Queer Eye for the Lectionary

Church Calendar 3-Year Index of Queer Eye for the Lectionary

2011-07-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

Year A

Advent 1
Advent 2
Advent 3
Advent 4
First Sunday after Christmas
Second Sunday after Christmas
The First Sunday after Epiphany
The Second Sunday after Epiphany
The Third Sunday after Epiphany
The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany
The Eighth Sunday after Epiphany
The Last Sunday after Epiphany
The First Sunday in Lent
The Second Sunday in Lent
The Third Sunday in Lent
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
The Fifth Sunday in Lent
Palm Sunday
Easter Day
Second Sunday of Easter
Third Sunday of Easter
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Seventh Sunday of Easter
Day of Pentecost. Whitsundsay
Pentecost 1
Pentecost 2
Pentecost 3
Pentecost 4
Pentecost 5
Pentecost Proper 12
Pentecost Proper 13
Pentecost Proper 14
Pentecost Proper 15
Pentecost Proper 16
Pentecost Proper 17
Pentecost Proper 18
Pentecost Proper 19
Pentecost Proper 20
Pentecost Proper 21
Pentecost Proper 22
Pentecost Proper 23
Pentecost Proper 24
Pentecost Proper 25
Pentecost Proper 26
Pentecost Proper 27
Pentecost Proper 28
Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King. Proper 29.
Year B

Advent 1
Advent 2
Advent 3
Advent 4
First Sunday after Christmas
Second Sunday after Christmas
First Sunday after the Epiphany
The Second Sunday after Epiphany
The Third Sunday after Epiphany
The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
The Last Sunday after Epiphany
The First Sunday in Lent
The Second Sunday in Lent
The Third Sunday in Lent
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
The Fifth Sunday in Lent
Palm Sunday
Easter Day
Second Sunday of Easter
Third Sunday of Easter
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Seventh Sunday of Easter
Day of Pentecost. Whitsundsay
Pentecost 1: Trinity Sunday
Pentecost 2: Proper 6
Pentecost 3: Proper 7
Pentecost 4: Proper 8
Pentecost 5: Proper 9
Pentecost 6: Proper 10
Pentecost 7: Proper 11
Pentecost 8: Proper 12
Pentecost 9: Proper 13
Pentecost 10: Proper 14
Pentecost 11: Proper 15
Pentecost 12: Proper 16
Pentecost 13: Proper 17
Pentecost 14: Proper 18
Pentecost 15: Proper 19
Pentecost 16: Proper 20
Pentecost 17: Proper 21
Pentecost 18: Proper 22
Pentecost 19: Proper 23
Pentecost 20: Proper 24
Pentecost 21: Proper 25
All Saints Day
Pentecost 23: Proper 27
Pentecost 24: Proper 28
Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King
Year C

Advent 1
Advent 2
Advent 3
Advent 4
Christmas
Second Sunday after Christmas
First Sunday after the Epiphany
The Second Sunday after Epiphany
The Third Sunday after Epiphany
The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
The Last Sunday after Epiphany
The First Sunday in Lent
The Second Sunday in Lent
The Third Sunday in Lent
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
The Fifth Sunday in Lent
Palm Sunday
Easter Sunday
Second Sunday of Easter
Third Sunday of Easter
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Seventh Sunday of Easter
Day of Pentecost. Whitsundsay
Pentecost 1
Pentecost 2. Proper 5
Pentecost 3. Proper 6
Pentecost 4. Proper 7
Pentecost 5. Proper 8
Pentecost 6. Proper 9
Pentecost 7. Proper 10
Pentecost 8. Proper 11
Pentecost 9. Proper 12
Pentecost 10. Proper 13
Pentecost 11. Proper 14
Pentecost 12. Proper 15
Pentecost 13. Proper 16
Pentecost 14. Proper 17
Pentecost 15. Proper 18
Pentecost 16. Proper 19
Pentecost 17. Proper 20
Pentecost 18. Proper 21
Pentecost 19. Proper 22
Pentecost 20. Proper 23
Pentecost 21. Proper 24
Pentecost 22. Proper 25
Pentecost 23. Proper 26
Pentecost 24. Proper 27
Pentecost 25. Proper 28
Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King. Proper 29

July 17, 2011. Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 11.

2011-07-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

I love this collect. With it I offer to put myself completely into God's hands, trusting God to provide quite independently of my ignorance, blindness, and weakness.

It is easy to see what the prayer says about God. When we pray it, what do we say about ourselves?

We are ignorant.
We are weak.
We are unworthy.
We dare not ask.
We are blind.

Ought we to accept that critique uncritically?

Undertakers know full well how vulnerable the family is when it walks into the display room to choose a casket. The poor are especially vulnerable to feeling that the more they spend, the more they will show their love of the deceased, defying their poverty by a conspicuous display of expensiveness. Never mind that for months ahead they will be paying off the debt with money that might better spent on a worthy project for the living that would give continuing honor to the deceased -- for example, they might buy a cheap wooden casket and spend the savings on the education of the family's children

We are extremely vulnerable when on our knees praying. Why not use the liturgy to strengthen us, not merely to humble and even possibly humiliate us? I suggest a set of opposite assumptions to bring to this collect:

We have good minds.
We can become strong in character.
Christ has made us worthy; God did not make us junk.
There is no risk in asking.
God gave us not only eyesight, but also the potential for insight.

With these revised assumptions of who we are, the church might revise the collect:

Creator God, thank you for giving us good minds. Bless us as we strive to use them well and seek to become wise. Help us to become strong in character. And realizing that you want us to ask, ask we do: please provide that which we do not yet see we need, through Jesus Christ your son and our joint heir of your everlasting kingdom

Bit too much? Do I need to tone it down a bit? Should the collect encourage an itsy bitsy grovel? I think not.

Honesty and candor do not threaten God nearly so much as blind obedience does. Professional liturgists need to smith the draft a bit more, but let's go for it.

Genesis 28:10-19a

I am sure that Jacob awakened refreshed by his dream. But should we?

This same dream is used by many today to close discussion on the bids for a Palestinian state. In property disputes about the Gaza strip or the huge wall to cut off ease of Muslim access to their own holy places, some use Jacob's dream to ratify all Jewish claims. If you must blame anyone, some argue, don't blame the Jews: they're simply following God's orders.

What for Jacob is a dream is for Muslims a nightmare.

Is God really such a respecter of persons?

Might Yaweh and Allah name the same person, seen but darkly through the eyes of Jews and Muslims?

My rector The Rev. Dr. Brent Bates pointed out in a recent sermon, we have a choice of what to hear when Jesus says, "I am the way." We may choose to hear "I am THE way"; or we may choose to hear "I am the WAY."

Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23

This is one of my favorite psalms. In my spiritual journey, I was very close to God as a child and as a teenager. I accepted the church's indictment of homosexual desire and actions and avoided intimacy and fervently confessed my fearful fantasies. I did everything I could to try to become straight.

At age 28, I concluded that my homosexuality was not just a passing phase, that I really am not plumbed as straight. I abandoned God who had, it seemed, so cruelly abandoned me. I embraced the criminal status the law prescribed for me. I furtively sought to make up for lost time in the company of strangers. To protect not only myself, but also my family, I immediately moved to Europe where any arrest would less likely be noticed in my hometown newspaper.

Meanwhile, God never stopped loving me. There was no place where I could flee from God's presence. God traced my journeys and my resting-places, and was acquainted with all my ways. Even when I said, "Surely the darkness will cover me and the light around me turn to night," it did not happen. Our darkness is not dark to God; our night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light to God are both alike.

After several years of wandering, I came to discover God's light where I least expected to find it, in the arms of Ernest. In Ernest's love for me, just as I am, I glimpsed how much more God loves me, and not me only, but absolutely everybody.

God in our time is using lgbtq persons as God has used many of the despised before us, to show that God's love has no limit. The lgbtq Christian movement is not about us, but about God, and about us only as God's servants. Jesus had his first success not with Jews, but with scorned Samaritans; and he was less concerned with their sins than with their thirst for living water. A luta continua.

Romans 8:12-25

Looking at this passage with what I imagine "A Straight Eye," we lgbtq persons are at risk. Many straights use us a cookie cutter examples of those who "live according to the flesh." Very few places in the world offer us the alternative of marriage, which straight persons, always the majority, reserve for themselves alone as the way to sanctify sexual intercourse. In this straight division of reality, lgbtqs manifest creation's "bondage to decay."

Recently The Rev. Matt Kennedy, a friend on Facebook, lamented that Presbyterians have now approved the ordination of gay people. +Matt proclaimed, "Presbyterians just took a flying leap off a very steep cliff."

At one point in the first 82 responses +Matt prompted, I wrote as irenically as I could imagine: "God's property is always to show mercy." My friend replied very much with a "Straight Eye for the Lectionary":

Yes it is. And he has already revealed the basis of his mercy...the life death resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Access to the saving benefits of Christ is open to all through faith--which is personal surrender and commitment to him. Jesus said that those who are his will make that manifest through the fruits of their lives...primarily obedience. "If you love me you will follow my commands"

Conversely we are told by Jesus himself: "But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death." (Revelation 21:8)

Those are not my words, but the words of Jesus of Nazareth risen and reigning in heaven and who will one day come again as judge. These words do not mean that if you sin you will not inherit the kingdom.

We all sin. It points rather to those whose lives are characterized by unrepentant defiant and proud sin. In other words, Louie, it is not your sexual sin but your unrepentance that is at issue. Unrepentance and defiance reveals a heart that is uncircumcised and unchanged. But there is hope and a future open before you and I pray you take it. The same Lord who pronounced the sentence above also said the following through his apostle John:

"If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. [9] If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. [10] If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.(1 John 1:8-10)

You are right. His property is always to have mercy to those who seek it. Louie, I pray that you seek it. You are correct that I am no better and in many ways morally worse than you. I would have no hope were it not for the grace of God leading me to repentance for all those things he reveals to be sin in my life. You too have that open door and I pray you will walk through it.

[Louie, you wrote:] "I pray that God will not use the same standard in judging you that you so rigorously use in not forgiving lgbtq persons."

It's the same standard Louie...the very same. His word, which reveals his holiness, is the measure of us all. And none can stand before him. But, again, that is why Jesus came--to save sinners like you and me. But to avail ourselves of this salvation we must be willing to say that God is right and we are wrong. That his word is true and our pretensions are false. We must be willing to surrender our proud and vain rebellion, cease clinging to our own designs and desires, repent of our sins and cling to Christ in whom, as you say, we are promised mercy, forgiveness and eternal life.

Jesus loves you Louie. Imagine what God might do through you even now to rescue those living in the darkness of sexual sin. You could bring such glory to his name and so many people to the gospel. So, again, I pray you repent and I pray that God will move in your mind and heart to hear and receive the truth of his word.

From my queer point of view, St. Paul was often wrong about sex. He was wrong to set mind and body, spirit and the flesh at enmity with each other. God made both, and we can live with wholeness (integrity) only when we can integrate spirit and flesh. St. Paul is on dangerous spiritual ground when he allows for marriage only as a form of lust control. ("It is better to marry than to burn" 1 Cor. 7:9)

There is much more abundance and generosity to grace than +Matt Kennedy or I have imagined. I honor him for his obvious compassion towards me given his view of God. I am grateful that he has given his permission for me to include this long quotation.

Gay Roman Catholic priest and theologian James Alison counsels: "Give someone who is wrong a soft place to land." No matter whether it is +Matt Kennedy or myself who is wrong, we both have the same soft place, safely in the arms of Jesus.

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

+Matt Kennedy feels called to invest lots of effort into separating wheat from tares, sheep from goats, the righteous from the unrighteous. He works for laws to support his divisions, both in the culture and in the church. With many others, and at great personal cost to himself, he left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with one of the continuing Anglican groups.

Jesus is not naive. He knows full well that there are weeds among the wheat, that there are evil-doers. His disciples ask him: `Then do you want us to go and gather them?" Jesus replied:

No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'"

Signing off

Jesus' counsel is an appropriate place to end this blog, with straight and lgbtqs alike watching and waiting. I hope that we do so with great expectations.

With this reflection I have completed the full 3-year cycle of the lectionary. Thank you for your interest. I encourage all of you to write your own reflections on the lectionary, especially fellow lay folk like myself, because we don't 'have to.' It is an excellent discipline through which to take Scripture seriously.

As the blog name emphasizes, I set out in this series to give a "Queer Eye" to the lectionary. Since that's the only kind of eye I have, I confess that from time to time I have gotten through an entire set of readings without ever saying anything that makes lgbtq experience stand out as distinct. In life, that is true even more so.

Although I am coming up on my 75th birthday in December, I confess that I am not altogether sure what gayness/homosexuality/queerdom really is. All human beings are far more complex than any label can adequately describe, and I see no real reason that affectional preferences should make one stand out any more than Ernest and I stand out for being left-handed or for being an interracial couple...

Alas, in much of the world we do stand out as interracial, and we do stand out as a gay couple.

If the world gives you a leper's bell, use it to make music. I hope I have done so in the series, albeit I am not a musician and some of it is likely discordant.

On the Great Gettin Up Morning, to which each of us draws nearer with each breath, I do not expect to plead, 'Let me in because I am right about homosexuality.' I will plead, 'Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.' And She will be. That's who She is.

My blessing

May God bless you and keep you. Lend your face to God so that in you others may glimpse God. Be about the business of redemption, cleaning up messes with as much delight as you can muster.

Love one another, especially those least loved and most difficult to love. Love your enemies as much as God does. Ask God to hold you to the same standard that you yourself use in forgiving them.

Hold great expectations because you are a joint heir with Jesus.

Fear not.

Joy!

Amen

See also

July 10, 2011. Fourth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 10.

2011-07-01T02:57:00.000-07:00

O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Many collects ask God to tell us what to think and do. Many of us ask God the same.

I suppose it does not hurt to ask, but it is important to excercise extreme caution when I am tempted to take my answers for God's answers. It is all too easy to justify my position by saying, "God made me do it!"

God has never promised to think for us or to act in ways that make us God's puppets or automatons.

Why should we choose to be God's puppet? God offers instead for us to be God's friend.

A Quean Lutibelle alternative:

God, just checking in, my friend. I hope all goes well for you, and if not, that you re-deploy your love in ways most likely to improve situations.

Thank you for giving me a mind and heart of my own. I hope that I too can deploy your love in ways most likely to improve situations. Here are some specifics in central focus for me today...... Love, Lutibelle/Louie

Genesis 25:19-34

First Sarah was barren until she was seventy. No wonder that she laughed (in Hebrew, "Yitsak, Yitsak. Yitsak, Yitsak ....." Try it out in a high wide-mouthed, high-pitched cackle!) Pregnant at 70! Whew! Even today we're tempted to share her unbelief.

Then her daughter-in-law Rebekah proves barren too!

What's going on with this family? How ironic that Abraham, the progenitor of progenitors, heads it.

When Rebekah finally becomes pregnant, she does so in spades -- with twins. Esau arrives first, with Jacob right after him, gripping Esau's heel.

In Beyond the Fringe, a 1960 British comedy revue, Alan Bennett played a vicar in the routine "Take a Pew". He said with falsetto: "My brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man." Some credit this show with the popularity of satire on the British stage for over a decade.

Jacob was smooth indeed, and a consummate trickster. The story pits Esau's physical strength (the "skillful hunter, the man of the field") against Jacob's wits, against Jacob's craftiness. Famished, Esau loses control and sells his birthright as the first-born for mere lentil soup with bread.

Later in parts of Genesis, Jacob himself falls prey to tricks of Laban, who becomes his father-in-law twice before Jacob gets the bride he wants.

Be glad that Hollywood did not get an advance copy of this script. The Bible version does not dress its main characters to please the crowds. The patriachs of Genesis often are less than grand.

Psalm 119:105-112

This selection repeats several basic tenets of Hebrew Scriptures. The speaker obeys God's law and expects to be rewarded. The speaker has enemies who set traps for him, but God protects the speaker, because "I have not strayed from your commandments."

The contract runs smoothly. God commands; human beings to obey. The speaker claims justification by virtue of the good behavior, and God rewards the obedience.

That's radically different from Saint Paul's understanding that we can never be good enough to be justified by the law. That's why, Paul and other apostles argue, we need Jesus to save us. Note the beginning verses of today's passage from Romans:

Romans 8:1-11

There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

For Saint Paul, the flesh is our great weakness. The flesh makes it impossible for us to obey the law fully.

