The Images we Choose (Mid-week Message)

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

March 26, 2014

The Images We Choose

 

“A bud, a flower, a little child—these are the voices that speak to [us] of God; all that is glad, all that is beautiful, all that is trustful and loving, all that tells of tenderness and constant care—these are Christ’s chosen emblems of the Most High.”  

                  --Mark Guy Pearse, Come Break Your Fast

 

Jesus chose certain images to speak of God.  “The Reign of God is like a seed that sprouts and grows on its own” (Mark 4:24-26).  “The Reign of God belongs to people who are like little children” (Mark 10:14).   “Look at the lilies of the field and how God clothes them in splendor” (Luke 12:27).  These are all loving, tender images of the One who gives the blessings of rain and sunshine both to “good” people and “bad.” 

 

 The late Fred Phelps in a demonstration.

 

This last week saw the death of Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, most known for its “God Hates Fags” protests at military funerals throughout the country. His God was an angry Deity, vindictive, and full of wrath and hate for sinners, those who had not accepted Phelps’ particular brand of fundamentalist Protestantism, and, most particularly, gays.  Images he used were a consuming fire, a devastating plague, a condemning judge, and a conquering military warrior.  

The Bible has a whole lot of images about God, some good and some bad. Some, I think, were included by way of negative example, how not to think about God. 

 

It is important how we think about God, for how we think about God tends to color and form how we treat ourselves and others.  I’m with Jesus here: our basic image of God should be a loving parent and not a tyrannical king or harsh judge.  

 

Grace and peace,  Fr. Tony+

You Have No Bucket and the Well is Deep (Lent 3A)

 

You have no Bucket and the Well is Deep
Homily delivered the Third Sunday of Lent (Lent 3A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
23 March 2014; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings:  Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42; Psalm 95

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

I have learned from experience that when my wife Elena brings an issue to me, I need to listen to not just her words.   Like many, as a younger man I tended to be quite literal in how I understood what others said to me, and this got me into trouble time and again.   Tell me I had done something wrong, I’d ask exactly what and when, and start trying to explain why I did it, how I didn’t intend harm, and why it wasn’t important.  If her words bore a lot of emotion, my default position was to avoid that particular minefield at all cost.  I learned that I needed to listen both to what she was saying and to the feelings with which she spoke, and the depths beneath the surface meaning of the words. 

Instead of replying back to the surface language, I now find it better to try to plumb the depths of the expression right out.  I don’t always get this right, but I try to correct course as soon as I realize what’s up.  

The Gospel of John has several scenes that reveal Jesus’ true identity where people misunderstand him because they understand only the surface meaning of what he says.  In chapter 3, Nicodemus asks “How can a person enter back into the womb and be born again?” as he is standing before Jesus, the one who brings birth from on high. In chapter 5, the invalid at the Pool of Bethzatha complains, “I have no hope of being healed since have no one to put me in the water when the water is stirred up…,” while Jesus, the one who will heal him and make him whole, stands before him. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus offers to quench the thirst of a Samaritan woman. She replies pointedly, “And just how are your going to do that?  This well is deep and you, sir, you have no bucket or rope.” 

With Nicodemus, Jesus is talking about spiritual birth and the new life it brings.  With the invalid by the pool, Jesus is talking about the healing that he brings, not therapeutic magic from a spring’s sporadic bubbling attributed to angels.  With the woman at the well, Jesus is talking about spiritual sustenance, not a simple thirst quencher.

Jesus meets her at about noon, the hottest part of the day and least desirable for hauling water.  This suggests that the woman is a social outcast even within her community, the Samaritans.  The reason for this becomes clearer later in the story, when we discover that she has lived a remarkably immoral life, at least by the standards of her community. 

