Donald Schell has given us permission to put this essay in the Reading Room. It was originally posted in the Episcopal Cafe. Donald is affiliated now with All Saints Company, a nonprofit foundation for liturgical renewal. He was a founding rector of Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, and his heart also belongs to the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance.
In the six weeks since my dad died, my mind has been wandering a lot. I read the newspaper or an email and think about emptiness and wonder about death. I hear a disturbing piece of national or global news and by some crazy logic of faith or hope, I remember my dad’s death, and feel sorrow for others’ suffering and the uncertainties we face, and then I’m moved to gratitude that we’re all alive and in it together. I try to write something (like this) and sooner or later the act of reflection and listening reminds me of something about him.

When I quit being irritated with myself for being so unfocused, I notice that raw edge of my consciousness feels oddly open to contemplation these days. Driving home to San Francisco after my first visit with mother after dad’s death, dazzling sunlight on the trees and the glistening waters of Crystal Springs Reservoir shone with life like I felt when I was newly and deeply in love thirty-four years before. Each sweet inhalation of breath surged with the contradiction of being alive with my father newly dead.

My mind seems awake, but it goes where it will. This attention that isn’t mine feels full of contradiction. If I try to direct attention, it stays bound to something else, something that continues the grieving.

I’ve been thinking again how much grieving shaped my life even from my birth. I was born in 1947, about three years after my parent’s marriage. In those years of their beginning my mother’s father died of a heart attack and her brother, a B-24 pilot was lost in action over Taiwan, the remains of her brother and his crew finally found months later. My parents faced all that as they lived through not knowing whether my dad, also a bomber pilot would return from daylight bombing raids on German munitions factories. And when I was born my dad was twenty-five and my mother all of twenty-two.

It took my mother a quarter century to discover how completely her devastating losses had closed her down. My dad’s steady love for us (for mother, for me and my sisters and brother) carried her and all of us through until her suicidal crisis finally got her started with a good therapist. Until then she’d walked a bitter road cherishing the unpredictable breaks in her deep depression and fending off Christian friends from our church who told her she was just suffering a crisis of faith. With the therapist’s help she found her buried grief and learned to trust grief’s logic and let it take its course. Grieving gave her back her life.

Mother led the way and was our teacher in grieving, and we’re reminding her of it now. I have to remind myself that it’s all right that I’m moved by the radiant beauty of a stand of trees on a hillside, and tell myself not to be surprised when next morning I’m barely muster the strength and resolve to get out of bed. I’m trusting that the Spirit, Life, and the Lord Jesus are in both the radiance and the weariness.

Three books have made a difference to me, and each, in its way, was a gift. Some months before dad’s death my wife Ellen was reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Mother had given it to Ellen because Didion’s account of the year following the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, touched her so deeply. Sometimes as Ellen read herself to sleep she wept and sometimes wanted to be held because Joan Didion spoke so plainly and uncompromisingly of loss.

As soon as Ellen had finished the book I read it. Joan Didion is an agnostic Episcopalian, someone who counts on a Prayer Book funeral at New York’s Cathedral St. John the Divine and Sunday liturgy to order her chaos and darkness, but who also firmly insists that there’s no eye on the sparrow. What she called ‘magical thinking’ in her title was another kind of ritual, her carefully avoiding markers of loss – not reading the obituary, not giving away her husband’s clothes and shoes as though he could come back to wear them. She watched herself hoping (against her own reason) that avoiding these markers would stop her loss.

Re-reading one of Dunne’s novels after his death, she wondered whether in his sudden massive heart attack, he himself felt what he’d written for a character – ‘a moment of terror’ and ‘eternal dark.’ Oddly I found these stark words another gift. And I was grateful she also told of the unseasonal fear as their daughter Quintana moved in and out of coma for months after her Dunne’s death. I thought of Didion’s book when I got the phone call that my dad had died.

On my flight home to California, my physician seat companion told me about his cousin’s new book about faith. His cousin the rabbi had debated Christopher Hitchins and the book took on the new atheists, but there was more to it. My seatmate would be seeing his cousin this trip, so he’d gotten himself a copy of the book. When he learned I was a priest, he asked if I’d read the author’s preface and tell him what I thought of it.

The book was Rabbi David Wolpe’s Why Faith Matters. I read the preface and three more chapters as we flew west, and I felt grateful to read the rabbi’s words the day my father had died. I wanted to remember why faith matters and he could tell me. My seatmate asked me to write his cousin a note about it, and then he gave me the book. I finished it the next day.

David Wolpe nearly lost his wife to cancer after their child was born, and then he suffered a brain tumor (benign) and a bout of melanoma (in remission after chemotherapy). Rabbi Wolpe tells his congregation, ‘Actually, we’re all in remission. Some of us just know it more clearly than others.’

David Wolpe writes reasonably and intelligently about faith – not specifically Christian faith (though he writes of our faith appreciatively) but a more generic monotheism that continues to trust some larger good than ourselves even when it refuses to prove it’s there. My busy pastor’s mind thought, ‘This would be a really good book for an inquirer’s group,’ but my heart was moved by it and touched unexpectedly. I took courage from David Wolpe’s courage in continuing to love and serve a God of compassion. Sometimes ‘my faith’ isn’t good enough to carry me through, but our faith is.

Each weekday morning Ellen and I read Morning Prayer together. I bring her tea in bed and we read (and talk about) the appointed readings. For our Psalter we’ve using Robert Alter’s stark, meticulous The Book of Psalms, a Translation with Commentary. Often we read Alter’s notes. He observes repeatedly that when a psalm says, ‘the dead do not praise you,’ that the writer means that is an abyss, a darkness. Writers of the psalms asserted that there was nothing or barely anything left of the person after death. Just silence and darkness without any lively intention to praise God.

One morning after my dad’s death, Ellen said that she was grateful that psalms said so plainly that death was death. It matched her experience of seeing my dad laid out on the floor after the paramedics had stopped CPR. He was gone. There was his body, but the life we’d known in that body, the man we’d loved was gone.

Now we’ve got his ashes in a closet in our house waiting the building of a memorial garden in my parents’ church. And dad’s not in our closet. It’s his ashes.

I was trying to understand (for whatever understanding is worth) why Didion, Alter, and Wolpe’s stark courage touched me, why ‘he suffered death and was buried’ is the part of the Nicene Creed that’s touching me most deeply righty now, and why, missing my dad as I do and appreciating in a thousand new ways how much he gave me through my lifetime, I’m determined to say that he’s gone. When people say, ‘Harold’s gone to a better place,’ I welcome their intended kindness, but also feel myself shut down at this vague ‘better place.’

Just last week talking to an old friend about my hunger to spend time with family, to be in the room with living, breathing with flesh descended from dad, to hear our stories and eat together. She said, ‘One dancer’s gone and you all are having to make a new choreography.’ Her words rang true. That image fit what we were doing and feeling.

How do we this ‘faith’ thing? That question is part of what keeps distracting me.

My wife is the real theologian in our family. I read and think about this stuff; she just gets it and tells it to me when I need to hear. Ellen was telling a much-loved priest friend of ours her satisfaction at the finality of death in the psalms, and he said, “Frederick Buechner says, ‘…dead as a doornail,’ and he’s right. Harold’s as dead as a doornail. That’s why we believe in the resurrection of the dead, not the immortality of the soul.”