Jesus pays the price for our sins, and it is through our faith in Jesus, not through our own righteousness, that we are justified -- according to Paul.

Saint Paul pits the Spirit against the Flesh. He believes that the Spirit alone can save us.

Not all early Christians behaved as Paul wanted them to behave. Read his epistles to the Corinthians, in which he becomes quite worked up with some of their sexual behaviors.

Paul's view of our creatureliness differs radically from the view propounded in the book of Genesis. When God made each part of creation, God proclaimed, "It is good!" It's hard to imagine that when God came to the genitalia, God said, "It is nasty! Yuck" -- But Saint Paul has led many to come to that conclusion.

Elsewhere, Paul says it's best not even to get married and recommends marriage only as a last resort, for lust-control. "It is better to marry than to burn" (1 Corinthians 7:9).

Nowhere does Paul even suggest that flesh and spirit can integrate fully. Yet I believe their integration helps define a healthy person.

That's another good reason that God gave us minds and trusts us to think for ourselves.

One of my first cousins graduated from the highly conservative Dallas Theological Seminary and worked his full adult life as a pastor and counselor in large independent congregations. We were close in growing up, and he valued me immensely as the one who gave him his first bible and, while I was still a Southern Baptist, "led him to the Lord."

Years into our ministries, I was in Dallas to speak at an Episcopal service, and we arranged to meet in my hotel room. Each tried hard not to offend the other in the areas of our clear difference.

"Louie," he said well into our time together, "I don't know much about gay people, but do you find that they have some of the same problems understanding faithfulness and commitment that I find many of our converts having? I am troubled that some are caught up in promiscuity and seem not to connect their sexual behavior with their spirituality."

"Some lgbtq folks have the same disconnect," I replied.

See my fuller account of this conversation at Huge Bibles.

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Evangelists and teachers, like sowers, are not responsible for the harvest, only for the planting!

At 74 I continue to hear from persons whom I taught during my 44 years as a teacher, beginning when I was 21. I am amazed at what some remember. Some credit me with major changes in their lives, yet sometimes I cannot even remember saying the transforming words they attribute to me.

I have learned to smile and say, "Thank you. It was a privilege to teach you."

And it was.

I did not make the seed, nor did I remain to nuture it as they and others have done long after they leave my classes.

I am but the sower. God gives the increase.

See also

July 3, 2011. Third Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 9

2011-06-24T00:53:00.000-07:00

O God, you have taught us to keep all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of your Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to you with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Enrollment dwindled a bit in my courses at Rutgers on The Bible as Literature when students learned that the elective was not an easy 'A,' that they had to write original papers, that in a secular setting I was concerned more with their critical thinking skills than with whether they were believers.

Often on the first day of class I would take an old bible and baptize it in a bucket of dirty water. I'd go to the window, look out in many directions, and report, "No lightning yet."

Then I would retrieve the soggy book, read from its cover, 'Holy Bible," and announce that in this class, the book would have to earn respect in the same way that books in any of their other courses had to earn their respect.

Still many returned to take the second course in the sequence, active Christians as well as Muslims, Buddhists, atheists and others.

"Why are you back for the Christian scriptures when you know from the class on the Hebrew scriptures that you disagree with me fully?" I asked a member of the Plymouth Brethren.

"That's easy," the student replied: "You love the book and you give fair grades when we earn them."

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

Two weeks into the Hebrew scriptures, a young female arrived before class with great excitement about the reading we have in the lectionary today.

"The gave her a nose ring!" she exclaimed. "Oh what fun I had in telling my mama that I am not being an upstart by wearing a nose ring: they were doing it in the bible thousands of years ago!"

Before she made this discovery, she considered dropping the class, claiming she could not think of any thing original to write for her first critical paper.

"Why don't you use this insight as kindling for your paper?" I asked.

"How would I do that?" she responded.

"What other references to jewelry can you find using the online bible? What purposes does the jewelry serve and what attention do the writers give to it?"

She was off and running. Her paper was impressive; for example, she discovered that jewelry came on hard times when prophets tried to explain newly arrived hard times..... Bracelets, amulets, rings, and the like, are easy targets to blame for bad fortune.

Consider July 3rd as 'Nose Ring Sunday.' Wear one to church. Celebrate with Rebekah.

One of the continuing pleasures of reading Scripture is to focus on details which are not in central focus for the narrators.

Psalm 45: 11-18

Not quite up to the pomp and circumstance of the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, but the impulse is the same.

The sad note here is that the king's pleasure gets direct attention: the bride is supposed to get her pleasure vicariously through him, by how much she pleases him. No mention is made of his obligation to please her.

The king will have pleasure in your beauty; *
he is your master; therefore do him honor.

Lutibelle prefers:

You will have pleasure in the king's beauty; *
you are his master; and he will do you honor.

One telling detail that memorializes the psalmist's patriarchal assumptions is the emphasis in "O king, you shall have sons."

Romans 7:15-25

I did not choose to be gay. Until I was 28 (in 1964), I fought it and kept my arousal patterns as a deep dark secret, telling only a few very close friends. During that time I lived in the closet. I disliked myself and I sought to avoid any other gay people. It was a lonely time. By the time I came out, I had had sexual encounters with only six persons, all strangers, when I was drunk and desperate.

I did not understand my own actions. For I did not do what I wanted, but I did the very thing I hated.... I felt it was no longer I who did it, but sin that dwelt within me.

I cried out, "Wretch that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?"

Like Paul, I felt that the body corrupts, that flesh is sinful in and of itself. I separated mind and body; I separated soul from body.

And I strove to reject the body as best I could. For years I fervently asked God to take away all my erotic desire.

All my prayers to change my desires failed. At long last, I gave up on God, or so I thought.

Yet God delivered me, just not in the way I had asked.

God sent a live human being into my life who loved me, and I found it impossible not to love him. Very quickly I found that we were attracted in dozens of ways, not just by sex, though sex was integral to our closeness.

We courted for five months and then we married, just the two of us in the presence of the Holy Spirit, using the Book of Common Prayer (1928 version, since it was the only one authorized at the time.)

I was not long into the relationship with Ernest before I realized that our love was transforming me. Instead of separating me from God, our love for each other drew me closer to God. Instead of rejecting sex, I integrated it fully with my mind and my soul.

I had almost died without this wholeness, this integrity. The church still encourages that kind of violence in many places.

When Ernest and I married on February 2, 1974, I did not know another couple who were lesbian or gay, so great was my isolation.

It should surprise no one that when I founded an lgbtq ministry in the Episcopal Church, I named it Integrity, to reclaim what the Church had violated.

I have booked a long conversation with Saint Paul on this matter. I grieve that he was so fully cut off from his own wholeness. He argued that marriage was for lust control only. He more than any other biblical writer promoted the unhealthy notion: "Sex is dirty; therefore, save it for marriage."

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Since today is "Nose Ring Sunday," let it also be an occasion to throw away concern for our good reputation. Jesus notes that the crowds call him a drunkard, a glutton, and a friend of sinners. At the great gettin-up morning, we too will be judged by the company we keep. Jesus' practice turns on its head conventional morality. How much time have you spent with drunkards and gluttons? Do you have a wide reputation of being a friend of sinners?

I don't know much about the righteous, but I know a lot about sinners, being one myself. The sinners that I know are not likely to invite someone to dine with them for a second time if the person tells them how evil they are and reports to the world on their bad behavior. I doubt that Jesus could have earned friendship status with sinners if he came down on them judgmentally. When he met with my Samaritan ancestor at the well, he expressed far more concern about her thirst than about her sin.

For years an Episcopal deacon in Chicago ran a facility for the homeless, and in highly visible gilded gothic script he hung a sign that said, "Love your neighbor today: leave him alone!" From all busybodies and from all who consider themselves better than the rest of us, good lord, deliver us."

Make the church a safe space for sinners, and you will pack the congregation much as Jesus did.

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Even for sissies like me. Indeed, for absolutely everybody!

See also

June 26, 2011. Second Sunday after Pentecost

2011-06-01T04:10:00.000-07:00

Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Matthew 10:40-42

Welcome is contagious, much as unwelcome is.

One priest I know liked to tell his parishioners how unimaginative they are. "I find it incredible than anyone, absolutely anyone, has been willing to worship here 10 or more years," he told them frequently.

Under that kind of leadership, attendance in the large parish dwindled dramatically.

Fortunately he left, and even better, he took his unwelcoming spirit with him.

His successor delights in finding new ways to say every Sunday what a great and welcoming and loving parish they are. Her spirit is contagious. Lo and behold, the parish is thriving again, and the people feel good about themselves and their opportunity to serve others through the parish's outreach.

"Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple-- truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.

Psalm 13

This is one of the shorter psalms. (The shortest is Psalm 117, with only 33 words in some English versions, only 16 words in Hebrew.)

In Psalm 13 the petitioner manifests a sharp mood swing that occurs in many other psalms as well: he moves from being morose to having great expectations.

In the psalm God's actions do not change; the speaker changes assumptions about God's actions. For the first four verses, the petitioner assumes that God has forgotten him. The petitioner asks God to act, but records no action taken by God. Instead, the speaker acts by putting trust in God mercy and saving help.

The psalm is almost a showcase for belief in the power of positive thinking. In the final verse, the petitioner no longer protests being neglected. Instead, the petitioner says, "God has dealt with me richly."

How often to we take responsibility for our own depression and thereby help to reverse it? How often do we nurture our depression and blame God for it?

Romans 6:12-23

Paul insists throughout his witness that good works and right behavior don't change our status with God one bit. We are saved by Jesus' righteousness, not by our own.

Yet Paul does not want us to continue in the sin from which Christ has rescued us.

He reminds me a bit of Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations. Miss Havisham does not in any way encourage spontaneity, delight, and freedom for Pip an Estella, yet she wants the children to behave as she assumes they should, so she commands them, "Play!"

That moment is one of Dickens' more memorable captures of perversity. Children's play is not children's play when it is done because it is commanded.

Paul wants Christians to be righteous spontaneously, but when they are not, he deploys passive aggression through which he hopes to prompt them rather than coerce them into right behavior.

To this end, Paul develops a rhetorical construct, insisting that they are still slaves as they were before Jesus saved them. The difference is that now they are (or Paul at least thinks they ought to be) slaves to God rather than slaves to sin.

"For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life." Note that Paul does not say, "For the wages of sin is death, but the reward for sinlessness is eternal life."

As a Gay Christian, I have encountered many who tell me, "God cannot forgive you because you have not left your homosexual relationship. You continue to sin, and your faith in Jesus is null and void until you do."

They may be right, but I am not trembling in fear that they may be.

I do not believe the bible's case against homosexual behavior trumps Jesus' first and second commandments. I do not believe my marriage to Ernest is sinful, though I do sin within the relationship. I do not feel it wrong that I love him; it is very wrong when I fail to love him enough, namely as much as I love myself.

I do not understand marriage as primarily sexual. Sexuality is integral to it, but not definitive of it. That is true of all marriage. Sex does not define it. Sex takes up relatively little time over the decades. Yet sex is not incidental to marriage; it's integral.

Much is at stake in our belief about such matters, but not eternal life. When I stand before God my maker, I do not intend to say, "My name is Louie Crew and I am right about sexuality, so please let me in!"

Instead, I will say, "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner."

I am not afraid. God's property is always to show mercy.

Have heterosexuals struck a better bargain?

Genesis 22:1-14

This is one of the most powerful stories in all of literature, and I find it deeply disturbing. No matter how I read it, I do not like it.

I do not believe that God goes around telling parents to kill their children. Nor do I believe God told Abraham to do that.
I would report to the police any parent whom I knew to be on a mission to sacrifice a child. Almost any police department in the world would arrest Abraham for attempted murder.
I resent the patriarchal assumptions throughout this story. Sarah, the boy's mother, is of no account and not consulted by her husband or by her husband's God.
The boy's "innocence" is tiresome and I take no delight in the irony when he asks, "But where is the lamb for a burn offering?"

When he grows up, Isaac is no more impressive. He manifests almost no energy, not even when his parents choose a wife for him. Isaac's twins walk circles around him, and Jacob easily deceives him.

There are light-weights aplenty in the world, but as a light-weight, Isaac demonstrates no impressive credentials for being revered as an outstanding spiritual ancestor.
In A Study in Biblical Psychology of the Sacrifice of Isaac, London 1954, Sigmund Freud impressively explored some of psychological depths that he saw in this narrative. Freud's imagination is richer than that of the father or the son in the narrative.

See also

June 19, 2011. First Sunday after Pentecost. Trinity Sunday

2011-06-01T01:22:00.000-07:00

Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Can you imagine Jesus asking the thief on the next cross to pray this prayer?

Can you imagine Jesus asking the Samaritan woman at the well to pray this prayer?

Would he even have suggested it to savvy Nicodemus?

Would he have asked it of any of his disciples?

“No!” to all of the above.

Would he ask Christians today to pray it? What do you think?

This prayer is designed to promote an institutional decision made almost 400 years into the Christian era, when the doctrine of the Trinity became official for much of Christendom.

I have no problem with the doctrine, and to the extent that I understand it, I believe in it. I grieve that the doctrine has for centuries been a major distraction from the work of ministry which God has assigned to us, work defined in today‘s gospel text, tempered with Saint‘s injunction in the epistle.

It makes good sense to maintain an institution well. Given the huge battles -- whether we like them or not -- that did arise, and still potentially divide us, we Trinitarian Christians have something at stake in the institutional endorsement of the doctrine. I am not ready to go to war with Unitarians, however, nor with other groups for whom the doctrine is merely a nice antique.

I view the Trinity as a handy metaphor for how God manifests God's self in different guises. God will go on doing that whether or not we formalize God’s behavior as an official doctrine.

Note: the authors of this collect would have us "worship the Unity." That's different from worshiping the doctrine itself. They also took care to write “by the confession of a true faith” rather than “by the confession of The True Faith.” For such wiggle room! I am grateful, not for myself, but for those who feel they need it.

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Where did you come from? Who were your parents? Who were their parents and who were their parents' parents?...

How did we get here as human beings? How did all living creatures have life? Whence come all inanimate things?

Does the Genesis narrative trump or otherwise negate in any way what science has to say about the world’s origins or the origin of the species thereon?

Many of us asked these questions less inhibitedly when we were children. The author of Genesis gives a set of answer through the creation narrative. Similar narrative proliferated the ancient world. Likely the Israelites first heard this narrative while they were captives in Babylonia and adopted it and adapted it in accord with their own understandings.

Try forgetting this familiar creation narrative and write your own.

Will God be a part of your narrative? Will you give to male human beings the supremacy explicit and implicit in this narrative?

Do you have any changes you would like to see to the human body?

An eye in the back of the head, for example?
Androgyny for everyone?
Any changes to the plumbing?
Any more controls, or any reduction of controls, on how the plumbing might be used?
Would you design ways to make it easier for surgeons to correct all physical problems when they arise?
Would you keep the immune system as it is?

.....

The psalmist proclaims, "I am marvelously made!” Is that true of you? Is that true of every human being? Is it true of every creature?

In Genesis after each major act of creation God looks upon what God has created and proclaims, "It is good."

On making snakes and other animals of prey, did God say, "Good!"?

Did God turn out the lights when She made our private parts? Is She squeamish about such things? Should we be?

The Genesis narrative does not show evil until Adam and Eve sin. Evil becomes their fault, not the fault of the creator. The narrative does not put the full blame on the Adam and Eve, however. It reveals Satan and God both as supernatural. Enter the snake.

Do you believe there is a Satan? As fully, more fully, less fully than you believe there is a God? Genesis takes sides between the two. Do you? On what basis?

Genesis exalts human beings over other creatures: it says that God gives us dominion over them. Scripture does not specify any constraints for that dominion. We have the power to annihilate species, and our rates of doing so have dramatically increased in the last 100 years. In your creation narrative, would you try to constrain human abuse of creation?

In Genesis God commands human beings to be fruitful and multiply. From the second decade of the 21st century, the human beings have obeyed that commandment with a vengeance. In your creation narrative would you encourage prodigal procreation?

Our planet is running out of resources, exponentially within the last 100 years -- fossil fuels being one of the more notable examples, with huge consequences for ecological balance (note well ‘global warming‘). Current discourse touts looking for alternative sources of energy as well as for ways to reduce our dependence on energy; but almost no one has promoted a cheap and 100% effective way forward:

If the human population effected a reduction to just 25% population growth for the next four generations, most of these problems would disappear.

