Deep Joy (MId-week Message)

Deep Joy

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 27, 2020

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”

― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

We have been seeing the ragged effects of our long quarantine and physical distancing: frustration at those who have a different sense of risk and comfort than we; blame and mutual reproach to whose life narratives—at odds with ours—lead them to react differently than we; a desire to simply make it all go away through force of will, no matter how silly.  And anger:  a lot of anger. 

Such feelings contrast starkly with my memories of a former mentor and spiritual director of mine:  a Buddhist nun in a small temple in the mountains north of Taipei Taiwan.  She was joyous.  I can’t think of a time when I did not see her smiling.  She clearly said and expressed her beliefs and opinions, but there was never a whiff of anger or resentment in her.  All she did was done with joy, gratitude, and empathy for others, especially those who disagreed with her. 

We are called to be Jesus’ disciples.  That means following him, and emulating him.  He had his enemies, to be sure.  And he said that in following him, we would have enemies also.  But he taught clearly: love your enemies.  It is clear that on rare occasion Jesus got angry or impatient with those who used religion as a means of oppressing others, spelling out in no uncertain terms where he thought they had gone astray.  But when I think of Jesus, I think of him with that gentle smile of deep joy of my Buddhist master, not with the condemning grimace of partisan purity found on the face, say, of a Franklin Graham or a Pat Robertson. 

We often think that following Jesus means conforming to outward rules or higher principles, following his “commandments” and keeping his “ways.”   But if this is mere outward conformity of actions or inward thought-policing,  it misses the heart of the matter. 

Jesus invites us into metanoia, often translated as “repentance,” but better understood as “a change of the mind” or “a turning of the heart.”  Jesus invites us to close relationship with God, who in his mind was not a warring potentate or dour judge, but rather an intimate and loving parent.    Gratitude should be our default.  Gratitude drives out fear, alienation, and contempt.  It encourages empathy and forgiveness.  That is why he asks us to pray “forgive us our debts as we forgive the debts owed us.” 

The fruits of the spirit according to Galatians are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (5:22).   If we think we are being touched by the spirit or spoken to by God, but what we get is anger, resentment, fear, and contention, we are probably mistaken.  Joy and peace are what the spirit give, what God inspires in our hearts, not partisan posturing or manipulation of others so that they give us what we want in a constant struggle for dominance of submission. 

Perhaps as a check on ourselves and the lies we tell ourselves, we should ask ourselves, throughout the day, “Am I smiling?”  “Am I trying to understand this person so different from me?”  “Am I thankful?”  When angry, we should ask, “What is it about me that makes me react in this way? What fears and insecurities?”  and not “why can’t that creep over there just change?” 

Note:  We are awaiting final approval from our Bishop for our plan to have limited face-to-face (F2F) attendance in the Church at Sunday service, hopefully starting this Sunday (Pentecost).  This is an occasion of great joy for me, despite the much work and stress involved.  Since most of our parishioners are in the at-risk age groups, we will continue having live-streaming of services: https://www.facebook.com/TrinityAshland/ .   Stay tuned in the next couple of days as we put out how this is going to work.  Initial F2F attendance will be limited to 20 plus ministers and musicians, and all will have to keep 2 meters physical distance from others and cover their faces.  F2F attendance, given the limited numbers, will be by invitation.  If you want an invitation, send an email to office@trinitychurchashland.org or leave us a note at the office.   Tomorrow's Thursday Noon Prayers will be by zoom, though we may be going to F2F meeting again in the near future. 

Take joy, take peace.  And remember to smile. 

Fr. Tony+

Power From on High (Easter 7A)

Hans Süss von Kulmbach, The Ascension of Christ, 1513 

“Power from On High”
Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year A)

 May 24, 2020
Homily given at 10 a.m. live-streamed

Ante-Communion and Benediction
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 
a recording of this service 

 Acts 1:6-14; 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11; John 17:1-11; Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36

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

Thursday was Ascension, the feast commemorating when the resurrected Jesus left the disciples, going into heaven to be seated at the right hand of the Father.  The Book of Acts places it after the 40 day ministry of the resurrected Lord and ten days before Pentecost, which we celebrate next Sunday.  In chapter 24 of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus on the evening of the day of his resurrection says this:  “Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in [my] name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.  And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

The 10 day period between Ascension and Pentecost is the archetypical time of waiting in Scripture:  “Stay where you are, shelter in place, until power comes from on high. Be patient!  Power will come!”  

There has been a lot of discussion in the last week about “reopening” churches.  But let’s be clear—the Church never shut down.  We merely limited access to the buildings as a public health measure, in a desire to do unto others as we would have them do for us, and to protect the health and safety of our most vulnerable members.  As we and the Bishop develop considered and cautious plans to gradually make the buildings available again—safely, and without undue risk—we must be patient. 