And her community, the Samaritans, are themselves as a group treated as social outcasts by Jesus’s community.  Most Galilean Jews felt compelled to go miles out of the way to travel to Jerusalem simply to avoid entering into Samaritan territory.   Many taught that Samaritan women were perpetually unclean, unlike Jewish women.
In Tyler Perry’s magnificent film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, the protagonist encounters a cousin she knew in her youth but has not seen for many years.  The cousin is in rough shape, strung out on heroin.  The woman asks her grandmother “What happened to her?” The reply? “Life happened to her! That’s what!”
Life has happened to the Samaritan Woman.  She is scarred by all this rejection and the hardness of her life, and is somewhat rough:  Jesus asks for some water and she immediately replies,  “You, a Jew, are asking me, a woman and a Samaritan for a drink?  Don’t you know that I am one of the unclean ones you shouldn’t speak to?”   This whole story is rife with group talk:  we Samaritans vs. you Jews, and we Jews vs. you Samaritans.  "Our ancestor Jacob gave us this well, you know!"  "Jerusalem vs. Samaria as worship centers."  Life has happened to this woman. 



No way she’s going to give this chummy stranger a drink. 

Jesus answers, “If you knew who I truly am, you would be asking me for a drink.” 
And this is where she misunderstands him.  “You have no bucket, and the well is deep. How are you going to draw water for me?”  She has heard Jesus’ words, but not their meaning.   Like Nicodemus and the invalid, she misses who Jesus is by being too literal. 

Literalism!  Some people today boast that they are good Christians because they, as opposed to others, “read the Bible “literally.”  I find this odd, given the fact that for the first 14 centuries of the Church, our best theologians and teachers consistently taught that the “literal meaning” of the Bible was its least important sense.   
Literalism!  Taking things ‘by the letter.’  Remember St. Paul said, “the letters kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:7).

There are many ways we let literalism get in the way of our faith and in the way of our love. 

How often do we use the words, “but you said,” trying to hold someone to a meaning of their words we had heard but they had not intended? 

How often do we let our literalism bring us to unreal expectations and disappointment in our faith?  “It says here that God will answer our prayers and give us what we ask in faith.  I prayed in good faith, and my loved one still died.”  “I prayed for healing and just got sicker.”  I prayed for protection for my family and my child killed himself.” 
And, on the other hand, how often do we let the literalism of our previous experience tell us that God cannot help us?  “The well is deep and you have no bucket.”  After all, miracles on occasion are known to occur, and prayers to be answered as we had hoped, though when and why is a mystery. 

When Jesus surprises the woman and tells her things he otherwise could not have known, she begins to see that perhaps there is mystery here, another meaning deep beneath the words Jesus has used.   As the spiritual sings it, “this man, this man, must be a prophet.” 
 
The living water he offers is not just a metaphor drawn from literal flowing water. Rather, it is the other way around:  the water he offers is the source of real, deep, and meaningful life and is what gives meaning to well water.  As he notes, “Drink from this well, and you will thirst again.  But the water I offer will become a spring welling up to unending life.  You will never be thirsty again.”   You don’t need a bucket for this living water.  He offers it whenever we stand at a deep well beyond our reach with no bucket.  He offers healing when no one is able to put us in the healing waters of the pool (physicians, counselors, care givers).  He offers new birth just when we seem most dead.  

The psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1966 famously described how the instruments we use affect how we see problems:  “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”   Much of our damaging literalism comes from a fearful desire for maintaining the illusion of control.  It prevents us from looking at things in a new light, and admitting mystery.

To be sure, we must not overlook literal meanings.  In conversations with loved ones, we ignore what they actually say at our peril, just as when we ignore the subtexts and feelings.  In scripture study, finding out what the author probably meant in writing a text is an important step in finding out what it means for us.  But we must not be slaves to the letter. 

Even though Jesus says we'll never be thirsty again, we do, in fact, experience “dry times.”   After the initial incandescent moment where we stand before the frightening and alluring mystery, where the veil between this world and the unseen one is transparently thin, where we see the meaning behind all and recognize it as the face of Jesus, we do come, from time to time, to a “thick place” instead of a thin one.