Has heterosexuality run amok?

Given reality on the planet in our times, we should reward heterosexual couples who choose to honor creation by not procreating. We should encourage communal structures, such as universal education, that give to many besides one's parents major roles in nurturing the young.

In meeting strangers, I find they frequently ask, "Do you have children?" "Yes," I sometimes answer. I have been blessed with between 4,500 and 5,000 children in my 44 years as a teacher.

During the time that students are my charge, I typically spend more hours with them, and certainly more "quality time" than their parents. They share with me ideas many would never share at home. They are maturing....

The same might be said of adults to whom the young apprentice themselves. We would reduce birth significantly by encouraging lgbtq people to live openly as lgbtq. At present, in most of the world, we risk far less persecution if we pass ourselves off as heterosexual. Many of us beget and beget before we come to terms with our primary orientation.

Several decades ago China instituted a policy of one child per family. "Professor," one of my brightest students told me when I taught in Beijing in 1983-84, "I believe our policy is still insufficient. It perpetuates our national consumption of far more than the earth can long sustain. I love my country so much that I am committing to having no children, so that all children will have an even better chance at a plentiful life."

Canticle 2

A Song of Praise Benedictus es, Domine

Blessed art thou, O Lord God of our fathers; *
praised and exalted above all for ever.
Blessed art thou for the Name of thy Majesty; *
praised and exalted above all for ever.
Blessed art thou in the temple of thy holiness; *
praised and exalted above all for ever.
Blessed art thou that beholdest the depths,
and dwellest between the Cherubim; *
praised and exalted above all for ever.
Blessed art thou on the glorious throne of thy kingdom; *
praised and exalted above all for ever.
Blessed art thou in the firmament of heaven; *
praised and exalted above all for ever.
Blessed art thou, O Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; *
praised and exalted above all for ever.

In Welcome to Samara, a sermon which I preached during General Convention 1994, I noted that when I fled the Baptist religion to become an Episcopalian, I was not altogether certain that I believed in God. But Episcopalians provided me a prettier way to pray to God. This Canticle would have come to mind then, even as it does now, as one of many important examples. Enjoy its rich cadence of anapests, tripping off the tongue, especially in the repeated

"Praised and exalted above all forever"

Scanned: / v v / v v / v v / v

Almost 50 years after confirmation (10/29/61), I wonder whether God wants all the adoration that I enjoy giving.

I doubt that God is very upset when we lose our faith for stretches of time. God never stops believing in us. God never stops loving all creatures.

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Saint is often much wordier. His brevity here is refreshing, advice aplenty for most of the auspicious church wars:

Agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss.

When I try to greet my adversaries with a holy kiss, most of them reject the kiss as unholy, alas.

Matthew 28:16-20

The Great Commission we all share as Christians is to make disciples throughout the whole world. We are to baptize the new disciples. We are to teach them to obey every commandment Jesus gave, the first and greatest of which he said it to love God with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength, and the second, which he said is "like unto it," that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Are we also to teach them to reject Buddhism, Islam, Humanism, Hinduism......?

Does the Great Commission command or implicitly endorse holy crusades of the murderous sort Christians undertook in the Middle Ages? -- or does it endorse America’s current, often murderous crusade to bring its vision of democracy to all nations?

Does the Great Commission endorse confiscation of Arab property to use for new settlements in Israel?

This text, as have many others, has been plundered to support religious intolerance and so-called 'holy' wars.

Contrast Saint's counsel: "Agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. "

See also

June 12, 2011. Day of Pentecost. Whitsunday.

2011-06-01T00:37:00.000-07:00

© 2011 by Louie Crew

Today's Lections

One way I use to help me understand a text is to look at the text writer-to-writer.

What assignment did this writer receive or give to herself?
How might I understand the same task in terms of my present time, place, and culture?

Questions like these make me an active participant, not just a passive recipient of Scripture.

For example, in teaching English composition, I have often distributed blank index cards, 10 per student, with these instructions: "Do not put your name on the cards, but on each card put the same 5-digit code, preferably with alphabetical and numeric digits. That will help me get all of your cards back to you even without knowing the identify of the writer.

"Next, on each card, write quickly, and without much reflection, the first 10 things that come to the top of your head when asked to list something you would feel guilty doing. Put a different one of these behaviors on each of your cards."

Once they have completed that part, I ask them to stack their cards in descending order of which behavior would make them feel most guilty, next most guilty.....least guilty. Once they have stacked them in this order, I ask them to assign '1' to the 'most guilty' card, '2' to the "next most guilty..." and '10' to the 'least guilty' card, putting these numbers in the top left corner of each card.

Once they have completed that part, I ask them to stack their cards in descending order of which behavior they find "most tempting" ...."to least tempting".... to "not tempting at all." For example, some might have said they would feel most guilty if they murdered someone but might want to say "not tempting as all" for this and several of their other behaviors.

Once they have stacked the cards in this order, in the top right-hand corner of each card they assign "A" to the "most tempting" card, "B" to the "next most tempting"..... I tell them to use "X" for each card they designate as "not tempting at all."

Then I ask them to put their gender as M or F circled at the bottom of all 10 cards.

Then I ask them to put within a circle at the bottom right-hand corner of each card the number of times they have attended a religious service within the last 30 days.

That done, I collect the cards, shuffling cards from all students together as I gather them.

Only then do I tell them that they have just re-written the Ten Commandments.

Once we sort the class' cards, we can discern the ten commandments they most held in common and compare their list with Moses' (or God's) list.

You will notice that they have given other variables (gender, participation in formal religious worship) that could lead to further revelations for the group, as would study of the number of "X" cards.

Had I begun saying, "Rewrite The Ten Commandments" the results would have been quite different. Behaviors reported through the assignment I give rarely have many matches with Moses. Most do not even think of Moses, yet they are taking the same assignment that Moses undertook.

Once I take them to Moses' list, they are ready to be actively engaged by it. That's one of the great benefits of giving ourselves the same assignment the writers of scripture gave themselves.

Assignments parallel to the writing assignments the authors of today's lections undertook:

Today commemorates the original appearance of the Holy Spirit. Write a prayer for a group or an individual to pray that either talks directly to the Holy Spirit or talks to God about the Holy Spirit and what you want God to make possible through the Holy Spirit and you. What are your top priorities? What is your major wish-list of gifts you want from the Holy Spirit? Do you want to compliment God with some verbal bowing, or do you want to talk to God as your friend?

Write as if you are competing to write a prayer that of all prayers produced by the class will be only one to be published in a prayer book. What will make your prayer stand out?

How specific can you become before your prayer works only for you but not for others who might want to use the prayer?

How general can you become before you are so bland and imprecise that the prayer says nothing of substance?

Only after you have written your collect, look at the collect assigned for this day and compare.

Do not be to quick to give top score to the collect in the Prayer Book. What in your collect would make the collect in the BCP better? What in the BCP version might make yours better?

The Collect

O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Acts 2:1-21

Humorist Mark Twain was asked "Do you believe in infant baptism?" Twain responded, "I not only believe in it; I have seen it happen!"

Obviously Twain was fudging, entertaining both those who practice infant baptism and those who eschew infant baptism. By "believe in" the questioner means, "Do you hold a theological position that supports infant baptism?"; but Twain answers taking a different and equally valid meaning of "believe in," namely "does it ever happen?"

Today we are celebrating the Holy Spirit. Maybe it's too easy for us to say, as we will in the Creed just after the sermon, "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life....."

Show what is at stake if we believe in the Holy Spirit. Show the Holy Spirit happen.

We are not Luke, the author of Acts, and we were not present at the original Day of Pentecost, so our details will not seem initially to bear much resemblance to Luke's narrative.

In 150 words or less write a narrative about human beings that coherently leads up to the otherwise surprise final sentence: "I not only believe in the Holy Spirit; I have seen the Holy Spirit happen."

In other words, use that as your last sentence and make sure that it is a convincing conclusion to your narrative.

Psalm 104:25-35, 37

Do not look at this text until you have written your own psalm.

Your psalm will have at least 6 verses. The first and the last of your verses should be these from today's reading:

O LORD, how manifold are your works! *in wisdom you have made them all;the earth is full of your creatures.

Yonder is....

[in this second verse and in all the other verses that you add, illustrate God's creativity by describing several specific creatures that God has made. Freely show how God interacts with the creatures. Have some fun here. God is having some fun with them.]

Hallelujah!

[This one word is to be your last verse. Obviously the verses you create should lead up to this word as a fitting conclusion.]

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

Obviously we are not all alike, nor does God expect us to be.

Don't read Paul's text until you have written your own, giving yourself the same assignment:

In a passage about as long at Paul's (207 words) describe in detail the different spiritual gifts of 4-8 friends of yours, especially as those different gifts enrich not only you but also others within the group. End your text with Paul's phrase "All these are activated by one and the same Spirit."

John 20:19-23

Take a peek this time. Unlike the earlier exercises, this time read the text before you write your own. It's shorter than most readings:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

Your assignment is to write a narrative about this same length (121 words) in which you describe how you or someone else literally breathed on someone else in a transforming way.

You might have been administering or receiving artificial respiration. Or it might have been the first time you kissed someone with your mouths open. Or it might have been heavy breathing after a rescue mission.....

If you have never had such an experience, make one up. If an experience you had holds no power for you or for others, add convincing details that will give it power.

Use your imagination. Seek to give a deeper truth than mere factual accuracy. That's what the writers of the Bible did as well.

Your narrative does not need an explicit relationship to John's. Although his text is your prompt, no reader of yours needs to know that.

See also

June 5, 2011. Seventh Sunday of Easter

2011-05-23T03:36:00.000-07:00

O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Word has it that God is too busy spending time with real folks in real need to take time out for kingship. God wants us as friends, not as vassals. Nor need we keep an eye out for God to "exalt us."

I prefer Quean Lutibelle's reVision: "God, send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us and prepare us for that place where our Savior Christ has gone before. Amen"

Acts 1:6-14

"Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."

Small wonder indeed that the disciples, after hearing Jesus' challenge, retreated to a room upstairs in their place of lodging, "constantly devoting themselves to prayer."

The script was not the script they expected.

If I imagine a video of my life as I expected to live it when I was growing up, it bears no resemblance to the life I have been blessed to live. Observe the young redhead with his heavy bible in front of his mother's azalea's just before heading off to church, where later he became a licensed Baptist minister.

At that time I understood very little about myself or about the nature of the ministry to which I already understood myself to be called. To live my own live, I had to lose that life.

Had I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a public queer, that redhead might have acted on some his early fantasies of committing suicide if puberty persisted in asserting his unorthodoxy. He did not yet know that God loves him "Just As I am without one plea."

How has the script you thought you were given changed?

What about the next act of your drama?

"Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?" We have work to do before Christ comes again, before we notice Christ already here among us.

Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36

I suspect the authenticity of the opening of this psalm:

Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered; *
let those who hate him flee before him.

Let them vanish like smoke when the wind drives it away; *
as the wax melts at the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.

But let the righteous be glad and rejoice before God; *
let them also be merry and joyful.

This passage lacks the provenance Rabbi Jesus taught us to expect regarding God claims. The God Rabbi Jesus called Father is not interested in scattering his enemies through a show-down of power. God the Father is interested in loving his enemies into friends. God's wants us to love enemies too -- not only ours but also God's.

The histrionics attributed to God here sound more like the proud imaginings of those who consider themselves more righteous than anybody else.

However, much else in the psalm is in synch with what Jesus revealed of God's priorities: God does indeed take sides, and God takes the side of the vulnerable. God is the "Father of orphans, defender of widows" and "God gives the solitary a home and brings forth prisoners into freedom."

1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.

When I founded Integrity in 1974, the church spent very little time addressing the issue of homosexuality. And most lgbtq persons in the church dared not speak up lest they find themselves summarily kicked out. For centuries homosexuality had been known as "the love not mentionable among Christians."

That changed when lgbtq Christians started finding themselves in Scripture and with increasing intensity demonstrated that God loves the outcast. Indeed, many straight people will not believe God loves them until they see how thoroughly God can love an old queen like me.

Spreading that ancient Good News and claiming blood kinship with Christ, lgbtq Christians provoke "fiery ordeals" indeed, even unto this day. See, for example, the website of The Westboro Baptist Church, known as 'GodHatesFags.com'. Fred Phelps, their pastor, has picketed many General Conventions of The Episcopal Church. The congregation pickets funerals of soldiers killed in action. Days after 911, Phelps asserted that fags working in the Pentagon and in the World Trade Center had prompted God's destruction of those place.

Peter faced far worse calumny and abuse, yet boldly proclaimed: "If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.."

Ernest and I lived in a tiny town called Ft. Valley, Georgia when I founded Integrity. As a racially integrated couple, we could not have been more visible. If we had announced our marriage in the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, we would not have drawn the attention we received when we took out a joint checking account at Citizens Bank in Ft. Valley.

A national John Birch Society Paper published in nearby Macon accused us of causing a tornado that hit Ft. Valley. Our apartment was stoned several times, We were under heavy threats of other violence. In that context, living with Peter's vision of God, I wrote "A Gay Psalm from Ft. Valley":

`

John 17:1-11

Fortunately God used double entendre when Jesus spoke from the cross, "It is finished." His earthly life? Well, no, not if you count the post resurrection appearances; and not if like Thomas, you demand to put your fingers into the holes the nails made.

Does this passage mark the end of Jesus' 'earthly ministry' as he is about to ascend into heaven? Well, what about the time he appeared incognito in Calcutta, or in the South Bronx?

The story is told that a woman working in high finance in New York decided a few years ago that she wanted to spend her summer vacation doing something significant to help those lest fortunate. Months in advance of her time off, she wrote a letter to Mother Theresa in Calcutta offering to spend her vacation time there serving the poorest of the poor.

Anxiously she waited. After two months she began to fear that her letter had been lost in the mail, though she had sent it Express. As the vacation time drew closer, she feared she would not hear anything at all.

Then a letter arrived, with a stamp for surface carriage, in an envelope that had obviously been used for other mail earlier. A dirty, frayed Indian stamp was attached. She tore open the letter to find out the plans for her.

On a small single sheet appeared just two words: "South Bronx."

The Sisters of Mercy operate a ministry for the poorest of the poor only a couple of miles from where she worked in Manhattan.

Has Jesus really departed, or might we find him, where he said we always might expect to find him, among those whom we consider the least -- not just those whom we consider the least in some exotic place on the other side of the plane, but among those whom we consider the least among us?

See also

May 29, 2011. Sixth Sunday of Easter.

2011-05-01T18:44:00.000-07:00

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

It would be hard to be more upbeat than this collect. We would be wise to pay close attention to what we are saying. The collect walks us step by step into greater expectations of God and of ourselves.

Acts 17:22-31

In a polytheistic culture, the Athenians had something going for them. The altar of "Unknown God" works like the tombs to the "unknown solder" at Arlington and various other parts of the world. There are so many bodies unidentifiable in a war that we choose one to honor grandly as a surrogate for the others.

In a universe of multiple gods, likely there are many whom we have not yet identified, so we at least modestly honor one as a surrogate for the others.

Saint purposely 'misses the point' intended by those who made the altar. Saint does not believe in multiple gods and proclaims that his God is living, not entombed in shrines made by human hands.

Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

Saint connects God to us and not to sculptured images and memorials. God "gives to all mortals life and breath and all things." We are God's "offspring."

Paul is an iconoclast to polytheism and asserts that we can glimpse God looking at God's offspring, human beings.

I wish that Luke had given a body count for the congregation and the details of any altar calls. Is his cleverness efficacious in prompting unbelievers to believe, or does his rhetoric work best on those of us who already believe and delight to have him express so well what we have experienced?

Paul directly connects his message of Jesus to something his audience already knows. Often I have heard straight priests preach to gay gatherings with not one word to relate to the specifics of our lives. Often they merely preach what they preached in their own congregations earlier in the week. What huge waste of gospel opportunity.

One of the reasons that I initiated this blog is to provide three years of witness to a queer eye for the lectionary.

Psalm 66:7-18

The psalmist today is as up-beat as the author(s) of today's collect. All has gone well for the speaker, and the speaker gives full credit to God. True, the speaker has known trouble, has known victorious enemies, has known what it is to be caught in a snare, but when the speaker called on God, God provided deliverance. The speaker feels vindicated and shows gratitude by burnt offerings and sacrifices.