The whole issue has raised questions about what the Church actually is, and what its relationship to the larger world is.   As in many other areas of this pandemic, marginal behavior and thinking that barely got us by before seem to have been blown apart.  I offer here a few comments about what church is. 

1) Church is not the buildings or access to them.  The Church has remained active throughout all this, if anything, at enhanced levels of pastoral care and interconnection.   I have wondered in the last weeks why some people who rarely join with us under normal circumstances are so over-wrought at the prospect of the Church buildings being closed.  I think that we often coast along with the impression of community and intimacy physical gathering gives us.  We see people we barely know, ask a few niceties, and think that we have connected in a deep way.  Note: the people who have been most active in reaching out by phone, mail, or electronic means are the ones who have felt the least forlorn and isolated. 

2) Church is not a refuge from the world, where the most important thing is how we interiorly feel about matters.   N.T. Wright notes that the Church is a bridgehead into the occupied territory that is the world:  when it is being church best, it is an ensign, a signal, and an overwhelming force for breaking down the bad in the world and boosting the good.  It is not just a sign of the in-breaking of the Reign of God Jesus proclaimed, it is this in-breaking’s embodiment.  In traditional theology, this is the Church Militant, the Church carrying out Jesus’ call to make disciples of all people. 

3) Church is not just those we see and touch; nor is it just those who show up and park themselves in the pews.  The Church includes the blessed dead.  Deacon Meredith and I have been impressed again and again in the last weeks, as we recite, read, and preach in front of the little red camera light, that the empty pews are actually full of the unseen, not just the digitally present, but also beloved sisters and brothers we have known in this place who have since died and gone on to glory.  In traditional theology, this is the Church Triumphant.
 
4) The Church is not a social club, or a voluntary association of like interests.  One of the most unfortunate effects of modernity has been a reduction of faith and religion in most peoples’ minds to merely what you do in your private time.  On the one side, faith has become something not worthy of the public sphere; on the other, it has been reduced to sloganeering and emotion-mongering for some in the public sphere to manipulate others and boost their tribe.  As much as on-line services encourage the feeling that we are not a congregation but an audience, not the body of Christ in the World, but just an on-line gathering of quirky like-minded people who pursue a shared arcane hobby, this is not Church.  But Church is the united prayer, mutual loving service, and the common hope of followers of Jesus, whether we remain physically separated or not.    This is the Mystical Church, the Servant Church, the Body of Christ. 

Just as those disciples in the 10 day gap between Ascension and Pentecost were at loose ends, and impatient, we need to follow Jesus’ counsel:  stay put and wait for power from on high!   Again, those most living in the Spirit through all of this are the ones who seem least the troubled and vexed by it.  

We should, I think, take this period of physical separation as an exile of sorts.  It is not an exile imposed by wicked agents of the State—remember—we closed our building before the State imposed the rules.  And it most definitely is not an exile to be relieved by some populist savior or the Feds.  We will find re-entry into our spaces in accordance with our values and the direction of our ecclesiastical leaders, in ways that minimize the risk to the most vulnerable, not because some among us simply are exhausted and inconvenienced by the whole mess. 

Rather, this exile has been given the Church as a blessing by the God whose body the Church is.  It is, after all, a way of showing our love and concern for the least of these, our family members.  As the Israelites in Babylon ironically sang, “How can I sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”  We’re learning to sing God’s love even when we cannot touch each other.  Soon, when we gather again, perhaps, we will have to learn to sing God’s love without a great deal of physical singing at all, since the open mouths and lungs that produce the beauty of holiness also, unhappily, have been shown to effectively spread this contagion.  

But the song of the Hebrew Slaves in Babylon, captured so well by Verdi in Nabucco, I think, captures how our love of the church in a time of exile still allows us to sing God’s love:

Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate;
Va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli,
Ove olezzano tepide e molli
L'aure dolci del suolo natal!
Del Giordano le rive saluta,
Di Sionne le torri atterrate...
Oh, mia patria sì bella e perduta!

Oh, membranza sì cara e fatal!

Go, thoughts, on golden wings;
Go, settle upon the slopes and hills,
where warm and soft and fragrant are
the breezes of our sweet native land!
Greet the banks of the Jordan,
the towers of Zion ...
Oh my country so beautiful and lost!
Oh memory so dear yet full of grief!

Jesus does not need buildings for his work to go forward. He needs us.  If we are asked, “Where is God in the pandemic?” I hope we can answer, “In the helpers, the caregivers, and those who are sacrificing for the good of others.”  I hope we can affirm, “God is in the love shown by those who give up what they love, even what they love most, to help others.”  I hope we can say, “God is in us and our putting aside our own wishes so we can do what’s right to help others.”  