My beloved theologian was on our friend’s argument like a hound after a rabbit. “’Dead as a doornail’ is just what he was,” she said adamantly. “so tell me about immortality and resurrection.” I needed to hear it too.
Our friend said he’d learned it from Charles Price, his old mentor from Virginia Seminary, and recently it had come up again in a book by John Garvey, Death and the Rest of our Life. As I listened, I wrote down the book title and within two days had gotten Garvey’s book and read it through. Charley Price and John Garvey agree, our hope that we’ve got an ‘immortal soul’ is a power move, claiming something about ourselves, something within us, that we desperately hope the abyss and darkness can’t destroy. A long shot, but a power within us. But Resurrection – Jesus’ and ours – is faith, our trust in God’s unfailing love.
It’s not some irreducible, barely glimpsed idealized essence of my dad that escaped and flew free from the fires of the crematorium. He’s gone, what remains is ash, is dead as a doornail. And the whole of him, the hands I marveled at as a kid when he played Rachmaninoff’s B minor prelude, the face that looked so much like mine and which, in the pictures I’ve got still teaches me to smile, the courageous heart that managed to squeeze almost eighty-seven years of living from a terrifying beginning as a preemie in 1921 and scarlet fever a few years later, the whole of that good man was, is, and will be held in God’s love. I don’t know what it means or looks like but I trust it – God’s initiative, God’s creative embrace that won’t let one vibration of one atom that was him out of the old/new whole of God’s making.

The Gospel writers are so determined that it’s God’s initiative that their preferred language for Jesus’ resurrection is that the Father “raised him up.”

The darkness, the abandonment, the devastation and decay and knowledge that we’re all just in remission and each of us alone faces a ‘moment of terror’ and ‘eternal dark’ must sink in, take hold, and be bitterly true. We’re none of us going to make out of this alive. None of us and nothing in us is any match for death. Nothing except the love of God.

A Homily by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori offered at the opening Evensong of the Trinity Institute’s Interfaith Dialogue on Religion and Violence, January 2008

How do we hear those texts – as Jews, Christians, or Muslims? Do we hear only our own tradition? Do we hear with the ears of one who has been liberated from slavery? Then choose this day to serve the God who has done that.

Do we hear what we’ve always heard? Justification for where we are, what we believe, the community in which we live and move and have our comfortable being? Careful. Nobody gets to see the Kingdom of God without being born again.

Do we hear with the assumption that we have the full and final and only truth? Well, God is still at work. Don’t be too eternally certain. In the meantime, be faithful.

At their best, religious traditions have always sought to lead human beings into greater understanding and knowledge of the Divine. Each of the world’s great religions was birthed in a unique context and time, yet each affirms a truth that reaches beyond that initial, limited context.

It is as though a community living in its own valley looks around for generations, minds the wisdom of its holy sages over the centuries, seeing and claiming truth in that place, and yet intuits that there is a larger application for that truth. The great religions for long periods worked in their own valleys, and a few adventurers scaled the peaks and ridges between those valleys and confirmed that truth in a larger perspective. Most of humanity, however, continues to affirm that their valley’s truth is the whole.

It’s much like the differing scales and theoretical messages of physicists. Newtonian physics works well at the human scale. Quantum physics is far more appropriate at much smaller scales, and relativistic and other kinds of physics are needed at the cosmic scale. Does that make any of them of them untrue? Despite the quest of centuries, we do not yet have a theory of everything.

The frequent human assumption that one cultural or religious context is the whole, and the hubris or idolatry involved in that assumption, becomes the underpinning of religiously sanctioned violence. The self-justified truth claim, whether religious or otherwise, is the source of all violence. If I am the most important reality in the universe, then my desires are most certainly to be satisfied, whatever may stand in the way. The use of force to meet those desires is the definition of violence. “Violence” has its verbal origins in the same root as “vital” – having to do with life, but violence is the use of one’s own life force to subvert or traduce the life of another.

The nature of religion – hinted at in the roots of that word meaning to link together or to bind to something larger – the nature of religion is to provide a world view that’s effective in leading us beyond ourselves, that we might give our hearts to something larger than our own narrow self-interest. The great religions insist that our relationship with that larger something or someone is reflected in our relationship with our fellow human beings. Sometimes, however, religion stops at the binding of a like-minded community that’s unable to see beyond its own group. That is the religion of the valley-bound, who see all outsiders as evil or impure or benighted. That is the religion of the enslaved, and it is the religion of those who refuse to deeply engage another who also claims eternal truth.

Each of the sacred texts we have heard this night has hinted at getting us out of our riverine declivity. Torah tells us the God to be worshiped is the one who delivers us from the slavery of domination, whether by Pharaoh or multinational corporations or mindless obedience. Jesus reminds us that we must be born from above into some larger Divine reflection  if we are  going to see what God’s world really looks like and is truly meant to  be. The Koran hints that while we are not only or yet one people,  still in that very diversity God is at work, and it bids us to strive to outdo one another in righteousness.

These three great faith traditions see different truths in their respective valleys, yet they do share a foundational assumption that the end of things is about peace – that great peace that reaches through or beyond human suffering to shalom, salaam, islam. Each speaks of that dream or end of God in different images, yet there is    a transcendent urge towards human community where all are fed in abundance, where no one studies war any more, where swords are re-forged into tools to feed the hungry.  Each urges on us the awareness that our relationship with those around us is, in vastly important ways, the relationship we have with the source of all. Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha’olam. (Blessed are you O Lord, maker of the universe.)

At our best, we might even manage to affirm that the water flowing through these three Abrahamic valleys has a common origin and source, and returns to the same oceanic reality. Violence results when we lose sight of that larger reality, whether in the person next to us or the folk in the next valley. The reminders about that larger reality come from the prophets and mystics in all of our traditions. The sad truth is that most adherents know little of either prophetic or mystical tradition. Too often we are caught up, either in scrupulous but dry adherence to rules or in impassioned but mindless ecstasy.

If we would embrace the fullness of life for which we are created, we must learn to love God and neighbor with our whole being, with mind, heart, soul and means. The Hasidic tradition speaks of that need for loving with both mind and heart, “Do not think that the words of prayer as you say them go up to God. It is not the words themselves that ascend. Rather, it is the burning desire of your heart that rises like smoke to heaven. If your prayer consists only of words and letters but does not contain your heart’s desire, how can it rise up to God?”

We remember today the birthday of a prophet who was also something of a mystic. A man who sought to deliver his people from Phaoroh, who knew himself born from above despite his feet of clay, and who at least toward the end was not loath to make common cause with his brothers and sisters. Martin Luther King went to the mountaintop, looked out over those other valleys, and did not come down again until he went home, dead by violence.

The antidote to that violence is always more life. Hafez, the Sufi mysical poet of the fourteenth century, put it this way,

“What is the sign of those who know God?
Fear?
They have dropped the knife.
They have dropped the cruel knife they most often use
upon their tender selves, and upon others.”

