car drives that she began to talk to me about how ready she was to die. Not that she didn't love us, but she was just tired -- and lonely. She missed my dad so much.

She told me she had had long conversations with God on the subject of her death. She told God how ready she was, how she was sure we would be OK if she left us for awhile.

I would listen and assure her that, yes, we would be OK, that she knew we would miss her terribly but we would be OK.

I lied.

It's not OK.

Mom, I saw this butterfly in the garden the other day.

It was still functioning, still flying from flower to flower, but it is missing part of one wing.

That's how I feel. I'm missing part of one wing.

Sweet Gospel

2010-09-08T10:45:00.001-05:00

Another in my continuing series of sermons by my friend, Bruce Coggin. A good sermon on some hard lessons. Enjoy.
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A Sermon
Preached at All Saint’s Church, Wichita Falls
Pentecost 15, 2010

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life, he cannot be a disciple of mine.

I don’t know about you, but I am so glad the weather has moderated. Mercy, you wake up on a morning like this one, and you think, “How lovely it would be today to join a throng of worshipers in a great nave, God’s lovely light streaming through jeweled windows, a great choir’s supernal anthems echoing in the vault, all that. Well, it’s just gonna be us, of course, in this little room with no windows at all, so we won’t fantasize. But at least, you say, let’s hope there’s something wonderful from the Bible for us to ponder. Yeah? And then you get Jesus telling us to hate Mama and Daddy and Bubba and Missy and the missus and the kids and even ourselves. Lord. Where’s the sweet gospel in that? But you can at least be thankful you’re not the preacher! I think I’ve told you that I go every week to a little gathering I call the Monday Morning Quarterback Club where a handful of clergy sit down and talk about the lessons we’ve got to preach on the next Sunday, and I’ve become a bit of a bore because I always insist on finding what I call the sweet gospel—and that’s not some saccharine something to cross-stitch on a cup towel. I just think that since God is sweet, the gospel must by nature be sweet, else it’s somehow skewed gospel. And I think there’s sweet gospel here, but it’s gonna take some work. So sit up. We gonna play godball.

In the Old Testament lesson we’ve got Moses laying down the law—and not the first time. He laid down the short form at Mt. Sinai back in Exodus, but some centuries later he reappears in Deuteronomy and lays down just a whole bunch more law, five or six hundred more just in case you didn’t get enough on the first go around. Mercy! I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like getting the law laid down to me; I don’t even like laying down the law myself—not that I get to much anymore, but I used to lay it down to my kids, for all the good it did me. I knew it put up all kinds of tripwires where their will and mine were bound to cross, but I did it anyway. All parents do. And it’s not a bad thing. I mean, a lot of laws work pretty well. In this country, people still pretty much obey the traffic laws, and the laws still pretty much work—although some of the cowboys and cowgirls up in this neck of the woods keep a feller on point. Rules are not a bad thing, necessarily. They’re meant to enforce and habituate good behavior aimed at securing the common good. The same rules don’t always apply to everybody everywhere. The ten years I lived in Mexico, I learned to change gears more ways than one when I crossed the border. Over here, you drive by the rules; over there, you drive by the rules, and you’ll get killed. They work it out a different way—but the surprising thing to me always was that they don’t have any more wrecks than we do, maybe fewer in fact. Here’s the point: the very fact that we have laws indicates that we need laws. Something about us does not work for the common good by natural reflex. Natural reflex says Me first! The common good says Maybe you first, maybe him, let’s see. The fact that we need rules indicates something about us and our place in the Great Order of Things—and religious rules tell us something about our place in God’s order. The only one of the Ten Commandments that’s anything unusual is the first one; all the rest are pretty ordinary stuff. What decent society doesn’t think it’s wrong to lie and steal and murder and mess around with somebody else’s wife or husband? The only one that’s really unique is love God with all your heart, soul, and mind—to which Jesus added, and your neighbor as yourself. Now, that one, that has legs, as the teevee reporters say of a story. It’s gonna come up again here in a minute.

Now that gospel. Jesus kicks it right off telling us that unless we hate our parents, our mates and our get, our siblings, and even ourselves, we can’t be his disciples. Gotta tote that cross. Then a couple of tiny parables about people who weren’t up to this or that job. Great way to start the day! Well, right off the bat that word hate just rings false in the mouth of the man whose every other word was love, whose two Big Orders were both to love, to love God and love each other. Something must be wrong here. Hate? When I was in the kid raising business, we raised ours not to use the word. When they’d say, “I just hate so-and-so,” we’d come back with, “Hate is a very strong word. Say, it displeases me a lot or I wish it were another way or something else. Hate is a strong word.” And they listened. Either that or they didn’t say it in front of us. In any case, hate in Jesus’ mouth stops me cold in my tracks, as do all the instances in the gospels when Jesus is credited with saying something so inimical to the voice of the Good Shepherd I’ve learned to listen for. And there are a good many.

Well, whaddaya do when you hit a stump like that? It’s not fair just to skip over it; and any word from Jesus, no matter how opaque, is precious. So I use a couple of tools to help me out of the ditch. The first, let’s call problems of transmission. Keep in mind that the earliest of the gospels—and that’s not Luke—first got onto paper at least twenty years or so after Jesus’ death and resurrection, and it was second hand. Luke comes along ten, twenty years later, and he adds a bunch of stuff that may have been taken down nearer the fact—but all the gospellers arrange stuff one way and then another. Who ya gonna believe? If I told you something fairly complex right now and then you told her and she told him and he told her after supper and then she called me, I’d have to and say, “Now, no, that’s not exactly what I said.” Y’know? I figure what Jesus said in today’s gospel has been problematized in passage, so I’ve got to allow for some latitude in the written words’ precise meaning.

Second, I try to contextualize the pericope, ahem. A pericope is a chunk of scripture, and at church we get a chunk this Sunday and another chunk the next Sunday and another chunk the next. We have to connect the chunks. If you’ve been good and have been in church the past few Sundays, you know that Luke is presenting a long teaching by Jesus on getting ourselves in the right order relative to God, the world, and our neighbor. We spent a couple, three Sundays on storing up treasures in heaven instead of on earth, all about false gods. Last Sunday we learned about not me-firsting our way through life. Go and take the lowest seat, and then if the master of the feast and so on. For today we skipped a pericope, ahem, that tells of a man who gave a banquet and invited his buds—and all of them said, “Oh, I’ve got to do this or that. I’ve got to go check out my new car. They need me at home. I have something to do that’s more important than your tacky old banquet. I, me, my.” So the host says, “Okay, cheat yourself!” and invites people whose egos don’t get in the way of their blessedness. And now, today: hate yer momma! What do you guess is going on? I think we’re hearing a very refined version of getting right with God, figuring out our place in God’s order and ordering our behavior to suit it. Can we go on from there?

I think figuring it out is at least part guess, so I look for a clue. Look at the scene Jesus chooses to make the point: the family. Where else are things any more intense? Where else do loyalties get across each other harder and faster and longer and fiercer? Families are where everything we say we believe and believe in eventually gets put to the test. Jesus, let me hazard, instead of telling us to hate each other—transmission—is saying that our promise to love God and each other will at times even bring us into sharp conflict with our families, our dearest and best. Yet we must always choose God’s love first among all the options—and that prioritizing doesn’t have to be ugly, just absolute. God before anybody, before Mama or Daddy or Bubba or Missy—or even (gasp) me. “His own life.” I think when Jesus says that, he means the day will come when every one of us will have to go down into that little room inside us where nobody else can go and have a meeting with himself and say, “It’s not me first. It’s God first, and then somebody else, and me last. Dang it.” And I think that’s more than just being meek and mild. I think it reflects the nature of God’s love. God’s love wants to be loved back—but only after it has been shared by its objects. That is, God’s love radiates from itself to me and from me to another and then back to God. If I am right with God, then I let that love flow through me to somebody else and then back to God—and maybe even wash a little back up on me from my neighbor. Isn’t that the way love works? I mean, I can love a Rachmaninoff symphony and sit by myself and love it; but give me a choice between spending the evening with Rachmaninoff and with somebody I love and who loves me, and there’s no contest. Love, especially God’s love, requires sharing among God and you and me. Me last. And it always has to be that way; otherwise we ain’t right with God, we cannot be Jesus’ disciples.

Jesus says we must bear the cross. Which cross? I know for sure that the heaviest cross I have to bear is me, myself, and I; and that cross forms every time my will goes against God’s will—which it does every now and then. If you’re anything like me, and I think you are, you know what I mean. I mean, none of us has had to suffer much for the gospel, not in any material way anyhow. There are places in the world where confessing faith in Jesus will get you shot. If I lived there, I think maybe I could justify keeping my mouth shut—unless, of course, I saw somebody else being mauled. Who said it about the Nazis? Niemöller, I think. “First they came for the Jews, but since I wasn’t a Jew I said nothing. Then they came for the communists and the socialists and the homosexuals, and I said nothing. Then they came for me, and there was nobody left to help me.” I hope I’d have the guts to speak up. Can’t say, haven’t been whipped into it. But since we don’t get tested that way, by rule, can circumstances require us to suffer by putting ourselves last? I know personally of a woman who starved herself during the Depression so her children could eat. Would I do that? I hope so. Or less dramatically, will I give up something I want to buy a mosquito net for somebody I’ll never see? Whatever’s the case, I don’t think Jesus meant for us to hate anybody but rather that we must let nobody and no thing come between us and God’s love.

Does that leave you a little dissasfied? Well, me too, so let’s move on to Philemon and see if we can improve the situation. Philemon’s a surprising little book. Not a word of doctrine or theology or teaching, no argument, no threat . . . well, maybe a very subtle threat, an implied urgency. Paul, an old man and way experienced, is in jail, and he writes to his friend Philemon. “Guess what? Remember that slave—that slave—you used to own—own. Well, they picked him up here, and he’s been in jail with me. And guess what? He’s been baptized and is our Christian brother now. Your Christian brother.”

(Time out for a story. This reminds me of Bishop Saucedo. He was bishop of the Mexican church for thirty, forty years. When he was consecrated, there were about six thousand Episcopalians in one diocese, most of them rich ex-pats; when he retired there were about sixty thousand in five dioceses, most of them dirt poor Mexicans. Since in those days, the bishop owned all the church’s property—Mexican law, don’t ask me—a priest in Acapulco sued him over something, and the police picked him up and put him in the slam. He spent over a year there. Bishop Davies helped get him out. And by the time he got out, he’d converted half the prison—baptized, confirmed them by the dozens, though I don’t think he married anybody. Weren’t doing that in those days.)

Anyhow, that’s what happened with Paul. Onesimus was no longer Slave Onesimus but rather Christian Brother Onesimus. And Paul puts the question to Philemon with tons of manipulation. “Philemon, you are the man! Your Christian witness awes me. It awes everybody. You are a light to lighten the Gentiles, dude! Now show me what you can really do. Put all of it behind you. Forgive it. You don’t even have to admit what a sin it was to think you owned another human. Just . . . gut up and take Onesimus back as your Christian brother. Not because you have to, but because you want to.” Funny thing about the lectionary today, they left off the last two, three verses. In them Paul adds, “And get my room ready, because I’m getting outta here too, and I’m coming straight to you!” He does not add, “to see if you’re up to the job I just laid on you.”
In this story, we see a man, Philemon, who has to confront himself and make a decision in Christ. He had the legal right to own Onesimus. Challenged, he would have defended that right with everything his upbringing—his family—and his circumstances—his culture—taught him, told him was meet, right, and so to do. He had to deal with his anger, his sense of outrage at the slave’s escape, cheating him of what was rightfully his. He owned Onesimus, dadgummit! And the ungrateful little creep ran off, no doubt leaving Philemon in various kinds of fixes. Philemon likely had hoped the cops would snag him and string him up, the sorry wretch! And now this. Paul asks him to shoulder the cross of his own wrongheadedness and wrongheartedness and tote it up the hill and nail himself to it. For Christ. For the sake of his baptism. For the salvation of his immortal soul. I can’t help thinking that Paul’s letter rattled him to the core. I wish I knew how it all turned out!

I don’t think Jesus wants us to hate. I don’t think hate is part of the nature of God, so that just about rules it out for Jesus in my book. When Jesus was . . . vexed . . . he spoke, acted pretty abruptly. Ask the moneychangers. But hate? I can’t imagine it. Nor can I imagine Jesus asking you or me to hate. I can, however, sure hear him saying, “It’s all or nothing at all, friend. Make up your mind. I’ll be right here when you do.” Sweet gospel? Yeah, I think so. Hard but sweet. He just leaves it up to us: either we put God first all the time, even when it hurts like the dickens, or we do not. So, which is it gonna be? For me, I’m the only who can answer that, and I don’t always get it right. When I know I’ve gotten in wrong, I have promised dozens of times to “repent and return to the Lord.” And when I do, he’s always right there. I can’t find any hate in that. Just sweet Jesus and sweet gospel.

Grace & Gumption: The Cookbook

2010-08-30T17:50:00.005-05:00

Here it is. Grace & Gumption: The Cookbook.

It is a follow up to Grace & Gumption, Stories of Fort Worth Women, our history of women in Fort Worth.

That I have edited and contributed to a cookbook will amaze and astonish some people, particularly my family and friends. Certainly anyone who knows me can tell you I am a much better story teller than I am a cook! My husband is the one who earns stars in that category. Luckily, Judy Alter -- who is a fabulous and fearless cook -- agreed to be the food editor, because I have no business editing recipes.

All the contributors to the original G&G had more stories to tell about fabulous Fort Worth women, so we had been tossing about a lot of ideas about how to do that. And we did this tossing of ideas mostly over food, because we are a group who likes to eat.

Judy is the one who came up with the idea for a cookbook. I admit I was a bit dubious at first, but I have enough faith in Judy's judgment that I was willing to try it. And soon it became clear that working on a cookbook gave us a fun way to look at the more intimate homey parts of women's lives.

A couple of contributors who worked on the first G&G couldn't work on this book, so we had the added pleasure of having Brenda Sanders-Wise and Joy Donovan join our ranks. It has been fun to get to know both of them better.

And guess what? Grace & Gumption: The Cookbook is listed as one of 8 Hot New Releases in the West Regional Cookbooks by Amazon.com. It's also available from PBS store online under the same category. Of course, the Library of Congress will have it, and the Austin Public Library has ordered it. Some book dealers have it under cookbook and biography.

Here's what the TCU Press said about it:

TCU Press publishes Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook

TCU Press announces the release of Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook, the follow-up book to Grace and Gumption: Stories of Fort Worth Women. The book’s fourteen talented and engaging authors have once again mined the personal papers of women in Fort Worth to create a fresh look at life in Cowtown, says Rebecca Sharpless of Texas Christian University. Readers will gain glimpses of pantries, kitchens, and dining rooms of the past and learn about the women who presided over them.

Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook combines the history of Fort Worth and the city’s brilliant, innovative women with their recipes. For some of the women cooking was a joy, for others it was just one more chore to complete so they could get on to more interesting things, which means that some of the women didn’t leave cooking trails. The contributors have been inventive in finding “related” recipes—some of them wonderful, some so complex you may not want to try. Some attempt was made to standardize the recipes but it was not possible in all cases—they would have lost their charm, says editor and one of the authors Katie Sherrod.

In Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook, we learn a great deal about what the people of Fort Worth have eaten over the past century and a half, and so we discern much about what the people have been about. The cookbook takes a new approach to American culinary studies, recording the lives of Fort Worth Women as well as discussing the food that they prepared and ate. Sharpless says, in her forward to the book, that while many American women, particularly Anglos, remained within their homes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Grace and Gumption tells us about women who set aside those boundaries and spent their energies in works charitable and for profit. These women taught about food, and they cooked to create businesses of their very own, some of which, like Pulido's Restaurant and Mrs. Baird's Bread, endure.

Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook is a book to cook from and to read for pleasure, although there are some recipes that Sherrod recommends readers not try at home. This book provides a window into the lives of Fort Worth women that will engage readers and explore an even more intimate aspect of the lives of these outstanding women.
The contents include:
“Cooking on the Frontier,” by Joyce M. Williams
“Cooking at Our Lady of Victory,” by Brenda Taylor Matthews
“The Modern Woman,” by Ruth Karbach
“Ranch Women, Cowgirls, and Wildcatters,” by Judy Alter
“Pig in a Pit, Stagecoach Kisses and Eating Heaven: Food and Philanthropy in Fort Worth,” by Ruth McAdams
“Serving the Children,” by Sherrie S. McLeRoy
“Cooking in the Barrio,” by Sandra Guerra-Cline
“Let My People Eat,” by Hollace Ava Weiner
“Colorful Palettes Make Colorful Palates,” by Joy Donovan
“Stirred In with Lots of Love, a Little Drama, and Duncan Hines™” by Jan Jones
“Regal Women in the Garden of Eden,” by Brenda Sanders-Wise
“Braving the Smoke—in the Back Room and in the Kitchen,” by Cindy C. Smolovik
“Cooking for a Living—Lucille Bishop Smith,” by Carol Roark
“Balancing Facts and Food in the Newsroom,” by Katie Sherrod

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And here's what a reviewer for the local magazine 360 West said:

Book for Cooks

TCU Press had a nice little hit a couple of years ago with its book Grace & Gumption, Stories of Fort Worth Women. Here's a smart idea for a follow-up, Grace & Gumption: The Cookbook. Editor Katie Sherrod and food editor Judy Alter have compiled essays from 14 local authors about women and food cultures throughout Fort Worth history. The story goes way back: You'll read about pioneers making coffee out of acorns when Cowtown was still more fort than city, and the first recipe here is for squirrel, dipped in buttermilk and cornmeal, then fried -- not every recipe is destined for your kitchen.