Of course, our buildings serve as ensigns and symbols in most people’s minds that the Kingdom of God is up and running.  It is important to return from our exile as soon as we can without causing great danger or harm. 

But in this, we need the blessing and power of the spirit: power from on high.  Let us pray for and pursue this, even as we wait in patience.     

In the name of Christ,  Amen

A Memory of Ambassador Matthew J. Matthews

A Memory of Ambassador Matthew J. Matthews
Anthony A. Hutchinson
May 21, 2020

I read today of the sudden death of Ambassador Matthew J. Matthews. The news made me very sad, since I have always considered Matt a brother and comrade since he and I shared a couple of life-or-death experiences over the course of a week in Beijing in June 1989. We were both junior officers at the U.S. Embassy: I was in the Cultural Affairs Section (Coordinator of Academic Exchanges) and he was a first tour political officer doing his required initiatory two years in visas and consular affairs. We were assigned to staff the overnight operations of the Press and Cultural Section, what we called the United States Information Agency in China during those days. After the imposition of martial law on May 20 and the military crackdown and Tian’anmen Massacre on Sunday June 4, the Embassy had gone on 24-hour coverage because so many communications would come in over night while China slept and the U.S. worked on the other side of the world.

 Monday June 6, Matt and I were assigned to staff one of the cars in the motorcade sent by the Embassy on the morning of June 6 to the universities on the other side of Beijing (about 20 miles away) to retrieve American students and professors and take them to the airport. The city roads were a shambles: demonstrators had erected barricades at all major intersections, and the People’s Liberation Army was only gradually taking them down. They too had set up road blocks: we had to stop and be cleared at three separate security points, all manned by teenaged Chinese soldiers from the remote provinces, all speaking barely recognizable Mandarin, holding their AK-47s pointed in our faces as they queried us, and visibly shaking from too little sleep and too many amphetamines. Matt, with his easy and colloquial Chinese from his pre-foreign service studies in Taiwan, talked us through all the checkpoints, schmoozing and empathizing with these poor guys tasked with a dirty and impossible job. The U.S. Ambassadorial flags on the cars that Ambassador James Lilley had ordered on the motorcade even though he did not accompany us seemed to help us clear the security blockades. When we saw bodies of demonstrators killed near the Square and retrieved and laid out on tables at the entrance of one of the universities (with big character posters “MOURN THE DEAD. REMEMBER,” I saw Matt frown, pause, and then silently wipe away a tear from his face before he schmoozed us into the campus to retrieve our compatriots there.

Two leading dissidents who had been put onto death lists by the Chinese Communist Party leadership sought refuge in our Embassy: they came in through me, on my first day in the Fulbright Coordinator Chair. After a delay for Washington to weigh in, they were sheltered in a hastily arranged apartment in the medical unit behind the Ambassador’s Residence that shared the compound with the Press and Cultural Section. Matt and I were assigned night duty there. Chinese security had placed hostile helmeted guards with AK-47s looking inward every two meters around the compound. A large angry crowd gathered, clearly at the behest of the leadership, since at that time any group of more than two people were being shot at on the streets to disperse possible demonstrators. They chanted, screamed, and threw garbage, rocks, and bottles full of vile liquids, breaking a couple of our windows.

Matt and I, hunkered down in the USIS office, tried to call for guidance, to no avail. Our radios were not working either. At that time, there was a safe room with highly classified files in the office. Remembering the great loss of classified materials from when the U.S. Embassy in Tehran had been overrun, and how even shredded documents had been painstakingly put back together by those who wished the U.S. ill, Matt and I started to discuss what we needed to do in anticipation of the angry mob coming over the walls. We both agreed that one of us needed to stay in the safe room and shred everything, while the other needed to go back an be with the dissidents. Matt said, “that way, we will have a U.S. witness if they murder Dr. Fang and Dr. Li and a dead U.S. diplomat if they kill everyone there.” We drew straws: Matt went back to the dissidents, and I started shredding. The mob continued to rage until 2 or 3 in the morning. Matt came back to help with the shredding around 4.

By the time my boss, Minister Counselor McKinney Russell, arrived at work at 7 the next morning, I was finishing shredding the last classified file. He looked at the heap of shredded bits of paper, and asked. “Tony, what have you done? Who gave you authority to destroy this archive?” Matt chimed in before I could answer, “We didn’t want a repeat of Tehran, sir. They told us in A-100 (foreign service basic training) that we had the authority to do the obvious and necessary when defending our national security materials. And that’s what we did.” McKinney took a breath, relaxed his hands, and then said quietly, “What about the dissidents?” We explained. When he understood that both of these Junior officers in front of him had been willing to die to help defend the refugees and protect the classified, he shrugged and said, “Of course, you were right. Shredding that material is going to make my life and work much harder, but it was necessary. And I am proud of both of you for level headed action while in harm’s way.”