Forget for the moment David's understanding in Psalm 51 that the sacrifices God really desires are not burnt offerings, but 'a broken and contrite heart.'

1 Peter 3:13-22

"Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?"

Well if you are queer, you might begin by standing in most congregations of Christians and pointing to each of them. Some congregations are controlled solidly by those who will harm us. They don't agree that we could ever be eager to do what is good. They believe that all our intentions are perverse.

But if queers suffer even for doing what is right, we are blessed. We should not fear what heterosexists fear. We must not let them intimidate us, but in our hearts we should sanctify Christ as Lord.

For almost three decades in the Episcopal Church queers have been ready to make our defense to anyone who demands from us an accounting for the hope that is in us; and we have tried to do it with gentleness and reverence. Among myriads of examples, you might listen to "Welcome to Samaria" as recorded when I preached during General Convention in 1994, total time just under 19 minutes:

John 14:15-21

In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.

Open my eyes, Jesus, to see you in those not noticed and not valued by the world.

See also

May 22, 2011. Fifth Sunday of Easter.

2011-05-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: 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; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Is this collect a fancy way to address our doubts? Using it, do we in effect say, we need your help with our faith. Can you please help us to know Jesus perfectly as the way, the truth and the life? If you do that, then we will be steadfast when we try to follow him?

I believe that faith is God's gift to us, not our gift to God. Faith is not a multiple choice test about God's attributes, where a perfect score will assure that we get to heaven. Is our faithfulness in attitude and behavior dependent on how richly God has filled us with seeing Jesus as who he is supposed to be?

I have few problems accepting Jesus claims to be the way, the truth, and the life; many who are far less certain that Jesus' claim are valid live lives far more faithful to God than my own.

Acts 7:55-60

Saul appears as a minor character at this point in Luke's narrative. He is a member of the crowd gathered to persecute Stephen, the first martyr. At the time of the martyrdom, Saul is convinced that he is faithfully protecting the faith from the Jesus folks and their heresy in claiming that Jesus is the Messiah. The Christians present recognize Saul with a rather dramatic gesture: "Then they dragged Stephen out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul."

What an anointing! Are the witnesses themselves Christians? Or are they just part of the anonymous crowd gathered to watch, such as those who gather for public executions even in our time when capital punishment is enacted?

Whoever the witnesses are, their public gesture of laying down their coats at Saul's feet shows that they recognize Saul as a powerful force behind the persecution of Stephen.

Of course Luke, the author of Acts, knows the end of the story. In Luke's account of the martyrdom, the detail stands our as a kind of anointing, all the more poignant with Saul's conversion to Christianity.

It is small wonder that after his conversion and his new name, Saul (now Paul) stays away from those whom he persecuted for three years (Galations 1:17-18). Clearly they will need some time to adjust to his claim of being converted.

Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16

These verses are jammed full of nuggets that show up widely in Scripture and in other Christian literature. Most famously, Jesus quoted verse five from the cross: "Into your hands I commend my spirit."

One of the most frequently used blessings or benedictions is lifted from verse 16: "Make your face to shine upon your servant," which becomes, "The Lord make his face to shine upon you."

The second of the Ten Commandments strongly forbad making images of God; yet verse 16 suggests that it is perfectly all right to ask for God's face to be seen in our own faces.

The passage is quite forceful in providing metaphors to reveal God's relationship to us mortals. For example, Verse 3 refers to God as

my strong rock
a castle to keep me safe
my crag and my stronghold
my tower of strength

In the 21st century few of us in great danger would seek out a strong rock, a castle, a crag, or a tower as a place of security. The most famous threats of our time (earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, nuclear radiation....) seem far more than mere "nets" that our enemies have secretly set for us.

The psalmist asks God to "rescue me from the hand of my enemies" and commits his spirit "into God's hands." In most modern battle, the hand that pulls the switch of major destruction is often continents away. The murderer or the destroyer often never has to lay a hand on the victim nor to look the victim in the eye. Even our dirt and our flowers are often made of plastic to decorate gathering places both public and private.

Yet I am quite unhappy with my attempt to re-cast the psalm in terms current now:

You, oh God, are the body scanner of my enemies and terrorists
God you masterfully sniff out lethal weapons and drug contraband
God you provide a perfect rocket for our escape to another planet or universe when the apocalypse arrives

Clearly I have not yet found a felicitous way to state in the context of our own vulnerability the God-claims that the psalmist made in pre-modern Israel.

Even when we use the language of security, we do so most often to talk about places that are least secure. TSA (The Transportation Security Administration), for example, emphasizes our vulnerability more than our security.

After World War II, The Securitate in Romania (the country's Department of State Security) marked the vulnerability of the citizens to its overreaching control of their lives. From 1948 to 1951 it grew from just 3,549 employees to 25,468, and under Ceausescu it became the most brutal police force in the world, with 11,000 agents and a half-million informers for a country with a population of only 22 million by 1985. (See Wikipedia).

1 Peter 2:2-10

I am fascinated with the comfort level that biblical writers had in using metaphors of gustation to celebrate God.

Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation-- if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

Peter echoes Psalm 34:8 "Taste and see that the Lord is good."

Many 21st century westerners might be disconcerted it told to "taste Jesus" or "taste the Lord."

I suspect we are the losers in not having easy access to this understanding of God and to this understanding of our own bodies.

I have often welcomed opportunities to preach on this text to audiences filled with many out TQBLG persons. Regardless of our own sexual or affectional orientation, read the text again intention supplying transgendered, queer, bisexual, lesbian, and gay as the referent for you:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Once you were not a people,
but now you are God's people;
once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy.

The passage rings dramatically true to TQBLG experience as Christians.

John 14:1-14

I am struck by the play between the material and the immaterial reality in this passage, one used at most Christian funerals to provide comfort for the bereaved. Momentarily Jesus' world of heaven sounds almost as material as Madonna's "material world" here on earth: "In my father's house are many mansions, many dwelling places....."

Yet Jesus' biggest claims, the ones about himself, are notably immaterial, philosophical, almost ethereal, "I am the way, the truth and the life."

How much is our own personal identity tied to the physical details of our lives? Those of us in our 70s have radically different understandings of "who we are" than we did when we were 14. Tennyson's Ulysses says, "I am a part of all that I have met." One who is 74 may still have all the makings of the self at age 14, but the one at 14 does not have a physical connection to the person she might become if she lives to 74.

Will heaven be at place that most will welcome if there, they find themselves with no connections to the physical selves that they were on earth?

Jesus has said that in heaven there will be no giving or taking in marriage. You won't know your spouse there? You won't know the other members of your family there?

How long is eternity, and will the many mansions there remain stuck in just one style forever and ever.

I am personally far more frightened by amputation or dementia than I am by death. One of the brightest members of my family now has serious dementia. Please pray for her, for those of us who love her, and for those who fear not being able to know and recognize those whom we love in this life or the next.

See also

May 15, 2011. Fourth Sunday of Easter. Good Shepherd Sunday

2011-05-01T00:12:00.000-07:00

I encourage you to listen to "The King of Love My Shepherd Is"

It is fitting as preparation for the lessons of Good Shepherd Sunday to meditate on the Chapel of the Good Shepherd at General Theological Seminary. The chapel is a holy place.

I was confirmed as an Episcopalian on October 29, 1961, 41 days before turning 25. Several gay friends explained to me that I could not be a genuinely gay Episcopalian until I had made three pilgrimages: one to All Saints on Margaret Street in London, a second to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and a third, to the Chapel of the Good Shepherd at General Seminary:

All Saints became my local parish four years later when I worked in a secondary modern school in London, 1965-1966, and again when I tutored American undergraduate for the Experiment in International Living, 1970-1971.

I first visited Grace Cathedral in the summer of 1974, while I was an NEH Fellow at UC Berkeley. I called to ask whether my husband and I would be welcome. The laughter from several secretaries prompted me to found Integrity four months later.

I did not make it to General Seminary's chapel until I moved to New Jersey in 1989, to work at Rutgers.

In 2003 General Seminary awarded me an honorary doctorate. Grace Cathedral's dean now is an out lesbian.

Today's Lections

The Collect

O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people: Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

I wonder how accessible language of sheep and shepherds is to urban folks in the 21st century. Or how accessible was it to urban folks in earlier times?

I well remember riding to Birmingham, Alabama, with my parents when I was ten or eleven. We had only a 2-lane highway, and traffic slowed to a trickle through the hills. It was very hot, and we had all the windows open.

Cars did not have air-conditioning then. At one point we gagged when a truck load of pigs pulled in front of us. The stench and the squeels pervaded all.

Behind us was a car with Yankee license plates, in which rode 3-4 kids about my age and their parents.

"Look, look!" they chimed excitedly, "a whole truck filled with sheep!"

John 10:1-10

Saint John's gospel indicates that Jesus himself had trouble being understood when he spoke of a gatekeeper and sheep: "Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them."

Wanting to be understood, Jesus explained:

Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

Jesus stresses

The sheep follow the shepherd because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.

TSA eat your heart out! Bill Gates, where is voice-recognition software this dependable?

Every year two or three dozen TQBLG persons ask me, "Where is a church where it is safe for my partner and me to go to church?" -- almost the same question I had asked of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in 1974.

Many of us -- and not just TQBLG folks -- have experienced harsh rejection and disapproval from church people. Like the Samaritan woman at the well, we thirst, but we don't want to be battered. We seek a pastor (etymologically a 'shepherd') who knows us and values us by name, someone who is more concerned with our thirst than with our sins.

Note well that the purpose of God's elaborate security is not so that the sheep, the believers, might live isolated from the pleasures of life. Christianity has too often earned a reputation of being a life-negative religion. You have to look no farther than English novels for the last 300 years. The moment a clergy person enters a group conversation about matters of the world, the clergy person typically blunders or seems divorced from the 'real' life of the others.

John's witness contrasts radically. In his account, Jesus does not say, "I am come that they may have life hereafter if they just deny themselves most pleasures in this life." No. Jesus the Good Shepherd proclaims: "I have come that you might have life, and have it abundantly."

Jesus' 'abundant life' is not a call to proclaim glibly "Eat! Drink! Be merry! for tomorrow we shall die." But neither does Jesus reject of the good things God has prepared for us.

Psalm 23

The 23rd Psalm stresses that even in the presence of our enemies, God prepares for us a feast!

When he faced severe depression, Martin Luther comforted himself by saying over and over, "But I have been baptized."

I am blessed very rarely to be depressed, but when I have faced depression, I have turned to this psalm. Millions of us have learned it "by heart." I urge you to pause now to say the psalm "by heart," and if you cannot, commit it to memory so that you can access it whereever you are.

Karl Marx, if this be opium, let me have access to it when pain comes. I hope no one ever again has to experience a Dachau or a crucifixion on a wire fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, but I am glad that most at Dachau and that Mathew outside Laramie had access to this opium.

Acts 2:42-47

"Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were done by the apostles"

One of the reasons that I am an Anglocatholic is the tradition's respect for awe. We use the body, the eyes, the ears, not just the mouth. We bob up and down. We fill the space with incense. We process. We use holy oils. We take long communal silences. We vest.

The actions of most Christian worship contrast radically with the actions of the work place, as shown in this sample:

God has given me strong faith. It's God's gift to me, not mine to God, and not something of which I can boast. If God ever takes away my gift of faith (I certainly hope that won't happen), I intend still to worship in community. Otherwise, how else could I ever sing? The bathtub just can't cut it, however hard I try.

Inadvertantly I have avoided one of the more engaging parts of this text, nor I have prepared a good segue:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.

As some have noted: "Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free health care. You're thinking of Jesus." You can even buy t-shirts to make this point.

1 Peter 2:19-25

Why does a good God allow people to suffer? That's one way of putting what theologians call "the problem of evil."

In this part of his letter, Peter focuses the problem more specifically on just one group of sufferers: "Why do good people suffer?"

Peter himself and many other Christians were suffering for their faith. He does not blame their suffering on God. Indeed, he sees the crucified Christ as the consummate sufferer, as one who knows all about pain and unmerited suffering. Therefore, Peter reasons: "It is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly."

Dr. King stressed that unmerited suffering is meant to be redemptive.

These texts have sustained me when I have been made to suffer for my claim that God loves absolutely everybody.

She does!

I invite you to listen to "The King of Love My Shepherd Is" as played on the magnificent 4115 Skinner organ at Old South Church in Boston

See also

May 8, 2011. Third Sunday of Easter.

2011-04-29T13:26:00.000-07:00

O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Are you better off saying, "The wind is surely shaking that tree" or "Apollo is playing his lyre"?

Most of us don't want to hang around people who say of their various actions, "God made me do it" or "Jesus said that I should talk with you about...." We build clinics to help such people.

One of the toughest challenges when one pursues postulancy toward ordination is to persuade those on the Commission on Ministry that God has called you and at the same time not to suggest to them that you have loony conversations with God. Much of the language you and the COM will use is coded. For example, you'll probably not raise gratuitous hackles if you say "I have discerned that God might want me...." instead of "God told me...."

As Christians, we pray. As Christians we expect answers, at least some of the time...., but few expect God to answer back in human language.

As a member of a COM it will be part of your job to cut through the vocabulary, using it critically, to discern [that word again!] whether the candidate will be a good priest or deacon.

Today's collect reminds us that God is doing redeeming work among us whether or not we notice. Through this collect, instead of asking God to be present, we ask God to "open the eyes of our faith."

Perception is extraordinarily important, and we who have perceived God among us may have lost contact with the wonder of it!

Would any of us be able to stand it very long if we were to become aware of how much God loves each of us? Would any of us be able to stand it very long if we were to become aware of how much God loves each of our enemies and adversaries? God wants us to love them as much as God does. She told me so!

Eucharist is not just play acting. That's not just a wafer or bread bit. That's not just wine. That's the body and blood of the Son of God.

May we become one with the one we receive.

Acts 2:14a,36-41

We don't think of the first century as an era of the mega church. Christianity was hardly a blip on the map of world religions until about the third century, at least two hundred years after it has moved from a Jewish cult. Yet Luke, in his account of Peter's evangelism, credits Peter with 3,000 converts at one altar call. That would warm the hearts of Billy Graham, Alden Hathaway, John Guest, and John Stott.

American slaves took notice too:

If you can’t preach like Peter,
If you can’t pray like Paul,
Just tell the love of Jesus,
And say He died for all.

I personally would prefer a much closer analysis than Luke gives us about these conversions. As he tells it, Peter scares them telling them that they have killed Jesus, whom "God has made ...both Lord and Messiah."

Were all 3,000 guilty as charged?

And even if they were, they seem quite unusual in immediately agreeing and asking: "What should we do?"

While studying for the Baptist ministry at Baylor (1954-58) at least once a month I joined others in the student Ministerial Alliance to visit those incarcerated at the McLennan County jail. We preached and then we talked to the men individually. I made a point to ask each one what his crime was, and on the way out of the jail, I asked the staff why each one had been arrested. Week after we the results were the same: what the men told me and what the staff told me did not match. The men always admitted to something lesser, and in the one exception, when someone admitted to something more grievous, I was convinced that his motive was to hook my interest, not to regale me with a confession.

Were the people in jail in Waco 60 years ago all that different from the murderers whom Peter converted?

Jesus was murdered in part because his murderers were angry at audacious claims that he was the Messiah, and yet this crowd unquestioningly believes Peter when he tells them Jesus is indeed the Messiah.

What more did Paul preach that did not make it into Luke's synopsis? How did Paul open their eyes to their complicity even among those who might not actually have been there?

I have seen others change their minds in great numbers, though they don't always do so in an instant.

I remember in 1961 trying to do something about my racism. I applied for a job in Ghana. The Africa-America Institute, which was doing the hiring, asked those of us who survived the initial screening to go to Atlanta University for an interview. So much had segregation affected my view of the world, I had never even heard of Atlanta University. Nor was I prepared to be the only white person in a room of 100 or more black applicants, and I was one of the only persons there without a Ph.D.

I went to Atlanta University audaciously prepared to bring sweetness and light. Sweetness and bright light turned right on me. If those who educated me had been so glaringly wrong in this matter, how much other ignorance did I have yet to discover in myself?