Such dry spots usually occur when we start worrying about not having a bucket for a deep well, when all our problems start looking like nails since we only have a hammer.   C.S. Lewis in his  ‘Screwtape Letters’  has the main character, the demon Screwtape, instruct his apprentice Wormwood as to why God sends us  “dry times.”  It is so that we learn to walk as free and equal partners with God.  It is to let us grow in our right practice of the will.  It is to help us actually deepen our relationship with God when the wellspring within us once again bubbles forth.

This week, I invite us each to try a spiritual practice intended to help us develop our imagination, be less literal, and overcome dryness.  Upon waking each morning, instead of hopping out of the sheets immediately, stay there.  Thank God for the new day, and then lying still take five minutes.  Imagine what the coming day will be like if God is present and fully in charge.  Let your imagination run wild through your day, and then bring it back to focus on a concrete task you must do this day to help God’s gracious Reign arrive.  

The fact is, Jesus meant it when he said we’d never go thirsty again.  The dry times, needed as they are, come to an end.  The spring indeed wells forth again with living water.  We see that our literalness was shallow and blind, and that we didn’t really need the bucket or the rope.  Once again we walk in the glorious light of a thin, thin place.  

Thanks be to God. 

Gun Violence (remarks before Ashland City Council)

March 18, 2014 Remarks to the Ashland, Oregon, City Council

As it considers proposals to require limiting access to guns by children

and a municipal ban on loaded weapons in public areas

By the Rev. Father Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland Oregon
As prepared

Thank you for the chance to address shortly some of the moral and spiritual aspects of the legislation before you.   I recognize and celebrate the wonderful breadth and variety of spiritual and ethical traditions we as a community enjoy here in Ashland and the Rogue Valley.  And I am a firm believer in the importance of a strong separation of Church and State in a democratic and free society.  I admit that as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I can address these questions only from the perspective of my tradition.  I hope, however, you might find them helpful as you consider these important issues. 

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori, on February 12, 2013 gave testimony to the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights on the issue of gun violence in the United States.  In part, she said,  “Far too many lives have been cut short or maimed by both random and targeted acts of gun violence.…    Each year, gun violence claims the lives of more than 3,000 children in the United States.  The victims of … these shootings are members of our families, … congregations, and communities, and we continue to grieve for the living as well as the dead..  …[T]he moment has arrived when our nation must come together to ask the difficult questions, and to discern what may be equally challenging answers, about how we can begin to break the cycles of violence…”  

The fact is—we are a violent society.  We glorify violence in our arts, have movies that tell stories of the good guys blowing the bad guys away, use armed force as a major component of our foreign policy, and proclaim it in our political memes.  And guns are an important part of this culture of violence.    

When the founders of this nation offered to the opponents of federalism an American “Bill of Rights” to help speed the state ratification of the Federal Constitution of 1789, it was in conscious imitation of the English Bill of Rights promulgated a century earlier by William and Mary:  a writ of freedoms that lays down limits on the powers of the sovereign, protected the rights and freedom of speech of the elected representatives of the people, including the right to petition the monarch without fear of retribution.  Most pertinent to our discussion here, the English Bill reestablished the liberty of Protestants to have arms for their defense within the rule of law, and condemned the deposed James II of England for “causing several good subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when papists were both armed and employed contrary to law.”   The American Bill of Rights included the “Right to Bear Arms” because “a well ordered militia” was essential to a democracy.

Our national political process is currently held hostage to an extremely small minority of gun manufacturers and merchants, and gun lovers, who believe that the Second Amendment Right is inviolable and absolute.  The corrupting influence of money and resulting political bullying has made it virtually impossible to enact reasonable and thoughtful controls and limitations on this national scourge.   Many today, and we have heard from some of them tonight, no longer see the right to arm oneself for self-protection as a contingent and bounded right that of necessity must be framed within the rule of law and regulation. 