Indeed, the book is as much academic-style history as recipe book, although most recipes are appealing. There are excellent ones from contemporary cooks like Jon Bonnell (whose mother and grandmother, philanthropist Mary D. Walsh, were prominent local women with grace and gumption), but the older stuff is arguably more fun, and no slice of life was forgotten, from Thistle Hill to the barrio: There are recipes here for schmaltz and matso balls from Jewish women's Passover tables, tortilla soup from the Lancarte family of Joe T. Garcia's fame, as well as Edna Gladney's own "reducing mixture," a diet drink that combines grapefruit and lemon juices, cream of Tartar and several spoonfuls of Epsom salts ("do not try this at home," we're told). But you'll see why Gladney needed that if you make her family's recipes for Uncooked Fudge or German Hot Potato Salad. Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook will be released in late May: paperback, $19.95; http://www.prs.tcu.edu/ -- Marilyn Bailey.

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And here's a note from Ruth Karbach, one of the contributors:

"Just for fun, I looked up the original Grace & Gumption on WorldCat and am thrilled to see it at Harvard University (two libraries there), the Bibliotheque de l'Universite Loval in Quebec and The British Library in London. We can celebrate that Grace&Gumption is in 109 libraries in New England, the Mid-West, the South, the Southwest and the West. "

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So enjoy the reading and the eating -- we certainly have.

Redheads RULE!

2010-08-24T20:13:00.008-05:00

Here's a story from ESPAN. Note the part about two young redheads -- emphasis added below.

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FORT WORTH, Texas -- Andy Dalton has nowhere to hide on the TCU campus, what with his red hair being a dead giveaway.

But Dalton is not the type of guy who would hide, anyway. Not when there are basketball games to watch and road trips to take. Not when there are kids who need some help, or a dog that needs a simple drink of water.

To put it simply, the 6-foot-3 senior quarterback is a TCU everyman.

He sits in the stands at volleyball games, jockeying for T-shirts like everyone else. He piled into a car with teammates and made the drive to the College World Series this past summer to watch TCU as it helped close down Rosenblatt Stadium.

"I'm a college student. That's what's fun," he says.

He counseled two young boys with red hair who were getting teased at school because only a star quarterback could convince them that red hair is, you know, cool. He still gets ribbed for a story that keeps growing in legend, when he helped a dog drink some water after it passed out on a run with its owner.

What you see on the field is what you see off the field.

Read it all here.

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Well, here are the two young red-haired boys referred to in the story:

They happen to be my grandsons, Gavin Judge, 6, and Curran Judge, 8. And they do indeed have gorgeous red hair, as do their mommy and daddy. Needless to say, I am an Andy Dalton fan.

The Simon Chronicles troisième partie

2010-08-24T11:54:00.020-05:00

It has been over 100 degrees outside for more than three weeks.

This is not comfortable for a person who is covered in fur, even gorgeous silken fur like mine. I know one must suffer for beauty, but there ARE limits.

So I have devoted much of my time in the last few weeks to monitoring and inspiring my Chief of Staff as she works at her computer.

Sometimes I am joined by Ms. Wiggles in this strenuous work.

But most often I am left to tend to this task by myself. As you can see, it is quite exhausting.

But my Chief of Staff insists on going outside to water the garden, which she has to do every day while it is this hot, so of course, I accompany her. By now I know all the coolest spots upon which to recline while I supervise her work. Occasionally she "accidentally" sprays me with the water hose. She thinks this is funny.

I am NOT amused by such juvenile water play.

But, sterling cat that I am, I do not abandon her to work alone. Unlike the dogs, who venture out into the heat only when forced outside to take care of bodily needs, I guard and protect her.

One never knows when a predatory squirrel will attack.

Although it's been so hot even the squirrels aren't moving much.

This one sprawled out on the brick walk that had been cooled off by the sprinkler. Brazen hussy.

The only things that moved at all in the garden -- besides my Chief of Staff -- are the butterflies, the dragonflies and the lizards.

My Chief of Staff really likes these big blue, gold, and black butterflies.

This bright orange butterfly likes the pink pentas. Ugh. Clashing colors. Butterflies have no taste.

This teensy butterfly likes the impatiens.

This little green guy hangs out on the pot of pentas near the front gate. He's a quick little thing. I've tried to play with him several times, but zip! Off he goes. Spoilsport.

This bright red dragonfly likes to pretend he's a flower.

This blue dragonfly hangs out around the greenhouse, I suppose because the blue paint on the window matches its blue body. Who knew dragonflies like to be color coordinated with their surroundings? I thought only cats did that.

It is so hot that this dragonfly didn't even move when my Chief of Staff took this closeup with her phone. Obviously bugs do not have the finely honed instincts of cats. But then, who does?

Eventually I am able to persuade my Chief of Staff to come inside where it's cool. This takes some nagging but I eventually herd her to the door.

Then, as soon as she opens the door and stands there waiting for me, I, of course, being a cat, take my own sweet time about walking through the door. This always seems to irritate her, for some reason.

Sometimes she says rude things to me, like "Simon, get your catly butt into this house right this minute!" Really!

But eventually we are both inside, and I can relax and catch up on my sleep. Sigh. It is SO exhausting trying to teach my human how to behave.

Thank God it's supposed to cool down tomorrow -- the highs will be only in the mid-90s.

Texas deserves better

2010-08-17T12:22:00.003-05:00

I grew up in West Texas, where a pragmatic conservatism born of a closeness to the land and a deep faith born of daily encounters with the majesty of Creation shaped folks into decent kind people.

Their conservatism made them slow to change, but their pragmatism made them willing to change. Their faith and innate kindness made them compassionate and merciful even to people with whom they had deep disagreements or about whom they had doubts.

After all, when your closest neighbor is 60 miles away on the next ranch it makes no sense to be prissy about their politics, religion or choice of partners. They may be the only folks around when you need help.

But in recent years far too many Texans have been lured into the narrow-minded, xenophobic mean-spirited conservatism being peddled by the Republican Party. And among other bad side effects is a serious outbreak of sheer dumbness combined with breathtaking arrogance and total contempt for the voters.

The most recent case is that of Texas State Rep. Joe Driver of Garland, a Republican who has been in office for 18 years.

Let me introduce you to Driver. Here's what he says on his web site under "Protecting Your Money":

"Do you believe that government must tighten its belt just like we do at home? Joe Driver does. In 2010, taxpayers are in revolt against the big spending habits of the liberals in government. Joe Driver favors capping state government spending, cutting taxes and reducing government intrusion into our lives. The more money of ours they take and spend the more difficult they make it for us to solve our own problems. For our economy to recover, we need less government spending and less government, period."

Under "Defending the Constitution" it says:

"Texas thrives because legislators like Joe Driver protect our economy, our rights and our pocketbooks. In the midst of this recession, Texans know that Joe Driver is defending our jobs, our savings and our freedom."

Under "On The Issues:"

"End reckless spending: Yes
Stop illegal immigration: Yes
Higher Taxes: No
More government regulation: No
2nd Amendment: Yes
Government controlled healthcare: No
Greater local control: Yes
Tough on crime: Yes
Helping small business: Yes
Government corruption: No
Restore our American values: Yes "

Sounds pretty good, don't you think? Well, it's all a lie.

Thanks to the Associated Press, we now know Driver, that ardent protector of our pocketbooks, has been double-billing his campaign and the State of Texas for expenses he incurred as a state rep. You can read the story here.

"For years," Jay Root of the AP wrote, "he has been submitting the same receipts -- for luxury hotels, airline tickets, meals, fees and other incidentals -- to both his campaign and to the Texas House. He has also been collecting thousands of dollars in state mileage reimbursements for travel in vehicles for which his campaign has shelled out more than $100,000 since 2000."

AP was able to document $17,431.55 in taxpayer money that Driver has pocketed. Driver's defense? Essentially it is, "I'm dumber than a box of rocks."

Driver, who is a former chairman of the House Law Enforcement Committee, claims not to have known that this practice is wrong. This elected official, who is on the powerful House Appropriation Committee that oversees the spending of state money, told the AP he thought "it was OK to bill two entities for the same expenses. He said he routinely pays hotels and airlines with donated political funds and then submits the same expenses to the state, taking the taxpayer money for himself.

"Now you're scaring the heck out of me," Driver told the AP. "It pretty well screws my week."

Awwww. Poor guy. Getting caught stealing from the taxpayers will do that for you.

He also said, 'If I knew it was wrong, I wouldn't have done it that way. I wouldn't have done it just to make money."

Ok. We'll pause here long enough for everyone to pull their jaws off the floor.

Now even though Driver may be ethically and intellectually challenged, he apparently has mastered the trick of bilocation -- being in two places at once.

Among the records Root examined were receipts Driver submitted for a trip to Memphis during the closing days of the 2009 legislative session.

Root write, "On that trip, House journals show Driver present and voting in Austin on April 30 at least two dozen times -- even though the travel records indicate he was traveling to Memphis during the proceedings."

The next day, Tryon Lewis, a Republican from Odessa, moved that Driver be excused to tend to "important business in the district." Not sure when Memphis, Tennessee, got moved into Texas State District 113.

So Driver steals and Lewis lies to cover up for him. Nice.

On his web site, Driver writes, "taxpayers are in revolt against the big spending habits of liberals in government."

If liberals do spend too much money, at least they do so openly and transparently in appropriation bills. Conservatives such as Driver just steal the money and blame the liberals.

Driver also says, "The more money of ours they take and spend the more difficult they make it for us to solve our own problems."

Right.

Driver is being opposed by Democrat Jamie Dorris in November.

Let's hope the voters in Garland are not as stupid as Joe Driver.

Texas deserves better.

God's school of love

2010-08-04T13:56:00.004-05:00

Once again I am honored to host a sermon by my friend Bruce.
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A Sermon
preached at All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Wichita Falls, Texas
The Rev. Bruce Coggin
August 1, 2010

Lordy, look at those lessons today!

Have we ever got a bunch of Bible to gnaw on for the next little while. The lesson from Ecclesiasticus—the author is either the Preacher or the Teacher or Qoheleth, depending on how you translate or don’t translate, which means we really don’t know who wrote it—is a favorite of nihilists and pessimists and was sure enough a favorite of mine when I was a card-carrying existentialist on the campus in Austin about a half a century ago. The passage from Luke’s gospel reports Jesus laying it hard on our backs for being greedy—or so it’s usually preached, though I think it runs just a whole lot deeper than that. And in Colossians we are in the realm of high Christology, the writer trying to get people’s eyes off the temporal and on the eternal and throwing in some behavior pointers as lagniappe. For what it’s worth, the Psalm could be hooked up to any or all of them, as could today’s Collect—but then we get off into liturgics and all that, and we’ve got enough to deal with without too many sideshows. So let’s get down to it.

The theme the writer of Ecclesiastes harps on goes way back in the Bible. Poor old Abraham—né Abram—all his threescore and ten used up and no children, or none by his Number One Wife, just one teenage boy that we know of, got on his concubine Hagar and not eligible to inherit the old man’s considerable flocks and tents and other chattel. He complains, “Eleazar of Damascus will be my heir!” That was the conniving foreman, likely a sleazy character, foreigner, lurking and rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the boss’ demise. God, of course, stepped in to prevent that, but nothing so dramatic happened to the Preacher/Teacher/Qoheleth. Life is a dreary business, sez he, lift that barge, tote that bale day and night—and then you die and somebody else comes in and enjoys everything you worked for, some sorry wastrel who did not turn a hand for any of it! How can anybody call that fair? Vanity, all vanity. A straining after wind.

Well, have you ever felt that way? Heavens to Betsy, how many people leave wills—notice that noun, made right off the verb, I will have it my way!—that cut their kids out dramatically or otherwise keep unworthy hands off their dragon hoard? You read about it all the time. Of course, you don’t have to die to know that feeling. Have you ever had a job where you started out with nothing or worse and absolutely gave yourself to it heart and soul, you and the enterprise fused, a blue-white flame of purpose—and then for some reason life takes you elsewhere, and in no time flat the folks where you once rode sky, wide, and handsome act like they never heard of you? I’m fond of saying that I’ve spent most of my life cleaning up other people’s messes, just as fond of whining that when I go back ten years later, nobody knows I’m a hero. If you’ve ever known that experience, well, you tend to sympathize with the . . . let’s just say the Writer. We work hard, most of us, and we are told we must be in control and exercise a kind of black-belt stewardship over whatever falls into our possession. Possession. An illusion in the long run. What’s the joke? “Didja hear? Old man Gotrocks died last night. Lord, the money that old man had! How much do ya reckon he left?” And the answer is, “Y’know, I reckon he left all of it.”

Whatever’s the case, the Writer of Ecclesiastes locates a pain a good many people feel, and the passage we have today brings no relief, just confesses the pain and admits there’s not a thing to do about it. I suppose that explains its popularity with young people discovering life’s Big Injustices for the first time. When I was reading Camus and feeling the weight of the centuries pressing upon me, Ecclesiasticus was the one piece of the Bible my crowd loved to allude to. “See there? Even the Bible says life is meaningless! So get depressed, dang it!” And it is pretty depressing on the surface. When Kitty finished reading and said, “The Word of the Lord,” I half expected you to come back with, “Thanks be to God. Not.”

On to the gospel lesson. Somebody in the crowd makes a fairly reasonable request in a culture where law and religion were fused, very much the way they are today in some Islamic societies. Jesus is a holy man, a wizer, and the man asks him to make a decision about . . . a will! An inheritance. We don’t learn. At once Jesus turns the question aside—I’m not about to make your decisions for you!—and seizes the opportunity to teach about the folly of loving things inordinately. My Greek’s too rusty for me to tell you if greed translates the word Luke used, but we’re talking not about asceticism—the rejection of the world’s thinginess and things—but rather about letting things get between us and God. Jesus tells the sobering parable of the successful man who quite reasonably takes steps to secure his hard-earned wealth. He identifies the problem. He weighs his options. He plans. He executes. He succeeds. Why is he not justified in celebrating all that? Why not eat, drink, and be merry?

Well, why not indeed? Don’t we all behave more or less that way? Or maybe I’d better hedge that bet. Don’t Episcopalians act that way? I mean, we’re a church of Elder Brothers, folks who get things done, who comply with requirements, who answer duty’s call, who manage what comes into our . . . possession. Oh, yes, that again, drat it, but don’t we deserve a little down time, a little R&R, a little party? Isn’t that Jesus’ favorite image of the Kingdom of Heaven? Well, yes, all that’s true. But let’s go back to possession and the Rest of the Story. That night at the banquet, our successful entrepreneur gets a little too far into his cups maybe, stows away a supersized hunk of roast lamb, and keels over in a fit of apoplexy. “Thou fool! This. Very. Night.” I regret that this translation says his life will be demanded of him. The Bible Jesus used in Sunday School says, “This night thy soul will be required of thee.” If it’s only life, the guy can die and be done with it; if it’s soul, then Jesus is talking beyond death and into eternity.

Let me point that difference up a little. Luke uses greed to translate what Jesus warns against, and you can bet your bottom dollar that most of the time you’ll hear this parable trotted out about the time we ask people to sign pledge cards. The parable’s twin elsewhere in the Bible—“Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust doth corrupt”—was enshrined exactly where in the Prayer Book for centuries? Why, right before we “took up the offering,” a real trivializing of what the eucharistic offertory is all about. To reduce this parable to a little teaching on being generous to the church ignores its far larger message. This parable does not say, “Be nice and share, especially with the church.” This parable says, “They don’t ask for your bank statement at St. Peter’s Gate, y’know. Things have their place. Keep ‘em right there.” And a lot more beside, but let’s move on.

The writer of Colossians is at great pains to help newly converted Christians understand a mystical perception of considerable sophistication. The letter comes along a couple, three centuries before the church got the doctrine of the Holy Trinity all hammered out, but it deals with the mystery of who Jesus was and how being Jesus’ own means being caught up in the eternal mystery of God’s urge to make himself thingy, to take our flesh and become one of us, to be born of a human mother, to rejoice and suffer as one of us, to die as one of us, an urge that should still make us shake our heads in a mixture of puzzlement and gratitude. The theologians who rassled the problem to the ground as much as it can be, the Ante-Nicene Fathers, never did reach unanimous consent. It is, as is just about everything about God, a mystery to be lived and apprehended, not information to be comprehended. To believe it, you have to see it, and you see it in Jesus first, then in those who are his by baptism. The writer reminds us that our baptism does a lot more than convey church membership. It reveals our eternal destiny which is to be caught up in God’s enjoyment and love of us and all creation and to share his life and his love forever.

In response, Colossians urges Christians—you and me in the lot—to do our best not to be distracted by things that don’t count in the long run and—and this is even more critical, I think—not to be discouraged in what is going to be a troubled life here on earth. The things, the facts, that take our eyes off our union in Christ and with each other—things like nationality, race, gender, religion, social caste—do not count in God’s eyes. God’s purpose is to bring harmony from our disharmony, shape from our chaos, joy from our moroseness, to take us all to his breast where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one unspeakable fire of love, three personalities united in one passion of self-giving and delight. And along the way, the writer hands out some pointers on behavior, but that in a minute.

Now, as quickly as I can. The first two lessons reveal two familiar human experiences which most humans, religious or not, likely know: the love of life in its abundance and the rejection of life in its harshness. The Writer and the cheated heir both must have loved their lives at least in part, else why work, why dig and delve, why waste time and energy getting and holding on to things? The Writer and the cheated heir also rejected their lives because . . . well, it ain’t fair! In the long run, all the things you dig and delve for let you down, turn to dross, leave you with a bad taste in your mouth. Vanity. Unfair. Those experiences are likely universal among us.

