Saying Goodbye

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"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!