At heart of the extreme fundamentalism of the guns right lobby lies the assumption that violence is the ultimate fixer.  Just as 17^th century English Protestants wanted guns to make sure they would never have to fear rule by Catholics or crypto-catholics again, and just as guns held by white night riders under cover of darkness and not the rule of law helped lynch oppressed people for two centuries in America, today’s Second Amendment fundamentalists really are interested in guns without controls because guns are lethal weapons.  They see them as giving them control and power over their own lives and those of others.  That’s why there is such a bullying and threatening tone in much of the discourse on this issue.   

I understand that there are strong feelings on this issue, and that others may differ from my perspective on this in good faith.   When such a belief is grounded in a faith that violence or threat of violence overcome the problems of this world and fixes what ails us and drives away what gives us fears, however, it is just plain wrong, and spells spiritual death.    God calls us to peace, and mutual love and service.  Jesus was an opponent of the Roman Imperial state, but an opponent who believed in non-violent resistance.  I do not believe that Jesus would think much of the boast of a Second Amendment fundamentalist about having to pry his guns from his “cold, dead, hands," even if that man once held back the waters of the Red Sea in an acting role as Moses.  Instead, Jesus says, “be wise as snakes, but harmless as doves.” 

But the founders also included in the Bill the Tenth Amendment, with its doctrine of reserved unenumerated powers:  “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  I believe that means that states and municipalities have the right to enact reasonable laws to frame and regulate our rights and enhance the safety and security of their people. 

I was raised in Eastern Washington, and love to hunt.  I understand the safe and appropriate use of firearms.  I support the Second Amendment when it is seen as part of a well-ordered rule of law.  But unless municipalities and states, and yes, the federal government, become willing to impose reasonable and moderate controls to fight this scourge and resist the siren call of the Second Amendment fundamentalists, I think the overwhelming majority of the American people will eventually become so revolted by the carnage of gun violence that they will rather simply abolish the Second Amendment than continue with the horrors that take place in its name.  And I believe that would be unfortunate.    Please vote for both of the proposed measures.  Thank you. 

Gao Brothers, Execution of Christ, 2009

Getting out of the Way (Mid-week Message)

 

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Getting out of the Way

March 12, 2014

 

Last Sunday, I preached on the problem of evil and the disjunction between God’s good ultimate and final intentions and our day-to-day life. 

 

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, wrote the following about God at work beneath and behind all our existence: 

 

“God is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of his final purpose and sometimes they resist. But if certain things came together in the world at this or that moment, the ‘flow’ would be easier and more direct. Perhaps a really intense prayer or a really holy life can open the world up that bit more to God’s purpose so that unexpected things happen. We’re never going to have a complete picture on how that works, because we don’t have God’s perspective on it all. But we can say that there are some things we can think, say or do that seem to give God that extra ‘freedom of manoeuvre’ in our universe. And whether we fully understand what’s going on or not, we know that it’s incumbent on us to do what we can to let this happen. We pray, we act in ways that have some chance of shaping a situation so that God can come more directly in. It isn’t a process we can manipulate; miracles aren’t magic, and we could never have a comprehensive manual of techniques for securing what we pray for. It would be very comforting if we knew the formula for success, but we don’t. All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God (to live ‘holy’ lives) in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through” (Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief; Louisville / London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007, p. 45). 

 

It is important to avoid “magical thinking” about God: that somehow he is out there and only has to be convinced to intervene and fix things for us.  God is not a wacky Great Uncle whose love we may milk, or Divine Bureaucrat whose approval we must curry.   God is beneath, behind, and under all things; in God, “we live and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).   Since God is love, only good intentions lie in the heart of God.  Much of the bad stuff in the world comes from our stubborn standing in the way of God achieving God’s gracious plans:  bullying, coldness, hatred, selfishness, thoughtless unkindness, turning a blind eye to need. 