But let’s add God to the mix. People of faith and wonder also know those experiences, but let’s rename them. Let’s call the first a spirituality of integration, the second a spirituality of alienation. The spirituality of integration moves us to find our place among all the wonders of God’s creation—to love the people we know, to love a song, to love a place, to love just living and breathing and . . . well, to see life as a big dish of macaroni and cheese (not Kraft’s), a glass of buttermilk for me, a glass of chablis grand crû for you. “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” What’s wrong with that? Absolutely nothing, sez I, so long as it’s tempered properly; because like everything else, that nectar can clabber. The spirituality of integration can degenerate in a hurry to a religion of smug self-satisfaction, can let us see life as a safe place where we can sin safely, a kind of ethnic religion that corroborates all our prejudices. There’s a good bit of that going around these days if you haven’t noticed. To keep that from happening, we need also to know that second spirituality.

The spirituality of alienation is also all over the Bible, most notably among the great literary prophets who wrote at a time when the Jews had it made, had the clabber of temporal success, a religion that justified everything the eating, drinking, being merry people—especially the ones at the top of the pile, the ones who counted—did. Then and only then did the prophets stand up and utter the great prophetic No! to all of it. No, says Amos, to people who do in widows and orphans. No, says Hosea, to people who keep God in his place. No, says Isaiah, says Jeremiah, to those who think that God’s favor means entitlement and not humility and self-sacrifice. Hard talk and true, and did they ever pay for it! And just like a spirituality of integration, the spirituality of alienation can clabber too. Think of the hippies. Though they might be surprised to hear it, they operated out of a spirituality of alienation, raised in abundance which they found cloying, tasteless, without purpose and value. That doesn’t mean for a minute every hippy was a prophet. Some were just spoiled brats. Nor is every crank who puts on a sandwich board that says THE END IS NEAR! a prophet. Most of the time we’re dealing with someone who rejects the world because it hasn’t turned to him for The Answer. There’s a good bit of that going around today, too.

As you no doubt know by now, I’m making for balance, a sane and holy balance between the love of things and people and life, the spirituality of integration, and the rejection of things and life in the raw, the spirituality of alienation. But I’m not a taoist. The balance I mean, the balance I think today’s Bible lessons point us to, is a balance with a preference, the balance Colossians teaches. Look at Jesus. A party boy. Loved his wine. Loved good company. Loved crowds. Loved kids. Loved like a champ. And at the same time a dadgummed troublemaker. Calls a lie a lie. No tolerance for hypocrisy. Disturbs the peace. Would rather die than fight the fire of hatred with its own weapons—and does. And wins in the end without boasting but rather with gentle compassion, assuring those who trusted him that they were and will be his forever, will enjoy the kingdom prepared for them before the worlds began. Colossians brings all that right down to earth, doesn’t it? When we learn to see the world that way, to pray that way, then instead of treating the thinginess of life as an invitation to get and keep and control, we see the thinginess of life as a gift from God that humbles us and gives us hearts to become our brothers’ keepers. No more greed (which is idolatry), no more putting each other down, but rather compassion, kindness, meekness, humility, patience.

Those are complicated lessons. They teach us things about ourselves that are both wonderfully comforting and utterly terrifying. Our souls, our spirits, our lives enlivened in God’s life, are part of the whole mystery of God. Yes, it’s in this thingy, thingy world that we learn to love. Creation is God’s school of love, and it’s so lovely at times that our weakness, our foolishness, our wickedness lead us to let it all get between us and our destiny. But the upward tug of the Holy Spirit’s hand in ours turns our eyes again and again to Jesus whose example teaches us to love the world without trying to own it, to cleave to him only, to let him clothe us in himself, so that at the day of our death when things are no more, we who are baptized into his death will live with him where truly Christ is and always will be all in all.

Cool thoughts on a hot day

2010-08-02T20:42:00.013-05:00

It was 106 today. Too hot to move.

So I thought it was time to post photos of the snow we had on Christmas Eve. Snow for Fort Worth is rare, and snow on Christmas is a once-in-a-lifetime event for most Texans.

For my Mom, of course, snow on Christmas was an annual part of her childhood. So she loved seeing this snow, even if it was sparse by the standards of upstate New York where she grew up.

Enjoy these photos of the garden in the snow, think cool thoughts, and pray for a break in the heat.

Saying Goodbye

2010-07-23T16:54:00.030-05:00

My mom was a gardener, not only of plants but of people. She implanted seeds in her children's souls that have borne fruit in all our lives -- seeds of intellectual curiosity, the love of reading, of the fun of learning new things.

Once when I was complaining,"Why do we have to do all this homework," she replied, "Because it's more fun to know about things than it is to not know about things."

When we moved my parents from Odessa to Fort Worth in 2004, I dug up all my mother's iris and day lilies and transplanted them to my garden so she could still enjoy at least part of her garden after the move.

Mom died Thursday, July 22, just as the last of her day lilies was about to bloom.

Julia Hettie Sayer Sherrod was 92. With the help of Community Hospice she slipped very gently from sleep into heaven.

In addition to the standing ovation I am sure she received from the angels, she was certainly greeted by her beloved Alan, my dad and her husband of nearly 63 years. He died in 2005.

This all happened rather quickly. On the 4th of July, we took her to the hospital with what turned out to be a blood clot in her leg.

Early in that stay she was in pretty good humor. Once when my brother Michael opened the blinds and the light was too bright, she borrowed his sunglasses. We all agreed it was a good look for her.

We got the blood clot and the resultant pneumonia resolved and she was moved to a rehab facility. But on Tuesday she had a stroke. She could not speak, her right side was very compromised and she began having several seizures.

She was barely conscious, but when I placed her rosary in her left hand, she immediately began fingering the beads. So I sat down beside her and began saying the rosary into her ear. As I did so, she began sliding the beads between her fingers.

Mom was born September 15, 1917, in Black River, New York. She graduated from Black River High School at age 16.

In 2007, she and I traveled to upstate New York for the Sayer Family Reunion so she could see all her siblings - Colin, Dot and Bill -- all of whom are still alive and well.

The Official Sayer Reunion T-shirt.

The Fab Four.

Mom with her older brother Colin.

And with her sister Dot (Dorothy).

And her baby brother Bill.

We also visited the graves of her mother, Colice Sayer, and her grandmother, Frances Caulfield.

She showed me the impressive Black River.

It is a beautiful swift running river containing more water than any river she saw for years in Texas.

Mom's life was a rich one. Following graduation from the Mercy Hospital School of Nursing in Albany in 1939, she was awarded a fellowship to St. Louis University where she received her Bachelor of Science Degree in nursing education in June 1942.

Mom and Dad at their graduations from medical and nursing school.

While she was in school, she managed a hospital and taught nursing at St. Louis University as well as at an African American nursing school. She was an excellent surgical nurse. One day in 1941 when a young surgeon named Vincent Alan Sherrod collapsed while preparing to do surgery, Judy rushed over to help him. It was the beginning of a lifelong romance. On September 8, 1942, they married.

The engagement announcement

Mom was the major wage earner while Dad completed a three-year residency in surgery at Missouri Pacific Hospital. He then joined the U.S. Army and was immediately diagnosed with tuberculosis. Unlike today, TB usually was a death sentence. Mom cared for him during his long convalescence and for the rest of his life, Dad often said it was her determination and support that kept him alive.

Helping Alan heal.

In 1949, Judy and Alan moved to Iraan, TX, at the request of his uncle, Frank Bascom, who worked for the Ohio Oil Company, later the Marathon Oil Company. Physicians were desperately needed in West Texas, and the oil company offered to pay for the move and set them up in practice if they would move their young family west.

Mom with her firstborn, Daniel Alan Sherrod.

And with her second son, Peter Stewart Sherrod.

And with me, her only daughter, Colice Kathryn Sherrod.

And finally with her baby, Michael Sayer Sherrod.

West Texas was in the midst of a several-year’s drought when they arrived. One can only imagine Mom’s reaction to the sere landscape after growing up in the lush beauty of upstate New York. She and Dad and the four of us lived through epic dust storms that took the paint off the side of cars and buildings.

Their first clinic in Iraan.

At the time, there were no physicians at all for three huge West Texas counties around Iraan. Mom and Dad worked as a team to deliver health care to the thousands of people in that isolated part of Texas. In 1957, they built a clinic in Iraan.

The clinic they built in 1957

Mom successfully wrote grants to establish a Well-Baby Clinic in Sheffield, TX, where she and Dad immunized the infants and children in these counties and taught young mothers to feed and care for their children. She also founded the Iraan Public Library. She and Dad were instrumental in establishing the Iraan Hospital.

Mom was a moving force in getting Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops established in Iraan. She was a member of the Iraan Garden Club, whose members were the embodiment of the triumph of hope over adversity, given the challenges of growing anything at all during the drought years. When three of us were in Catholic boarding schools in Austin and San Antonio, Mom drove 600 miles round trip to see us every weekend.

Mom, as the only other licensed health care practitioner in the area, often functioned as would a nurse practitioner today because Dad was so often away at the hospital in Fort Stockton or making house calls to remote ranches. While he was away, she ran the clinic and triaged the patients, taking the most seriously ill to Fort Stockton when necessary.

Once she had men secure an oil field worker with a broken back onto her ironing board and carefully load him into the back seat of her big car. Then she loaded us four kids into the car and drove us all to the hospital in Fort Stockton where my dad was doing surgery.

We saw this kind of thing all the time. People instinctively turned to Mom when they needed help. She exuded competence and calm.

M parents were devout Catholics, driving 30 miles to either McCamey or Rankin to attend Catholic Mass because there was no Catholic Church in Iraan. When they moved from Iraan to Odessa, they donated their clinic building to the Catholic Church, who turned it into St. Francis Catholic Church.

In Odessa, Mom continued to manage Dad's medical practice while also volunteering at Catholic Charities and serving as long-time treasurer at St. Mary’s Catholic Church.

Mom and Dad and Mom's beloved Scottie, Ian.

She was a member of the Odessa Garden Club, continuing her interest in gardening – an interest she passed on to me. She read widely and voraciously and was a published poet.

After she and I traveled together to China in the early 1980s, she recorded her impressions of the trip in poetry.

Mom and me at the Registan in Samarkand.

We also traveled to Russia and Uzbekistan, because she had always wanted to go to Samarkand.

Here we are in the spice market in Samarkand.

Mom at the Bibi-Khanym Mausoleum

She and Dad also traveled extensively, making trips to Ireland, Europe, South America, New Zealand and Australia, and the Far East. In 1981, she accompanied Dad when the Odessa College Jazz Band (in which he played saxophone) toured in Mexico. Mom’s purse became famous on that trip. Out of it she produced a needle and thread to repair a band member’s trousers just before the curtain was to go up at the Mexico City concert; a small bottle of pure water for taking pills; a small bottle of Pepto-Bismol; and many tissues when allergies attacked the band. Judy was always prepared.

The clan gathered at their 50th wedding anniversary

Mom was preceded in death by our father, who died in 2005.

Mom is survived by her children, Dan Sherrod of Richardson and his wife Patricia; Dr. Peter Sherrod of Plano; Katie Sherrod of Fort Worth, and her husband, the Rev. Gayland Pool; and Michael Sherrod of Fort Worth and his wife, Dr. Melissa McIntire Sherrod; two brothers, Colin and William Sayer; a sister, Dorothy Sayer Foltz; nine grandchildren and five great grandchildren.

With Gavin Patrick Judge, her third great-grandchild, at Thanksgiving 2004. Her great grandchildren called her G-G Mom, for Great Grandmom.

For her 90th birthday party, her grandson Nicholas made her an amazing three-tiered cake.

Serenading Mom

And now, while we all rejoice that she is at peace, we know we will miss her every day of the rest of our lives.

Well done, Mom.

We love you.

Rest in peace.

Just "Imagine"

2010-07-19T14:28:00.003-05:00

John Lennon was "my" Beatle. He and George Harrison won my heart early on.

I've loved all of Lennon's songs, but I've never "heard" a rendition of "Imagine" that touched me more than this one from the show "Glee."

For those who are not familiar with Glee, here's a description of the show from its web site:

"The series follows an optimistic teacher, WILL SCHUESTER (Matthew Morrison), who - against all odds and a malicious cheerleading coach - attempts to save McKinley High's Glee Club from obscurity, while helping a group of aspiring underdogs realize their true star potential. "

Thanks to Mark Harris for pointing me to it.

Religious freedom and Ground Zero

2010-07-13T09:33:00.002-05:00

Here is my response to the latest Texas Faith question from the Dallas Morning News Religion Blog. Read it all at:

TEXAS FAITH: Is a mosque at Ground Zero religious freedom too far?

Tue, Jul 13, 2010
Wayne Slater/Reporter

The debate over a mosque near Ground Zero has rekindled questions about religious expression in a nation that treasures religious freedom. Plans for the $100 million mosque just blocks from the site of the 9/11 attack have angered the families of survivors. It's become an issue in the New York governor's race where Democrat Andrew Cuomo answered his Republican opponent's objection to the mosque this way: "What is the country about if not religious freedom?"

There are conflicts, of course - say, when religious expression violates the First Amendment (school-mandated prayer) or endangers lives (outlawing Appalachian snake handling). And there's the annual dustup over singing Silent Night in a public building, which never seems fully resolved. But the debate over the mosque is different - and raises a more fundamental question.

What are the limits to religious expression in America? Are there any? Should there be?

Our Texas Faith panelists weigh in with a thoughtful discussion on the issue:

KATIE SHERROD, Independent writer/producer
First of all, curtailing mandated prayer in public schools is not a restriction on religious expression. To the contrary, it is a defense of religious expression because it allows ALL religions to express themselves as they see fit without the state forcing non-Christians to listen to Christian prayers. Prayer in public schools is not forbidden. Any student may pray privately in any way they choose. What is forbidden is state-sanctioned prayer.

Because let's not kid ourselves -- state-mandated prayers in the USA are always Christian prayers. Imagine the uproar if Christian kids were forced to listen to an imam pray to Allah over a school loudspeaker. That is also the case with the singing of Silent Night. It's a Christian song, as are most Christmas songs of course, given that the holiday celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ. Why should Jewish and Muslim school children have to sing Christian songs? Again, imagine the uproar if the school decided everyone was required to attend a Seder in the cafeteria at Passover.

The building of the mosque near Ground Zero is another case entirely. Muslims have purchased land to build a building in which Muslims will pray and have services. The people who frequent that mosque will not be forcing anyone else to worship there or to listen to their prayers. This is exactly what the First Amendment is meant to protect. People walk by all sorts of things on their way to and from Ground Zero, including profane and offensive graffiti. Having to walk by a beautiful mosque should be no more offensive than having to walk by the beautiful St. Paul's Chapel.

Timothy McVeigh, a Christian, blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing many children as well as adults. The Episcopal Cathedral is right across the street and was heavily damaged in the blast. Yet not one person objected to its being rebuilt near that Memorial because a Christian had committed that terrorist act.

Wrapping up xenophobia in outrage over 9/11 does more to dishonor the memory of those who died on that day than does the construction of mosque in a country founded on religious freedom.

The Texas wind and my mother

2010-07-06T19:33:00.005-05:00

My mother, Julia Sherrod, will be 93 in September. This weekend she was hospitalized for a blood clot in her leg, and after three days in bed, she has pneumonia. She's sleeping a lot, but when she's awake, she smiles her lovely smile at us and I think, "What a woman."

She was born in 1917 in upstate New York, about as far north as you can get without being in Canada. She grew up in Black River near Watertown. At 16 she went off to college and then nursing school in St. Louis, at St. Louis University, where she met and married my father, Alan Sherrod, who was in medical school there.

I know she must have loved him a lot, because she moved with him, two toddler boys and baby me out to Pecos County in West Texas, to a tiny town called Iraan. This was just at the beginning of the 1950s drought in West Texas.

I figure my mother, reared in the vast greenness of the Finger Lakes region, must have thought she had moved to the outer edges of Hell -- an arid dusty place where the only color came from an immense blue sky.

We've recently had some lovely rains in Fort Worth, a gift from Hurricane Alex. Mother has asked me every day if my garden is loving the rain, because she knows down to the marrow in her bones that in Texas, rain is the greatest gift of all. As I've spent time with her in her hospital room, we've talked often of the weather, for weather has loomed large in her life.

In her early years it was the cold weather of the north. She and her brothers and sister have vivid memories of snow drifts reaching to the eaves of their two story house in Black River, of walking to school through tunnels of snow.

But she has spend the majority of her life in the arid heat of West Texas. One of the first lessons Texas taught my mother is that the weather is about the only force Texans give in to, and they do that only because they have no choice.

Texas weather is a living entity to those of us who grew up here. The West Texas wind is a constant presence, like the sound of our own breathing, and only when it stills do we get frightened. The hair lifts on the back of our necks. Something ominous is about to happen.

Texas weather can kill. We grow up knowing that in our bones. People who have seen a flash flood, or a tornado, or a drought-spawned dust storm have an understanding of the term "an act of God" embedded in their souls. Only God could create such forces, or hope to control them.

As children we were warned constantly not to play in ravines or gullies, partly because of rattlesnakes, but mostly because of the danger of flash floods. Texas was held in the bone-dry grip of the '50's drought then, and the earth was packed hard as a grave.

The wind rattled dry mesquite branches and at church, everyone licked their dry lips and prayed for rain. Ranchers' mouths grew thin and hard, and caliche dust caked their sweat-soaked hair, turning it white even on young men. Tears were the most plentiful source of moisture, and they were damn few for these tough, tired people.

Their red-rimmed eyes scanned the skies until the dust storms drove them indoors. Rain had abandoned the earth, and so the earth gave itself to the wind.

The wind would move in slowly, pick up the earth, swirl it around and drop it again, maybe a mile away. It teased the earth with laughing gusts and dust devils. Gradually it picked up speed and earth until it was a swaggering brown giant, blotting out the sky.

The wind and the earth locked in a dark violent dance out over the flat lands and the sun hid. People fled inside and locked doors and windows. but they couldn't keep it out. Dust crept in everywhere as it tried to escape the wind, sifting under doors and windowsills with desperate ease.