Those who drop the knife have done as the writer of I John suggests; they have given up fear. “Perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”

The end of violence is discovering the wild embrace of the One who has created us. Rabia of Basra, an eighth century Sufi mystic, speaks of fear and love. She says,

Ironic, but one of the most imtimate acts of our body is death.
So beautiful appeared my death, knowing who then I would kiss,
I died a thousand times before I died.

“Die before you die,” said that Prophet Mohammed. “Have wings that feared ever touched the sun? I was born when all I once feared, I could love.”

The Christian mystic Meister Eckhardt put it like this in the fourteenth century.

They are always kissing. They can’t control themselves. It is not possible that any creature can have greater instincts and perceptions than the mature human mind. God ripened me, so I see it is true. All objects in existence are wildly in love.

And Rumi, the Sufi mystic, said;

With passion, pray.
With passion work.
With passion, make love.
With passion, eat and drink and dance and play.
Why look like a dead fish in the ocean of God?

Dead fish have been hooked by violence. The response to the violence of our faith communities is either to tap the knowledge that comes from scaling the heights, those ridges between our river valleys, or by jumping in the river and swimming down to the sea, but not as a dead fish.

Ray Suarez, a writer and senior correspondent for the Jim Lehrer News Hour, gave this address to the 2009 General Convention of The Episcopal Church last July. He imagines what would happen if we Episcopalians gave up all  that make us distinctive – and begs us not to. A warm and witty address from a man who loves this faith tradition…

It is a joy to be asked to speak to this gathering of my brothers and sisters from all across the country and the world. I left a reporting trip in Tanzania to come here in full confidence that these invitations don’t come every day. It’s a privilege to speak to you on this day when we remember [Saint] Benedict’s radical welcome to all who come from what the old prayer book called “the blessed company of all faithful people.” With outstretched arms we take a big, broad, view of what that beautiful phrase means… “the blessed company of all faithful people.” That includes our partners and friends from other branches of the family who are with us today.

At this point in the life of the Episcopal Church, some of us, and some of the parishes we call home, may not be feeling they are in a blessed company right now, and are being forced to think about what welcome means, who is included in welcome. It is a tough time, even if your attendance is good, your pledges are strong, even if you have more baptisms than burials in an average year. We are forced to fight the battles, forced to live out the arguments that history conspired to make converge right now, in our day, in our time.

Benedict had some plain-spoken advice for this gathering: “Let the house of God be wisely managed by the wise.” I’ll let you decide if you are in the wise. None of us in this room could have chosen, could have elected to be born, grow up, or be called to serve at another time. We have no choice but to play history’s hand. So we are struggling, perhaps in our buttoned-down, Anglican way, to figure out what to be in the 21st century, to keep the lights on, the altar set, and wait for people who left after the storms got bad, and trying to bring others in through the door for the first time and say, “Welcome, you are home,” while still very much having to be a place of coherence, love, service, for the people who’ve never left. We don’t give you a spiritual means test when you come to the front door before we let you in. Instead, we say as Jesus did, “Come, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

There are people who lampoon us, wish us ill, use us as a punchline for lame jokes based on some very old stereotypes, and frankly, from material that wasn’t all that funny to begin with. But at least those old jokes, poking fun at imaginary church of WASP matrons using ‘summer’ as a verb, country clubs, white-shoe law firms, and pedigrees – those old jokes had some measure of affection in them. These days the jokes contain more derision, condescension, and harsh judgment born of ignorance. Recently I was reading the religion blog in the Washington Post and one essayist, John Mark Reynolds, wrote: Do you know what you get when you cross an Episcopalian with a Southern Baptist? I didn’t know, so I kept on reading. You get someone who comes to your door and rings your bell, but once you open it has no idea what to say.

No idea what to say? Really?

I could swear I was in church at 7 am on Ash Wednesday morning, heard our challenging lectionary, was called out, forced to confront myself by a strong sermon, and then called to be holy by our penitential rite. I thought we had a lot to say, and when I picked my head up to look around there was a big crowd of witnesses sharing that sobering moment with me.

Nothing to say?

When my son and daughter and the youth of our parish head out year after year to the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast, and to the Lakota Sioux lands in North Dakota, and to our sister parish in Honduras, they worked hard, very hard, and began and ended every day with worship. Like so many of our youth, they have plenty to say, “Not only with their lips but with their lives.” Or, as Benedict himself might say, ora et labora, pray and work.

At a time of bewildering complexity and ever greater challenge some churches have told us that contrary to what you’ve heard, being a Christian in the 21st Century is actually a piece of cake, all you gotta do is follow a few, very simple rules. The churches that say that have definitely had a good run the last 20 years. There are shelves in bookstores groaning under the weight of critical social science scholarship, marketing theory, and even, occasionally, theology; books that tells us what we’re doing wrong and what the other guys are doing right. And in 2009 we can either stop being us, or hold on and believe that what we are and how we got to this day has prepared us for whatever God’s going to dish out in the years ahead. We may not know what’s in store, but we must share Benedict’s conviction, in the final words of The Rule that ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus, “that in all [things] God may be glorified.”

It would have been easier in the 1970s to say, you know, this fight over whether priesthood is a privilege granted to men only isn’t going to do us any good at all, so let’s duck it. Just kick the can down the road. It would have been easier, much easier, to pull up stakes and run when our cities changed in ways that weren’t so great for the bottom line, or, as I heard people say in the 60s and 70s, “too many of our churches are in the wrong places.” But we suffered along with our cities, and in places like the west side of Chicago, and Inglewood and South Central Los Angeles, and the South Bronx we stood for something all right and we had plenty to say. And now, as we are burdened with another family fight over what part of our family is given the gift of servant leadership, what part of our family is called to carry the blessed burden of the episcopacy, and which families will be able to seal their life’s commitment with the blessing of their church, that’s a fight we can pretend to duck, but in real life, we just can’t.

Proverbs this morning called for the search for hidden treasure. We’re all on it. I go to church, with a few thousand other human beings who bring a broad range of life experience and religious conviction through that front door with them every Sunday. We don’t agree on everything. But what do we agree on?

That we bring Jesus to a suffering world…

Orare est laborare…

That there is worship in work…

That the liturgy we share binds us to a procession through history that has lasted centuries, of a hope kindled since the Last Supper and the Resurrection, carried by faithful servants fired up by the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations. All of those things are much more important than the things we can’t agree on.

But there are about a million fewer of us than there were a half century ago, and it’s a much bigger country. American society did not stand still in those years. There was increased mobility, intermarriage, a larger fraction of the American population rejecting religion entirely. If the critical observers are right, in order to have a strong and secure place in the diverse American religious marketplace we have to stop being who and what we are, who we have been, and start watching the people who are filling arenas and pitching best-selling books for cues. Those places have come to some conclusions about success, and we don’t measure up. So let’s stop clinging to that outmoded prayer book that happens to be one of the crown jewels of the English language, we’ve got the get rid of that hymnal, with all those tricky tunes and old-fashioned words, stop those long sermons delivered by people who always seem to want me to feel bad about something,   the organs, the outfits, it’s so archaic in a world where religion bestsellers are trying to convince me that Jesus wants me to be rich. I thought Jesus wants me to be holy, and it just goes to show you how wrong a guy can be.