 

We need to get out of the way.  God invites us at all times and in all places to conform to his kind plans, and go with the grain, the beautiful and good grain, that God has laid in the wood of creation.   

 

Lent is about listening and observing, and trying to discern where that grain is, and then identifying ways to more fully go with it.   If we do this, miracles just might happen. 

Knowing Good from Bad (Lent 1A)

“Knowing Good from Bad”

9 March 2014

Homily Delivered the First Sunday in Lent Year A

8 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11; Psalm 32

God, give us hearts to feel and love; take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

Three years ago this week, a powerful earthquake hit the Northeastern area of Japan, setting off a powerful tsunami that killed thousands of people and caused the greatest nuclear power plant disaster since Chernobyl, a critical environmental problem that is with us to this day.  Earlier that week, an earthquake devastated Christchurch New Zealand.  In our congregation in Beijing at the time were Japanese and New Zealanders from the affected regions, and as a group we were feeling a lot of faith challenging questions. 

Such horror is enough to make you wonder if faith or even optimism is justified.   It was after an earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 killed thousands of worshippers crammed into the Cathedral for All Saints’ Day services that the Enlightenment, and with it the modern world, lost confidence in a world guided by any kind of friendly providence.  Voltaire and Rousseau both argued if God were good, he could not be almighty, and if he were almighty, he could not be good.  This is the classic problem of theodicy: how can God exist with such irrational and random horror.  In the words of the infamously funny Australian subway public service video a few years ago, there are just “so many dumb ways to die.” 

At the Ash Wednesday Service earlier this week, we began Lent with the words, “remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return.”  Today, we began our Lenten Sunday worship with the Book of Common Prayer’s Great Litany.   “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and  flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine, Good Lord, deliver us.”   (TEC BCP, p.  149)  “…from dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us.” 

Today’s story from Genesis seeks to answer the question “Why do we have to die? Why is the world so screwed up?”  Does the bad we see in the world mean that God made it bad, or that God is part bad?”   We often misread the story. It is about ha’adam, Hebrew for “the Human Being,” or Every Man and Every Woman.  It is about each and every one of us.  Evil here comes into the world through a talking snake, the cleverest of all animals.  That detail alone should tell us that we are dealing with a folk story here.  The snake convinces Every Man and Woman to eat the one fruit—of all the wonderful fruit available—forbidden them, the fruit of knowing good from bad.   As a result, they are changed, become aware they are without clothes, and become ashamed.  There is a link between the snake’s cleverness, ‘arum, and the couple’s nakedness, ‘arummim.

The story tells the answer to these hard questions about evil and death:  “We don’t know why, and perhaps cannot know why, there is evil and death in the world.  It’s a mystery!  But one thing is sure—the evil we do and the evil we see do not come from God.”

The Book of Job makes the same point, as do many stories about Jesus in the Gospels.   Jesus’ healing the sick tells us that the ultimate purpose of God does not include disease, suffering, and death.   God doesn’t intend horror and disappointment for his creatures.   One of the key difficulties in theodicy is finding the appropriate connection between God’s ultimate good purposes and intention and what we experience in our actual lives. 

Elsewhere, Jesus was asked about people who suffer horrible things.  Once, a man born blind was pointed out to him:  “Was it his parents sin or his that caused this?”  “Neither,” he said.   Another time people came to him and said,  “Did you hear that the Romans massacred those countrymen of yours who were worshipping in the Temple?  Their own blood was mixed with that of the animals they were sacrificing!  What did they do that was so bad that God punished them this way?”  “They did nothing any worse than anyone else,” he replies, and continues,  “What about those people who died in the Tower of Siloam when it collapsed?  They were no worse than anyone else.”  “The lesson we should take here,” says Jesus, “is not that they were particularly bad, but that we all need to be better” (Luke 13:1-5).  