The maddened wind flung the earth against all obstacles, blasting paint from cars and buildings, tearing up weedy bushes by the roots and sending them head over heels like clumsy frightened tumblers.

Then, the sound would change. The frenzied keening became mournful. As if sickened of the violence, the wind would slow, drop the earth from its grasp and move away, moaning.

The earth would settle back into its new places, waiting for rain to find it again.

Rain. It was the key to life, and a way of death.

But when the rains finally came, they had been too long away. The earth was hardened and rejected them.

With no place to go, the water ran frantically into the low places, gathering momentum as it went along. By the time it reached the lowlands and was forced into smaller and narrower gullies, its speed and force was terrifying.

Out of control, it gathered up cattle, goats, horses, people, cars, mesquite trees -- roots and all -- and slammed the entire writhing brown wall furiously against any bridge or obstacle in its way, taking parts of the highway and the bridges with it.

And then it was gone, leaving newly shorn ravines and gullies and an eerie silence in its wake. The earth would be damp for a few minutes, then the sun and the dry air would greedily devour the moisture.

Nothing was left to pay witness to its passing except frightened children and shaken adults, puny bystanders in this elemental affair of the heart.

The earth was not the same after such storms: new lines, new shapes were forced into being by the wind and the water.

But the people survived, heads bowed only to strong winds and God.

Celebrating Works in Progress

2010-06-30T15:21:00.003-05:00

Someone reminded me of a 4th of July article I wrote in 2005 for The Witness magazine -- one of their lectionary reflections. And while the readings are for Year A, I think the ideas in the reflection are still valid.

Lectionary Reflections for the Fourth of July (A)
Readings for Independence Day (U.S.), Year A, July 4, 2005
Deuteronomy 10:17-21
Psalm 145 or 145:1-9
Hebrews 11:8-16
Matthew 5:43-48

Jesus sets some high benchmarks for the church in the Gospel reading for the Fourth of July:

"Jesus said, `You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy."' But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Be perfect? Clearly the church has a long way to go.

On the Fourth of July, we also celebrate the high benchmarks the founders set for the nation they were dreaming into being, the idea "that all men are created equal" being perhaps the most demanding of all.

We had a long way to go on that one the minute it was put on paper.

The man who wrote that phrase, and many who signed onto the document in which it is stated, owned human beings as slaves.

After the Revolution, only white male landowners could vote. Nearly a hundred years later, the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 gave black men the right to vote. It would take another century and the civil rights movement of the 1960s for black men and women to be able to safely exercise that right.

Women first demanded the vote at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 expanded that right to women of all races.

Now our nation is engaged in another struggle toward the ideal of equality for all -- equal civil rights for lesbians and gays.

This is mirrored by the struggle in the church, as lesbians, gays, transgendered and bisexuals step up to claim their places in the life of the church as baptized sons and daughters of God.

This is a pattern Jesus would recognize. At the urging of the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus enlarged the circle of his ministry. And he kept enlarging it, reaching out to those on the margins time and again.

The church constantly falls short of the ideals offered us in the Gospel. It is -- we are -- a work in progress. But this process is inexorably driven by the fact that, as Walter Brueggemann said, the arc of the Gospel is always bent toward radical inclusion.

The United States of America also is a work in progress.

Our nation is a great experiment in democracy. And here, over time, the arc of history is bent toward justice, just as Martin Luther King said.

But this movement toward the founders' ideal is in grave peril today as our national leadership distorts American values in an unjustified war, treats prisoners of war in ways that violate the Geneva Conventions, and passes budgets and tax policies that enrich the rich while penalizing the most vulnerable among us.

Many parts of the church, including our own Episcopal Church, are beset by those who, in the name of "orthodoxy" or "tradition," will do just about anything to keep intact their vision of a patriarchal white-male-dominated church defined not by who is included, but by who is kept out.

It is easy to be discouraged by all this.

That's why the Fourth of July is a good time to raise our eyes to those impossible benchmarks set by Jesus for the church and by the founders for our nation.

Meditate on them. Let them firm your resolve, because the work is not easy.

"But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. . . Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

and

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. "

Yes, right now the gap between the reality and the ideal seems so huge as to be insurmountable. But it is in that gap that the Holy Spirit resides.

Let us gather up our courage, pledging our lives and our sacred honor, and get to work.

Barbed wire and the Anglican Covenant

2010-06-24T18:56:00.019-05:00

I've been thinking about barbed wire.

Barbed wire is mean stuff, meant to control and punish.

Invented in the late 1800s, it's a simple thing, just two strands of wire twisted with sharp barbs spaced along it. Any person or animal trying to get through barbed wire is punished with painful cuts as the barbs slice skin and hide.

Prior to its advent, everyone had free access to the range. Native Americans, poor farmers and ranchers could graze their few head of cattle alongside the hundreds of head of wealthier ranchers. Barbed-wire ended that.

I began thinking about barbed wire while contemplating a piece of sculpture we have in our garden. For several days now, it has been haunting me. I mean, it's been there for years. I see it nearly every day. But just recently I found myself coming back to it again and again, sitting and staring at it as the song of the cicadas splintered the hot June air.

The piece was created by a TCU art student in the late 1960s who, sadly, did not sign it. Two bronze doves are imprisoned in rings of barbed wire. One dove's wing has been pierced by the sharp wire. Rust has stained the wing, looking like dried blood.

Still, it tries to fly.

But the dove is trapped and cannot take wing.

And I know this is exactly what the proposed Anglican Covenant will do to the Anglican Communion.

It seeks to wrap rings of bureaucratic barbed wire around the Holy Spirit, imprisoning the Spirit in processes of discipline designed to enforce unanimity of theology, of interpretation of Scripture, and who knows what else.

It is a document born out of fear that seeks to force an institutional solution onto a relational problem. It is designed to control and punish.

We are meant to be creatures of hope, not fear. Amid all the other challenges of reconciling the world to God through Christ, why on earth would we want to put this Covenant between us and the Holy Spirit?

Canon Kearon speaks

2010-06-21T21:20:00.004-05:00

Here are some thoughts on the latest Executive Council meeting. These are MY observations and opinions, not those of the council.

Although I think the work we did around mission and ministry was our more important work, I want in this post to focus particularly on the Q&A session with Canon Kenneth Kearon. I have interspersed this with some Texas wisdom that I think is applicable.

The room for the meeting was set up as usual, with all of us sitting at round tables for five or six with microphones at each table. There were two podiums set up at the front of the room. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori presided from one and anyone else making a report, presentation, etc., spoke from the other. There was a big screen between and slightly behind the two podiums on to which reports, copies of resolutions, charts, etc. could be projected. It was also used during the daily worship to project the prayers.

Wednesday was spent in prayer, private conversation, updates since the last meeting, and reports from the CEO and other staff members as well as reports from various committees about work already done and work to be done.

Thursday was spent in committee meetings, and Thursday evening we met with the bishops of Maryland and their deputies at dinner. Bishop Katharine and Bonnie Anderson, president of the House of Deputies, are members of ALL the committees, and they sat in on various committees all day Thursday.

It was the task of the World Mission Committee to craft the questions for Canon Kearon, although they solicited input from all Council members -- and got it.

There's two theories to arguin' with a woman. Neither one works.

So Friday morning Bishop Katharine was at her podium and Canon Kearon was standing at the other. Bishop Katharine was half sitting on a stool behind her podium looking very relaxed and non-anxious, holding her hands loosely clasped in front of her. Canon Kearon, on the other hand, looked like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs

It began with Canon Kearon telling Bishop Katharine that he wanted the session to be private, with staff and press put out of the room. He talked about how the press was the enemy of us all and that bloggers would take anything that was said and distort it.

So Bishop Katharine said, "All those in favor of a closed session, please raise your hands." Four or five hands went up.

"All opposed?" Hands went up all over the room. The session remained open to everyone.

There was one positive moment when Canon Kearon said to Bishop Katharine, “I gather you’ve also been visiting England and there have been some issues that arose during your visit there. I just want to say I’m not a member of the Church of England, I'm a member of the Church of Ireland."

Most of us took this to be a back door apology for the way Bishop Katharine was treated by the Archbishop of Canterbury [he told her not to wear a mitre] -- "mitregate," as it is being called. By the way, Bishop Katharine remains amazed at the uproar over it, and she clearly is losing no sleep over something she calls “bizarre, just bizarre.” She did comment in conversation that the readings that day were wonderfully apt, being about the woman who knelt before Jesus with her hair uncovered.

Back to the session with Canon Kearon. After his oblique apology about the miter incident, it went downhill. You would think after the vote to NOT close the meeting, he would have gotten the message that we were in no mood to play his game of "Let's all us people in positions of power get together and make decisions without consulting with those most affected by them." But no.

Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.

Then Canon Kearon looked out at a room that was at least nearly half full of people of color, and the first thing he said was the "problem of increased and growing diversity in the Anglican Communion has been an issue for many years." He said that by the 1990s leaders in the communion has begun to name "the diversity of opinions in the communion and diversity in general as a problem and sought some mechanisms to address it."

Jaws dropped all over the room. People looked at one another in disbelief. Had he really just said that? Yes, indeed he had. Whether Canon Kearon meant diversity of cultures, of people, or of thought, to see “growth in diversity” as a problem is astonishing in a leader in the Anglican Communion, don’t you think?

Another aside – throughout his presentation and in his answers he referred to The Episcopal Church (TEC) as “tech”, something that really grates on me, probably because it is how the schismatics always refer to The Episcopal Church.

Canon Kearon told us he would talk to us about “the way I see it because I don't think the way I see it is the way any of you see it."

You think?

Canon Kearon said during his statement that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has limited authority beyond the ability to call meetings of certain communion bodies, make some appointments and "occasionally articulate the mind of the communion."

"Everywhere I go, everyone wants him to act as a sort of an Anglican pope as long as he does what [they] want him to do.”

Well, actually, no. We don’t want him to act as a sort of Anglican pope. That would be Rowan who wants to be an Anglican pope. It would be Rowan who keeps forgetting that he has "limited authority beyond the ability to call meetings of certain communion bodies, make some appointments and 'occasionally articulate the mind of the communion.'" And I dispute the latter point.

After detailing our offense – the consecration of Mary Glasspool “put this church out of step with the rest of the communion” -- he said we should have expected consequences because actions have consequences. But apparently not ALL actions have consequences. Can you say “interventions?”

"Each instrument of communion [Archbishops of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates Meeting]has condemned them and asked for them to cease, but we are a voluntary communion and have no [ability] to act against a province," he said. [Emphasis added.]

Get that? We have no ability to act against a province – except you just did, Kenneth.

It was at that point that Bishop Katharine quietly said, "Kenneth, we're ten minutes into the time we have allotted for this."

He said that put him in a dilemma.

Bishop Katharine said, "Can you wrap up?"

He was a bit nettled, but did sum up. And then it was time for questions. Canon Kearon said he would answer all the questions he "can" answer and may leave some questions unanswered. Bishop Katharine said she would send any unanswered questions to him to answer later in writing. As far as I’m concerned that is all of them, because I found his answers totally inadequate. For a man who used the word “logic” every other sentence, there was not a lot of it demonstrated.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

The first question was asked by Canon Rosalie Ballentine, chair of the World Mission Legislative Committee. Rosalie is from the Diocese of the Virgin Islands.

“”There is a covenant being considered that has in it certain processes, some of which have caused great concern for some of the provinces on how fairly they would be applied. For example, the Province of New Zealand gave only partial approval to the covenant, with members of its General Synod noting that Section 4 could “get into a situation where we sanctify a process of exclusion or marginalization” and that it might be implemented in ways that are “punitive, controlling and completely unAnglican.” Do the recent actions of the Archbishop of Canterbury give credence to these concerns?

Canon Kearon’s responses to all the questions were carefully parsed, often to the point of leaving more than one of us wondering, “Exactly what did he really say?”

He did say that “To remove people from representative functions [within the Anglican Communion] is not to be [exclusive]. Being in full communion does not require us to have people from [a particular church] representing the Anglican Communion.”

A “full communion relationship” does not commit any church body to “everything” done in connection with the Anglican Communion, he said, but indicates a shared fellowship.

He said the Archbishop of Canterbury was not anticipating enforcement of Part 4 of Anglican Covenant by removing Episcopalians from ecumenical bodies.

Bonnie Anderson, president of the House of Deputies, asked the next question.

“There are always consequences to living authentically as Christians. Within relationships among Christians, however, we ought to have opportunity to question those consequences, lest all end up walking on eggshells. Is there such a process now? And, do you foresee a season of such sanctions or is the removal of ecumenical committee appointees from The Episcopal Church an isolated event?

Canon Kearon said he “hopes” removal of TEC from ecumenical bodies was an isolated act but repeated his remarks that we have not exercised gracious restraint.

As near as I could decipher his answer, he said – and these are MY words, not his -- that more sanctions might be forthcoming, depending on how much more power Williams thinks he can get away with arrogating to himself. One wonders exactly just how inflated Rowan Williams’ idea of his office really is.

Canon Kearon earlier had said, “...the aim has not been to get at the Episcopal Church, but to find room for others to remain as well as enabling as full participation as possible for the Episcopal Church within the communion.”

Now did you get that? We get sanctions for being faithful to our baptismal promises, to our canons and to classical Anglicanism in order to “find room for” other provinces who are crossing borders, promoting schism, and abetting the persecution of LGBT Anglicans.

Don't squat with your spurs on.

Blancha Echeverry from the Diocese of Colombia asked (in Spanish), “You have stated that The Episcopal Church does not “share the faith and order of the vast majority of the Anglican Communion.” Given the place of the Chicago Lambeth Quadrilateral in our common life as The Episcopal Church, how was it determined that The Episcopal Church does not share this faith and order?

He said that we don’t share the understanding of same-sex relationships as the rest of the Communion.

Now, Mark Harris has done an excellent examination of this whole faith and order issue at his blog. Please go read what he says. But essentially what Canon Kearon seemed to me to be saying is that by fully including LGBT Christians in the life of our church we have violated a core doctrine of Anglicanism, something I find astonishing – and more than a little disturbing.

Jim Simons from the Diocese of Pittsburgh asked the next question. Jim was the sole member of their Standing Committee left after the previous bishop and other diocesan leaders left The Episcopal Church.

“I am Jim Simons, a priest resident in the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh which, as I’m sure you are aware, went through a recent and painful schism. Currently, there are over 100 priests, deacons and one bishop canonically resident in the Province of The Southern Cone as well as another Bishop canonically resident in the Province of Rwanda functioning in our diocese without licenses and laying claim to some of our parishes. This is in clear violation of the canons and it is also not unique to our diocese. What if any disciplinary action do you anticipate toward provinces who engage in such jurisdictional incursions?

Canon Kearon replied that he sent letters to Southern Cone, Rwanda, et al at the same time he sent letters removing Episcopalians from ecumenical bodies asking for clarification of their actions, but added that “no instrument of communion” has addressed the questions about interventions by bishops from other provinces. Note that earlier he had said that all the instruments of communion had condemned interventions and asked that they cease. But that is apparently not enough to get Kearon to take action against them, while a "proposal" from the ABC in his Pentecost letter that Episcopalians be removed from ecumenical bodies is acted on by Kearon virtually the next day.

Jim followed up, asking whether any of the “instruments of communion” will address these question, Canon Kearon said he hoped so.

Later Mark Hollingsworth, Bishop of Ohio, addressed Canon Kearon, saying he had a bishop in his diocese doing confirmations and ordinations and meeting with disaffected Episcopalians, so he is really clear about what an intervention looks like and is puzzled that the Archbishop of Canterbury and Canon Kearon have so much trouble figuring that out.

Canon Kearon then made a strange comment about how some of those bishops and priests “appear to be Americans” and so it is difficult to figure out if they are intervening in The Episcopal Church or not.

They don’t just “appear” to be Americans, they ARE Americans. So what? They are still intervening in The Episcopal Church under the auspices of another province in the Communion. This is not hard to figure out, Kenneth.

Lee Alison Crawford, a priest in the Diocese of Vermont, asked, “As a lesbian priest, in a 20-year relationship, legally recognized civil union in my state for ten years , and serving in a congregation, I ask this question because inclusion is very important to me. In his Pentecost letter, the Archbishop of Canterbury said, “We are praying for a new Pentecost for our Communion. That means above all a vast deepening of our capacity to receive the gift of being adopted sons and daughters of the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It means a deepened capacity to speak of Jesus Christ in the language of our context so that we are heard and the Gospel is made compelling and credible.” Removing people by executive action seems counter-intuitive to furthering inclusion. How is the exclusion of Episcopal Church members reconciled with the language of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Pentecost letter?

Canon Kearon essentially answered by saying that one form of exclusion for faith and order issues is not the same as other forms of exclusion. I am still seeking enlightenment on that reply.
Then Bishop Wendell Gibbs, Bishop of Michigan, asked the stumper, “The Church of England remains in full communion and ecumenical dialogue with the Old Catholic Church, which blesses same-sex unions, and the Church of Sweden, which has a partnered lesbian bishop and blesses same-sex marriages. Given this fact, how are we to reconcile the removal of Episcopal Church members from ecumenical bodies?

LONG silence ensued. He looked at Wendell like a calf looks at a new gate. He clearly didn't know where to go.

Canon Kearon hemmed and hawed and finally said that there are different types of full communion and that the sticking point is being able to represent the Communion vis a vis faith & order. Wendell stressed the point of who the Church of England is in communion with, but Canon Kearon had nothing more of substance to say.

So. It gives one pause, doesn't it? And makes it really clear why we fought the Revolutionary War.

If you're ridin' ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there.

Texas Republicans and the oil industry

2010-06-13T15:29:00.004-05:00

A story in today's Fort Worth Star-Telegram was about Texas Republicans calling for an end to the deep-water drilling moratorium. It said the moratorium is hurting the oil industry.