But hey, while we’re jettisoning all these things that are leading us to what is called marketplace failure, let’s also stop the radical welcome.  Let’s stop the willingness to live, sometimes uncomfortably, with the ambiguities of modern life. Leave behind that notion that we don’t have all the answers yet. Then we can relaunch EC 2.0, having acquiesced to those who, like that Washington Post essayist, think the only thing we’re really for in 2009 is to be mocked, dismissed, diminished, pushed to the margins of the American experience of the struggle to be God’s people in the world. When we do explain ourselves to the world, why not stop the explanations that come draped in ecclesiastical bumpf, an impenetrable torrent of rounded-edged words that leave even me wondering what the heck they’re talking about, and I’m fully bi-lingual in English and Church.

In places where our natural feedstock, the kinds of Americans who have normally been Episcopalians going back to the 18th century, are gone, died, moved… in short supply, whatever… those neighborhoods need us in the 21st Century, because in 2042 this will be a majority minority country. We’ve got to act like a church that hasn’t already internalized the narrative of its own decline. We’ve got to talk about our heroes and assert, reclaim a place in the common culture: We aren’t trapped in some obscure corner, we have been immersed in making the country what it’s been for better or worse for 225 years, from the Constitutional Convention to abolition to the Social Gospel movement to the battles against child labor and disease and municipal corruption of the reform era, to civil rights and the second emancipation. So many people need what we’ve got… spiritual wayfarers who are already looking for us… would love to join a church that’s ready to love them back… we don’t know who they are yet, and they don’t yet know we’re there. We’ve got a calling for the 21st century. It’s the same calling it was in the first century, as it was in 1534, and yet the world we head out into the world to work in is changing all the time.

Sermon for the annual service of the Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals
Durham Cathedral, Saturday 26th September 2009
The Reverend Doctor Steven Shakespeare, Lecturer at Liverpool Hope University

I want you to imagine something. I want you to imagine that there is another world above us. I’m not talking about a heavenly or spiritual world. It exists, like ours, in space and time. But it is a world fundamentally different from ours. The inhabitants of this world – because it is not a lonely place – have a rich experience. But their experience of dimensions, of colour and sound, of desire and satisfaction, of communication – all of this is so far detached from anything we might recognise, as to be unrecognisable. We would find it hard – impossible even – to know what it would be like to live in this other world or to be one of its inhabitants.

Let’s say that, somehow we had contact with this other world. We couldn’t talk with its inhabitants or understand their point of view, we couldn’t enter into their experience – but we were aware of them. What attitude should we take towards them? Should we pity them because they are not like us? Should assume that the only way we can understand them is to assume that at some level they really must be like us after all? Should we fear them, try to keep them out of our world? Should we even do what we could to destroy them?

I hope you might agree with me that all of these reactions – of pity, assimilation, of fear and hate – all of them have more to do with our own insecurity and need for boundaries than anything else. None of them is really warranted by our contact with this other world.

Now you might already have worked out that I am not talking about anything particularly far fetched or exotic. That other world I asked you to imagine is very real, and very everyday. In fact it is quite literally above our heads right at this moment. For in this great cathedral, there is a thriving colony of bats.

Now why should we be interested in bats? Aren’t those of us who think there is a valid reason to be concerned about the moral status of bats and other nonhumans just a bit well, batty – a word that just means having bats in your mental belfry?

I now teach philosophy and ethics, and one of my courses looks at the whole issue of what it means to be a person. What defines a person? Is it reason, language, community, emotion? Can persons be explained as nothing more than neural processes, behavioural responses, chemical reactions? And – crucially – are human beings the only ones who qualify to be persons?

One of the seminal articles on this topic came out in 1974. Written by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, it was entitled ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ In essence, Nagel’s argument was simple. Few would deny that bats have some kind of experience. But because they find their way around the world through sonar, a system of subtly modulated shrieks and echoes, their world is experienced by them in a way we can hardly begin to conceive. Our bodily and mental structures are so wholly dissimilar. Just imagining what it would like to have membrane wings, or be the size of a bat: none of this helps. We cannot get into their heads.

And still, we have good reason to think that bats do have experiences, that they do have a world and that they do communicate with it and each other. Nagel’s point is that, however much we might come up with elaborate physical explanations of bat behaviour, something will still escape us: the felt quality of actually being a bat, actually living in that strange world so different from ours.

As far as I know, Nagel wasn’t setting out to make an argument for treating bats kindly. His purpose was to reject the idea that experience – including our own – could ever be reduced or explained away physically. There is something unique, something irreplaceable about the quality of what each of us experiences. It can’t be captured by abstract definitions or by science, however helpful science is in revealing the wonders of life around us. Scientists cannot become bats, despite what the films might pretend.

This might seem a far cry from what motivates each of us to think that nonhuman animals are worthy of our moral attention, of our care, concern and compassion. But I believe there is a very strong link.

We are often inclined to think that we are at the centre of the world. Perhaps not us as individuals, but our species. Human beings are the reason creation exists, the hub around which everything revolves. It was an image of our importance that was underlined by the classical idea that the whole universe really did orbit around the earth – and that only human beings had the reason and language and soul to contact the higher spheres.

The church has at times supported that vision, as it has bought into other exclusive and colonial assumptions. But it is not true to the radical heart of Christian existence. Christian faith exists because these exclusive boundaries have been crossed. The Word becomes flesh: not simply human, but flesh. The scandal of Christianity is that the eternal God identifies with the matter of the world. And one of the first things Jesus does, after the Spirit descends on him in the form of a dove is to go to the desert, beyond all human waymarks and ownership – to be with the wild animals.

God so loves the world that he gives his only Son. Not just human beings, the world. In Greek: the cosmos: the whole complex, rich and startling universe which unfolds around us in myriad forms of matter and life. For all that the drama of salvation is described in terms of human sin and faith, there is another text to be read: the Word made flesh comes to disturb our thrones and empires. The world is no longer ours to fear, dominate and control. There world is many, with voices we cannot hear and lives we cannot understand – but all of them included with us in the creative love of God. In our reading from Revelation, when we come to the heavenly throne, what do we find? A picture of the divine as a lamb, an image of sacrifice and animality. How subversive is that?

We should not be surprised by this, even though we might struggle with what it means. We have a hard enough time grasping that for God our little hierarchies of race and gender and sexuality crumble before the breath of the Spirit. Fortunately, there have always been voices in our traditions who have witnessed to God’s solidarity with the world and with all life. Scientific study of nonhuman animals has enriched our appreciation of their wonderful diversity and intricate adaptation. We know we are not alone in possessing the power to make signs and communicate, have social bonds and rituals, use tools and show compassion.

But for all this, we still need a change of heart and mind. Knowledge alone is not enough. We need to experience a shift in our picture of the world no less radical than the one which displaced the earth at the centre of the universe.

I hope I’ve said enough to persuade you that this is about more than animal rights. Don’t get me wrong: the call for animal rights has played a key role in combating cruelty, and Christians have a role to play in animals rights movements now as ever. But even as people have gradually accepted that animals have some kind of rights, we still meet with barriers. European legislation on animal experimentation is watered down, numbers of animals used in UK experiments is on the rise; zero grazing is still a reality; Tesco resists high profile campaigns to eliminate factory farmed chickens. You may have seen some of the disturbing imagery inside slaughterhouses filmed in an undercover operation by Animal Aid. What lingers is the sense of callousness, the way sentient creatures are treated as objects to be kicked, trampled and discarded.