Jesus knew well that sometimes bad things happen to good people and that in this world the evil often prosper.  His death of the cross is the ultimate example of the righteous suffering unjustly.   But he trusted in God and the goodness of God nonetheless.   That’s why in Gethsemane, he asks if it is possible to have the cup pass from him.  But immediately he adds, “Your will, not mine, be done.”  It is this very openness to God that gets us out of the way, and helps bring the kingdom closer.  

The interesting point in the Genesis story is that knowing good from bad is seen as part of the package—recognizing nakedness only comes from already having partaken of the snake’s craftiness.  It is only when you can distinguish between the two that bad really begins to bother you.  For me this is one of the greatest evidence of the existence of God: if this horror-ridden world were all there were, why should we find that objectionable or wrong?  A fish in a bowl isn’t aware of the water.  It is only when deprived of water that it knows that something is seriously not as it should be.  We’re that fish out of water, gasping for God and good. 

That is the point of today’s Gospel reading.  Where we, Every Man and Every Woman, defect from God's purpose for us and sin, Jesus Christ in the desert, though completely one of us, overthrows the tempter’s power.  And this through complete openness to his Father. 

We often lose sight of this basic point in the story of the Fall of Humankind because of the historicized way many of us have come to read these stories, a process helped along by the rhetorical flourishes you can see in today’s reading in Paul.  But even there, note that Paul in today’s epistle says Adam passed sin to his descendants “because all have sinned” not “so that they all sin.”  In his classic phrasing of the doctrine of original sin, St. Augustine pushed it further by suggesting that this sin in our origins was a moral contamination transmitted through the very act that generates children, sex, which he associated with the symbol of eating the forbidden fruit in the Genesis story. 

In the Book of Genesis, however, there is no hint of such a demonization of human sexuality.  Genesis sees sexuality as part of God’s good creation, and seeks to counter its divinization in the fertility cults so abundant in the ancient near East. 

This story in Genesis does not teach that sexual sin corrupted our first parents and transmitted this to us all.  Instead, it tells a story where figures representing each one of us go astray.  And go astray we do.  Elsewhere Genesis teaches that the human heart, for whatever reasons, has a mysterious tendency to go astray and desire evil.  In the story of the Flood, we hear, “Yahweh saw that the wickedness of humankind was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (Gen 6:5)   Later Judaism develops the idea in this verse into the doctrine of the Yetser hara‘ “the inclination to evil,” the rabbis’ doctrine similar to Augustine’s Original Sin, but without blaming some human ancestor for one’s failings or disparaging sex and the body.

The greatest proof of the truth of the teaching of a “Fall of Humankind,” therefore, is not to be found in the archaeological or fossil record.  It is to be found by looking in the mirror. 

So much for how Genesis explains moral evil that comes from human choice.   What about natural horror, “nature red in tooth and claw,” or the great economies of waste and suffering seen in natural selection in the evolution of species?

Genesis hints that there is a lack of perfect conformity to God’s intention even in the natural world as God created it (without benefit, as it were, of a historical “Fall of Man”). In the Priestly account of creation in Genesis 1, for instance, not all the commands of God in creation are perfectly reflected in what immediately happens as a result, especially if you read this in the original Hebrew. Charles Foster writes:  

 

“‘Let light be,’ commands God; ‘Light be,” comes back the report.  This is not ham-fisted editing: whoever put this story together knew exactly what they were doing.  ‘Grass grass,’ God tells the earth.  But the earth does not.  It ‘puts forth’ grass.  The created order is slightly disobedient from the start.” Of the eight “let there be” orders in creation, only “Let there be light” is implemented exactly  (The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin [Hodder & Stoughton, 2009] pp. 132-33). 