Peter's congregation experienced his sermon as an epiphany, an awakening to the consequences of actions they had taken trying to protect God from evil heresy. Until Peter spoke to them, they had not seen God in Jesus.

Note what Peter says to Christian converts in his epistle:

1 Peter 1:17-23

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.

Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17

The selections from Psalm 116 celebrate God's saving act. The speaker talks about the way life used to be:

The cords of death entangled me;
the grip of the grave took hold of me; *
I came to grief and sorrow.

Then I called upon the Name of the LORD: *
"O LORD, I pray you, save my life."

The lectionary skips 6 verses. Our reading picks up at a time after the speaker has been rescued and asks, "How shall I repay the LORD?"

The audience of Peter's letter are in a similar state. Peter's preaching, as Luke records, called them to repent their complicity in the murder of Jesus. In his epistle, Peter lovingly counsels them, and us, to "love one another deeply from the heart."

Luke 24:13-35

Jesus is still into vanishing acts like those Luke describes. Now we see Jesus; now we don't.

It's tempting to expect the second coming to be grand, "on clouds descending," with angels and archangels, and the whole company of heaven.

We're smack dab where the Israelites were at the first coming, fearing heresy if we see God in someone who is a friend of sinners, drunkards and other low life.

Spend some time with those who live on the street, not to bring Jesus to them but to meet Jesus in them. Jesus is already there. He prefers incarnation as those whom we deem to be the least among us.

See also

May 1, 2011. Second Sunday of Easter.

2011-04-22T08:53:00.000-07:00

Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ's Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Note well: the collect assumes that when we have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ's Body, we do not automatically show forth in our lives what we profess by our faith. We are reborn into that fellowship nonetheless. Nothing can alter God's inclusion.

As the Baptists proclaim, "Once saved; always saved!" The Prayer Book manifests the theology of the Episcopal Church, and we as a church are at one with the Baptists on this one.

Seeing that we are unalterably marked as God's own forever, we may freely ask God to grant that we may show forth in our lives what we profess by faith.

Acts 2:14a,22-32

Peter's interpretation of David is just that, an interpretation. The majority of Peter's fellow Jews then and now do not read David's text as referring to Jesus.

We Christians have for the most part allowed Peter his interpretation of Hebrew Scriptures because it concurs with our own perception of who Jesus is in the context of Judeo-Christian history.

Before Jesus' life, few would have read resurrection from the dead into David's short text:

He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh experience corruption.

The passage is too vague to lead inexorably to that interpretation.

Cynics might add, that the passage is "conveniently vague" for Peter to make his claim. (Or more sympathetically, "conveniently vague for Peter to share his new experience in terms already familiar to his audience.")

Peter contextualizes David's comments in the experience of his life and in the lives of other Christians. There can be no doubt that early Christians saw Jesus' death as not final like David's. David's tomb they can still see, Peter notes, but Christ's tomb is empty. Christ was not abandoned to Hades. His flesh did not rot. He was resurrected.

It would be far fetched to claim that David knew about Jesus. Although Peter calls David a prophet, few then or now see prophecy as David's defining gift. Peter makes the claim to accord with his own experience of Jesus.

Should not all Christians understand scripture in the context of our own experience? How else can if fully speak to us?

Obviously we would be wise to test our individual understanding of scripture against the interpretations others have given and continue to give it.

We also would be wise to test our own interpretation of scripture against Jesus' summary of the law and the prophets in the two greatest commandments:

Does our interpretation hold up when measured against the commandment to love God with our heart, our mind, our soul, and our strength?
Does our interpretation hold up when measured against the commandment to love our qtblg neighbors (or any other neighbors ranked the least among us) as much as we love ourselves?

Psalm 16

Those who compiled the lectionary clearly chose this psalm because of Verse 10:

For you will not abandon me to the grave, * nor let your holy one see the Pit.

Fragments in Hebrew scriptures, such as this verse, suggest the possibility of an after-life, yet Hebrew scripture has no clearly articulated or consistent doctrine of an after-life.

1 Peter 1:3-9 and John 20:19-31

Peter brooks no doubt about Jesus' resurrection nor any doubt about the resurrection of those who believe in Jesus. The resurrection is at the heart of his proclamation.

For Peter the resurrection is the source of all hope: Christ has died, Christ has risen. You and I will rise with him.

Thomas, who loved Jesus no less, is, in John's account, harder to persuade.

Thomas was not present when Jesus made his first post-mortem appearance to the disciples, and they do not persuade Thomas when they claim they have seen Jesus. Thomas demands proof. He wants to put his fingers into the nail holes.

A week later they are all sitting in a room with the doors shut, yet mysteriously Jesus appears without opening a door. Jesus clearly has heard of Thomas' doubts but he does not say to Thomas,

You petty little pipsqueak! After all I have done for you, after all I have been for you, you trust me so little that you want to play Sherlock and conduct an inquest?!

Instead, Jesus says gently, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe."

The Episcopal Church so much respects doubt that we have named two percent of our congregations for Thomas (153 out of 7933).

I highly recommend that over the weeks of Easter you seek out 5-10 persons whom you most respect and ask them what they believe will really happen to them when they die? Keep your own view out of the discussion for at least the first 10 minutes.

Ask them:

Will you spend any time in the grave?
Do you believe in a literal heaven?
What do you expect heaven to be like, and why would you want to spend eternity there, or in any other place?
Do you believe in a literal hell?
What do you expect hell to be like, and why would you want to spend eternity there, or in any other place?

Store all answers in your heart and ponder them.

See also Wikipedia's article on Resurrection.

See also

2011-04-01T04:02:00.000-07:00

April 24, 2011. Easter Day.
© 2011 by Louie Crew

Today’s Lections

The Collect

O God, who made this most holy night to shine with the glory of the Lord's resurrection: Stir up in your Church that Spirit of adoption which is given to us in Baptism, that we, being renewed both in body and mind, may worship you in sincerity and truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

This is the second of three collects recommended. I have chosen it because of the three it most explicitly addresses the effects of resurrection in our own lives.

What would it mean to you to be stirred up with the "spirit of adoption"?

When I was 11 years old, I went with my aunt and uncle to the state adoption agency in Montgomery where they fetched their new daughter. Earlier the couple had come from their country home twice to the hospital in my hometown (Anniston, AL) where my aunt could receive trained medical attention in childbirth. Each time the child was still born. Never have I heard any other wails to match my aunt's in the days she stayed with us afterward. Depression and gloom filled every space.

What a contrast when I saw them coming out of the adoption agency bringing their daughter, truly stirred with a "spirit of adoption."

God has adopted you and me as his children! We need a huge infusion of the "spirit of adoption" that my aunt and uncle manifested. Adoption is not just a sentimental idea: a real child arrives: you and I arrive, and God glows even more radiantly than my aunt and uncle glowed.

Baptism is a sacrament, that is, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. Indeed, 'God, stir up in us a spirit of adoption that we, being renewed, may not only worship you in sincerity and truth, but may also manifest the fruits of this adoption by loving even our enemies as much as you love them.'

Acts 10:34-43

God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears God and goes what is right is acceptable to God.

Surely not if the person is a low-class Samaritan? Or a queer? Or a homeless person? Or......

Anyone can't really mean "anyone", can it?

All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.

Everyone who believes?! No exceptions?!

It should come as no surprise that the Church in India has had remarkable growth among the Dalits (the "untouchables).

It should come as no surprise that Jesus had his first major successes not among the Israelites, but among the Samaritans.

It should come as no surprise that some of the most vital ministries of the Episcopal Church are among tblgq persons, despised in most of Christendom and in most other parts of the Anglican Communion.

It was not just for heterosexuals that Jesus rose from the dead. Alleluia!

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

I love the decisiveness of Psalm 118:

On this day the LORD has acted; *
we will rejoice and be glad in it.

When Ernest and I were down home for his father's funeral in January 1998, we visited his mother's grave and then we visited several places special to his faith journey, most notably the place where he was baptized.

Two years later, when we were in Alabama to lead a retreat for Integrity, we visited the graves of both my parents and the sanctuary of Parker Memorial Baptist Church in Anniston, where I was baptized.

I can well understand why in his darkest moments of depression Martin Luther sustained himself by repeating again and again to himself, "But I have been baptized!"

I have been baptized! I have been baptized!

On the day of my baptism, "the Lord has acted"; I rejoice and am glad in it!

Colossians 3:1-4

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

I urge you to seek out a community sunrise service this year, preferably one outdoors in a cemetery. Arrive before most others, while the musicians and others on the program are setting up. Take members of your family, especially any children.

Sunrise services are some of the fondest memories I have of growing up. They were special. We we weren't just Baptists or Methodists or Pentecostals or Presbyterians or Episcopalians. We were hundreds of Christians gathered in the cemetery knowing the tomb we sought was empty!

Don't worry. There will be plenty of time for you to make it to the 10 o'clock mass in your own parish afterward.

Matthew 28:1-10

Something very special is going to happen at your parish today. You may experience it as powerful and definitely as unlike most other times when you have been there for Easter.

Jesus himself is coming to the service, but he is coming incognito, disguised as one of the other parishioners or maybe as a visitor. If you converse with the person you believe to be Jesus in disguise, you are to make no comments about what you have heard. The only way that you can let Jesus know that you are 'in the know' is by the way that you treat him. Hold great expectations of all, especially of those you have never rated highly before, remembering Jesus' reputation for especially liking the disreputable.

Wait patiently. Observe closely, gently.

All will be revealed, possibly soon and dramatically, possibly long after and subtly.

See also

April 17, 2011. Palm Sunday

2011-04-01T01:50:00.000-07:00

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

It's fairly standard to consider as spiritually dangerous the self-scourges that many imposed upon themselves as marks of faithfulness in "The Dark Ages." Some whipped themselves. Some sat for months at a time in all sorts of weather on top tall poles.... See Wikipedia's entry for scourge

Do we risk the same spiritual danger if we "walk in the way of [Christ's] suffering"?

Or is our imitation of his suffering rather like a vaccination? Does the imitation inoculate us against the real thing? Is that why in many parishes on Thursday the priest will wash only one foot, rather than two instead of both feet of those who volunteer?

Are these photo-ops which Jesus would welcome, and do you want to worship a God who expects them?

As a teacher, I am intrigued by Isaiah's opening:

The Lord GOD has given me
the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning he wakens--
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.

How many teachers would put into their personal mission statement, "My job is to sustain the weary with a word?" Might they be better teachers if they did?

How many students see their wakening as a call to listen? Would they be better students if they did?

Does one diminish what one may receive from a teacher if one holds low expectations to start with?

Do teachers diminish what we have to give if we care little for sustaining the weary?

I relate to the rest of the passage most poignantly as a gay Christian. While I have not been struck nor had my beard pulled for being gay or Christian, I have been spat upon and several times bullies have thrown rocks at our home. Some have threatened to run over me while I jogged, shouting "Faggot! Louise!...."

The rector of my parish in the 1970s refused week after week to share the peace with me, and the vestry sent me a letter asking me to leave.

A bishop summoned me for discipline.

And I have frequently received anonymous, threatening calls, which I memorialized in a meditation:

Breathing Calls I've Received

#1

With mouth open, with vocal chords
on during exhales, off during inhales,
with sounds approximating uh:

inhale, exhale; inhale, exhale;
inhale, exhale; inhale, exhale;
inhale, exhale; inhale, exhale.

Then say softly, as the o in "who"
and sustain through one very long breath:

"oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...."

#2

Say "Hello." Then, with lips fully
closed, rapidly and loudly click
the top of your tongue against your
soft palate. Alternately breathe
loudly through your nose, as

click, click, click.
inhale, exhale; inhale, exhale;
inhale, exhale.
click, click, click...

until the listener hangs up.

#3

Say seductively, softly, with lots
of breath:

"Hi, sweetie. Hey there?
How are you? Hello.
Hi there. You. Yes. You.
Hi, sweetie...."

Repeat infinitely. Allow the person
called to speak briefly at any point,
but answer only with this litany.

#4

Pucker your lips as for a kiss.
Inhale through the pucker
in short, continuous jabs of sound,
until you or the one called
gets too tired to continue.

#5

In a low crescendo of aspiration,
say ah, but do not turn on
your vocal
chords when doing so, as

"ah, ah-, ah--, ah---,
Ah, Ah-, Ah--, Ah---,
AH, AH-, AH--, AH---"

Begin again as often as needed.
Alternate the size of your mouth
to vary the effects.

#6

Burp. Slurp. Hiccup.
Burp. Slurp. Hiccup.

#7

Make a series of clicks,
such as a cowboy makes
when he urges horses faster.
Punctuate rigidly thus:

2 sets of clicks. Silence.
3 sets of clicks. Silence.
2 sets of 7 clicks. Silence.
5 sets of single clicks. Silence.
Repeat indefinitely.

An African American in my freshman honors class at the University of Alabama in 1966 wrote a paper I vividly remember in which she described walking across the campus facing real heckling as well as actions hard to assess. Just three years earlier, Governor George Wallace had stood "in the schoolhouse door" to try to block the integration ordered by the court. He was unsuccessful, but hearts take time to change. 'Did the baseball accidentally come so close?', she asked herself.

She explained that to survive her vulnerable isolation, she fixed a permanent smile to use approaching all strangers, yet she feared her smile might freeze in its mechanical insincerity. Her diction echoed Isaiah's in the presence of enemies:

therefore I have set my face like flint,
and I know that I shall not be put to shame;

When I founded Integrity in 1974, I was essentially saying:

Who will contend with me?
Let us stand up together.
Who are my adversaries?
Let them confront me.
It is the Lord GOD who helps me;
who will declare me guilty?

Many still do not hesitate to declare folks like me guilty, but far fewer now than then. I know in whom I have believed. His property is always to show mercy.

Psalm 31:9-16

But as for me, I have trusted in you, O LORD. *
I have said, "You are my God.

My times are in your hand; *
rescue me from the hand of my enemies,
and from those who persecute me.

Yes, yes, Lord!

Most TBLG persons of my generation (née 1936) can well understand.

I have become a reproach to all my enemies and even to my neighbors,
a dismay to those of my acquaintance; *
when they see me in the street they avoid me.

Over the years, especially early on, I found that males quickest to avoid me have themselves been gay and deeply closeted. Their avoidance is sometimes my first clue about their closet. Straight men comfortable with their own sexuality have little reason to be afraid of the sexuality of someone else.

Coming into class early one morning in the 1970s, I spotted a young woman scheduled to have an interview that day. She was dressed to the nines and had obviously spent hours preparing her looks to their best advantage.

"You look great, Jennifer!" I complimented her. She smiled, knowing that I was right.

"And you look sharp too, Phillip," I said to the young man sitting next to her.

Indeed, he had spent hours buffing up every day for many months, and he knew that he deserved the compliment. The glee of all the women around him confirmed my assessment, but he looked on uncertain.

"Have I said anything wrong?" I teased.

"Not yet!" he responded with a broad smile.

"Fair enough," I responded. "Now class, turn to page 322...." I continued as soon the bell rang.

Philippians 2:5-11

This passage clarifies the healthiest understanding of humility to be found anywhere in the bible.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself....

Christ knew that he was in the form of God. He was God's equal. He had nothing to fear from the worst the world might give him.

We Christians who have been marked as God's own forever are also in the form of God. God has made us God's equals. We have nothing to fear from the worst the world might give us.

So are we TBLG Christians in the form of God. We are God's equals, even when most straight Christians in the world have not yet had that revelation.

By baptism each Christian of any sort has been reborn into a new person 'in the form of God' -- even when other Christians sit in fierce judgment.

True humility does not derive from our being worthless, but from our being of great worth. We empty ourselves because we are joint heirs with Jesus. We have equality with the God of the universe! It is from that perspective that we can have "the same mind...that was in Christ Jesus."

It's a mind thing. Jesus' first commandment requires us to love God with our minds.

We have no need to exploit our equality with God. We have no need to lord it over those who persecute us or say all manner of evil against us. We can become obedient even to the point of death knowing full well that we are safe, even privileged in having this mind of Christ.

Matthew 27-11-54

This is the longest reading appointed by the lectionary for the full Christian year. Don't shortchange yourself by slipping into an early service where it is unsung.

Put aside all that could distract you. Plan the rest of your day well before you get to the service, so that you won't be calculating during the service how you will get all your chores done.

Don't look at your watch! Gracefully give it your full attention, Imagine that Matthew himself is the lector. Let the Holy Spirit work on you through it.