Months later, over beers, Matt joked with me about the experience, and winkingly laughed when he said: “Hey—getting kudos from the boss--that’s why we joined the Foreign Service, isn’t it?”
Matt was a brother and comrade, and I am thankful to have served with him in those hard times.

Rules for Re-opening? (June Trinitarian Article)

Father Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians

June 2020

Rules for Re-opening?

We have been living apart and worshiping separated for almost 3 months now due to measures taken to stem the contagion of the Corona-virus pandemic.  As the state relaxes its guidelines and we enter into a gradual, step-by-step re-entry into our common life, I think it is worthwhile to remember some basic things about how our faith tells us to behave.   I recite them as a reminder to myself as much as for others.

Do unto others as you would have them do to you (Matt 7:12).  This is the basic reason why the Church has been encouraging us to maintain physical distancing and hygiene rules—not out of fear of getting ill ourselves, but out of concern that we not unwittingly transmit illness to others who may be more vulnerable than we.   It is why we are reopening physical access to the church slowly, deliberately, and with great caution.  Given the fact that most of our parishioners and ministers are in the at-risk age groups, we need to continue offering on-line services for those who need to remain at home even as we open up opportunities for face-to-face (masked, and at a 2 meter distance) worship and activities.   

Judge not, lest you be judged (Matt 7:1).  Different members of the congregation will have different thresholds of feeling comfortable and safe:  while most of us feel it best for now to remain sheltered at home, others are finding that their need for normalcy and getting back to Church and having Communion outweighs their need for continued sheltering.  Neither group should look down their noses and judge the others as either reckless endangerers or timid scaredy-pants, as worshippers of Mammon or faithless betrayers of God.  The Vestry, Worship Committee, and ministers are working with the Bishop to come up with a step-by-step way forward that is responsible, keeping with the state guidelines, and current science.  We want to thank everyone who responded so quickly to our Parish survey on reopening options.  This will hurt, to be sure:  it looks like at the outset of this process we may have to give up for the duration congregational and choral singing, handling common-use prayer books, communion in two species (wine along with the bread), hand-shakes and hugs at the passing of the Peace, and even uncovered faces.   Even our “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” will be strained by limits in attendance numbers.  We should not take any of these matters as an occasion to pick and choose and demand our personal preference at all costs.  A wholesome spirituality demands that we remain open, and try to get through this by “bearing one another’s burdens” (Gal 4:6). 

Be Countercultural--Keep yourself unstained by the World (James 1:6).

We live in a world and nation divided into parties, tribes, and cliques that affirm their own identity and enforce group conformity by flattening all differences of opinion into short soundbites, colorful memes, and mutual reproach.  The Gospel demands that we be counter-cultural, that we not pursue the idol of NO NUANCE, or the demon of BLAME THE OTHER SIDE.  Life in a pandemic demands,  now more than ever, that we be honest about the subtleties and nuances in our understanding of things that drive the decisions we make together.  We may have to metaphorically hold our noses to accept things that may not be our cup of tea.  But that is okay.    The world tells us to look out for number one, protect our own interests, and stand up for our own opinions.  The Gospel teaches us, however, that self-sacrifice is the way of the followers of Jesus.  Brent McCracken wrote recently in The Gospel Coalition Blog:

“At a time when self-idolatry is being exposed in ugly ways, the church has an opportunity to model love that places the interests of others above the self. For example, someone might find it personally difficult—even maddening—to have to wear a mask during church and stay six feet away from everyone at all times. You might think these precautions are a needless overreaction. But here’s the thing: even if it turns out you’re right, can you not sacrifice your ideal for a season, out of love for others who believe the precautions are necessary? Even if you personally think it is silly, or even cowardly, for someone to stay home even after the church is open again on Sundays, can you not heed Paul’s wisdom in Romans 14: ‘Let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother’? Or 1 Corinthians 8:9: ‘Be careful, however, that your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak.’  Even if you think these precautions are a needless overreaction, can you not sacrifice your ideal for a season, out of love for others who believe the precautions are necessary?  Likewise, those who think the lockdowns should continue should not pass judgment on those who question the wisdom of the government’s ongoing restrictions. Churches should strive to honor people on both sides of the spectrum. Yes, it will be costly for churches to keep offering online services for those who don’t feel comfortable attending physical gatherings. Yes, it will be a sacrifice for church members who are sick of masks, social distancing, and Zoom to continue to use these for the sake of others. But little is more Christian than a posture of sacrifice (Rom. 12:1). We should embrace it with gladness.” 

I hold all of you in prayer, and thank you for remembering me and Elena in your prayers.  As we cautiously reopen face-to-face Church life , let’s remember that the Church never was the building and its trappings.  The Church includes even those most separated from us, the blessed dead.  And the life of caring for each other and gently showing forth the love of Jesus goes on, inside and outside the building. 