The Priestly author only hints at this lack of conformity of the created world with God’s intentions.  He knows that God’s declaration that creation is good, when in the face of recalcitrant nature, presents us with mystery.  But the idea ties in with Augustine’s doctrine of what evil is.  For Augustine, evil is not a positive thing, but rather the absence of good.  And if God is all good, then the very act of creating something that is not-God implies that there will be gaps in the goodness of the created world.  That is how he accounts for the natural evil in the world.

But again, the very reason we feel that the world should be without natural evil, is that in fact we were created with an imprint in us of a God of love and beauty in which there is no harm, and no horror. 

William Pike, writing on the Haiti earthquake eight years ago, said that he had been reminded of the story of Elijah’s flight to Mount Horeb in 1 Kings 19, where God spoke to Elijah not out of an earthquake, whirlwind, or fire, but out of the whispering of the still breeze.  Pike remembers the words used in the passage—“The Lord was not in the earthquake.” 

God indeed is not in the earthquake, is not in the horror, not in the fire, nor the flood.  God is not in our misdoings and our failure to do the right thing.  All these show us how far the world is from God's ultimate intention, not God in action.   Rather, God is in the efforts of people trying to do the right thing.  God is in those who help the victims of such things, who reach out to others and show the grace and love of God written in their hearts.  “Why was that man born blind?” ask Jesus’ opponents.  “So I have the chance to help him and heal him,” is his reply. 

May we all this week continue in our prayers and searching to find such loving and repentant hearts. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.  

Fire we can Touch (Mid-week Message)

Fire we can Touch 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

March 7, 2014

 

Often in Chinese, the construction of the ideogram tells you how the idea represented is understood.  The Chinese character for “ashes” (above), pronounced huī, combines the symbol for a hand (the two lines on the upper and left hand margins of the character) with a smaller character for “fire.”  The idea is that ashes are “fire that can be handled.” 

 

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, and in our liturgy we heard a lot about dust and ashes as symbols of penitence and mortality.   It is important to remember that ashes are “fire we can touch.”   The ashes imposed are the remnants of last year’s Palm Sunday branches celebrating the Lord’s arrival in Jerusalem before his Passion.   The link with Holy Week is clear, and with it the link to Easter Sunday, and, at the end of the Great Fifty Days of Easter, the fire of Pentecost and the descent of the Holy Spirit.   So too can the reference “you are dust and to dust you shall return” be understood as acknowledgment that we are part of the great cosmic engine, the carbon and oxygen atoms of our makeup coming from the furnaces of exploding stars hundreds of millions of years ago, "stardust, billion-year old carbon" in the words of the song "Woodstock." 

 

Lent is the season where we take such great themes, take hold of them small, and put them to practical use:  connecting better with the Ineffable, the Perfect, the Beautiful, and Love Itself through acknowledging our limitations, failings, and impermanence.   Lent’s ashes are indeed fire we can handle. 

 

St. Columba of Iona wrote the following prayer about such fire: 

 

Kindle in our hearts, O God,

The flame of love that never ceases,

That it may burn in us, giving light to others. 

May we shine in your temple,

Set on fire with your eternal light,

Even your Son Jesus Christ,  

Our savior and redeemer. 

 

Grace and Peace,   Fr. Tony+

 

(Thanks to Mother Elyn MacInnis for the kernel of this thought, found in her book Character Reflections.)

 

You are Dust (Ash Wednesday)

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You are Dust

5 March 2014

Ash Wednesday

Homily preached at 12 noon and 7 p.m. Said Holy Eucharist

With Imposition of Ashes

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 103; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10;

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

God, give us hearts to feel and love. Take away our hearts of stone,

and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

The Church has traditionally prepared for the Great Feast of Easter by observing a period of fasting and penance lasting for 40 days, not counting Sundays, which are themselves festivals of the Resurrection.  It recalls Jesus' time of fasting in the wilderness preparing for his public ministry.  During the period, Christians reflect on where they fall short of God’s intention for them when He created them.  Through an enhanced program of spiritual discipline--usually including self-denial, more prayer, and confession and spiritual direction--we seek closer communion with God and amendment of life.   