But the slaughterhouse is only the graphic reflection of our own society, of our own minds. The callousness is bred into us. And we have to ask which is worse: the tired out worker who can’t be bothered to stun an animal properly before it is killed, or the well-fed consumers who chuck the packaged product into their trolleys.

We need a change of heart. Not only animal rights, as if animals are lesser versions of ourselves, but a sense of wonder at the mystery of nonhuman life. Shock and outrage at cruelty can move us to change. But we also need to feed and educate our desires, our connectedness with the worlds around us, our humility in the face of so much mystery that lives and breathes without reference to us.

That is why its crucial for services like this to happen, for all the resources of symbol, tone and texture to be used. One of the themes put forward for this year’s Animal Welfare Sunday is that animals are ‘not forgotten by God’. Remembrance for Christians is not just a mental thing. It is physical, emotional, spiritual. The primary remembrance we celebrate is when we break bread and share wine in memory of him who gave his life for the world. God’s body is remembered, is able to reach and touch the earth. Wounded and abused, it identifies with all tormented and enslaved creatures. Risen and glorious, it affirms that the life of the flesh can be liberated and renewed.

The liberation theologian Johannes Baptiste Metz calls our remembrance of Jesus a dangerous memory. It is dangerous because it challenges the power structures of our world, the stories of power and exploitation we live by. It calls us out of the comfortable centre to walk with a subversive Lord. And who knows which worlds he will take us into?

Of course there are those who say that this is all a diversion from our central concern: human suffering. I disagree. There is no absolute dividing line between human and animal. Cutting the world up in that way is an act of violence. There is really no such thing as an animal standing over against human beings. How can we force the sublime diversity of nonhuman life into such a narrow straitjacket? And how can we ignore our own evolved and animal selves?

Even on its own terms, this idea that attending to nonhuman welfare is a distraction just doesn’t add up. There are well documented links between violence done to humans and violence done to animals. And we have only to look at the ways in which excluded groups are labelled as bestial and subhuman to realise that the whole language of human and animal is weighted down by powerful acts of exclusion which affect people as much as other sentient life. Consider just one example, from the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who was an influence on Nazi ideology. He wrote that non-European races are ‘psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans, we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives’. The divide between humans and animals is never neutral. It is a link in the chain of enslavement, colonisation and ethnic extermination which has reached such a pitch in the last hundred years.

How can we be freed from this legacy? I believe grace draws us into another space, one which is not dominated by our gaze, made solely for our needs, one that is a strange new creation. I remember one day walking in the Peak District in a valley filled with abandoned millstones. These markers of human industry were being reclaimed by moss, soil and grass. As we looked for somewhere to sit, we saw a line of ants was marching across the path. As we watched them, we realised that we were in the middle of a huge network of anthills, each connected by busy roads full of insects going backwards and forwards. Suddenly, the whole place was changed. It was no longer just scenic backdrop for our leisure. We had come across a world, a complex world with its own geography and lines of communication, a world totally indifferent to us. The valley was no longer simply ours. It was a revelation.

Cynics will ask if ants have rights or if they are worth as much as human beings. Such questions miss the point. It is not enough to define the world with legalities, however important these may be. The starting point must simply be to stop and wonder. And wonder can be an opening to the traffic of grace, even a grace carried along the beaten tracks made by insect feet. Grace creates a different geography of the heart.

Nonhuman animals do not have to be like us, or of use to us in order to be remembered by God, to be touched by the saving body of God. We do not have to be bats and they do not have to be us for them to be included in God’s care. It is the radical difference and strangeness of the world of the bat – of the bird, of the ant, of the eel – which should make us pause. The boundaries of our imagination and understanding are not the boundaries of reality.

When we travel in awe and trepidation to those boundaries, we should treat them as holy places, not final limits. This does not mean that there will not be conflicts between our plans and projects and those of other animals. But dealing with conflict is very different from the wholesale assumption that animals exist to be caged, eaten, worn and experimented upon for our own benefit.

The bats above us are a reminder that there are creative ways for different lives and different worlds to be held together. At the limit, at the boundary – God awaits us. With a gift of mystery and of love, God holds the worlds in outstretched wings.

Pentecost 14 – Year B September 6, 2009

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 / Psalm 146 / James 2:1-17 / Mark 7:24-37

I’m not going to preach this morning about Proverbs or the Psalm. This group knows about putting integrity before success, about the importance of generosity in the rich and justice for the poor, about sharing food with the hungry, about caring for widows and orphans. We’ve heard that “the Lord pleads their cause” to us, and so we do our best to respond. So, we probably don’t need to dwell on the Letter of James, either, when it condemns discrimination against the poor and calls us to supply their bodily needs. We get that and we know that, “faith without works is dead”, that works of compassion are a natural expression of (and evidence of, genuine faith). Justice and generosity and works will always “preach”, but I’m confident you’ve internalized that message. Anyway, that’s not what I’m thinking about this morning.

And I’m not really thinking about Mark’s gospel, either. Anyway, I don’t know what more I could say about this episode. Over the years, you’ve heard just about every interpretive angle on the showdown between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman; the power of her persistence, the depth of her faith, Jesus’ breaking of gender taboos, or the evolution of his thinking about his mission. As for the healing of the deaf & dumb man, some of you remember that Sunday, a few years back, when we called out to each other, as Jesus called him (and us), “Ephphatha …be opened!” Be unstoppered, unfettered, irrepressible. Important stuff for living an enthusiastic, abundant, spirit-filled life. But again, that’s not what I’m thinking about today.

What I am thinking about today is being here, instead of up in Bean Blossom, about being unsettled, uprooted, unmoored, and uncertain, about being in unfamiliar territory, about a certain reality setting in. Last fall at this time, things were just starting to get real; we’d completed our capital campaign. We’d formed a building committee and chosen an architect. We were beginning to imagine the changes some of us had been talking about for years finally taking form. For a full year, as the committee worked through countless details, the project has become progressively more and more real. First, floor plans, then elevations, then construction documents, and then bids, and the hiring of a contractor.

Reality came right up close when we said farewell to the pin oak and said our prayers, and dug the first shovel of earth. From that time forward, it has rushed upon us unrelentingly as trees were felled, earth moved, trenches dug, slabs poured, new walls framed, old walls demolished…an empty church, stripped of its beautiful things, down to bare walls, and then bare studs. A hole in the south wall where the altar once stood. A shell where a community once gathered so confidently, so comfortably. And here, this morning, a community gathered, as if in exile, waiting for restoration. Reality has really set in. That’s what I’m thinking about, and I imagine some of you are thinking of it, too, this morning.

People have been working very hard. Extra planning for worship. Moving church furnishings and equipment. Monitoring the process and responding to circumstance. Helping out at the work site. Keeping egos in check and civil tongues in our heads…bearing with one another is always a challenge under pressure of uncertainty and change. They say building a home is one of the greatest challenges a couple will ever face. I suppose that means that remodeling and expanding a church home is one of the greatest challenges to a community of faith. When we are under pressure in the life of faith, it is crucial to remember to tend and feed and maintain that faithful life together, to draw fully upon its resources.