Fr. Tony+ 

Why I Hope (midweek message)

Gustave Doré, Jesus Prechant Sur La Montagne, c. 1865, 
oil on canvas, 130 x 196 cm, private collection

Why I hope

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 20, 2020

“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” (1 Peter 3:15-16)

When I heard these words read as part of last Sunday’s epistle, I felt convicted.   How long has it been since I gave an account to myself, let alone anyone else, of why I have hope?   In times like the present, when we all face fear and isolation on a daily basis, it is easy to lose faith, and with it, hope.   

I translate Hebrews 11:1 this way:  “Now trust in God is what undergirds and embodies the things for which we hope; it is what demonstrates things we cannot see.”    Having faith in God, being faithful to God—this is core to Christian hope. 

Faith is not about “believing that there is a God.”  It is a disposition of the heart, not a position of the mind.  It is about trusting in the love beneath and behind all things, and as a result becoming more and more trustworthy.  Remember that the commandment is “Love the Lord your God,” not “Subscribe to the proposition that ‘God’ exists.” 

Blessed Marcus Borg regularly told of students who said they did not believe in God.  He would ask them to describe what they didn't believe in, invariably an old irascible white guy with a beard up in the clouds, a supernatural patriarch who keeps scores and viciously punishes slights.  Marcus’ response was invariably, ‘I don’t believe in that, either.’   For him, this caricature was a form of idolatry.  Instead, he wrote, 

“Experience of God, not belief in God, is the invitation of Christianity… ‘Be compassionate as God is compassionate’ is the defining mark of the follower of Jesus and the ethos of the Community of Jesus…  Reality is permeated indeed flooded with divine creativity, nourishment, and care… Imagine that Christianity is about loving God. Imagine that it’s not about the self and its concerns, about ‘what’s in it for me?’, whether that be a blessed afterlife or prosperity in this life. Imagine that loving God is about being attentive to the one in whom we live and move and have our being. Imagine that it is about becoming more and more deeply centered in God. Imagine that it is about loving what God loves. How would that change our lives?”

I am not a natively faithful person.  I tend to be skeptical and distrustful.  When faced with the ugly things and horror that we must face in life—say, the lingering sickness and prolonged death of a loved one—my default position seems to be to throw up my hands in despair and wonder whether life has any meaning, any sense beyond its apparent randomness.  But I have seen moments of glory and mystery as well: compassion, kindness, forgiveness, and steadfast commitment.   I may have felt the despair of being sick, but also the joy of getting better and having health once more. 

I may have felt grief at the loss of a loved one, but I have also had dreams and momentary glimpses of the departed in bliss.  I may have seen senescence and decrepitude, but I have also seen the beauty of children growing into healthy, grounded adults.  And as I see those about me live into their trust, and becoming more and more centered in love, I am affirmed and empowered to trust, to hope. 

The Psalter expresses the whole range of human emotions, and in so doing tells us it is okay to be a human being with feelings.  What matters is how we act of our feelings.  The stories of our Lord’s life in the Gospels are the heart of my faith and trust:  he too had moments of doubt and fear.  He died in seemingly random and meaningless torture, still chanting the psalms from the Cross expressing fear at being abandoned but ultimate hope in a loving God who would make even death right.  The apostolic proclamation of his rising from death and appearing to his disciples (1 Cor 15:1-12) and the various stories this proclamation generated over the first three generations of the Church (Mark 16; Matt 28; Luke 24; John 20)—these give me assurance that Jesus’ hope was grounded in the deepest reality, and, simply put, just plain true.      

God did not promise that if we had faith, all our woes and fears would be at an end. Rather, God promised to be with us in all that we must go through.   One of the great signs of hope for me is a crucifix:  God on the Cross, there alongside us all in our sufferings and joys, shows us that the way of the suffering is indeed the way of life and light.  As John’s Gospel startlingly puts it, Jesus was lifted up into glory even as he was being hoisted up on that killing tree. 

I have hope because I have trust in God.  I find this cruel, crazy, and beautiful world a place bursting with the love, creativity, and joy of God.  Yesterday I posted photos of Trinity Garden in its spring glory on the Trinity Facebook page (click here to see) in honor of Rogation week, filled with prayers for the natural world before this Thursday’s Feast of the Ascension:  even as we are hunkered down due to the pandemic, the natural world about us is in all its flowery glory.  As Jesus taught, it is in the very moments of suffering that we can best see the hand of God (happy are the poor, the starving, those dying of thirst, the grieving, the persecuted), not because the suffering is any less severe, or because God inflicted it on us (not!), but rather, because it is in the very moments where God seems most absent that God is actually most present, ready to help us, no matter what. 