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of this season of Lent.   On this day, we recite more complete forms of confession and litanies, and have priests impose ashes on our foreheads in the sign of the cross. 

The ashes are administered with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”   The words come from the story of the creation and defection of humanity represented in the characters Adam and Eve in Genesis 2-3.   They are the concluding words of the curse (or is it a blessing?) that God lays on human beings as a result of their defection from his intentions for them. 

It is important to remember that they are not a divine put down, a way of degrading us and telling us what little worms we are.  The context of the story is that God wants all good things for his creatures, and that it is we who have made it impossible for us to receive all of God’s blessings. 

The words also show up in the Burial Office, when the priest recites, while blessing the remains, “You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return.  For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return.’  All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.”  [Forgive me for quoting this during the 'Alleluia-free Zone' of Lent, but the point is really important, especially during Penitential seasons:  there is hope buried in sorrow because God is God.] 

This prayer in the Burial Office makes a contrast between the Immortal and perfect God and us, mortal,  flawed, and made of dust.

One of the readings for Morning Prayer this morning was Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.  The Pharisee goes to the Temple and prays all about himself—“Thank you, since I am so special, so much better than everyone else!”  This paragon of religion is all focused on himself, how good he is.  He thanks God only because things are so good for him.  It is all about him.  The Tax Collector, on the other hand, stands apart, without even lifting his eyes, and just prays, “Forgive me, a sinner.”  The focus here is only on God’s mercy, only on God.  The Tax Collector is not beating up on himself, just trying to tap into the Sea of Compassion, the Well-spring of Love.   It is not really about him at all, it is about God. 

Lent is all about God, and only secondarily about ourselves. 

It is not about beating up on ourselves and being drama queens about supposedly how rotten we are.  It is about looking at God’s beauty, God’s perfection, God’s simplicity, and God’s Deathless Life, and drawing from that vision hope for ourselves. 

We are dust.  But it is God who made us, out of very special dust, "star-dust, billion-year old carbon," the remnant of the explosions of stars early in the age of the universe.  And God is not yet finished with us. 

The Book of Common Prayer's Collect, or Prayer for the Day, for Ash Wednesday is as follows:

Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Collect provides succinctly the theology and belief that must lie behind any authentic practice of the Lenten Fast.   

Most of us, like T.S. Eliot in his poem "Ash Wednesday," find that we dare not hope to reform or change, dare not hope to be the unusual old dog who can learn a new trick: 

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

But as the Collect says clearly, our hope for amendment, our hope for closer communion with God, our hope for hope itself lies here:  God does not hate anything that He has made.  Dust we may be, but it is God who made it and who made us.  No matter how far we are from what God intends, no matter how much we have distorted the image of God that God placed in us in creating us, no matter how twisted we have become and what bad use we have put to God's gifts, God forgives and heals. 

But this grace can be accepted by us only if we are sorry for our misdoings, and the start of such sorrow lies sometimes merely in only being desirous of being sorry for our misdoings.   This provides God something He can grab onto as he struggles with us, works with us, forgives us, and heals us.

The journey we set out on in Lent is a path on which we let that desire work in our hearts and become sorrow for our misdoings.   We let the silly disciplines we impose on ourselves ("no meat," "no alcohol," "no sweets,") make us uncomfortable enough that we pay more attention to things we usually like to avert our attention from.

As the Collect reminds us, it is God who does the real work in Lent-- He creates in us new hearts able to feel sadness at our failings (that's what contrition means).  It is God who makes us able to have the right feelings about our failings ("worthily lamenting our sins"). 

As we begin this journey, let us take to heart those words “You are dust and to dust you shall return” and in our hearts know that God is not yet finished with us.  God not only made us once, whether long ago in evolution or at our own conception, but God is still at work on us.   That is why even at the grave we can sing a song of praise. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.