Enjoy!

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

Publication History of "Breathing Calls":

Queers! For Christ's Sake! From May 12, 2004
Jotspeak.com. From August 2010
Earth's Daughters 27 (1986): 6. Used my pen name Li Min Hua
Talkwork 2 (1991): Side 1 of an audio cassette
Fine China: Twenty Years of Earth's Daughters Springhouse Editions, August 1993: 162. Used my pen name Used Li Min Hua
Short Fuse Issue #66 (1996): n.p

See also

April 10, 2011. Fifth Sunday in Lent

2011-04-01T01:04:00.000-07:00

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

So much has this collect comforted me throughout my life that I am reluctant to bring to it the close scrutiny which I have brought to so many others in the Queer Eye series, but I will nonetheless.

The psalm encourages our dependence on God and asserts that by ourselves we sinners cannot bring into order our unruly will and affections. I believe that we might do a better job with our unruly will and affections if we were less quick to give up and ask God to take care of them. Do we live into the full integrity that God wills for us if from the get-go we disrespect ourselves this much?

A major part of collect's appeal is the clear way it demonstrates how we might order our lives, not by fixing our hearts on the swift and varied changes of the world, but by fixing our hearts on what God commands and on what God promises.

Ezekiel 37:1-14

This is one of the great short stories of all times -- a vision of resurrection where a field full of bones becomes alive with God's creative magic. God takes that which has been dead and reconnects the parts. Compare with Quean Lutibelle's rendition:

Then he said to me, "Mortal, these bones are the whole of the Episcopal Church. They say, `Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are living in a post- Christian era and we are cut off completely from our past as Episcopalians and from the great past of Christianity itself.'

Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the God's realm. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act," says the Lord.

Psalm 130

Did Saint Paul somehow tamper with Psalm 130? It manifests his major theme that we can never please God if we expect to win his favor by our good behavior.

Other psalms stress that only our good behavior in keeping the law will please God. This psalm says that is a hopeless endeavor with which we can never succeed.

If you, LORD, were to note what is done amiss, *
O Lord, who could stand?

For there is forgiveness with you.

Saint Paul constantly stressed that the law is too difficult for anyone to keep thoroughly, that we are in desperate need of the grace that Jesus effects. Saint Paul stressed that we cannot be saved by our own righteousness, but only by Jesus' righteousness.

Romans 8:6-11

Saint locates our sin in our flesh. He's almost obsessed with the notion that loving God means turning away from the flesh. He offers no way to experience God's love in the flesh. He arbitrarily separates the mind and the body, and in Paul's equation, the body always loses.

In the preceding chapter, Paul describes himself as split between the mind and the body: "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." (Romans 7:19, KJV). In utter exasperation" he cries out, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (7:24).

"deliver me from the body"?

Is the body the problem? Is sex the problem? Is carnal desire the problem? Are we wise to seek deliverance from the body and its desires?

The author of Genesis had no such contempt for the flesh. About all of creation, God said, "It is good!"

I disagree with Saint on this issue. He seems a victim of his own Greek education in the artificial division of the mind and the body.

Poet William Blake wrote parallel sequences of poems, one called the "Songs of Innocence" and the other "Songs of Experience."

An example of Blake's "Songs of Innocence" is

The Lamb

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, & bid thee feed
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight;
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek, & he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child, & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee

An example of Blake's "Songs of Experience" is

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

God made both the lamb and the tiger. Blake encourages us to live within the tension of God's diversity, not to choose just one, the tiger or the lamb.

I believe that God wants us as mature Christians to integrate both mind and body, body and soul, not to dismiss the one to have the other. I offer my own song of experience, as an x-rated vision of God's loving creation:

Watching the Watcher

I watched God when He made
Adam's penis,
matched it with his own,
checked it out for size,
for accordianability,
and for fit and feel
in a dozen orifices;
and I swear
He was happy,
did not draw the curtain,
never smirked,
but winked,
even blinked in anticipation.

I watched God as She made
Eve's vagina,
measured it with Her delicate fingers,
nudged out a dimension,
added springs, nectar, slush,
rejected the notion
of a finger-like protrusion
self-insertable at the entrance,
purred to experience
for the first time
the joy for which
Eve was being made.

John 11:1-45

This is a Christian variation on the Ezekiel story. Both deal with death and resurrection. The bones in Ezekiel's story have long been dry and free of flesh. Lazarus has been dead four days, and there is a stench, Martha notes, warning Jesus lest in his grief he might not have noticed.

Small boys like to mine this passage for trivia. "Jesus wept" (11:35) is the shortest verse in the bible. The syntax suggests the short pulse of one grieving as Jesus is grieving.

But John invites us backstage to appreciate Jesus' mastery of theatrics. Jesus knows that all he has to do is ask God quietly to bring Lazarus back to life, but he wants those in the crowds to have a richer spectacle,

Jesus thanks God for "having [already] heard me" but calls out "Lazarus, come out!" for the crowd to hear. John reports that Jesus indulges in good theater "for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you [God] sent me."

This story resonates profoundly with the experience of many lgbt Christians:

"Louie, come out!"
"Ernest, come out!"
"Hazel, come out!"
"Myrtle, come out!"....

The secrecy of the closet stultifies. Many experience it as being buried alive, being cut off from wholeness, and vitality. It buys 'respectability' at a fearful price of our very wholeness.

"Come out! Come out!" Jesus beckons.

See also

Sunday, April 3, 2011. Fourth Sunday in Lent

2011-03-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

My parents died in 1982, Mother in January, Dad in July. After each funeral I stayed with their friend and contemporary Mrs. W. B. Moore, who had tutored me in Latin in the 9th and 10th grades. Mama Moore was a member of Parker Memorial Baptist Church where my parents had been members, the place where I was baptized at age 8, the place which licensed me as a Southern Baptist preacher in March 1954 as I prepared to enter Baylor University that fall.

After my father's funeral, Mama Moore and I had a quiet meal and then sat in her large den (she called it a 'hutch'). "Louie," she said, "I don't believe in the after life. I don't have any need to upset my friends at Parker Memorial by telling them, but I just don't. I believe that the only life we have when we die is in the influence we have on those whom we have loved. Louie, don't ever stop loving your parents. Something very vital in you would die."

"Evermore give us this bread that Jesus may live in us, and we in him."

Without naming it, Mama Moore was describing how Jesus chooses to be resurrected in 2011. That's why we Episcopalians call it Eucharist, from Greek εὐχαριστία (eucharistia), which means "thanksgiving". The Baptists stress that the Lord's Supper is a Remembrance, in which we re-Member Jesus. We make Jesus a member of us again. We elect to remain a part of him.

1 Samuel 16:1-13

I have served on numerous search committees. I was co-chair of the committee that nominated candidates for our most recent episcopal election in the Diocese of Newark, and I was secretary of the nominating committee for the episcopal election before that. I recently served on General Convention's joint standing nominating committee. I also served two terms on the Standing Committee of the Diocese of Newark, which with the bishop, had a deciding vote on whether or not a postulant could become a candidate and be ordained. Also during 44 years as a professor I served on numerous hiring committees.

I undertake such assignments expecting the Holy Spirit to be available to help us discern the best fits, but I don't want to blame all our choices on God. Jesus himself chose one bad egg out of a dozen.

Samuel offers an important model of how to go about discernment, but a troublesome one. Don't always choose from the first pickings. Ask to see those not on view, those tending sheep. "The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart."

Psalm 23

While teaching English at Er Wai, Beijing's Second Foreign Language Institute, 1983-84, I was asked to give several lectures at large on the subject of rhetoric, the discipline that looks closely at the strategies a writer or speaker uses to connect to the audience. For one of my lectures in this officially atheist setting, I chose to look at how the psalmist connects with those who speak the psalm, those who use it.

Note closely the grammatical point of view. At the beginning the psalm is in the first person singular, "The Lord is my shepherd. I will not be without anything I need. He...."

Note well how sheep relate to shepherds. The psalmist is prescribing that those who say or read the psalm will take the same relatively docile and totally dependent relationship with God.

In verses 2 and 3 the speaker of psalm talks about God in the third person, "He make me lie down, he leads me, he revives me, he guides me.

But in verse 4, subtly and dramatically the speaker shifts from third person to second person when taking about God.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I shall fear no evil; *
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff, they comfort me....

The psalm never returns just to talk about God: it talks to God.

If you are not a believer, you might jump on this rhetoric as an example of how religion and opium collaborate to dull critical thinking: without negotiating whether or not the faith claims are valid, the worshiper has been 'suckered' into them.

But if you a believer, you may have already dealt with you doubts. You may also have concluded that faith, by definition, is something spiritual, the substance of things hoped for, not the evidence of things seen.

The imagery works powerfully on the speaker as well. Even when we are surrounded by those who wish us harm, God always brings us a feast.

Imagine what that reality means to lgbt Christians in Uganda. Imagine what that means when those who seek to harm you are kept at the edges where they observe you enjoying the feast, not worried about them at all.

Ephesians 5:8-14

As a gay person I lived too many years in darkness, in hiding, ashamed of who I am, fearful that I might act on who I am, scared that all my efforts to become heterosexual were not working, convinced, even with an abundance of evidence to the contrary, that all courage and goodness was the exclusive province of straight people, that God could not possibly love me or anyone like me....

Indeed, once I was in darkness, but now in the Lord I live as a child of light and try to do what is pleasing to the Lord. I did not find a way to become a heterosexual, but I did find ways to try to be the best homosexual person I can be, with God's help.

Much of that was made possible in my marriage to Ernest Clay, truly a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward transforming grace.

"Sleeper, awake!
Rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you."

John 9:1-41

John makes it sound like there were a powerful lot of Anglicans present when Jesus performed his miracles on sinners. When they couldn't fault the obvious evidence that the blind could now see, that Jesus had made them whole, they faulted Jesus on a technicality: he had healed them on the sabbath, breaking the law.

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, "Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner."

He answered, "I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see."

They said to him, "What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?"

He answered them, "I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?"

Then they reviled him...

Get over it, ++Henry Orombi. Get over it, ++Nicholas Dikeriehi Okoh. Get over it, ++Onesphore Rwaje... Get over it, all 8 primates who boycotted Presiding Bishop and Primate Katharine Jefferts Schori. ""'Show up' to heal the world."

See also

March 27, 2011. Third Sunday in Lent

2011-03-01T02:31:00.000-08:00

Today’s Lections

The Collect

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Do we really have no power in ourselves to help ourselves? Then we’re in a big mess.

It’s in the DNA of most Americans to believe that God helps those who help themselves.

Are we to be God’s co-dependents, God depending on our complete resignation, we depending on God's taking care of all our business?

Exodus 17:1-7

I have serious problems with this narrative. It’s a close call as to who is less attractive in it, Moses? Or God?

The people are thirsty. What on earth is wrong with that? That’s the way God plumbed the body. Moses has been happy to have them honor him as their leader; why make a big deal out of an understandable expectation that leaders lead?

Jane Byrne famously won election as mayor of Chicago running against incumbent Michael Belandic who seemed incompetent in providing snow removal three months earlier, in January 1979.

Taking care of basic community needs is part of the job description of the leader, and a part of the job description of a God worthy of recognition. Yet God’s snit tops Moses’ snit when the people say they are thirsty.

In his own defense, God says they liked it well enough when God gave Moses the power to lead them out of slavery. What’s a little thing like being thirsty?!

For their disrespect God punishes them by making them wander in the desert for 40 years, so that only their children will be free of the taint the parents have brought upon themselves merely by saying, We are thirsty!

With help from God, Moses puts on a great show of giving the people the water they asked for. Photo-ops are not strictly a 21^st century phenomenon. Leaders have been putting their faces on commemorative plaques on public buildings for millennia.

Psalm 95

I prefer to read/say this psalm without including verses 8-11 – an explicit reference to today’s Exodus selection. I hope that the adoration of God so well stated in the first seven verses is spontaneous and authentic, not just a way to placate the God of the Great Snit, the God who flips out if you get thirsty at an inconvenient time.

Romans 5:1-11

Saint’s God is almost unrecognizable in the God of the Great Snit portrayed in Exodus. When the people were thirsty, the God of the Great Snit despised them. Yet Saint’s God is most accommodating and patient when we might least expect it:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person-- though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

John 4:5-42

How much poorer Christianity would be without this narrative! I preached at the Integrity Eucharist during General Convention 1994 at Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis. I opened saying, “Welcome to Samaria.

I consider the woman at the well my spiritual ancestor. Samaritans occupied much the same relationship to Jews in Jesus’ day as queers occupy in much of the Anglican Communion right now.

In 1974 a Florida bishop startled the House of Bishops when without warning he asked, “What do you do when you find a queer priest in your diocese?” The House was less shocked with the notion there might be gay priests than they were that an Episcopal bishop would be so uncouth as to mention them publicly.

The bishops did what they do often when confronting an explosive situation: they formed a task force. And as if to prove they really were Episcopalians, they called it the “House of Bishops Task Force on Homophiles in the Ministry.” Few besides Episcopalians, ever anxious to be delicate, talked that way about us in 1974. Homophiles ? Say what? Give me a break!

I first learned of this group after I founded Integrity in October that year, with announcements in The Advocate and The Living Church. It’s anyone guess as to which of these two publications members of the Task Force read, but I received an invitation to come to Washington in November to meet with them, that they might learn who this stranger was from Fort Valley, Georgia, a place none of them had previously heard of either.

We met without fanfare or public notice in a quiet room at Epiphany, since Henry Bruel, the rector, was a member of the Task Force, as was Rt. Rev. John Walker (then Bishop Suffragan of Washington, later the ordinary). Others included Rev. Canon Clinton Jones (pioneer regarding counseling lesbians, gays and the transgendered), Bishop David Richards (director of the Office of Pastoral Development, the place to which troublesome bishops are sent), Dr. George Benson, a psychiatrist in St. Louis, and a few others whose name now escape me).

Jesus’ assignation with the Samaritan woman at the well was sub rosa as well. Respectable Jewish men did not hang out with Samaritan women. Samaritan women knew they could cause less hassle if they washed clothes in the heat of the day.

John’s narrative is high camp. Knowing that she has no husband, Jesus asks about a husband any way. When she replies she does not have one, he teases, “You have spoken truly, because you have had six husbands and the one with whom you are living right now is not one of them.” Zap!

She teases right back trying to start a theological argument about where to worship God, either here in Samaria as her people teach or in Jerusalem where his people teach.

Jesus does not take the bait. Instead he shifts to a deeper level of candor. Neither group is right. That’s not the way we experience God. God is not the private property of any religious community. God can’t be owned or pinned down to our own expectations. God is a spirit and we worship God in spirit and in truth. We, all of us, are the ones with whom God seeks this relationship.

She is excited and tells everyone not “He told me all my sins” (which in a sense he had done), but “He told me everything I have ever done.”

Unlike Moses or God in today’s passage from Exodus, Jesus cared more about her thirst than about her sin. He offered her living water.

When Jesus’ disciples showed up, they, much like Jesus’ disciples today, did not like the company he kept, They said nothing but registered their shock silently. After she left, they produced the fast food they had fetched and urged Jesus to eat.

Jesus was annoyed: "I have food to eat that you do not know about."

It is not surprising that Samaritans were Jesus’ first ‘success story.’ He had far better results with them than with the Israelites.

It is not surprising that the fastest growing church in India is The Church of South India, principally a church of the Dalits, the untouchables. To all untouchables Jesus speaks far more clearly and lovingly than do most of Jesus’ disciples.

+++Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, met with seven of us lgbt folks during the 2009 General Convention in Anaheim. We each had 90 seconds to make our witness. I reminded the archbishop that Jesus did not take on leadership in Samaritan Liberation, but Jesus did take many opportunities to bear witness to Israelites about how he had seen God at work through despised Samaritans. “In the name of Jesus,” I said, “I charge you to do the same.”

Pray for +++Rowan. Pray for me. Pray for all Samaritans.

See also

March 20, 2011. Second Sunday in Lent

2011-03-01T01:09:00.000-08:00

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen

Genesis 12:1-4a

In Hebrew scriptures many characters seem larger than life.

Noah foresaw the flood and rescued human beings and animals in an arc.
Moses led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt.
Saul built the first temple in Jerusalem.
David was a beloved king, a musician, and a strong warrior.
Elijah was one of the most respected prophets of all time…..