That’s what trust is; that’s what hope is. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Called to Our Side (Easter 6A)

Called to Our Side

17 May 2020

Sixth Sunday of Easter Year A

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

10 a.m. Live-Streamed Ante-Communion and Benediction 
a recording of this service  

Acts 17:22-31; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21; Psalm 66:7-18

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.

Amen.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus friends are afraid and feeling abandoned.  Jesus is about to die, and he says goodbye.  Everything they had hoped for—the in-breaking of God’s Reign, a close community with a kind and loving leader who stood by them, healed them, listened to them, gave them hope—all this was evaporating before their eyes.   

How could they breathe?  How could they live?  How could they hope?  How could they do anything but howl? 

In this scene of loss and grief, Jesus tells his friends, “I will not leave you orphans.  I am going away, but will come back. I will ask the Father, and he will send you another helper called to your side, who will stand with you no matter what.”

Parakletos is the word used here for “helper,” from para-kaleo to call to one’s side.   This idea is expressed in Latin as ad-vocatus, behind the word used in the translation we used today, advocate.  The King James expresses it as “comforter.”     

To this point in the story, Jesus has been the one who has been comforting, standing by, and defending.   Jesus has welcomed all to his table, healed and forgiven with no judgment, and has acted indeed as the very Spirit of Truth, the breath of life. 

Jesus before he leaves promises us that the Father will send us another helper called to our side, another advocate, another comforter, giving us life and breath.  Remember, breath in Latin is spiritus, or Spirit. 

In John, the evening of the Resurrection Jesus returns to his friends and says, “Peace,” and then breathes on them adding, “receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:21-22).  In Luke/Acts, the coming of the Holy Spirit to the Church is placed on the day of Pentecost, 50 days after Passover and Easter, after the Ascension of Jesus. 

But though John wrote decades after Luke, his view seems to reflect the earlier understanding of the coming of the spirit:  Paul writing just a decade after Jesus’ death, says that “the Lord” (that is, the Risen Jesus) “is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:17)

The presence of the Risen Lord in our hearts and minds is the basis of Christian spiritual life. This Advocate, this Comforter, this “Friend” beside us, the Holy Spirit—this is who makes Jesus present for us. 

It is a much abused concept.  People say the Spirit inspired them to do this or say that, to find a parking space here, or excommunicate that person, or go to war.  Some say the spirit tells them to disregard public health practices aimed at reducing the transmission of Covid-19.  But simply because people think the spirit is talking to them does not make it so. 

Saint Paul puts it simply: “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control” (Gal 5:22).   One of the reasons I can say with faithful hope that the Episcopal Church was guided by the Spirit to include women in ministry and gays and lesbians in our common, sacramental life, is that all these fruits of the spirit are present in the intuition behind this decision.  Jerry Falwell or Franklin Graham saying the Holy Spirit tells us in the Bible to reject such people, not so much. 

The Spirit blows where it will.  It is not a set of legal rulings nor canonical rubrics.  It is flexible, but inexorable in its demands: life-affirming, loving, and joyful.  Note that both in John’s account of the Last Supper and of the Risen Lord’s appearance on Easter evening, the spirit is promised or given along with the gift of peace, of a sense of wholeness, abundance, and calm.

I have had moments in my life where I know I felt the Spirit: peace, clarity, loving kindness, and courage.  I felt it when I asked Elena to marry me, and thirty years later, when I asked her to take Christian vows of marriage with me.  I felt it when I sought confirmation in the Episcopal Church, and when I recognized God’s call to me to be a priest.  I have felt the gentle promptings from Jesus as I have counseled and consoled people, and as I too have needed consolation and courage.  I have felt its sweet calming comfort  even amid the stress of the Covid-19 isolation and distancing. 

We are well advised to reason and study things out, to seek counsel and advice to help us get our bearings.  And it is wise to be cautious in making claims of “being guided by the Spirit,” if only to relieve God of the burden of having silly or wrong things chalked up to his account.  

But we need to listen.  Active and regular prayer as part of a rule of life, reading scripture as well as thoughtful, uplifting and even challenging books, a regular practice of contemplating beauty and serving others, and listening to spiritual direction from a trusted and discreet friend—all these are ways to help hear the Holy Spirit. 

I invite us all this week to look at how we’re doing in pursuing such regular practice. 

Jesus is here now, present for us.  The spirit of love and holiness is here now.  It is up to us to do what we can so that we better hear his voice and recognize the hand of God in the world about us. 

Thanks be to God.  