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DALLAS -- Rep. Joe Barton and other Texans in Congress asked President Barack Obama on Saturday to call off a six-month moratorium on deep water oil drilling to avoid hurting the drilling industry more than it has already been damaged.
Republican House members led by Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land, say they'll file a bill Tuesday calling for an end to the moratorium, which they say is creating financial hardships for businesses and workers in the deep water drilling business.

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As a Texan I'd just like to say -- read any story about whole fishing industries in multiple states along the Gulf Coast in danger of dying; read about birds, dolphins and other forms of sea life that are already dead and dying; read about whole recreational industries in danger of dying because of the reckless drive for profit by ONE part of the oil industry on ONE deep water well -- and then tell me why ANYONE would be feeling sorry for the oil industry or support Texas Republicans in this insanity?

The Simon Chronicles -- Partie Deux

2010-05-31T12:10:00.023-05:00

Hello.

I am Simon.

The Cat.

I have asked my Chief of Staff to assist me in preparing this, ah, report.

It is a meditation on sleep, something humans beings seem to take much too lightly. But then, you are not Cats, are you?

"Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care. The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath. Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast." -- Macbeth, Cat who allowed William Shakespeare to live with him and to use his name as the title of a "play."

If Cats are anything, we are professionals at sleeping. Our keen minds and highly honed bodies require, oh, about 20 hours of sleep a day.

"Life is too short to sleep on low thread-count
sheets." -- Prissy, the cat who allows Leah Stussy to
live with her.

We are such professionals that we can sleep in the most insalubrious of situations. Why, here I am shown sleeping in the driveway. This makes my Chief of Staff very nervous and she scolds me for it constantly. But of course I am always careful to sleep out of the way of the Big Moving Machines she and her assistant use. I am not an idiot.

But most of the time I sleep in one the many lovely places my Chief of Staff has prepared for me around my garden. She has nicely placed them in shady spots where I can doze while also keeping an ear turned to her whereabouts in the garden or the house. If she goes anywhere NEAR the cupboard where my treats are stored, I know it.

This chair is in the Chapel Garden. I often doze there in the early evenings while my Chief of Staff and her assistant have "drinks" in the garden. Why they don't just drink out of one of the fountains like I do is one of the mysteries of my life.

"And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created." -- Sheik, Cat who allowed D.H. Lawrence to live with him.

Here I am dozing next to one of the statues of St. Francis, one of the rare human beings who really understood what God was doing when She created the animals first, THEN the humans.

"Consciousness: that annoying time between
naps." -- Unknown Cat

Here I am sleeping while keeping one ear on my Chief of Staff as she reads the newspapers, things human beings need to keep them informed about what is happening in their world. Cats, of course, need only their noses and their ears to know what is going on their THEIR world.

"There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast." -- Cat owned by some really smart but anonymous human.

Cats can sleep anywhere, even amidst the toys that the human kittens my Chief of Staff adores insist on strewing about MY room in the house. I allow these two kittens to believe my room is their room.

"Without enough sleep, we all become tall two-year-olds." -- Bijou, Cat who allowed JoJo Jensen to live with him.

We Cats are masters at total relaxation, something humans seem to need "wine" or "drinks" to accomplish. Pity.

Sometimes I also guard my Chief of Staff's computer case when I sleep.

My Chief of Staff has prepared a basket for me that she calls "my" basket. It is one of the MANY places I sleep.

"O bed! O bed! delicious bed!That heaven upon earth to the weary head."-- Cissy, Cat who allowed Thomas Hood to live with her.

She has made the basket quite comfortable, and it is exactly the right size.

I also sleep in the "the boys" bed, although in reality it is MY bed. I graciously let the "grandchildren" think it is theirs.

See what I mean about the toys?

Sometimes I am so relaxed my Chief of Staff thinks I am about to fall off the bed. Silly thing. Cats never fall off beds.

Oh, all this dictation is exhausting. I need a nap.

"There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock." Cat who was owned by an anonymous human.

Another of Bruce's sermons

2010-05-21T13:06:00.002-05:00

I am privileged to host another of Bruce Coggin's sermons from All Saints, Wichita Falls, one of our displaced parishes. Bruce shares the care of this dynamic congregation with Maurine Lewis. This entire group is one of our diocese's greatest blessings.
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A Sermon on Ascension Sunday
Preached at All Saints’, Wichita Falls, Texas
May 16, 2010

A casual observer—should we have one!—might be forgiven a little confusion about what’s going on here today. The service leaflet says Seventh Sunday of Easter; but the hymns and this sermon are all about Jesus’ ascension, the Ascension. So, which are we about this morning?

We’re about both, of course. This is in fact the seventh Sunday since Easter, but back in the good old days when everything was done right and everybody was happy, the Sunday after the Feast of the Ascension was called, logically enough, “The Sunday after Ascension Day.” Then they changed everything. You see, Ascension Day is always forty days after Easter, and that’s always a Thursday. Since they repealed the law that required people to go to church on major feasts, observation of Ascension has fallen off some little bit. I mean, how many of you greeted each other last Thursday with “Happy Ascension Day!”? (Don’t all stand at once.) Ascension was sort of like Transfiguration which always came on August 6th, a date which more likely reminds people of Hiroshima these days. So the folks in the liturgical movement quite wisely moved the observation to the last Sunday in Epiphany, and one of Jesus’ most epiphanic moments now gets a little more face time with the average Episcopalian. Now it’s Ascension’s turn, I reckon. The Roman Church, where it’s run from the top down and you can get a decision, already changed the name of this Sunday to Ascension Sunday. We’ll get there eventually, and that’s all good.

I say good because the ascension, Jesus’ ascension, is one of the most problematic yet critically important events in the Lord’s life on earth. I mean, it’s the end of the story, for one thing, and beyond that the implications of that . . . fact? myth? . . . are compellingly important. Let’s deal with the fact/myth bit first.

After Jesus’ resurrection, scripture tells us, he tarried—love that word—in his resurrected body for forty days, a number whose import I don’t need to elaborate. When you think about it, wouldn’t you expect Jesus would have spent those six weeks running a kind of victory lap, filling the disciples jam-full of teachings now that he had their attention? You’d expect big crowds, press conferences, riotous acclaim. I mean, everybody in town saw him executed, yet here he is! Funniest thing. After his resurrection, Jesus had very little to add beyond renewing his promise about the Holy Spirit and telling the disciples to get cracking. Then up and out. One wonders.

At any rate, on the fortieth day, a Thursday, scriptures tell us he and the disciples were outside the city and walked into one of those clouds that show up every now and then and open up and you just never can tell what’s going to happen. This time the disciples were, I’d bet, somewhat amazed to see Jesus just lean into that cloud and ride it right up to . . . well, way up in the sky, out of sight, gone. Foosh! There are lots of famous depictions of the moment. Jesus always has the same sappy look on his face, as if floating up into the empyrean was nothing unusual, and the disciples often express an unsettling serenity at the sight. I mean, that guy on TV, the magician who walks on water and through glass doors and all that? When people watch him, they take on about it somewhat. You’d expect the painters to show the disciples evincing some level of Oh my gawd!, wouldn’t you? But no, he just rode up into the sky and that was that. Never can tell when that’ll happen.

Now, folks, that’s a problem. Isn’t it?

When I was a graduate student some decades ago at the University of Dallas, a pretty conservative Catholic school, in a very upscale program that considered the vast realms of politics and literature all at once, we were summoned each semester to what the Great Ones in the faculty called a colloquium. What it was, they invited a Great One From Afar to come give a talk on some Big Topic, after which the faculty would listen as the students responded, asked questions, got asked questions. A real hot skillet dancing moment, believe me. The colloquia always took place in a smallish amphitheater auditorium, dais down at the bottom, seats rising in a semi-circle. The faculty sat up on the top seats, students in the middle, speaker on the stage—all except for Dr. Donald Cowan, the president of the university and a scientist. (His wife, Dr. Louise, really ran the place, and she sat up top. And watched. Like Madame Defarge) Well, one semester the Big Topic was nothing other than: The Ascension. Myth or fact? And what does it all mean, Alfie? The speaker was from California, I recall, and when we’d all settled in he took the mike and started out this way: “If at nine in the morning of Thursday, May 16, A.D. 33, the body of Jesus, whatever it was made of, left the earth headed for Heaven or wherever traveling at the speed of light, he would not until this good day have gotten beyond the boundaries of the known universe or even the reach of our most powerful telescopes. Surely by now, with all the sky watching we do, we’d have picked him up.” Then he stopped and glared up at us as if to say, “Howzabout them apples?”

As Mark Twain said, “a kind of black frost descended upon the chamber.” Nobody budged. Then Doctor Don leaned back in his front row seat, threw his arm across the back of the seat beside him, ran his eyes over the audience above him, smiled broadly, and said, “Oh, how innocent!” You might say the rest of the evening didn’t go as planned.

But, you know, the guy had a point. If you take the ascension literally, physically—and that’s one of the options here—you run into that problem right away. Unless there was some anti-matter finagling or some other kind of intervention, divine or otherwise, an object leaving the surface of the plant at light speed way back then would indeed not be even nearly beyond the reach of the Hubble, which came along later, and maybe we could . . . oh, you get the point. Most people—I guess, though these days you never know—most people long ago abandoned the three-decker universe notion that would justify the claim that Jesus “went back to Heaven,” but without arguing the endless points of contention in that claim, let’s just say most people don’t think that way any more. Right.

So, then, what happened to the body? If the Romans could have burnt it, they would have, just to get him out of their hair. Did the disciples hide it? Every now and then we have another eureka moment when somebody discovers Jesus’ remains and then finds out it ain’t really him. And if it’s all a story, who made up the story? And did they all lie about it the rest of their good lives long? Was it mass hysteria? Was it mass delusion? While there are relics of just about everybody in Christian history you can think of, there are absolutely no relics of Jesus—outside a few vials of his tears and some spurious little body shards claiming to be the residue of his bris scattered around Europe. The best we’ve got is the Shroud of Turin, and that’s a whole nuther Pandora’s box of claim and counter-claim. If Jesus did not in fact ride that cloud up the Heavenly way, wha hoppen to his resurrected body?

This one of those ya pays yer munny ya takes yer choice moments de luxe, and I don’t think there’s much to do about it. It’s one of those rocks in the road that Robert Capon says is in the Bible because the Holy Spirit wants it there. I’ll take that. But if the Holy Spirit’s insistence seems to leads us at once to an imponderable, what is it we’re supposed to be hearing, seeing, learning? Gotta cast the net on the other side. I think there are at least two directions to go from here. One has to do with you and me today, and the other has to do with getting a story told. One is mandate, the other, mystery. Let’s take the you and me part first.

Did you notice the lovely icon of Jesus’ ascension that graces the first page of Joyful Notes this week? Sometimes the Orthodox surprise me. Their icons are so . . . un-human looking so much of the time, all dark and somber and rigid. But in this one, Jesus looks almost like he’s skipping, definitely moving, which is sort of un-iconish in my experience. He looks happy, too. And did you notice, right at the edges of the image on both sides, what he’s doing? No? He’s holding hands. You don’t see with whom, but he’s holding hands. Wonder who that could be? Wanna guess? Another fetching icon I remember is of the resurrection. Jesus is coming up out of a door let into the ground—sort of reminds me of us coming out of the storm cellars after the cloud passed when I was a kid over in that county I grew up in—and he’s got somebody with him. A man, naked as the day he was born . . . er . . . created I mean, because it’s Adam. In the three days in the tomb, Jesus went down to Hell and brought everybody out, starting with our eldest brother. Isn’t that wonderful? And in this icon of the ascension, Jesus is holding hands and skipping along. I figure he’s holding hands with you and me.

Looky here. The ascension means that Jesus’ work among us is done. The second person of the Trinity—we call that Christ—took human flesh, lived, loved, taught, resisted, suffered, and died, just like us. That was so, since we’re so prone to skew God’s messages to fit our own notions, we could see the perfect revelation of God in the flesh of one of us who was utterly incorruptible, made no compromises with expedience, showed us God as God wants to be seen. He came to reassert the claim of God’s love on us, to invite us to live in and out of it: love God with all you’ve got and love your neighbors as yourselves. He got even more specific: love each other as I have loved you. And why? As today’s gospel says, so the world may know that God sent me. The church’s mission, our whole mission, is to be the sign of God’s redeeming, self-giving love for the creation. Believe me, that’s enough. And believe me, after two millennia, we’ve still got a long way to go to accomplish that mission. Yes, maybe nearly half the world’s vastly expanded and expanding population is nominally Christian. Good. I guess. But just as surely, there are people within earshot of this place who haven’t got a notion of God’s love in Christ, don’t have a notion what the cross is all about, would look at you like a calf looking at a new gate if you asked them what Jesus’ ascension is all about. When Jesus goes away, he just turns it over to us, that’s all. No other plans. Oh, the Holy Spirit is at work, to be sure, but in territory largely held by the devil. Jesus’ ascension is the astonishing corroboration that he actually trusts his work to us, to the likes of you and me! He thinks we can do it. Or at least enough of it to let the world see that he really did come to reveal God. So . . . we’ve got work to do, no?

Here’s where you can throw up your hands and say, “I hope you don’t expect me to save the world! That was his job!” You hear that, and it’s a fairly reasonable response in some ways, but it misconstrues the job. We need to pay attention to Mother Theresa here. When somebody scoffed at her—“How on God’s good green earth do you think you’re going to take care of all the homeless people in Calcutta? More people sleep on the streets here every night than live in some countries!” Know what she said? “One at a time.” One at a time.

Jesus has, like it or not, handed the work of redemption, of lifting up the fallen and showing them God’s love, over to the church, to you and me, and to say the job’s too big is silly. Of course, it’s too big, but as the hymn says, no arm so weak but may do service here. All we have to worry about is the people God sends our way, but we really really really ought to pay attention to them. This congregation is learning a lot about that these days, and though you may think your efforts are just a drop in the bucket—they are—you must remember that if you don’t put that drop in the bucket you’re in the same condition as the feller who had only one talent—and went and buried it. So the ascension is mandate. Hold hands with Jesus. He can’t take care of this one or that one, hardly matters which one, right now, so you do it. Mandate. Bear the light. So the world may believe. We already believe. Our love in Christ must bring God to those who don’t yet believe.

And now, the rest of the story. Every story has an ending, even those wonderful fantasy movies where the kiddo heroes ride off into the skies on gorgeous, silky Falcor in a never-ending story, has to stop somewhere. The Bible is a story book, a library of stories, a bunch of narratives laid out alongside each other, each a subset of the Big Story of God’s love of creation. Capon again is so useful: he reminds us that the Bible is like a movie. Even if it’s got scenes you don’t like, you gotta stay until the end, gotta see it through, if you are ever to have a chance of understanding it. And the ascension of Jesus, his “going back home,” is effectively the end of the story—or better, the end of that part of the story. There is in the study of literature what they call “a sense of an ending.” You can tell when the story’s over, and the best stories don’t try to do more, don’t rattle on when they’ve said all there is to say. I don’t know how much you know about the structure of the music we’re accustomed to, but music is written and performed in a particular key called the tonic. Usually a piece—from a lullaby to a choral symphony—starts out in its tonic key, can then go off in a bazillion directions exploring this key and that, slipping and sliding often with amazing complexity until it just about wears a feller out. But if you have any ear for music at all, you know when it’s getting ready to stop. The conductor’s arms wave and the musicians play their hearts out in the key a fifth above the tonic until all at once, crash! Everything drops back to the tonic and you know it’s over. I don’t know of anything written in the key of C that ends on a G-minor chord. The story, the song, comes back home.

Jesus’ story ends that way. We say he came from God into the world to love it and show it that God does not condemn us but rather loves us, and that those who see that, realize it, accept it, believe it, live in it, are given God’s own eternal life in his kingdom forever. John three sixteen. So what’s he gonna do next? What’s left to do? Think of the story of the Bible, from Genesis right on through Revelation, as a western. In a western we usually see pioneers starting out to make a new life in a new place; they run into trouble they can’t handle; A Tall Stranger rides in on a Tall Horse, sees the problem, solves it—and runs for mayor. No! Of course, he doesn’t run for mayor. Then everybody would hate him. No, he does what western heroes do: he rides off into the sunset, and the people standing around all shake their heads and study that silver bullet. That’s the way Jesus’ story ends, and our part is how to honor that silver bullet.

Or think of it as a tableau vivant, one of those wonderful pageants late nineteenth, early twentieth century school kids got dragooned into at commencement exercise. Say it’s June 1919, the U.S. has just won World War I, and for commencement every kid in school gets dressed up as a Good Yankee Doodle Dandy or an Evil Hun or a Brave But Battered Belgian Maiden or a foot soldier or a ship captain or a Red Cross nurse or somebody else in the war. The prissiest girl in school gets to be Miss Liberty and wrap herself in a flag and stand up on risers and hold a torch way up high. All this behind the curtain, lights off. Then the curtain parts, and the narrator begins telling the story, directing the light this way and that, telling who this is and who that is, finally ends up with all the lights on and sparklers spritzing and the upright piano hammering out America, the Beautiful—that Kate Smith thing hadn’t been written yet—and then it’s all over. That’s the way I think the Revelation works. That’s the way any story works, really, the way allegorical paintings—and icons to be sure—work. The whole story is here, and it has an ending. A mighty happy one. A mystery.

So on this Seventh Sunday of Easter which is in fact the Sunday after Ascension and might just as well be Ascension Sunday even if it did all happen on a Thursday, we can have a sense of both an ending and the anticipation of a mighty new beginning—because next Sunday is Pentecost, the day we remind ourselves of the Holy Spirit’s presence among us, and that’s a whole nuther look into the mystery and another day. Today though, be thankful that Jesus rode into town on a tall horse and showed us how to handle the bad guys. Be thankful that when he left, we got a silver bullet. Be thankful that he promised us that where he is, we may also be, indeed in his eyes already are. Be thankful that he showed us everything we need to know to do the job he left us, namely to celebrate God’s love for us—what we do in church—and to show it to everybody who crosses our path who doesn’t know it yet—what we do out of church in the world—so that the whole world may both know and believe that God is love and is reconciling all things to himself.