But what did Abram (Abraham) do? Why is he ascribed great stature in Hebrew Scriptures?

Abraham was a nomad who accumulated a fair amount of wealth.
In his very old age Abraham fathered Isaac, who himself is not very remarkable
And through his concubine Hagar Abraham fathered yet another son, Ishmael.

Those ‘achievements’ do not compete well with the heroics of many others in the Biblical narrative. Yet three modern religions trace their lineage through Abraham – Judaism through Isaac, Islam through Ishmael, and Christianity through Jesus through David through Isaac….

In today’s epistle, Saint Paul imputes holy celebrity status to Abraham because he did without question what God asked him to do. He trusted God had good reasons – even when he thought God asked him to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham’s faith, his trust, was reckoned as righteousness.

“So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.”

Psalm 121

I lift up my eyes to the hills; *
from where is my help to come?

Note that the verse ends with a question mark. Although no punctuation appears in the oldest manuscripts, bible scholars translate the text as an interrogative.

Where does the speaker expect to find his help? From the hills? From high places? No!:

My help comes from the LORD, *
the maker of heaven and earth.

I rejoice that those who compile the lectionary appointed Psalm 121 for the second Sunday in Lent. It is not penitential. The speaker does not grovel. The speaker does not cry out in pain that withers, as the speaker did in the psalm for the first Sunday in Lent.

If we expect to address our sin and our guilt seriously, as Lent invites us to, we need just as seriously to address the consolation that God offers to us. In the rest of the psalm the speaker addresses the rest of us, with some of the most comforting words in all the Bible:

[God] will not let your foot be moved *
and he who watches over you will not fall asleep.

Behold, he who keeps watch over Israel *
shall neither slumber nor sleep;

The LORD himself watches over you; *
the LORD is your shade at your right hand,

So that the sun shall not strike you by day, *
nor the moon by night.

The LORD shall preserve you from all evil; *
it is he who shall keep you safe.

The LORD shall watch over your going out and your coming in, *
from this time forth for evermore.

So be it. AMEN

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

Saint Paul spent much of his early life trying to follow the law to the letter. In his zeal, Paul was present at the stoning of Stephen, the first martyr. Yet when he converted to Christianity Paul radically departed from the view that righteousness comes by our right actions. With that standard, no one can win, he reckoned; we will all fall short of earning our way into heaven if the goal depends on how good or how right we are. We don’t earn our way; Jesus paid our way for us. We have salvation by God’s free gift through Jesus.

Abraham’s simple, straight-forward trust of God is not simple for Paul: it is a means of Grace and is accounted to Abraham as righteousness.

John 3:1-17

Many say to lgbt people, You must be born again! You are not meant to be lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgendered. Those are not you. You must be born again.

Believing those people, many a night through my adolescence I prayed “Make me a heterosexual, God,” When Playboy Magazine first appeared (1953), I bought copies in an effort to rewire my circuits heterosexually; but it prompted no arousal. And my involuntary fantasies remained stolidly homosexual.

I felt that God had made me the piece of junk that so many took us queers to be.

I was like Nicodemus thinking that I would have to go back into my mother’s womb and exit it properly.

“Not so,” Jesus told him. “Get a life. Get a new life of the spirit.”

God never made my homosexuality go away but performed a great miracle: God gave me a new life, a new spirit as a gay person striving to be the best gay person I could be.

John 3:16 is possibly the most memorized bible verse of all time. It is perverse to read it as, “"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that every heterosexual who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Just what part of “Whosoever” so difficult to understand?

"Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him."

Woe unto those who hoard this good news as a private secret.

Nor is it a secret for lgbt persons to hoard privately. Having experienced so great salvation, let us share the good news everywhere: God loves absolutely everybody.

See also

March 13, 2011. The First Sunday in Lent

2011-03-01T00:48:00.000-08:00

Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

It’s Sin Time again, with a capital ‘S’. While the Prayer Book provides for us to confess daily, the church calendar devotes 40 full days, most of them delightful spring days in the Northern Hemisphere, to temptation – our need to be on guard against it and our need to confess fully when we have fallen into it. The church risks coming across as saying to spring, when the ‘young’s fancy turns to, well, love, beware!”

Ironically ads for E.D. medications probably are most effective when they warn, “If your erection lasts for more than four hours, consult your doctor.” “No,” responds a septuagenarian friend married to an octogenarian with increasing dementia,” “No,” she responds, “call me!”

Today’s collect offers solace to those with ears to hear: You are not alone! We are all right there with you. We are all “assaulted by many temptations.”

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

Hear God’s voice calling out in the huge garden: “Eva! Eva! Where are you? Eva!”

“Louie! Louie! Where are you? Louie!”

Been there? Done that?

“Bow-Back made me do it,” I answered when my parents asked why I had done what they told me not to do. “I didn’t do it; Bow-Back did. Don’t blame me!”

“Eva! Eva! Where are you? Eva!”

Of course, males wrote this version. God does not call out, “Adam! Adam! Where are you? Adam!”

If confronted, Adam could say, “Eve made me do it. Don’t blame me; blame her!”

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.”

Before this they were naked but did not see their nakedness. Now they make loin clothes, and ever since then most people in the world cover principal sexual parts.

For the writer of Genesis, the misconduct of our first parents explains the presence of death, pain, toil…. You name it: if it is undesirable, Eve made it happen.

Psalm 32

It is not uncommon for men to say, “If she had not be so seductive and scantily clad, I would not have done it…. She made me do it!”

The psalmist offers a rejoinder:

Do not be like horse or mule, which have no understanding; *
who must be fitted with bit and bridle,
or else they will not stay near you."

We must grow up. We must take responsibility for our own actions!

The psalmist imitates the speech of one who has not repented:

While I held my tongue, my bones withered away, *
because of my groaning all day long.

Guilt is indeed withering. Confession offers healing.

Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven, *
and whose sin is put away!

Happy are they to whom the LORD imputes no guilt, *
and in whose spirit there is no guile!

The story is told of two gay young men in Manhattan who on Friday night headed for the Village. When they passed by St. Patrick’s Cathedral, one said to the other, “Wait here for me for 10 minutes. I need to make my confession.”

“That’s what I don’t understand about you Catholics!” his friend complained. “You know you are headed to the Village to sin as much as you can yet you stop off beforehand to make your confession.”

“Ah, ever the Presbyterian,” the young man replied. “You protestants rarely get it right. A sailor knows that a ship will continue to get barnacles, but when does that ever stop him from removing the barnacles with a good routine scrub down?”

“Well, that does sound convincing,” replied the Presbyterian.

“Why don’t you come in with me and make your own confession. It will do your heart good. All you have to do is say, ‘Father, since my last confession I have……’ and name your sins. Then the priest will give you something specific to do as penance.”

They made their way to adjoining booths. Ten minutes later the Catholic was done, but he could see his friend’s shoes still in the booth. Thirty minutes later his friend was still in there. “This is ridiculous! I should have explained that he doesn’t have to go on forever. He must be confessing everything he has ever done. I’m out of here.”

In the wee hours of the next morning he made his way back to the building where they shared an apartment. The Presbyterian was not there. Nor was he there on Sunday, or on Monday…. Finally, on Tuesday evening, the Presbyterian showed up, looking horrible. His clothes were filthy. But his face shone.

“Thanks for getting me to make my confession,” his friend said. “But you will never believe what the priest gave me for penance.”

“What?” the Catholic asked.

“He said I had to do all the stations. Do you have any idea how many there are in Manhattan?!

[On hearing this story, a Monsignor told a friend of mine, "I'll never give the stations as a penance again until I know for sure that the penitent knows what they are!"]

Romans 5:12-19

As one might in a good sermon illustration, Paul compares Jesus with Adam. Jesus reverses Adam’s mistake. Sin came into the world through one person, Adam; sin is overcome in the world through one person, Jesus. Because of Adam’s sin, all human beings had to die. Because of Jesus’ righteousness, all might be forgiven and be able to live forever.

This is the locus classicus for the Doctrine of Original Sin, but it is possible that Paul was writing a good sermon illustration but not intentionally forming the hard and fast doctrine which many later Christians have made of it.

Jews wrote Genesis and value it still; yet they have not developed a doctrine of Original Sin. That’s a Christian interpretation of Genesis, and not all Christians believe in Original Sin either.

In its particulars, the Doctrine of Original Sin is hard for many 21st century Christians to take. Does God demand blood for blood? Christ’s blood for the blood I would otherwise owe for my own sins?… That God sounds primitive, even barbaric to many who nevertheless believe Jesus is Lord.

Matthew 4:1-11

The author includes many sexual overtones in Genesis 2. Most notably, after they have sinned, they “know” that they are naked and make clothes for themselves. Know is a euphemism for sexual intercourse in much of the bible and even today in polite courtroom inquiries: “Did the defendant ‘know’ his girlfriend?”

After Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden, they have children, and one of the specific penalties Eve pays is to have great pain in childbirth. God created Adam and Eve without pain.

In narrating Jesus’ great temptations, Matthew does not include sexual temptations. If Jesus was made in all ways as like unto us yet knew no sin, would he not have had sexual temptations the way we all do? Did Jesus have wet dreams?

Scripture and church tradition are moot on these points. In fact, many view such questions as sacrilegious.

The three temptations that Matthew records are

A temptation to use a miracle to feed himself.
A temptation to use a miracle to show off his power to the people
A temptation to worship Satan to gain power over all the dominions Satan controls

The first is hardly a challenge from Jenny Craig or Weight-Watchers. He is seriously hungry. Try fasting for forty days.

In all three instances Satan tempts Jesus to abuse his power to make his life easier; Jesus rejects all three.

Most Christians still expect Jesus in his next coming to be King of Kings and Lord of Lords, to get it right, as it were, and put all other gods under his feet.

Might we be as wrong in these expectations as the Israelites were in their expectations when God first came as Jesus? Might we be looking still in all the wrong places? Might there still be no room for him in the Inn? Might we see him more clearly in the smiling eyes of a very hungry child or in the kindness of the Samaritan who takes the orthodox out of the ditch, tends their wounds, and pays the bills?

Matthew assumes that Satan is in control of “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.” Jesus does not naysay that claim; he merely refuses to worship Satan. Have we any reason to conclude that Satan has lost this control?

See also

March 6, 2011. The Last Sunday after Epiphany

2011-02-23T00:56:00.000-08:00

O God, who before the passion of your only begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Exodus 24:12-18

This passage reads like bona fides for Moses. People did not elect him: God chose him. Moses went up on the mountain alone, and he stayed there forty days and forty nights.

When persons run for President of the United States, typically they run for close to 600 days and nights, and they don’t benefit from the presumption that they are spending time close to God.

Now the appearance of the glory of the LORD was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.

Compare those data with date from a major modern example of pyro-techniques” The fire in the collapsed twin towers of the World Trade Center burned for 99 days

Psalm 2

God seldom laughs in the whole of the bible, but Jesus laughs often. See my 1973 article Did Jesus Laugh, first published in The Lutheran Forum.

Yet in the second psalm, the “kings of the earth rise up in revolt, and the princes plot together against the LORD and against the Lord’s anointed:"

God responds by laughing. He derides them, as if to say, “I gotcha!”

Rarely do we imagine Jesus mocking his enemies. He taught, “Do not return evil for evil.... Bless those who curse you. Do good to those that spitefully use you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.”

2 Peter 1:16-21

Peter lays out his own bona fides. Although we have no fool-proof way to check them out 2,000 years after the fact, Peter certainly seems to feel it important that we accept what the he and other eye witnesses as accurate.

When Peter speaks of the prophecy in Scripture, he is not referring to Christian scriptures, but to Hebrew scriptures, the only scriptures he knew. He asserts that the Holy Spirit spoke through God in the creation of those scriptures.

Peter observes that their reports more fully confirm the prophecies in Hebrew Scripture.

Peter asserts that he and others who report the power and coming of our Lord Jesus report what they have seen with their own eyes. They were present at Jesus’ baptism when the Holy Spirit descended and said, “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Matthew 17:1-9

More bona fides; for Jesus this time. The transfiguration places Jesus in the company of Moses and Elijah, two major spiritual icons.

It’s such a moving triumvirate, that Peter, James and John, allowed to witness it, don’t want to leave. Peter says: “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

From spontaneious religious experience to church architecture: ever was it thus.

Rather than trust spiritual experience to regenerate itself, Peter, James and John, like many throughout religious history, want to preserve the experience in permanent dwellings.

God interrupts suddenly with a bright cloud that overshadows them, and a voice affirms of Jesus in almost the same terms that the Holy Spirit had used at Jesus’ baptism: "This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!"

Jesus ignores his disciples' plea stay enraptured on the mountain. “He came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid.’ And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.”

When we have had a powerful experience of God, often we want it to last forever. Yet manna, God’s holy food for our journey, cannot be freeze-dried. It comes in ample supply for only one day at a time. Any leftovers rot

The readings from Exodus, 2nd Peter, and Matthew all emphasize spiritual credentials – Moses’, the apostles’, and Jesus’. What about our own?

In John 13:35, Jesus said, “By this shall all know that you are his disciples if you have love one for another.” If you were put on trial as a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you.”

Today's collect emphasizes that the transfiguration occurred before the passion, adding: “Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory.”

See also

February 27, 2011. Eighth Sunday after the Epiphany.

2011-02-01T04:18:00.000-08:00

Most loving Father, whose will it is for us to give thanks for all things, to fear nothing but the loss of you, and to cast all our care on you who care for us: Preserve us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties, that no clouds of this mortal life may hide from us the light of that love which is immortal, and which you have manifested to us in your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen

Do you experience insistent “faithless fears”?

Is it faithless to have anxiety about the fate of planet earth? Or is that fear faithful?

Was the father faithless to be anxious when his prodigal son took his inheritance and squandered it in riotous living far away from home? When he saw his son returning far down the road, he ordered that the fattened calf be made into veal scaloppini, and dashed to embrace him, “For this my son who was lost is found!”

Jesus taught us to pray for God’s kingdom to exist not just in heaven, but here on earth. Jesus taught us to pray for God’s will to be done not just in heaven, but here on earth.

Those are wrong who proclaim that politics and religion should not mix. They must mix if we are to have good religion or good politics.

Rather than seek deliverance from anxiety, we might use our anxiety to prompt us to act righteously.

Should we really cast all our cares on God? Is that a way to treat our friend Jesus?

This Collect is the intoxicating opiate that Marx warned about – a drugged dependence on God rather than a faithful acceptance of the vitality and capacity that God has given us.

Atheist George Bernhard Shaw faithfully warned: “Beware of the one whose God is in the skies” (“Maxims for the Revolutionary” in Man and Superman (1903).

Beware of love which is so immortal that you have no need to act on it until death.

The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace

-- Andrew Marvel.

Isaiah 49:8-16a

The Lord says to the prisoners, "Come out"… to those who are in darkness, "Show yourselves."…. The Lord …will have compassion on his suffering ones.

“If your high school is a safe place for lesbian and gay students to come out, please stand.”

Only three students remained seated when this request was made at a recent conference of the National Association of Independent Schools.

Lgbt students need data far more accurate than this in determining whether to “come out” and “show themselves.” Likely several students stood just to make their schools look good, with no close attention to the stark risks which lgbts face if they show themselves.

A friend is proud that her granddaughter and two classmates at an Episcopal high school had the courage to remain seated. The grandmother is strategizing with the three regarding how to persuade administrators to restore the Gay-Straight Alliance which they disbanded when a few parents complained. The parents did not want their children even to hear about such people.

How comfortable would prisoners feel sitting on the pew with you. How comfortable do you feel when face to face with “the least” among us?

Isaiah’s rhetoric can easily sound reassuring if we hear in it only about God’s deliverance of our spiritual ancestors in a time thousands of years ago. How comfortable are we to allow God to use us as agents of deliverance for prisoners and those who are in darkness right now?

Psalm 131

With only two verses Psalm 117 is the shortest psalm in the bible:

Praise the LORD, all you nations;
   extol him, all you peoples.

For great is his love toward us,
   and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.

   Praise the LORD.

With only four verses, Psalm 131 is not far behind. Perhaps if we say if four times we’ll be closer to knowing it by heart

My take on the first verse:

O LORD, I am not proud; *
I have no haughty looks.

I might say this to God, but would others say the same thing about me?