Seen and Unseen (Midweek Message)

Seen and Unseen

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

May 13, 2020

“We believe in One God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.”  (BCP, 358)

We moderns often tend to look down our noses at those who have gone before as primitive, superstitious, and pre-scientific.  The great myth of human progress tells us that if they predated us, they were not yet at our level.  But this myth is in most ways a falsehood: though technology and specific areas of knowledge may have advanced, we remain very much the same creatures as those who went before.  Most of the themes and concerns of our modern literature were probed deeply long ago in the literature and culture of the ancients.  Human beings now, as then, a pretty much the same: our fears, our loves and hopes, our desires for security and prosperity, our being torn between doing what’s right and what gratifies us.  But, “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” (L. P. Hartley), and we tend to see foreign countries as somehow less than our native land.    

One of the areas where this is most evident is in how we account for difficult to explain things.  Most people throughout time have spoken of such unseen forces, and personified them as gods, demons, angels or spirits of one kind or another.  We tend to prefer to talk about randomness, probability, and projection of our minds’ concerns.  Or we may blame conspiracy, even though no evidence for such exists—it is the very absence of such evidence that convinces some that a conspiracy must indeed exist. 

We are often flummoxed by scriptural stories of angels and demons, and downright amused by what we see as the “naiveté” of prayers like this one found in the Celtic tradition:

Bless, O Chief of generous chiefs,

Myself and everything near me,

Bless me in all my actions,

Make thou me safe for ever,

     Make thou me safe forever. 

 

From every brownie and banshee,

From every evil wish and sorrow,

From every nymph and water-wraith,

From every fairy-mouse and grass mouse,

    From every fairy-mouse and grass mouse. 

From every troll among the hills,

From every siren hard pressing me,

From every ghoul within the glens,

Oh! Save me till the end of my day.

    Oh! Save me till the end of my day.

            (Carmina Gadelica , p. 81)

When we simply pooh-pooh such discourse as silly superstition, we miss the deep emotion behind such utterances, the real fears they expressed, and the fact that the people who used such imagery were well aware that few, if any, actually saw such things with their eyes.  They were, after all, part of the unseen world.  But that did not make them any less real for these people.   

Our current pandemic-driven shut-down of common life is lasting longer than many had anticipated; many of us, under stress, experience depression and traumatic fear.   In a real way, we are facing demons, fairies, and brownies, and sprites of our own: fear of sickness and death, anger at a loss of our personal autonomy,  deep hunger for reconnection with people, a desire to blame someone, anyone, rather than accept it as a random outbreak operating on its own epidemiological rules, unfortunately not completely clear to us now.  Depending on your ideology and tribe, take your pick of whom to blame:  the Chinese, Deep State smarty-pants behind the “PLANdemic,” or, on the other side, the President and the people supporting him, irresponsible libertarians and anti-vaxxers putting their own desires ahead of the health and safety of others.  Or we can blame ourselves (“We are being punished!” “I am being punished!”) or God himself (“This is Divine punishment for [fill in the sin of someone else you don’t like.]”)

Finding a place where the veil between this world and the unseen one is so thin as to be transparent is key in safely navigating through these rising waters so teaming in demons, nymphs, and water sprites.   Prayer is such a thin place, as is getting out into the beauty of God’s creation.  Puncturing our self-esteem and pride helps:  recognizing that we are as much at risk to unseen and difficult-to-understand forces as were our ancestors and those who we like to label as “superstitious.” 

I am not saying that we need disregard science and its difficult path of reducing uncertainty bit by bit through careful and reasoned falsification through experiment.  Science has proven, I think, its efficacy in handling problems over relying solely on mythology and symbolism.  It is important to never let faith in a time of scientific knowledge be reduced to pursuit solely in a “God of the gaps,” in charge of an ever-decreasing space of what we do not know or understand.  Since God is maker of all things, both seen and unseen, God can help us even as we try to help ourselves. 

I am also not saying that all memes and symbols have equal value in revealing truth and pointing to an ethical and efficient way forward.  When all is said and done, there may indeed be blame rightly assigned to those who have made matters worse by pursuing their own visions of the unseen and unknown while ignoring the seen and demonstrable.  Snake handlers for Jesus and wearers of tin-foil hats are heretics because they do not truly believe in a God who made the universe, seen and unseen,  and set it in motion in patterned ways that the human mind, also a creature of God, can perceive.   

Even as we follow medical and public health advice, we need to humbly admit that there are things beyond our control or understanding.  So in addition to respecting medical and scientific expertise, we need to pray, or at least let awe enter into our contemplation of the world.  Asking the “Chief of Generous Chiefs” to help us, drawing an invisible Caim circle of protection around us as we invoke the Holy Trinity, the Blessed Virgin, and Saint Michael the Archangel to defend us all against our demons—be they depression, scape-goating, PTSD, or even fairies, brownies, sprites, nymphs, or rebel angels—well, this, to my mind is right and good. 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+ 

Live-Giving or Death-Dealing (Easter 5A)

 

Stoning of St. Stephen, Giulio Romano 

  

 Life-Giving or Death-Dealing

10 May 2020

Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

10 a.m. Live-streamed Ante-Communion and Benediction
 a recording of this service and homily

Acts 7:55-60 ; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16 ; 1 Peter 2:2-10 ; John 14:1-14

God, give us hearts open to change and grow,

Ground us in You,

Our Rock and Unshakeable Refuge. Amen.