So, I hope you were tuned in as we began our worship this morning, saying the familiar “Collect for Purity”, appealing to God, who knows our innermost being and all that we think and feel, from whom no secrets are hid, to cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so that we (unencumbered by worry or frustration) may love God without reservation, lose ourselves in praise, and enter into the refreshment and renewal of Holy Communion. Friends, it is the healing, restoring love of God which will sustain this faith community, as it always has, as wet work through these changes with the building and anticipate the changes in leadership that lie just ahead.

So, if there are any here this morning who feel off-balance, off-put or even off the reservation, I encourage you to stop now and close your eyes (if that helps) and take some deep breaths. As you inhale, think of the very air itself as the Being of God, entering your body, bringing divine life and energy.

And as you exhale, imagine the purification of your body, the removal of the by-products of respiration, the CO2 and the lactic acid, but also the cleansing of the thoughts of your heart. If there is unease or annoyance over what you’re hearing, well, that’s something to breath away now. Continue to breathe, receiving into yourself God’s healing love, expelling the toxins of fatigue, doubt, hurt feelings, resentments, fears about the future, struggles at home, at work, at St. David’s…whatever you carry in here today, so that you are opened and able to receive all that word and sacrament and fellowship have to offer.

I invite you to look beyond the strangeness of our temporary worship home and see as gift, as part of God’s provision. It’s a place to light, where we can take a breath, enter into worship as we always do, using the familiar, comforting forms, and place our lives, our hearts, our whirling minds on the altar for God to take and bless and break and give back. Oddly enough, this room (and we hope we won’t need it for very long) can become for us a new sanctuary (in the fullest sense of the word), where we lay down the burdens of worry and disruption and weariness and grief over the passing of the former things.

And so, the core of today’s message can be found in the words of our opening Collect of the Day, “Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord…”

You know, God, that I sometimes fail to trust in you, even half-heartedly. Sometimes (in the heat of the moment), I fail even to remember that you are there, having earned my trust many times over, waiting to be trusted. When I worry about the new worship space, what it will be like, whether we will love it and rejoice in it, help me to trust that all this is part of a bigger plan, a plan you know, a plan you are revealing to us slowly, as we have eyes to see it. Help me, in the words of the discernment prayer, to hold my convictions lightly, accepting that I don’t have all the answers and that those with whom I disagree most may be most in tune with your will. When I become aware of hurt feelings and bruised egos, let me be an instrument of your peace, but let me not confide in my own strength of perception or persuasion. You have knit this Body together and you, above all, know how to preserve and strengthen it.

When I feel out of my depth, as I do much of the time these days, remind me to take refuge in your mercy, your love for me, for this congregation, for this ministry to the wider world. When I become anxious about my own future, or the future of these, my beloved friends in Christ, as we begin the process of separation, replace my anxiety with your peace, which passes understanding, which appears to make no sense under the circumstances. And in all these things, God, may I always remember that I am not called upon to rise to these heights by my own strength, but by your mercy and by the power of your son Jesus Christ and his indwelling Spirit. AMEN

The Rev. Jonathan Hutchison – Vicar, St. David’s Episcopal Church, Bean Blossom, Indiana

Presiding Bishop’s Opening Sermon
[July 8, 2009] The following is the opening sermon of Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, preached at the July 8 opening Eucharist at the Church’s 76th General Convention.

Four and one-half years ago, I had the great privilege to join in the consecration of a new bishop, one who told an amazing story about the journey that had brought us all to that place on a cold night in Seattle. At the end of the service, Victor Rivera father, the retired bishop of San Joaquin, wrapped the new bishop his daughter Nedi, in his cope. Some of you may not know that while Victor Rivera was bishop in San Joaquin, and for many years afterward, he insisted that women should not be ordained. He didn’t go to Nedi’s ordination as a priest, and he had never taken communion from her, over the more than 25 years that she served as priest. I asked Nedi later how he had come to change his mind. She said to me, “He didn’t change his mind; he changed his heart.”

Ezekiel is talking about a changed heart, but in an even more radical sense he means a heart transplant. Ezekiel is speaking to a disheartened body, yearning for home, aching to be reconciled, impatient to end their depressed and heartsick state. Any parallels?

Heart transplants are at least possible in this era of history – brain transplants aren’t yet – but Ezekiel is also talking about a brain transplant. His people understood the heart not as the seat of emotion, but the seat of decision-making, the critical faculty of judgment that we talked about yesterday.

Look at the passage and listen again. Ezekiel says the body will be disinfected (I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean), and then comes the surgery (a new heart I will give you, and a new spirit). This is about a new way of understanding and acting, new life that comes from living in a new way.

We didn’t get to hear it this morning, but if you were to keep on reading Ezekiel goes on to report God’s word about the consequences of this new heart: God says, “I will summon the grain and make it abundant, and lay no famine upon you. I will make the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field abundant, so that you may never again suffer the disgrace of famine among the nations.” He also notes that this abundance will prompt the people to repentance for their misdeeds, and he promises that the towns will be repopulated, and the desolate land brought into production again. God’s garden will be recreated (Ezek 36:29-35).

A new heart results in renewed creation – that reconciling mission we’re so fond of talking about. We receive this new heart from an organ donor who has given his life so that all might indeed have more abundant life.

Hearts renewed stay that way, living flesh not hardening into stone, when they continue to share that new life – the exercise of pumping keeps a heart healthy. Ezekiel’s hearers need a heart transplant because they have forgotten the source of their life and blessing, they have turned inward, they have become small and fearful. Their new life, like that of the dry bones he speaks about in the next chapter, will come as they receive the moist breath of a life-giving God, as they take in hope and possibility and the creative spirit of God, even in the face of crisis.

The Episcopal Church in the Philippines is offering us a remarkable example of what a healthy and life-sustaining heart looks like. The heart transplant began in 1898, with services held by chaplains of the occupying U.S. Army. Though we would probably prefer a different avenue, the miracle of new life happens even in war, and it happens even despite colonial structures. In 1901, General Convention established the Missionary District of the Philippines and elected Charles Henry Brent as missionary bishop. The first Filipino clergy were ordained, and the missionary district became a diocese, in 1937. By 1971, there were three dioceses and indigenous bishops in each one. In 1990, the Episcopal Church in the Philippines became an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. A covenant relationship with this Episcopal Church continues up until this day, and the Episcopal Church in the Philippines achieved self-sufficiency financial independence in 2008. At the offertory this morning, Prime Bishop Edward Malecdan will present a gift to our church in gratitude for our continuing covenant relationship, as a sign of the strong and growing heart in that Church, eager to reach out to others in love. It is a sacrificial gift, and it will bring more abundant life to both donor and recipient.

The heart of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines began in the missionary heart of this church, as the heart of this church has its origins in missionary hearts farther east, going back over many centuries to the sacred heart in whom we all find our home.

That transplanted or expanded heart has much to do with ubuntu. It is a recognition that the one Body of Christ has many parts, each essential to the functioning and flourishing of the whole, and that no one part can be the whole. It is a deep and abiding acknowledgment that together we are whole, and he cannot be whole otherwise. When the parts of the body are working together, they discover both their gifts and their limitations. The little toe plays an important role in balance, but it can’t smell, even if it is occasionally odorous. The elbow can’t run, even though the energy it gives to a pumping arm can add stability and power to the whole body in a sprint.