Happy Ascension Day!

An Easter Sermon

2010-04-19T12:07:00.004-05:00

My friend, Bruce Coggin, has done it again -- preached a sermon that I wanted to share. So read and chew on this.

A Sermon
preached at All Saint’s Episcopal Church, Wichita Falls, Texas
Easter 2010

V. Alleluia! Christ is risen!
R. The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Let me tell you a story I hope is true. I’d hate to tell a fib in church on Easter Day, but I believe I heard it from Fr. Alexander Schmeeman, for many years dean of St. Vladimir’s Russian Orthodox Seminary on Long Island. I’ll say it was him, if it wasn’t, maybe nobody’ll find out.

The story goes this way: in the first years after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the Soviet government in Moscow was at pains to stamp out religion all over Russia, to re-educate the benighted Christians about the opiate of the people. They sent teams of propagandists into the rural villages to explain the folly of religion to the peasants and give them the good news that the Soviet government was about to start doing all the things the church had promised forever and never delivered on, as well as a lot of other wonders. A team goes out to Village X somewhere in the Urals—think Doctor Zhivago—calls the few hundred villagers to some assembly spot, and harangues the silent, sullen crowd for a couple of hours.

When the speeches are over, nobody moves, nobody makes a sound. So the leader of the atheist pep squad hauls the village priest up to the front and asks him, “And what, you scum, do you have to say about all this? How can you answer us?”

The old priest, likely nobody impressive, shambled up before the crowd in his grubby cassock, summoned all his lung power, and barked out, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”

The response thundered back, “The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!”

End of re-education session.

Now, that’s a wonderful story of faith in action, of a belief so profoundly fixed among a community, such a habit of life, that even the fear of bloody repression could not pry those villagers loose from it. Great moment. Great story.

Now . . . I can’t help wondering how that story would play out if something similar happened today in some little town in, say, Montague County down the road a piece here? You know and I know it would be a far different story. As our country becomes more and more biblically illiterate and either non-Christian or just reputedly Christian, you’d be justified to wonder how people would respond—because it’s anybody’s guess what people believe Easter is all about.

And who’s to blame for that? The church hasn’t done as good a job of selling Easter as we have Christmas, have we? I mean, even though the slobbering orgy of conspicuous consumption and aggressive generosity that mars the way this country celebrates Christmas has little or nothing to do with what the birth at Bethlehem was all about, you’ve got to admit that almost anybody you’d ask what all the fuss was about could at least tell you it’s Jesus’ birthday, and everybody’s for birthdays. But Easter? The worst I ever heard was a bad joke about “that’s when Jesus dies and then comes out of the cave on the third day and if he sees his shadow he has to go back in for six more weeks.” And we hear a lot about Spring and the renewal of life and all that, none of which makes much sense in the southern hemisphere where winter’s coming on. You’d hear most Christians say something about the resurrection, though if pressed on the details, you’d get responses running anywhere from bedrock fundamentalist literal reading to a vast range of lower octane attempts to deal with the improbable Bible story. Probably the most innocuous and engaging response we see is all the Easter bunny lore, fuffy hoppers everywhere and happy kids hunting for eggs. The lady at the check out desk at the motel this morning had on bunny ears, and I wished her a happy Easter, which she returned all bubbly and . . . well, just glad about it all.

Why do you guess it is Christmas is so much more popular than Easter? I think I know why. I mean, after all, Christmas begins with a baby, at the manger, and everybody loves babies! But Easter? Easter starts in a graveyard, in a graveyard, which is a little discomforting, and the story is . . . well, just not very believable. Today’s version: Mary goes to clean up the corpse, finds the tomb empty; tells the men who come, take a look, and run off; and then sees somebody she doesn’t recognize who tells her he’s Jesus.

Now, who’s gonna believe that? The resurrection story goes against everything we know about death, doesn’t make any sense at all. Even the biblical narratives reflect the difficulty of believe any such thing. In today’s gospel, Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus, thinks he’s the gardener—and several Renaissance depictions of this story show Jesus with a hoe or a little sharpshooter in his hand. Thomas didn’t believe it until he touched Jesus’ wounded hands. The travelers on the way to Emmaus didn’t know him during an eleven mile hike home. The disciples on the lake sorta kinda recognized him but weren’t sure until he fixed their breakfast. And on and on. It’s not believable.

Let me butt in a minute and say how I define belief and how I define faith. Belief, in my book, is something we have when we’ve been given enough evidence to suit our empirical minds that this or that fact is in fact a fact, where all the columns add up the same way, and all the pieces fit: that’s something I can believe. Faith, the way I use the word, is something more in the realm of a corroborated notion, something we hear about or perceive ourselves, singly or in community, something that doesn’t submit to empirical proof yet also something that tugs us, inclines us, somehow seems to ask for our . . . what? . . . mental consent? Spiritual consent? I can’t say exactly, just something that pulls us toward acceptance and trust when we can’t gin up what I’ve called belief. Faith and belief are two very different critters in my book. And can say for sure that I have faith in a good bit I don’t believe, can’t believe. That’s what we call a paradox, and I sure didn’t invent that. I think we misuse the word faith a lot, load it up with more certainty than it can bear. It’s sort of like the way we misuse brave and coward: a coward, you’d say, is not brave; a brave man is fearless! But if he’s fearless, why does he need courage? I say the brave man is the fellow who’s scared to death of the boogher on the porch and still musters the gumption go out and face it. A man who can’t believe can have faith. St. Paul prays, “Lord, I believe! Help thou mine unbelief!”

Now, since I’m talking about faith, I can witness only to my own and the way it finds itself in the faith of the whole church. Most of you from around here know what it means to testify in church, and I’m about to give my testimony.

I first became really aware of the reality of death in the late forties when my Aunt Cecile died and was buried from the Coggin Avenue Baptist Church in Brownwood where she and Uncle Mose were every Sunday members for decades. I was ten or younger, and I adored her. Mose was my Grandfather Yeager’s brother, the baby of that big family, ran a barber shop in the Southern Hotel for years, and Aunt Cecile was his soft, talcumed, sacheted, laced up, blowsy, sweet, cooky baking, great-nephew spoiling wife, my favorite among many great-aunts. And she died. And I was taken to the funeral. And we did as Baptists do, filed past the casket for a last look. I thought she looked funny. Not natural. Not much like Aunt Cecile. Her stomach was all pouched out, and her face was . . . well, she didn’t look much like Aunt Cecile to me. I asked questions.

I was raised in a standard Bapto-Methodist middle class Texas family, and I got the standard answers both at home and at Sunday School: Jesus came back to life. His body, dead as a doornail when they laid him in the tomb, miraculously once more possessed life—he re-booted—and got up. And talked. And all the rest. Nothing more. Just that. Especially at Sunday School I got the notion I ought not ask.

It bothered me considerably. I right quick transferred the whole scenario to myself. I knew I was going to die. I knew since I’d been baptized in 1948 I would be resurrected, so I really wanted to know how that was going to work. One of my earliest phobias—one I still have—was the fear of drowning. I’d read a lot of Horatio Hornblower books and knew about men going down with the ships or walking the plank or otherwise getting dead under water, and I really did not want to do that—unable to breathe, eyes all blurry and dark like in the swimming pool. That made the idea of the resurrection worse, because I knew what happened to men who died at sea: fish et ‘em, fish and other critters, because they were just skeletons when they washed up. And if I were going to be resurrected, would God have to get all my bits and pieces from the fish that ate me? That’s a childish fret, of course, but it was sure real to me.

Later as a young adult, still pondering these matters, I learned that about every seven years my body swapped all its atoms—all its atoms—for other atoms, that by the time I got as old as I am now, I’d have shucked eight, nine, ten bodies, might even been toting around some atoms some of you used before. In the resurrection, whose would they be? It all seemed almost laughable.

And, by the way, if I’ve got resurrected body options, which one would I get? The one I died in? Could I get a better one? It was laughable. And so by the time I was a brilliant undergraduate, I’d abandoned all that. Just not believable. Did not make sense, any of it, and especially all that about resurrection. To borrow a trope from Gertrude Stein, death is death is death. Period.

Yet . . . before I graduated college, I was confirmed at All Saints’ Episcopal Church on the campus in Austin, and by the time I finished a first graduate degree, I knew I was headed for the priesthood. Now, what kind of sense does that make?

You never know where you’re gonna find help articulating things, finding a way to express your living experience, a lot of it not easy to understand, a lot of it pretty hard to relate. I found help for this moment today—I must preach to you about the resurrection this day—very recently in a place you’d not expect. You know I’m an English teacher, and I’ve been re-reading Tennessee Williams’ short stories recently. Yes, I said a place you’d not expect. In one reflective narrative about his life as a script writer in Hollywood, he tells of an afternoon when he’d written for hours, then decided to call it a day. He said he rubbed a place on his chest that hurt, and that led him to consider what he called “this rubbery machine,” our body, this funny thing we get around in, not perfect and not designed to last very long, not a very reassuring habitation. And yet, he says, that little house we live in has a tenant, someone, a being, a presence, a conscience, a person, who tries endlessly to describe himself, who peers anxiously out as if listening for something, waiting for something. He said he wanted to know more about that tenant and what he’s up to. I think that’s really good. Somebody inside this funny rubbery thing, a tenant who describes himself—and what do we do all our lives? Try to decide who we are, why we’re here, what we’re here for, where we’re going. Describe ourselves. And always looks anxiously out, expecting something, listening—and hearing things, seeing things. I think that’s really a helpful formulation of . . . who, what, I am. Or believe I am.

I know that I came back to the church—not to faith, mind you—to the church on the purest whim. I went to a wedding in San Antonio at St. Mark’s Church and walked into All Saints’, Austin, the next day—and I’ve hardly been outside a church on Sunday morning since. What called me to do that? I know that when I was a graduate student at Columbia, I could not stay away from St. John the Divine two blocks down the street, went almost every day to hear the boys sing Evensong in St. Ansgar’s Chapel. Why? And I never once thought about priesthood until one day a woman there, a perfect stranger, asked me if I were a seminarian. I was trying to describe myself, and little pieces of the picture kept falling from somewhere into my little rubbery machine head. And heart. Off to the seminary I went, under Bishop Mason’s hands I went, and into the priesthood I went—but I have to tell you, I could not then and cannot today say I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the survival of that little tenant in my rubbery machine. It makes no sense.

But thanks be to God who giveth us the victory, I can say with as much certainty as I’m capable of that I have faith in the resurrection, maybe could say I believe in it by faith. It still makes absolutely no sense, goes against everything I know about death empirically—and yet faith enables me to stand up here in front of you and tell you it’s God’s truth. Whatever tugged and pulled and notioned me back into the church and into the priesthood and into a life of looking out and listening and being up to finding what I’ve defined as faith has vanquished my unbelief horse and foot. And how’s that? Why because the notion has been corroborated more times than I can tell you. I have faith in the resurrection because I’ve seen so much resurrection. Without going into lurid detail, most of it not news anyway, I can tell you that about twenty or so years ago, I died and went to Hell. Or may as well have. Life was Hell—horrible, tasteless, joyless, painful, full of my own ugliness and what the Heart of Darkness calls the horror. Horror. Yet I came back to life, by no means through anything I did or even tried to do. I came back because that tugging started again and pulled me right up from the grave. I won’t tell you about all that, but here I am.

I’ve seen resurrection all over the place. I could but won’t tell you stories of dozens of people I know who’ve died one way or another, some who needed to, some who just got bludgeoned, and over time and with love and God’s grace shared by people they maybe didn’t even know, found themselves alive again. Funniest thing is, they often don’t recognize themselves any more, others say, “I hardly know you any more!” I’ve seen it in individual people and in congregations, among them this one. When I met you these eighteen, twenty months ago, about all you had left was resentment, anger, fear, enough Hell on earth to qualify you for a death certificate. But this morning here you are, alive and kicking and skipping forward to meet the Bridegroom on Resurrection Day. I can’t say any of the cadavers I’ve prayed over at countless graveyards has reappeared, but neither can I say for sure they’re not alive somehow. I know I’ve got all kinds of dead people I’m in touch with, and I imagine you can say the same thing or will one day when you’ve sent a lot of people you love across Jordan. Resurrection is real. That which was dead is made alive, that which was cast down is raised up, that which was old is made new. Life is not ended but changed—and you don’t even have to be religious to believe that. Just raise a garden. Raise some kids. Just look at all the busted down rubbery machines in this room, the lame and the halt, half of us not ten years from the grave—and did you ever see so much life?

Resurrection is real.

Yet . . . it’s not just resurrection we preach, not just the return of life in the Spring, not just the general greening of the earth up here on this half, not just an existential philosophical concept. This is not the Sunday of Resurrection: this is the Sunday of the Resurrection, of a specific resurrection, Jesus’ resurrection. And that makes everything every so much more . . . pointed. I mean, we have here both a real challenge to belief and a real moment when nothing but faith will do.

Let’s watch Jesus as he faces his earthly doom, the breaking and failure of his own rubbery machine, let’s watch how he behaves while the world, the flesh, and the devil break his body. Let’s keep our eye on his spirit, on what goes on inside him, and how that tenant behaves. When they come to seize him, he chides Peter for resisting and heals Malchus’ ear. When the Sanhedrin revile him, he stands them down. When Pilate condemns him to please the mob, he is civil—the guy’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. He’s compassionate with the crowd—“Weep not for me but rather weep for yourselves.” He forgives the soldiers who nail him to the tree. He pardons the thief and promises him paradise that very day. The more the outward man decayeth, as the old Prayer Book said, the more the inner man is strengthened, the brighter the flame burnt.

Don’t take that to mean it was all just a show, that he knew he was going to be all right, could therefore be generous. Divinité oblige. None of that. His spirit held out nearly as long as his rubbery machine, but if Jesus is to be fully human—and he is fully human—then he must go through not only the best we know but also the worst. If Jesus is fully human, then he has to know what despair is, what death in the spirit is. Those last words from the cross—Father, why hast thou forsaken me?—come from a broken, terrified heart. Oh, I know it’s the thing to say he was reciting the psalter, but I don’t believe that for a minute. The man is in pain you and I can’t imagine, people are laughing and spitting and jeering, his poor mother and a pair of friends are helpless in front of him, he’s vomiting blood and pushing up against the nails, writhing just to draw a breath. He felt forsaken, all right. That cry was not piety. That cry was the anguish of every human being who ever lived or will live. God, why are you doing this, letting this happen to me? You said you loved me!

And then the rubbery machine fails, shuts down. With his last breath, Jesus lapses into habit, into trust, into faith. Usually we hear the last Word read as some kind of triumphalist boast in a Charlton Heston voice: “It is finished! Into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Never has seemed that way to me. I see a man, body broken, spirit broken, fall back on what’s left—faith. I think it sounded more like, “Oh, Father, it’s all over now. I can’t go on. It’s all in your hands now.” And that is the voice of faith speaking in the face of some mighty believable circumstances that point to the contrary.

They take him down and they put him in the tomb and they leave him. Yet before you know it, they see him again, alive, talking, eating, walking, teaching, encouraging, praying. And from that day to this, people who’ve known resurrection in themselves and known Jesus’ resurrection in the faith of his risen body have proclaimed that Christ is alive, that the Lord is risen indeed.

Do I believe that? I can’t answer the question that way. Do I have faith in Jesus’ resurrection and my own and yours? You better believe I do. I’ve bet everything on it, committed my life and my loves and my hopes to it. And I pray that when my rubbery machine turns off I’ll have the presence to say “Oh, Jesus, take me with you. It’s all up to you now!” with my last breath. After all, that’s the only hope we have.

It’s also the only hope we need, because if Jesus is who we say he is, then our death is part of his act of gathering us up into his victory as he promised time and time again to do—If I be lifted up I will draw everyone to myself . . . those the Father gives to me I will not lose . . . my Father’s house has many rooms . . . come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you before the worlds began.

That, dearly beloved, is Easter faith, Easter victory, Easter joy, and we’ll sing and pray that victory for the next forty days and for the rest of our lives and on into whatever wonders eternity holds for us in God’s good grace. That’s Easter. And if people want to celebrate that by putting on bunny ears, it’s just fine with me!

V. Alleluia! Christ is risen!
R. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Blogs and birthdays

2010-03-26T10:58:00.003-05:00

In my post "Who is in the room matters" I wrote that the HOB "received" the report of the theology committee on same sex marriage.

That was not correct.

They didn't even "receive" it. It was "presented" to them. I've been told that the bishops were so underwhelmed by the report[s] that there was a long discussion of what word to even use to describe what happened.

Now that the report has been published for all of us to read here many people have begun to comment on it. One of the best I've seen is posted at Friends of Jake entitled "I won't lecture you on theology if you won't lecture me on science."

Episcopal Cafe is gathering and posting comments as well. So go read it and let us know what you think about all this.

Elizabeth Kaeton has posted her thoughts on Bishop Lambert's comments and demonstrates that he is not alone among bishops in not wanting inconvenient people in the room where decisions are being are made.

Read and enjoy. And please say a prayer for my grandson Curran, who is 8 years old today. He and his brother Gavin are my heart's delight. May he continue to grow in grace and knowledge of God.

Who is in the room matters

2010-03-25T11:08:00.003-05:00

At their just-concluded meeting, the House of Bishops "received" the two reports from the no-longer-secret-committee of theologians about same sex marriage.

Mary Glasspool, bishop suffragan elect of the Diocese of Los Angeles, attended this meeting at Camp Allen near Houston as did Bishop Gene Robinson. For non-Episcopalian readers of this blog, Glasspool is a fine priest and a lesbian living in a long-term committed relationship. Bishop Robinson is a great bishop, and a gay man living in a long-term committed relationship.