There is this a little detail in today’s reading from Acts, the stoning of Stephen:  the guy who held everybody’s cloaks so their arms would be free to hurl those rocks was a young man named Saul.  By so doing, the story says, he consented to the murder.

 

When the world is divided, you have to make a choice of whom you support.  If you support Stephen, you risk dying with him.  If the crowd, you share blame in the horror you turned a blind eye to.  Merely standing on the side means you go with the oppressors.  As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote:  “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

Saul, who later will become such a force for good in the story, is thus introduced in the narrative of Acts. 

It’s easy to divide the world into “good guys” and “bad guys,” especially when one group is hurting another.  But confusing the struggle between good and evil with group identity is wrong.  Jesus warns us over and over to not fall into this trap.

“Be wholly complete like God—who impartially gives the blessing of rain and sunshine equally to the ‘righteous’ and the ‘wicked’” (Matt. 5:44, 48).  “The first will be last and the last first”… ‘good guys’ will be turn out to be bad, and the ‘bad guys’ turn out good (Matt. 20:16).   A pillar of righteous living goes to the Temple to pray and so does a notorious sinner—the Pharisee and the Tax Collector—and guess who goes home right with God? (Luke 18:9-14).   “Forgive others as you would want to be forgiven.” Then, on the cross, the line here quoted by Stephen: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

The deep logic to Jesus’ stories and words here is this:  every single one of us is a mixture of good and bad.  We are all God’s creatures.  Labeling a person or group as wholly “Good” or “Bad” only confuses matters. 

The line between good and bad is not between groups of people, but runs down the middle of each and every human heart.    So we need to help and pray even for our enemies. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

When asked, “who is my neighbor, to whom do I owe love,” Jesus tells a story of righteous priest and Levite turning a blind eye to human suffering, while a wicked, unclean heretic foreigner—the Samaritan—stops and has compassion.   In this story, the religious ask “what will happen to me if I stop?” and keep walking.  But the Samaritan asks, “what will happen to this poor man if I don’t stop and help.”

Today’s passage from 1 Peter quotes a text from Isaiah that says where the difference between good and evil truly lies:

 “Look! I am placing a foundation stone in Jerusalem,

a firm and tested stone, a precious cornerstone, safe to build on.  Whoever trusts in it need never be shaken.

I will test you with the measuring line of righteousness

and the plumb line of uprightness.” 

Since you have made your refuge out of lies,

a hailstorm will knock it down. 

Since it is made of deception, a flood will sweep it away.”  (Isaiah 28:15-17). 

“Righteousness” and “uprightness” are the standard God uses to test us:  these two words in Hebrew can be translated more concretely as “justice or fairness” and “compassionate acts or almsgiving.”  If we don’t have these, Isaiah says, we are liars deceiving ourselves, on unstable ground.  

Jesus was thinking about this very passage when he gave his parable of the house built on a rock and not on sand and when he gave Peter his name, meaning “Rock.”

1 Peter also quotes Psalm 118 here:  “On this day the Lord has acted, I will rejoice and be glad in it!”  “You turned death into life.”  You took the stone the builders discarded as flawed and placed it as the capstone!”

Christians since the beginning have used this Psalm to describe the resurrection of Jesus. It is a mainstay in our Easter liturgies.  The very fact that Jesus’ case was so hopeless—dead and buried in a quarried tomb—is why Peter uses this image of the stone rejected as a sign of victory over death, sin, and suffering.

Peter adds a final passage to tell us of this mystery of the heart, another oracle from Isaiah: 

¹⁴The Holy One can be either a Hiding Place
    or a Boulder blocking your way,
The Rock standing in the way of the willful …
A net preventing trespass…
¹⁵Many are going to run into that Rock
    and get their bones broken,
Get tangled up in that net
    and not get free of it.”  (Isa 8:14-15)

Jesus, the living rock, can be our foundation or our ruin.  Grounded in Hum, we are life-giving; apart from Him, death-dealing.  It’s not in our group identity that the difference lies.  It is in whether we cultivate fairness and justice, and practice compassion and acts of solidarity with those in need.   It is in whether we seek our own benefit or work and pray for the blessing of others. 

Do not be deceived or led astray by tribal calls of good-us vs. evil-them.  Do justice, love compassion, walk humbly with God. Follow Jesus, and your grounding is sure. 

In the name of God,  Amen.