The Episcopal Church in the Philippines cannot serve as the primary church in Haiti, even though it has important connections in other parts of this Church, like Los Angeles. Nor can this Episcopal Church still be the primary gospeller in the Philippines, yet the full communion partnership between the Episcopal Church in the Philippines, the Philippine Independent Church, and this Church enriches us all.
The first missionary bishop in the Philippines evidently understood this. He insisted that he wouldn’t “found an altar against an altar.” He wouldn’t go starting Episcopal churches with the goal of converting Roman Catholics. He saw the mission of that nascent church as evangelical responsibility for English-speaking expatriates, and for the urban Chinese population, but more especially for the unevangelized peoples of the Philippine Islands. The strength of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines today largely comes from the indigenous people of the mountains and the lowlands, where the Episcopal missionaries first took the gospel. Brent wouldn’t let them stay in the cities; he believed that the cities already had most of the altars they needed. He went looking for people who were open to being born again, from above, open to receiving a new heart and a new spirit.

That is still our mission work – taking good news and rebirth and offering heart transplants to the languishing. The heart of this church will slowly turn to stone if we think that our primary mission work is to those already in the pews inside our beautiful churches, or to those at other altars. We are in cardiac crisis if we think we can close the doors, and swing our incense and sing our hymns, and all will be right with the world. The heart of this body is mission – domestic and foreign mission, in partnership with anyone who shares that passion.

Jesus has already given this body a new heart. Every time we gather, the Spirit offers a pacemaker jolt to tweak the rhythm of this heart. The challenge is whether or not we’ll recognize and receive that renewed life, whether the muscle will respond with a strengthened beat, sending more life out into the world.

If you read Ezekiel a bit more closely, you discover that the delivered promise of full larders and planted fields and repopulated cities is followed by repentance, by metanoia, getting a new mind – and a new heart. Once abundance is recognized, people begin to feel their hardened hearts. Abundant life is not only promised, but realized, and when we notice, we begin to accept the transplant. We will find more abundant life only in being poured out in giving life to the world.

So, how will this heart push more lifeblood out into a languishing world? Can hear the heartbeat? Mission, Mission, Mission…

The Fifth Sunday of Easter,  Year B,  May 10, 2009
Acts 8:26-40  /  Psalm 22:24-30 / 1 John 4:7-21 / John 15:1-8

Looking over the readings for this Sunday, I’m immediately brought up short by this line in the Collect, that prayer that summarizes – or collects – the themes of our scriptures:  “Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life.”   Oh my, how this pushes my ‘institutional church’ buttons.

The specific button-pusher here is the word “perfectly”.  C’mon.  It’s daunting enough to attempt to follow Christ, challenging enough to try to model our behavior and attitudes on his, but to perfectly know him?  For me, all sorts of interior warning lights and sirens go off when confronted by such a requirement.

This is probably because I have devoted a large chunk of my adult life to recovering from trying to be perfect.  Somewhere along the way – most likely courtesy of some over-zealous parenting and thanks to the nuns who ruled my grade school religious ed. classes — I picked up the idea that God expects me to be perfect, in the sense of flawless, always thinking the right thought, always doing the right thing.

Very “either/or”.  Either you’re perfect or you’re not, right?  As part of my religious education, Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 5:48 to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” was lifted out of context and cited in support of this unreasonable expectation.

This did not seem like ‘good news’ to me.  But, considering the terrifying alternatives offered by the church of my childhood, I decided I’d just have to attempt the impossible and strive to be the flawless human being God apparently required me to be.  As you can imagine, my image of God was long on remoteness, sternness, and rigidity and mighty short on compassion.

Initially, Jesus wasn’t much help.  Not only was he the one who said the thing about being as perfect as God, but it seemed that everywhere I looked at church there he was hanging on the cross, bleeding and suffering — my religious mentors at the time implied –because of humanity’s abject failure to meet that perfection standard.  Humanity…that would be me, right?

It’s a wonder I didn’t give up on religion altogether.  Why didn’t I?  Because I kept encountering a Jesus who was not nailed to the cross, dying; a Jesus who was teaching and healing and hanging out with his friends, living.   I kept learning new things about this Jesus, things that simultaneously re-wound him backwards into his earthly ministry while fast-forwarding him into my own 20th century life.

The wonderful mysterious multi-layered stories he told, stories I couldn’t get my mind around but that made something true in me ring like a struck gong.  The infirmities of mind and body and spirit he mended.  His penchant for speaking his mind to the religious authorities that made me wish he’d sat next to me in religious ed.  His ability to make something out of nothing filled me with hope.  His calling of bumbling, quarrelsome, cowardly, radically imperfect people to discipleship helped me believe that I might be called to follow him, too, flaws and all.

Flaws and all.  The disciples’ varied and glaring character defects make it abundantly clear that perfection, in the way I had been taught to understand it, is not a prerequisite for discipleship.  So, what does Jesus mean when he says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”?  The Greek word which becomes ‘perfect’ in our English version of the New Testament is teleios.  It means “complete”.  How many of us feel unfinished?  How many of us feel incomplete?  Now, here was something to which I could relate.

It began to dawn on me that my quest for perfection had been all about seeming, acquiring, constructing.  If I just made myself behave in a certain way, maybe form would follow function.  But what lurked beneath the façade – the unfinished me, the fear, the resentment, the need to control, the hollow place from which they came – always won out.  Perfection, in the sense of flawlessness, was clearly impossible for me to achieve.

But perfection, in the sense of a process toward completeness, that was something to which I could aspire.  I discovered that teleios comes from telos, which means “end” or “goal”.  Becoming whole is a marvelous goal, a goal that is central to Jesus’ ministry of healing and reconciliation.  So, I devoted myself to recovering from trying to be perfect and began the process of submitting to completion.

And I came to understand that this process begins deep deep inside, at the very heart of who we are, and works its way outward, sort of the way a puncture wound heals from the inside out, finally manifesting in an integrated true way of being and behaving that expresses something of the nature of God.

Remember I said earlier that that line from Matthew about perfection that caused me such trouble had been lifted out of context?  Well, the context is Jesus’ extended teaching that has come to be known as The Sermon on the Mount.  The line about being perfect comes immediately after a series of statements Jesus makes about how keeping God’s law is all about what goes on inside each one of us.

For example: “You have heard it said…, ‘You shall not murder’ and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’  But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.”

And it comes just before Jesus’ teaching about not practicing piety in public in order to be seen by others, but rather giving alms and praying and fasting in secret where it’s just between you and God.

This reinforces my sense that the process of being perfected, completed, made whole, is interior.   And, I would offer that it is not something we do by ourselves.  I don’t think we can do it by ourselves.  We cooperate.  We participate.  We allow.  We turn again and again toward the light.  But the work of transforming fear into trust, hatred into love, resentment into acceptance, control into letting go, is completed by Jesus the Christ in his incarnational role as embodier of the presence of the Divine in us.