Episcopal News Service has a story in which reference in made to a comment by Paul Lambert, bishop suffragan of Dallas, in a posting to the Anglicans United website. I found it revealing and informative.

Here is the statement [emphasis added]:

"It goes without saying that the recent Consent for the Bishop Suffragan of the Diocese of Los Angeles has been a topic of discussion among the gathered bishops and how that will impact our relationships with the larger Communion. Although we have not had a plenary discussion on this development we will no doubt do so when the subject of the Anglican Covenant later this week occurs. Of course, her presence at our meeting makes it difficult to discuss this openly and honestly, both for her and the House gathered. I bid your prayers that we may have a spirit of mutual respect and forbearance for all involved. I do believe that we will do so with sensitivity and concern for all."

One might ask, how does the presence of Mary Glasspool make it difficult for bishops to discuss how her election will impact our relationships with the larger Communion openly and honestly?

Would the bishops say things behind her back that they would not say to her face? Apparently so.

It is indeed harder to talk about another human being as an "issue" or a "problem" when he or she is in the room looking you in the face. It is even harder when they are worshipping next to you, taking communion beside you, sharing the Body of Christ.

It is the power of the incarnational experience, and it is exactly why some have fought so hard and long to keep people of color, women and LGBT people out of the rooms where power is wielded and decisions are being made that affect the lives of people of color, women and LGBT people. It is why some primates, bishops, and other individuals have refused to worship with our presiding bishop and have loudly demanded she not be allowed to come to meetings of the primates.

It is why the Archbishop of Canterbury declined to invite Gene Robinson to Lambeth.

But we are an incarnational church. Each of us has been sealed as "Christ's own forever." That includes Bishop elect Glasspool as much as it includes Bishop Lambert. It includes Bishop Gene Robinson and the Communion Partner bishops. It includes every person of color, every woman, every LGBT person in the Anglican Communion.

Yes, it makes it harder for those who have been accustomed to wielding power unchallenged for so long to continue to speak and act as if all these millions of people are somehow "less than" other people.

Yes, this means that when you say LGBT people are "intrinsically disordered" you are going to have to say it to their faces -- and then -- harder still -- listen to their response. You might even have to witness the deep wounds your words and actions have caused and are causing all these people.

But given that we are brothers and sisters in Christ, this new reality in our House of Bishops should be an occasion of rejoicing, not lament. Our bishops are beginning to experience what the House of Deputies began to experience long ago -- who is in the room matters.

Bishop Lambert obviously realizes this, as he writes, "I bid your prayers that we may have a spirit of mutual respect and forbearance for all involved. I do believe that we will do so with sensitivity and concern for all."

I join him in this prayer.

Losing Liz

2010-03-22T10:30:00.005-05:00

Friday I was among several women who were honored as a "Veteran Feminist of Texas" by the VFA of America at the Women's Museum in Dallas.

While there, I treated myself to a red T-shirt with one of my favorite sayings. It is a quote from the writer Laurel Thatcher Ulrich -- "Well behaved women rarely make history."

I was literally holding that shirt on Saturday when my husband walked in and said, 'Liz Carpenter died."

I hugged the shirt to my chest and cried. And then I had to laugh, thinking of Barbara Jordan, Molly Ivins and Ann Richards greeting Liz with big hugs and cries of "Well, I guess they'll let just anyone in here!"

Heaven is a lot more fun this week than it was last week. But what a loss for us all.

Liz Carpenter was the incarnation of Ulrich's saying. Killer smart, bawdy, irreverent, kind-hearted, generous and feminist to the core of her being, Liz Carpenter never DID behave the way society thought "good girls" are supposed to behave. And she taught at least two generations of Texas women how to do the same.

One of the prime evenings of my life was when a group of us from Leadership Texas found ourselves sitting around at Liz' house with Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards and other amazing Texas women. I remember thinking, "Thank you, God, for letting me live to be in this room."

I laughed so much that night my stomach muscles were sore for days afterward. Barbara Jordan taught us all how to sing Gospel songs right and Ann and Liz tried to top one another with one-liners. We were almost too weak to walk when it came time to leave -- a common affliction of anyone who spent much time around Liz and Ann.

Liz' most common greeting upon meeting new people was not "Hello," it was, "Do you support the ERA?"

She was never afraid of that second "F" word -- "feminist" -- and it grieved and puzzled her that so many younger women are so comfortable using the first "F" word and so uncomfortable naming themselves as feminists.

Her battles for women's rights began as a young reporter trying to get equal access with male reporters to the halls of power. She credited Eleanor Roosevelt with breaking down barriers for women reporters, because Roosevelt would allow only women to come to her press conferences, forcing many newspapers to scramble to hire women.

Another Texas politician -- and a friend of Liz Carpenter - did the same thing for women reporters of my generation. When Sissy Farenthold ran for governor of Texas in 1972 [she ran again in 1974], she was largely ignored by the Texas press. The only reporters who covered her at all were women working in "women's sections," having been denied jobs in the main newsrooms of the large Texas dailies.

Then suddenly it looked liked Farenthold might actually win the Democratic Primary, which in those days meant she would win the General Election. The newspapers sprang into action, trying to get interviews with her. She would agree, but only if they sent one of the woman reporters who had already been covering her. I was one of those reporters.

Her support meant women reporters all over Texas were found suddenly to be capable of doing "real" reporting by their editors. Dozens of us were finally allowed to do political reporting, a job formerly reserved for male reporters as it was thought to be too tough and rough for a woman to cover.

Sissy's act of solidarity was cheered on lustily by Liz, who was constantly exhorting us to keep a toe stuck in the doors we had pried open so women coming after us would have an easier way in.

It is that sense of sisterly solidarity that Liz worried younger women are losing. She worried that if they don't understand how hard fought were the battles to get them into the rooms of power, how could they be expected to stay vigilant on behalf of other women? She worried that our daughters would have to fight all the same battles again and again.

Liz understood power. Hell, she worked with LBJ, the politician who understood power better than anyone -- and Liz would regularly face LBJ down in arguments. She would go head to head with him, giving as good as she got. He adored her.

Liz understood that power is a neutral thing that can be used for good or for ill. She understood that reserving power into the hands of less than half the population is not healthy for any people or nation. She knew that any nation that refuses to use the resources that reside in its women and girls will never thrive.

Liz understood the interlocking nature of oppressions -- we can't fight sexism without fighting racism, and we can't fight heterosexism without fighting sexism and racism.

In her early 70s she took on the raising of the three youngest children of her brother Tom Sutherland, who had died of cancer. When the mother of the children, who ranged from 11 to 16, and their older siblings were unable to look after them, Liz took charge.

Her 1994 book “Unplanned Parenthood: The Confessions of a Seventy-something Surrogate Mother,” is a hilarious and deeply touching account of that time in her life. But the things she learned from those teenagers honed her insights and kept her keenly attuned to changes in our our culture.

Liz never "retired." She was engaged down to her toes every minute of her life.

I know we are supposed to say, "rest in peace," but I think that would bore Liz to tears. So I'll just say, "Give them all my love when you see them."

I am going to miss her for a long long time.

Reflections on Executive Council

2010-02-25T10:04:00.004-06:00

Here are some reflections on the recent Executive Council meeting in Omaha.

On communications:
I was asked at my first EC meeting last fall in Memphis to head up a sub-committee of the Executive Council Joint Standing Committee on Governance and Administration for Mission [GAM] to respond to a letter to the Council from the Episcopal Life Board of Governors.

That letter explained that the Board of Governors was created by Executive Council in 1990 and that "the need was seen then, and we believe continues now, for independent oversight of the news operation of The Episcopal Church. We believe that such oversight helps protect and ensure the credibility, power and authority of The Episcopal Church’s media. The board also works as a conduit and sounding board for story ideas, suggestions and observations from members of The Episcopal Church. We do so being guided by the principle that the news operation of The Episcopal Church affects and belongs to the whole Church."

The letter asked Executive Council to designate a member of Council as a liaison with the Board of Governors and to fund one face-to-face meeting per year of the board.

Underlying all of this, of course, was the tension that remained in the aftermath of the decision to cease publication of Episcopal Life and the still-resonating pain of staff reductions at the Church Center, especially those that affected the communications staff; and issues about news coverage at General Convention and afterward.

Before I left Memphis I met with Anne Rudig, director of communications at the Church Center, and with Chief Operating Officer Linda Watt. Then I met in a face to face meeting with the Board of Governors and Anne Rudig in Chicago on Nov. 17 at the Episcopal Church Center, Diocese of Chicago. I was very impressed by the frankness with which everyone spoke and of the clear desire of everyone in the room to find a way forward.

As often happens when people of good will get together in the same room, several misunderstandings were cleared up and large areas of common ground were uncovered.

I wrote a draft report of that meeting and circulated it to everyone who had been in the room for their comments, corrections, and suggestions, which were then incorporated into a second draft. That was then circulated to all the same people again, and to the other two members of my sub-committee, and everyone’s final comments and suggestions were incorporated.

So it is accurate to say that the report we presented to GAM represented a consensus among this group. That report described the many areas of consensus and made several recommendations, chief among them being that the Executive Council continue the existence of this body because "the need for a vital robust news organization that does tell our story is more important than ever. It is time to extend the board’s mandate to reflect these changed circumstances – including the expanded nature of the news operation and the rapidly changing means of delivering that news including online as well as offline news gathering and dissemination."

Agreement also was reached about how the board and the staff might best work together, using regular conference calls between the Communications staff and the board "working off a co-created agenda to insure a timely exchange of information and feedback."

Two of these conference calls already have happened.

We recommended revising the mandate of the board to reflect the changed circumstances since its establishment in 1990, including changing the name to more accurately reflect the role of the group.

[In this process, several names were suggested. GAM members thought Episcopal News Service Advisory Committee best reflected the role of the group. Arguing over the name was not a ditch I was willing to die in.]

The discussion among GAM members also brought up the need to bring the group into compliance with changes in the bylaws of Executive Council and to bring clarity to the oversight and administration of the group's budget, which formerly had been part of the communications department's budget. We also wanted to respond to the board's request for clear lines of communication with the Executive Council and to make clear this group's mandate dealt with the news gathering and distribution areas of the Office of Communications, and not with its public affairs division.

We were unable to meet their request for money for a face-to-face meeting, but now that we have clarity on where their budget should be and on communication with the Council, I remain hopeful we can find some funds in 2011 and/or 2012.

After more consultation on Saturday with Sharon Tillman, president of the board, and with Anne Rudig, this resolution was crafted and passed by Council:
---------------------------
Resolved, That the Executive Council, meeting in Omaha, Nebraska from February 19-22, 2010, directs that the name of the Board of Governors of Episcopal Life be changed to Episcopal News Service Advisory Committee, and be it further

Resolved, that this committee of Executive Council will be comprised of members appointed for six year staggered terms from each of the nine provinces by the respective provincial governing body and up to three at-large members will be appointed by the presiding officers to enhance diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, expertise, language, sexual orientation; and be it further

Resolved, that its mandate shall be revised to read: “This advisory council shall consult and advise on news gathering, distribution and publishing efforts and ventures of the communications staff at the Church Center engaged in news gathering and dissemination with the goal of insuring that all publication[s] regardless of the means of dissemination effectively serve the needs of the church at all levels, i.e., national, diocesan, parish -- to keep the voice of the whole church in a prominent place in the operation of any news gathering entity of the Church” and be it further

Resolved, that the committee shall report annually to the Executive Council through its Joint Standing Committee on Governance and Administration for Mission, and provincial members shall maintain regular communication with their respective provinces, and be it further

Resolved, that this committee and its budget will be overseen and administered by the General Convention Office.

-----------------------------

All the current members of the board remain in place as do their terms of office. A copy of the final resolution was emailed to Tillman as soon as it passed and she shared it with the rest of the board members. I also participated in their conference call on Tuesday to answer any questions. Members of the Communications Office were on that call.

*******

Other issues that struck me included the helpful [and moving] report of the efforts of Episcopal Relief and Development in Haiti. But I also was struck by the report of the work of ER-D in the wake of the massive winter storms that have left the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation without power or water or heat for more than a month now. What's worse, the power company is telling the community that it may be six months before power is restored.

Council member Terry Starr spoke very movingly of the situation. One example he gave of the cascading effects of the ice storm is the story of several families who moved into one trailer because it had a wood-burning stove. The trailer caught fire and while everyone got out unharmed, they lost all their possessions and are once again homeless.

The Episcopal Bishop of South Dakota, John Tarrant asked for and got relief funds from Episcopal Relief and Development, and Valentine's Day was set for a special collection to help the 30,000 Sioux in an area the size of Connecticut. But Episcopalians cannot do this alone. This situation calls for state and federal efforts.

According to Episcopal News Service, Tribal Chairman Joe Brings Plenty, said they lost 3,000 power poles and the reservation water system.

News reports say that the South Dakota National Guard, the state Department of Public Safety, and the Army Corps of Engineers have supplied some emergency generators. But according to the release, food, medical supplies and additional generators are needed.The tribe's one and only grocery store lost all perishables. Dialysis patients are also being evacuated three hours away to Rapid City.

This story has been almost completely under the "compassion radar." With the except of MSNBC's Keith Olberman, who is now raising funds at MSNBC for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Storm Relief - Emergency Assistance Fund -- the national media have pretty much ignored this story.

This is a part of the larger story of the sorry state of our nation's infrastructure, but I can't help but think that if this had happened in an affluent less isolated place to a bunch of suburban families that the story would be all over the news and the power poles and lines would have been fixed long ago.

I plan to do what I can to raise awareness of this issue and I hope all of you will join me and the rest of Executive Council in this effort.

What Simon Says

2010-02-04T18:45:00.003-06:00

My friend Simon Sarmiento over at Thinking Anglicans has done some excellent work rebutting the MANY misrepresentations "relating to The Episcopal Church in General Synod paper GS 1764A, a briefing paper for a Private Members’ Motion dealing with the relationship between the Church of England and the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA)."

This is the latest maneuver by the schismatics to get themselves recognized as Anglicans. PLEASE go read what Simon says.

Trust Women

2010-02-03T19:00:00.002-06:00

Planned Parenthood can't afford the million bucks it takes to buy airtime during the Super Bowl, but it has created its own video response to the Tim Tebow ad with former Olympic gold medalist Al Joyner and Minnesota Vikings running back Sean James.

Trust women. What a radical idea.

Pass this along.

Which kind of religious messages get TV airtime?

2010-02-02T19:57:00.003-06:00

This week's Texas Faith question in the Dallas Morning News dealt with the Super Bowl ad of Tim Tebow.

Here's the question:

University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, a Heisman winner, has prepared an ad that CBS has said it will run during the Super Bowl. Supported by groups like Focus on the Family, Tebow’s ad will tell the story of how his mother decided to give birth to him despite medical complications that were severe enough that doctors recommended against it. Serving as a missionary abroad at the time, she returned home and went ahead and gave birth to him.

Some organizations, including the National Organization for Women, want CBS to pull the ad. They claim introducing the subject of abortion is political advocacy and doesn’t belong in a Super Bowl telecast.

Here is the question for the week:

Should CBS pull the ad? Or keep it? Please explain your position.
--------------------------------
Here's my response as a member of the Texas Faith panel:

The question should be asked more precisely -- which religious viewpoints are to be allowed onto the nation’s airwaves?

Case in point, the 2004 ad called "Bouncer" that the United Church of Christ wanted to run on CBS. You can see it at here.

Two burly bouncers stand in front of a church door, deciding who gets to go in and who does not. They stop a gay couple, but let a straight family in. They stop handicapped people, but let able bodied people in. They stop minorities, but let white people in. The words "Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we." come onscreen. Over an image of a happy diverse group of people, a narrator then says, "The United Church of Christ. No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here."

CBS rejected the ad as "too controversial," saying it advocated same-sex marriage. The UCC protested that the point of the ad was to demonstrate that everyone, including LGBT folk, should be welcome in church. Another similar UCC ad, "Ejector," also was rejected by the networks and their cable networks in 2005.

So having banned an ad by a progressive Christian denomination as ”too controversial,” CBS now is allowing an ad supported by conservative religious organizations prime air time before a huge Super Bowl audience.

CBS is not alone in this prejudice against progressive Christians. In early 2005, the UCC tried to buy time on the ABC network, only to be told that ABC did not accept any religious advertising. One month later, Focus on the Family was allowed to buy prime time advertising on ABC's SuperNanny show.

So apparently if the message of a “religious” ad is a conservative one, it is acceptable. But what if Tim Tebow's message was to tell men and boys that women and girls are as much made in the image of God as are men; that it is never acceptable to treat women solely as relief valves for a male's sexual needs; that women should have complete control over their reproductive decisions so that if his mother had decided to terminate, that decision should be as respected as is her decision to carry the pregnancy to term?

After all, Tim Tebow will never have to make a decision about whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. But he, like most male sports stars, will most likely face a decision about having sex with women lured by his sports celebrity. How refreshing it would have been to hear him reflect on how men should handle such decisions responsibly, instead of putting out an anti-choice message that once again lays the entire burden of unplanned pregnancies on women.

I suspect such an ad would never see the light of day on a network. It would challenge way too many of the macho patriarchal ideas that still rule our nation's airwaves, airwaves that, in theory at least, belong to all the people.

Is religion a factor in oppressing women?

2010-01-20T10:05:00.003-06:00

Here is this week's Texas Faith question in the Dallas Morning News and my response as a member of the Texas Faith panel.
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The question:
Nelson Mandela has formed a group called The Elders to address causes of suffering around the globe. One area that the council, which includes such members as Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu and Aung San Suu Kyi , has been looking at is whether religions oppress women.

In responding to this new organization, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently observed that:
Paradoxically, the churches in Africa that have done the most to empower women have been conservative ones led by evangelicals and especially Pentecostals. In particular, Pentecostals encourage women to take leadership roles, and for many women this is the first time they have been trusted with authority and found their opinions respected. In rural Africa, Pentecostal churches are becoming a significant force to emancipate women.

This week’s question is two-fold:
Do you think religions are a factor in the oppression of women? If so, how? If not, please explain your view.
Also, is Kristof right? Are Pentecostals ahead of the pack in encouraging women to take leadership roles?

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My reaction on reading Kristof's column was, "Well, duh." But having a white male say this in the New York Times apparently makes it news.

Of course religions are a huge factor in the oppression of women, in fact, the major factor. Certainly the three Abrahamic faiths are. Feminist theologians have dealt with this for years. The recently deceased Mary Daly spent a career detailing the ways this is so and discussing the terrible consequences in the lives of women and girls.

Daly's statement, "When God is male then the male is god," perhaps explains it most simply. The insistence by the major world religions that God is masculine leaves women in the lurch. Men may be made in the image of God, but women? Not so much. It then becomes easy to name women as "the other," and once that happens, it is easy to justify all sort of mistreatment as "God's will."

If you trace the objections to women in leadership roles in religion back far enough, it invariably comes down to the fact that women are considered not quite as human as men. The Catholic Church spent decades debating whether or not women even had souls.

For centuries, men have claimed the spiritual realm while relegating women to the physical world. Having done that, men declared that women are "dangerous" to men's spiritual well-being because women are easily tempted -- all Eve's fault of course -- and thus in need of masculine control.

The fact that women bleed and do not die also frightened men, causing leaders of various religions to declare a menstruating woman as unclean and therefore, unworthy.

As to the Pentecostals? It is not hard to lead the pack in encouraging women to take leadership roles, since so few religions and denominations do so. Some progress is being made. For instance, The Episcopal Church started ordaining women in 1977, and now both its presiding bishop and the president of the House of Deputies are women. Lay and ordained women sit in both the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies and make up more than half the Executive Council, the body that governs the church between General Conventions. The presence of women in these leadership roles is changing the church, much to the dismay of those men who feel women have taken leadership roles to which they are entitled simply by virtue of their maleness.

Perhaps if a few more men begin to say what Kristof said, eventually the media might begin to pay attention to what women have been saying on the matter for decades. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

A belated Happy New Year

2010-01-11T18:27:00.017-06:00

Life has been busy, and I've been fighting a cold caught in October that became a sinus infection that became a bronchial infection that has hung on tenaciously, leaving me with limited energy.

A new round of antibiotics seems to be helping, so I'm hopeful I'll be back to normal soon -- or as close to normal as I ever get. One of the results of the lack of energy has been the neglect of this blog. I had all I could handle in trying to "do" Advent, get ready for Christmas, and also try to communicate all the good news coming out of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.

OK. Enough of the pity party, she said, coughing bravely. I'll try to catch up.

We are thawing out of what has been our part of the Big Freeze that has been sitting on most of the nation for what seems like forever. We haven't had it as bad as many parts of the nation, but for us, lows in the teens are rare. It's hard on our water pipes, on our gardens, on our crops and animals, and on humans, especially the poor, the homeless and the old.

We had an honest-to-goodness white Christmas -- I know, I know, my friends in Michigan, New York and Canada will laugh and call it a powdered sugar Christmas, but for us, two inches of snow is a LOT. And it lasted for more than two days!!!!!

These photos were taken about 10 AM on Christmas Eve morning and much more snow fell afterward.

The garden looked like it had been sprinkled with fairy dust or the aforementioned powdered sugar.

The Rose Window sculpture almost disappeared into the brush behind it.

The warrior woman -- our tribute to Owanah Anderson -- stood stoically on her pedestal with her whitened standards flying behind her.

This white maiden sheltered under the winter honeysuckle.

The walks were still clear but the snow was beginning to stick.

The Chapel Garden was turning into a White Garden.

The Chapel Garden Choir sang bravely on in spite of the snow.

Mary snuggled with John and Jesus.

Simon snuggled in the ficus tree's pot in the sun. He's the lump on the right. [DON'T tell him I said that.]

Mike snuggled in a chair in the Farm House.

Wiggles and Toby snuggled with each other.

And Daniella snuggled with her boys, Curran and Gavin.

Happy New Year to all of you, Beloveds.

Look this way!”

2009-12-06T18:43:00.010-06:00

My good friend Bruce Coggin has done it again, preached a sermon that knocked the socks off some folks who are pretty picky about their sermons. So I'm sharing it with you. Enjoy.
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A Sermon preached at St. Simon’s Church, Fort Worth, Texas, on Advent II 2009

As I don’t doubt you’ve been reminded a dozen times, each Advent the Church takes up anew her centuries-old task of telling the story of her Savior in her life of prayer, the year-long sequence of feast and fast between Advent I each year and Christ the King the next. I’ve heard it said that the first great feast of that cycle is Christmas, and sure enough the church’s canons say Episcopalians must celebrate the birth of Jesus or lose their “good standing” status. The canons don’t give us much advice on checking that all out, of course, but in any case Christmas is the first big milestone on the path of liturgical prayer each year.

Let’s not, however, forget Advent and its messages, something really easy to do when you live where people put up Christmas trees the day after Thanksgiving and plunge like lemmings into the annual orgy of belligerent acquisition that has become the way far too much of the world takes notice of the birth of that Jesus fellow. Advent reminds of the world without Jesus, before Jesus, no Jesus. Percolate that thought a little while. And in that realm we run into the figure who straddles the abyss between life without a savior and life with one: John the Baptist. Used to be, the Prayer Book gave us John the Baptist on Advent II and the Blessed Virgin on Advent III. But since They Changed Everything, we get the crusty, pungent fellow to deal with not just one Sunday but two. In a row. The Virgin can wait her turn!

JOHN THE BAPTIST – TITIAN 1487
Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice

If we can believe Luke, Jesus and John were cousins, close cousins though whether first or second or third-down-from-the-longest-and-strongest double half cousins twice removed can’t be established. John’s the babe that leapt in his mother Elizabeth’s womb when her youthful—and pregnant—kinswoman Mary came to visit her in the hill country—cooler, you see? John’s birth was not quite the bash Jesus’ turned out to be, but his Old Pap Zechariah did brast forth with a hymn of thanksgiving for the boy’s birth that enriches our prayer life today as the beloved canticle Benedictus Dominus Deus (Luke 1:68-79).

By the time we run onto John again, he’s about thirty and making a world of trouble, gone into the freelance propheting business—Israel’s always worked alive with them—running around just outside the city limits, gathering crowds, and telling them: “Hey! HEY!! Looka here! Thissaway! Turn around. Repent. Come be baptized to show your sins are forgiven. And look out, because the Kingdom of God is just blowin’ in all over the place!” Well, that’s what he said. Look it up. And he was not socially acceptable. I mean, he ate bugs and wore animal skins. My friend Owanah and I were looking at paintings of him, and about one she asked, “What’s that little critter he’s feeding?” I had to say, “He ain’t feedin’ it. He’s wearin’ it.” That’s the fellow who gets to be the first one to show Jesus to the rest of the world. God’s thoughts are not ours.

A couple of things before we go any farther. The way we use the word repent it means feeling very sorry for something you just got caught doing. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as it goes, but that’s only a minor subset of what the word actually means. The Aramaic word shuv that John used means turn smooth around and go the other way. Look the other way. The other way. Another way. John was asking people to forget all the superstructure of their religion, all the gesture and rite, all the sin counting, all the hope that God would soon ride in on a tall, mean horse and vindicate them. “Forget all about that,” he said. “Shuv! Turn around. Look the other way. Look this way!”

Second, some folks think John’s the one who invented baptism, which is not even nearly so. The Greek word we get baptism from just means washing, and the Jews were big on washing up before they went to church. Remember: ours is a desert born religion, and they don’t have lotsa water in the desert. The act of washing, part of the old holiness code, was in its origins very expensive, using up some of the rarest and most precious stuff they had, a real sacrifice. By the time John comes along, of course, the Jerusalem religious establishment has all the water it needs, but they were still big on washing, baptism. Solomon had a vast basin of water, a kind of Holy Cistern, installed in the temple precincts to get the smelly masses scrubbed up. John didn’t invent baptism, but he did use baptism as a sign of the forgiveness of sins. That was new.

Now, we customarily say John was the last of the Jewish prophets, though our Jewish and Muslim confreres don’t agree. Today you heard readings from two other Old Testament prophets, one from Baruch, another from Isaiah quoted by John, and both those messages were about return and restoration, the children of Israel coming home from somewhere, coming back to Jerusalem, and so magnificent is that homecoming that the hills fall down flat so God’s Israel can just stroll home on level ground. No rough places. Smooth sailing all the way. Now, the fact is that both Baruch and Isaiah were talking about something quite specific: after decades of captivity in Babylon, the descendants of the first captives were coming back to Jerusalem. The King of Persia was paying their way home on first class tickets, and when they got there they had permission to rebuild their temple and go right back to the religion his royal predecessors had tried to blot from the face of the earth. And so the prophets at the time, watching and waiting and wondering, burst forth in exultant hymns of rejoicing and triumph. We’re going home! And when we get home, we’re going to rebuild the church house and start praying, and then everything will be just hunky dory. Since they were, in their opinion, the only people on the planet God cared about, they’d soon show the world How These Things Are Done!

Of course, that didn’t happen. Things went from bad to worse. First this, then that, then the next invader conquered Palestine—Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Romans. Take a number. By the time John shows up four centuries later, their religion has descended into a murky guilt management system which promised them that wunna these days, by golly, God’s gonna take a hand and kick out all our oppressors and then we’ll show ‘em How These Things Are Done. No progress.

Now, if things were so bad off when John gets the preaching bug, what on earth was he talking about? What specific incident prompted him to stand up and say, “Looka here! Your sins are forgiven. The Kingdom of Heaven is bustin’ out all over!” His predecessor prophets had the Persian king’s amnesty to fuel their hope, but what on earth was John looking at? What drove him nutty, so nutty he risked his life with a bunch of foolishness about the Kingdom of God? It’s for sure nothing was happening in history that could have encouraged him. The only conclusion I can draw is he was looking at the same thing you and I have been looking at for some time now: Jesus. I mean, the minute he got people looking his way and splashing in the Jordan and hoping for the Kingdom, the first thing he did was point away from himself and point at Jesus: “There he is. He’s the one. That’s the lamb of God. Listen to him.” For the life of me, I can’t imagine anything else that prompted him but Jesus—and I mean Jesus first-hand.

When I try to figure out John’s motivation, I can’t help recalling the cousins story. I mean, John had to know Jesus, had to know everything you and I know about Jesus and just a whole lot more. He had to know that Jesus was really really different, really really onto something that would change history, would surely change the way people think and pray and live about and with God. All the sweetness and meekness and kindness and irresistible love, to say nothing of the Stand Up Guy Jesus who took on the most powerful people in his world without hesitation, John had to know about, had been drawn to, had talked and prayed and argued with. That’s what young people do, especially earnest young people working out the way they live with God. And years of such spiritual ‘rassling with Jesus had convinced John that . . . well . . . what he said: “There he is. Jesus. He’s the one. Listen to him.”

So, what do you guess it was John saw in Jesus that turned him around. What do you see in Jesus that keeps you turned around? A lot the same things, I figure, though I also figure that Jesus has shown each of you things about himself he hasn’t shown anybody else. I mean, that’s the way God counts, isn’t it? One. One. One. One. Each of us has seen things in Jesus that turned us around, keep us turned around, and those things must be pretty special. What do you suppose?

It’s not as if the world knew nothing about God before Jesus or as if God somehow pupated into something new that Jesus came to announce. It’s not God that needed changing. The Jews knew a lot about God, in fact. Among other things they knew God is the source of life, powerful beyond conceiving, righteous—which means, in the struggle between what we call good and evil (a far more complicated matter than right and wrong, since those change) God’s on the side of good—and that God’s on the prowl, immanent, busy among us, cares about us. The Jews knew all that. And that’s a lot. What did Jesus add to that for John? For you?

I think Jesus sorta kinda re-draws the picture of God and does that just by being himself, who he is. We believe Jesus is God incarnate, that God loves us so much that he became one of us—which is scandalous to many—and that when we look at Jesus we see God whole, all of God. And who, what is God? God is love. That’s a word that’ll slip out from under ya if you’re not careful, but let’s specify at least one critical aspect of God’s being that Jesus announced, lived, was: self-sacrificing love, self-denying love, self-abnegating love. You first love. Me last love. The kind that even the Baptist embodied when he said of his cuz, “That’s the one. I’m nobody. I will vanish. He’s first. I’m not worth taking his dirty shoes out to clean.” The kind of love that in simple terms says “You first” in a busy store and says, “Here, y’all kill me and leave them alone” in more challenging moments. Now, that was new. Isaiah talked of the Suffering Servant; Jesus was that love. That’s one.

Another, I reckon, was the revelation that the way God wants us to serve him is not chopping up livestock on an altar but rather going to the little, the lonely, the lost, the least of “these my brethren,” and giving them the shirts off our backs. Literally. That’s new. Amos warned about mistreating the helpless; Jesus was one of them, lived with them, sought their company.

And another. With the baptism John preached, Jesus shows us that God is not mad at us, indeed that God loves us so much that he’s somehow overcome, forgiven, all the weakness and foolishness and wickedness and sloth we slosh around in most of the time. John’s baptism was not a trick, not something to do so God would do something else. Baptism, Christian baptism, is not the way we elicit a Pavlovian response from God: “Okay, God? Watchin? We’ve got one, right here, about to dunk him. You watchin? Gonna wipe away them sins?” We don’t baptize to get God to do something; we baptize because God has already done something. And that was new. Even more amazing was Jesus’ promise that when we live baptized, forgiven lives and clothe ourselves in that self-sacrificing love that feeds hungry people and loves people who aren’t worth shooting, why, when we do that Jesus binds us to himself and promises that where he is we will be. With him. Forever. Jesus is a walking RSVP invitation to life in the Kingdom of God. Mercy. Is it any surprise John had to tell somebody?

So this Advent, let’s ponder the Baptist a little, and let’s give thanks for his knowledge of Jesus, for the love that made him say, “Not me. That one.” And let’s thank God for the forerunners who showed Jesus to us. Your walk with the Lord may have started at your grandmother’s knee; it may have started in a brawl in a saloon; it happens all over the place, all the time, right this red hot minute. There is a world not forty yards from where you’re sitting that knows very little about Jesus, lives in a boiling kettle of anger and fear and frustration and violence, and does that world ever need somebody to point it to Jesus.

This Advent ask St. John to fill you with his excitement, fill you so full you can’t keep quiet about it. Hope for the day when you can be the smelly ol’ hide-clad, bug eating weirdo who shows Jesus to someone worse off than you are. Maybe you’ve already had that blessed chance. If you have, do it again. And if you haven’t, as the Advent prayers teach us, be alert, be aware, keep your eyes open. Some day, somewhere, you’ll be the one whose turn it is to shout, “Hey! Looka here! You’ve got options. Forget all you’ve heard about how bad you are. Your sins are forgiven. And look at that one, Jesus, the Lamb of God. He’s the one. Listen to him!”

The Archbishop issues a threat

2009-12-06T17:02:00.006-06:00

I never imagined the Archbishop of Canterbury would remind me of my grandson, but then I never imagined the Archbishop of Canterbury would so cave in to threats that he would resort to them himself.

My grandson Gavin is five years old.

Like all young children, one of the biggest events of his young life is his birthday, or more specifically, his birthday party.

To his mind it is the grandest most excellent event one can imagine, and therefore, an invitation to this event is a prize beyond price.

Because we adults who adore Gavin are not idiots, we say “no” to him when he asks to do something that’s dangerous or inappropriate, or wants something of us we are not prepared to give to him.

As a result, Gavin sometimes gets really really really really really angry with us. When this happens, he pulls out his ultimate threat: “If you don’t do what I want, I won’t love you anymore and I won’t invite you to my birthday party! So there!”

Which brings me to Williams’ statement about the historic election of the Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool as bishop suffragan of the diocese. [Glasspool’s election was preceded by another historic election, that of the first woman bishop suffragan in the diocese, the Rev. Canon Diane Jardine Bruce.]

If you have somehow missed this fact, in addition to being a superbly qualified candidate for bishop, Glasspool is also honest and open about the fact that she’s been living in a committed relationship with her partner Becki Sander for 22 years.

Here’s what Williams wrote:

“The election of Mary Glasspool by the Diocese of Los Angeles as suffragan bishop elect raises very serious questions not just for the Episcopal Church and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole.

“The process of selection however is only part complete. The election has to be confirmed, or could be rejected, by diocesan bishops and diocesan standing committees. That decision will have very important implications.

“The bishops of the Communion have collectively acknowledged that a period of gracious restraint in respect of actions which are contrary to the mind of the Communion is necessary if our bonds of mutual affection are to hold.”

Paraphrased this means, “if you don’t do what I want and refuse to consent to this election, I won’t love you anymore and I won’t invite you my Lambeth party.”

It’s a threat, folks, and interference in our polity that is breathtaking in its arrogance. What’s more, any “bonds of affection” that can only hold if bolstered by threats don’t have much to do with affection and a lot to do with bondage.

The Episcopal Church at General Convention made a very clear statement about where we are on the issue of human sexuality and priests and bishops in Resolution D024. We are committed to the Anglican Communion AND we are committed to following our canons.

So here’s some questions for the bishops and Standing Committees of the Episcopal Church:

Are we going to consent to the election of bishops based on the gifts they bring to the church, or are we going to consent to their election based on threats from bishops in other Provinces, including the Archbishop of Canterbury?

And if we give in to this threat in the guise of exercising "gracious restraint," what kind of communion will we find ourselves part of? And at what price?