So, in a very real sense, becoming perfect involves offering our unfinished selves to God and allowing God in Christ to inhabit that hollow place within, and from there, from the core of our being, work outward his remaking of us through all our many layers, until our way of being in the world begins to change.  This change from within is not illusory.  It is real.   And because it is brought about by Christ, because Christ inhabits it, it is one with Christ’s being.

The writer of 1 John touches on this intimate and living relationship.  “[I]f we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”  There’s that word again.   And it’s communicating something that should shake us to our very foundations.   The statement that God lives in us should be enough to take our breath away.   But, the writer of 1 John goes on to say that God’s love is perfected, brought to completion, in us.  Now, this may mean that God in Christ is working in us to bring our love to fruition – that is, to make us better lovers.

But it could also mean that we are, somehow, with all our inner loose ends and unfinished business, essential to the completion, the fulfilling of God’s love.  That your learning to do and, more importantly, be love and my learning to do and be love is vital to the fullness of God.

Please don’t ask me to explain this.  I can’t.  I am simply flabbergasted by the implication that we are not just complicated reclamation projects, being rehabbed by God into dwelling places for God’s love, but that we are necessary elements of that love.  We are photons without which the Great Light is diminished.  We are essential particles of creation, vibrating with infinite potential.  It’s not complete, it’s not full, it cannot come to fruition without us.

This is huge.  And, for me, so new that I know I must move carefully into it, letting it work in me as I have learned to let Christ work in me.  I offer it to you so that it may work in you also.  Take heart from something else the writer of 1 John says — “We love because [God] first loved us.”  We don’t have to manufacture this love.  It is already flowing .  Take heart from our gospel metaphor.  We are branches, growing out of and of the same substance as and dependent upon the Vine.

But hold this – it is we, the branches, whose part it is to flower and bear the fruit.  AMEN.

Exodus 12:1-4,11-14 Psalm 116:1, 10-17 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 John 13:1-17, 31b-35

The Darkest Night

Our liturgy tonight is worship meant for the dimming of the day. Night approaches. As we gather, this particular Thursday evening in April in the ninth year of a new millennium, to light our little candles against the growing gloom, we take our places with the ancients who, some 3,500 years ago, huddled behind bloodied doorposts as death passed close and a mysterious birthing into freedom lay immanent. As is the way with story, they cower there still, caught between annihilation and liberation, and we with them.

We take our places, too, with their descendents climbing stairs to an upper room in Jerusalem almost 2,000 years ago. As is the way with story, they gather still, caught between incalculable loss and incomprehensible life, and we with them.

Only one among us knows the full depth and breadth of the death that is passing close, the dark night closing in, a night that holds in its shadowed embrace all the suffering and loneliness and alienation that breaks the great heart of creation from the beginning of time to the end. Only one knows that above and beneath, behind and before, and – inexplicably – within this darkness, pulses light immeasurable.

The One who knows is here with us tonight. He is our Host at the table that now waits glowing with white linens to hold the holy meal. He is our Servant with bowl and towel. He teaches still, in bread and wine and cleansing water.

But, soon, very soon, the bread will be broken, the cup poured out, the water spilled upon the earth from a wounded side. The table stripped, become its shadow self, a burial slab. The linens a shroud. Our Servant Host surrendered into death’s mute embrace.

This is God in God’s most confounding guise. Not shining forth. No glory here. Not Emmanuel, God with us as we would like, the comforting sound of familiar footsteps walking in the dark by our side. This is God leaving us, walking ahead into that darkest of places, disappearing around a bend barely visible in the gloom, drawing mystery around himself like a shroud.

This is the God of Isaiah, explaining, “My ways are not your ways.” This is the God of Job, refusing to explain anything at all.

But not refusing to equip, not refusing to prepare. God with us in another way. Not the way our weak and needy selves would prefer. In a way that calls us to claim an inner strength we doubt we have. In a way that awakens within us what we have always thought belonged to the Master alone.

The bread broken and shared, the cup offered. “Do this in remembrance of me.” The washing of feet. “…if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”

Such scandalous intimacy. Our feet gently held, healed of the road’s hurts, dried by hands that are not our own. Our hands becoming the hands of someone greater, someone more compassionate. Bread becoming flesh – his flesh, our flesh. Wine becoming blood – his blood, our blood. Consuming — somehow ingesting the essence, the true being-ness of the One these plain things represent. Somehow, the One who is leaving is also here, within.

The distribution of the bread, the wine. Given and received. Together we come to the altar rail, and we are linked through the One whose Being we take in – Christ, like the hub of a great wheel. Each of us a spoke.

The washing of each other’s feet. Giving and receiving. We come to be washed, bringing our need for wholeness, for care, for comfort, for community. And we wash, becoming Christ Healer, Christ Servant, Christ Mother, for one another. In this mutuality we are linked in a different way, a way more complex, multi-layered and interwoven than spoke to hub. We are Christ to Christ to Christ. Love to Love to Love.

Together, in the dimming of this darkest night, we build the Body that will be broken and mended, food and feeding, love and lover a thousand thousand thousand times before the story is through.

“Little children, I am with you only a little longer…I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Amen.

~ Deborah Pender Hutchison

This version comes after conversations among Ed, Pamela, Jonathan and Phyllis. The new sacristy will have a right triangle sliced off its northeast corner. The existing south and west walls stay – each is just over 11′ long. This is the first version – it will be revised many times. Your ideas are welcome too! If you’d like to look at a sketch of the floor plan, please email or call Pamela.

Proposed new floor plan for sacristy, version one

Version one of proposed layout for south wall of sacristy

Version one of proposed layout for west wall of sacristy

Additional notes:

Cabinetry to be good-quality white laminate or “green” alternative

Slab doors

Countertop to be Nevamar or “green” alternative.

The vestment press may need a new top.

One-basin sink, sprayer faucet

More overall lighting

Task lighting uc and at sink

New, openable window at counter height

On the walls – wall-mounted ironing board, full-length mirror, bulletin board

The new kitchen will be about seventeen feet long and twelve feet wide, with pocket doors on both short walls. This sketch was developed from a meeting between Carol & Pamela, with additional thoughts offered by Coral, Jane and Yvonne. This is the first version – it will be revised many times. Your thoughts are welcome too! Click on the sketch to get a larger sketch. If you are interested in a detailed floor plan, email or call Pamela.

Additional notes:

Cabinetry to be good-quality white laminate or “green” alternative: cabinets run 96″ to ceiling

Slab doors

The cabinet next to the refrigerator on the west wall is 24″ deep

Countertop to be Nevamar or “green” alternative

2 farm sinks, backflow protection on drains

uc, task and ambient lighting

Plumb for anticipated eventual fridge with ice maker and plumbed-in coffee maker

Rough-in wiring for disposal at EACH sink

Rough-in wiring for second fridge

Rough-in for eventual range hood

REVISIONS: Brisk conversations have been going on via email. Note these changes.
1. Ditch the 33″ east wall sink. Put in a three-basin commercial sink.
2. Delay purchase of prep tables. Maybe an ordinary kitchen table instead?

INSTALLATIONS/ EQUIPMENT
42″ Kenmore Elite ceramic-top electric range
stainless steel panel behind range
Three-basin commercial sink
24″ sink
2 dishwashers
2 wall ovens

Proposed kitchen floor plan, first version

First version of west wall, new kitchen

First version of east wall, new kitchen