Would the beggar to whom I nodded “No” as I left Dunkin Donuts this morning say of me, “He is not proud. He does not look haughty?”

I might feel better about myself if I invited her in with me and bought breakfast for her. I might also use my communications gifts to promote laws that would assure that fewer people needed to beg, free of the caprice of how generous I feel day to day.

My take on Verse 2

Would we want the President of the United States to pray?:

I do not occupy myself with great matters, *
or with things that are too hard for me.

If our child comes to us with a great matter that is very hard, should we respond with this verse?

The text invites us to think of ourselves more lowly than we ought to think. It promotes a humility that diminishes our spiritual resources.

My take on Verse 3

But I still my soul and make it quiet,
like a child upon its mother's breast; *
my soul is quieted within me.

I like the speaker’s acceptance of personal responsibility. “I still my soul, [God]”, not “God, please still my soul.”

The speaker summons an image of earlier stillness common to most human beings, when we were unweaned.

Soul can get us there. Spiritual sedation is efficacious. We do not need Tylenol or aspirin.

The verse, indeed the whole psalm, has potential as a “speech act”; that is, with it the speaker purports to cause something to happen, and does not merely describe what might happen.

“With this ring I thee wed” is also a speech act, as is “I now pronounce you husband and husband” if said in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., or in the Coquille Indian Tribe in Oregon. In all other states “I now pronounce you wife and wife” lacks efficacy as a speech act.

Be still, my soul. Be still.

My take on Verse 4

The first three verses of Psalm 131 are all written in the first person singular, as something the speaker says to God. Without warning, Verse 4 shifts to the third person:

O Israel, wait upon the LORD, *
from this time forth for evermore.

The shift works to snap a speaker out of private meditation. It proclaims the public significance of such meditation: Do this meditation communally forever.

1 Corinthians 4:1-5

As a paragraph in a letter to Christians in the fledgling church at Corinth, this text shows Paul rambling through personal and corporate ethics. His guiding principle is that we think of ourselves as “stewards.” He illustrates: “Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.”

But that reflection does not sit well with him. He’s been in jail enough not to trust his criminal justice system. He knows too that what he has said and what he plans to say later in this letter will surely make him unpopular with those whom he criticizes in the church in Corinth.

While Paul does not abandon his “stewards” metaphor, he tempers it: “But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court.”

This paragraph is not a good model for establishing how Christians should make ethical decisions. Saint Paul is writing a letter, not a juridical treatise.

Witness the problems that Pope Maledict has put himself into, indeed the whole Roman Catholic Church into, by his resistance to being “judged by [other Christians] or by any human court.”

Matthew 6:24-34

These are not comfortable words to the rich:

"No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

One way to soften this judgment is to exempt oneself as not wealthy. It’s easy to find many who are far wealthier and then assert their greater wealth as prima facie evidence that they serve wealth more than they serve God. And yes, we might admit, there are those poorer than ourselves. Even Jesus, we might note, observed “The poor you have with you always.”

My friend Larry Graham warns against such solipsism:

"The poor you will always have with you" is not a commandment.

How does your income compare with incomes of others in the United States? See the latest summary from the U.S. Census Bureau For a more global perspective, see how income in the United States compares with income in most other places.

When God asked murderer Cane where his brother was, Cane replied snidely, “Say what? Why are you asking me? Am I my brother’s keeper?!”

Your brother’s prison warden? No. Your brother’s brother? Yes.

Who are my brothers and sisters? “God has made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26)

See also

February 20, 2011. Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany.

2011-02-01T02:45:00.000-08:00

O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Collect takes a cue from Saint Paul and treats love as a spiritual gift – not something we give, but something God gives through us. Like Saint Paul, the Collect treats love as God’s “greatest gift” – greater than faith, greater than hope.

D. H. Lawrence complained that we human beings use the word love so much that we have diminished the power of the word to say anything clearly. Lawrence suggested that we stop using it for several years. Perhaps later we would re-discover it authentically. Perhaps not.

Poets have been known to place extremely high standards for what can be called love. In his sonnet sequence to the mysterious male “W.H.,” Shakespeare early on describes their friendship in charged, sensuous language:

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:

But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

That is to say, ‘You are gorgeous, and I will keep you fixed as gorgeous by writing words about you that Louie Crew and thousands of others will still relish four hundred years later.’

Flattery might be welcome when affection is reciprocal, but in time the poet’s friend lost interest. In anguish, the poet fortified himself with idealism that sounds increasingly manipulative:

Sonnet 116

Let me* not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

* [italics are Quean Lutibelle’s]

.

In other words, ‘You may think you can leave me, but I won’t let you. I’ll keep you alive in my poetry, and I’ll bear whatever you make me bear until doomsday. I cannot possibly be wrong in my understanding of what love is. So there!’

Would you welcome being fixed forever on a page or in an artist’s painting or sculpture when you no longer gave a fig for the poet or artist?

Is the love the poet professes healthy? Is it love? Maybe Shakespeare was charitable to hide the identity of “W. H.”?

Saint Aelred of Rievaulx loved a monk who did not reciprocate his affections, and Aelred, like the speaker in Shakespeare’s sonnets, takes pride that his own affection remains constant and reliable.

Saint Paul says, “And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profits me nothing” (1 Cor. 13.3).

It’s easy to want to be a loving person and to persuade ourselves that we really are loving. It’s hard to love as God loves, unconditionally and without manipulation.”

It is easy for me to say, “I love X but do not like X”; but is that not a cop out? That distinction makes love less demanding so that I can feel better about my failure to love unconditionally.

Sometimes I have used “I love X but do not like X” to rationalize the fact that while in the abstract I may wish the best for the person, in reality I prefer to have as little to do with the person as possible.

In September 1995, I represented the Diocese of Newark at a Worldwide Conference on Evangelism at Kanuga. In a breakout session, a person from New Zealand felt called to witness to me knowing that I am a gay Christian: “We love you, Louie, but you are a defilement on the Body of Christ.”

Matthew 5:38-48

In Matthew’s account, Jesus cuts no slack for ‘safe’ distinctions about what love requires. He commands that we love even our enemies: “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?”

I suspect my soul would short circuit as with a huge power surge were I truly to see how much God loves the persons who most displease me. How might I love them as much as God does?

In William Werc’s Prayer William says:

…But here all know [I'm gay], Jesus...
  Do they hate queers as much
   in Chicago, New York, or San Francisco?
I wish my company had a branch
   in one of those places.
Even their bishops claim to love us,
   though clergy do throw love
   around very glibly.
I wonder if they'd love a son or a daughter
   who is one?

I wish you'd talk back, God.
   I'm one weary quean ….

Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18

Reading Leviticus is sometimes hard work. Teaching the Bible as Literature at the university, often I have passed out copies of the legal code related to using laboratory mice when researching carcinogens. That gives a modern literary parallel to the rhetorical purposes in Leviticus. Much of Leviticus is devoted to public health concerns through elaborate purity codes.

Yet right in the middle of its heavy emphasis on health issues the passage today speaks as clearly as almost any other biblical text about the demands of any love worthy of the name love Theologian Carter Heyward says, “Love without justice is cheap sentimentality.” Leviticus concurs:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God.

You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the LORD.

You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.

You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD.

You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

Why do so few know these imperatives? Why would many Christians be unable to name the book in which they appear? Is it easier to go for the queers?

I get the impression that few lay Christians have voluntarily made it all the way through Leviticus unless we are lesbian or gay and for our survival have to know well the few bible bullets that some aim at us. See my collection of texts that address homosexuality in Scripture.

Psalm 119:33-40

Here, as often in the psalms, the speaker expects to please God by following the law.

Teach me, O LORD, the way of your statutes, *
and I shall keep it to the end.

Give me understanding, and I shall keep your law; *
I shall keep it with all my heart.

Make me go in the path of your commandments, *
for that is my desire.

Incline my heart to your decrees *
and not to unjust gain.

Good sentiments, Saint Paul would agree, but daunting. Who could succeed in living up to the law’s demands? Christ met those requirements for us. We are saved by grace, not by our own righteousness, but by Christ’s….

1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23

Are you aware that God lives in your own body? That’s what Saint Paul emphasizes.

Does it make any difference in how you think about yourself and in how you think about others if God has taken up residence within you?

Ernest gave me a t-shirt on Christmas that proclaims: “Don’t be stupid. We have world leaders for that.” Saint Paul makes a similar point: “So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours…. all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”

In the Eucharist we become blood kin to God. Is that merely an imitation of two little boys cutting themselves to share blood as a bond for life? Or something far bigger?

May we become one with the one whom we receive.

See also

February 13, 2011. Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

2011-02-01T00:34:00.000-08:00

O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Compare:

O God we thank you for marvelously making us. We thank you for minds that can create and hearts that can assess what we need to do. We thank you for being in our world to prompt us to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly. May we do that in honor to Jesus Christ our Lord, and in honor to you, his father. – The Quean Lutibelle Prayer Book

The BCP version would have us grovel yet again. Do you like those who grovel before you? Why should we think that God does? Groveling is often easier than acting rightly. In groveling we plead for a special handicap that most often we do not need. God wants us to be friends, not slaves.

Ecclesiasticus 15:15-20

Ecclesiasticus makes my point more forcefully. The choice is ours: we can keep the commandments or not. We can act faithfully or not. God is watches us but does not rush in to do work which God has made us fully able to do.

Before each person are life and death,
and whichever one chooses will be given.

Psalm 119:1-8

The 119th is the longest of the psalms, yet these first eight verses do not seem auspicious. Like many others, this psalm promotes faithfulness to the law. Like many others, this psalm begins in the third person talking about God, and shifts (here halfway through, at verse 8) to the first person, talking to God. This rhetoric is likely not accidental. It invites the worshiper to participate at a safe, non-committal distance at first and then, without serving notice, the psalm has the worshipper talking directly to God.

The first verse says that people are happy when they walk in the law of God. The last verse has the reader/listener to make a real commitment: “I will keep your statutes.”

Prayer is sometimes utilitarian, as a way to keep the faithful in line. Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the people.” It turns off some of the critical faculties, as does the rhetoric of this psalm.

When the debate was not going his way in the Continental Congress, Benjamin Franklin was wont to say, “Gentle, I move that we pause for prayer.” On one occasion, Alexander Hamilton, who was not on Franklin's side of the issue, replied, “Gentleman, I move that we not bring in any outside interference.”

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. - Desmond Tutu

1 Corinthians 3:1-9

The Anglican Communion seems in a virtual free-fall right now. Many dioceses are facing major budget crunches and people who are dying are not being replaced with anything like the number of those lost. Scholars and theologians have been referring to America as post-Christian for almost half a century, and most vestries are facing the evidence glaringly before them even if they have never heard of scholar’s prognosis.

In 1957, between my junior and senior years in college, I took a three month trip through Europe with a friend who had roomed with me in prep-school. (The trip cost me, including round-trip boat passage and all other expenses, only $870). I was continually struck with the age and grandeur of church buildings, and I was surprised by how many of them were nearly empty of worshippers. In recent decades that same phenomenon has been increasingly obvious in the United States, even in the Bible Belt.

Strife likely did not cause most of our departures, but it surely does not draw new members.

Even the church in the first century was beset with strife. In chapter 3 of his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint tells his readers that they are too caught up in arguments that have nothing at stake in them. What difference does it make that you learned a truth about Jesus from one person and I learned the same truth from another? What difference does it make that you are a Presbyterian and I am an Episcopalian?

The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. For we are God's servants, working together; you are God's field, God's building.

That was a hard sell for Saint. It’s a hard sell for most Christians today. Especially as times get harder and resources fewer, the bickering can easily grow more intense.

Someone has said that we academics fight the hardest of all precisely because there is so little at stake in the outcome of our disputes.

Matthew 5:21-37

One the features that I highly treasure in Christian scriptures is their iconoclasm. Christianity is an anti-religion religion.

So you want forgiveness? Jesus tells you how to get it. Pray to God saying: “Use the same standard in judging my sins that I use in judging those who have sinned against me” – Quean Lutibelle’s rendering of “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive….”

So you want to feel close to God? Don’t head to God’s house for a quick fix of holiness. Don’t try to buy God’s good favor with fine offerings. God is not interested! Instead, first go see the one with whom you are in conflict and be reconciled.

Don’t read scripture to justify your harshness to others:

Let your word be `Yes, Yes' or `No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

At our best, Christians are loving, not judgmental or rancorous.

For some, Episcopalians provide the first evidence that Christians can love nonjudgmentally:

"Father Gribbin came right into her house like he was perfectly comfortable there!"

The young atheist referred to Emmet Gribbin, chaplain at the University of Alabama in the 1960s. The student's friend had had a baby out of wedlock, and the student observer was pleasantly shocked to discover that a religious person could respond without scorn. Instead, Father Gribbin saw to it that the mother and the baby got what they needed, materially as well as spiritually. The baby grew up, and its mother and stepfather became Episcopalians decades ago, as is the prominent lawyer, who was the undergraduate atheist student at that time.

Through love and simple kindness Father Gribbin spoke far more cogently than most of their childhood pastors.

See also

February 6, 2011. Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany.

2011-01-24T09:20:00.000-08:00

Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen

With the collect we ask for abundance and freedom. Isaiah emphasized that abundance and freedom come at a cost, not just as a result of our piety:

If you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The LORD will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,

Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12)

One of the best known political self-appointed prophets of our time has said that people who speak of “social justice” are using the code language of communists and socialists. We would have to apply an exacto knife to Isaiah’s words to make that particular modern prophet feel good.

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.

What political priorities would please God according to Isaiah?

It is standard to reply to one who speaks of justice demands, “You have quit preaching and gone to meddling.”

Some Christians pride themselves on never mixing religion and politics: according to Isaiah, both their religion and their politics are suspect.

Psalm 112:1-9, (10)

One might initially think Psalm 112 is at cross purposes with Isaiah. The psalm promises, “Wealth and riches will be in their house” – speaking of those who have great delight in keeping God’s commandments. But the psalmist does not let us pick and choose which commandments we will follow.

The righteous are merciful and full of compassion. (verse 4)
It is good for them to be generous in lending *
and to manage their affairs with justice (verse 5)
They have given freely to the poor, *
and their righteousness stands fast for ever; (verse 9)

1 Corinthians 2:1-12, (13-16)

Several colleagues manifest the spiritual gifts that Saint Paul touts . Listen to those gifts in two comments of The Rev. Reynolds Cheney. with whom I was honored to serve on the Standing Commission on Human Affairs in the 1994-97 triennium.

Reynolds Cheney explained the Commission on Human Affairs' agenda as a struggle for the souls of our people vis-à-vis the values of our culture and the values of our church. "We are too absorbed by the values of power and being big. We reward people for being successful in the values of the culture. We need the standards of the servant community, not a success community."

From the Minutes for the Oct. 12-15, 19995 meeting of the Standing Commission on Human Affairs

and more specifically in Cheney’s example from parish life:
A vestry member had a modest income from raising and harvesting pecans, yet gave generously not only of her money but also her compassionate service to anyone in need. She was one of the first women to join the vestry. At one meeting, a general complained about giving to the church, especially any money going beyond the parish itself. "The problem is one of control," the general said. When we give money beyond our parish, we don't have any control over how that money is spent!"
"No," the new vestry member replied, gently but firmly. "The problem is not one of control. When I give my money to the church, I give it to God. I don't need to control what the vestry or the diocese or the national church does with it. I trust that they will do what should be done with the Lord's money. The problem is not control, but faith. You need more faith that God will take our offerings and do with them far more than we could ever dream."

From the minutes for the March 14-16, 1996 meeting the Standing Commission on Human Affairs

Matthew 5:13-20

Some of what Matthew reports Jesus saying is contrary to Jesus’ own practice. Here Jesus says poignantly, “Whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven”; yet elsewhere Jesus frequently violates the law and the prophets as the religious leaders of his own generation understood them. He spent major time with sinners, and preferred their company. He made himself unclean by touching and healing lepers. He healed on the Sabbath. He even harvested food on the Sabbath. Even against his own inclinations, he healed the importunate widow.

The standard “way around” this seeming contradiction is to emphasize that Jesus as God’s son “fulfilled” the law through sacrificing himself on the cross, “worthy is the lamb that was slain”….. Saint Paul certainly stressed that we are saved not by our merits, but by Christ’s.

That tact seems a smokescreen when used to deal with the apparent contradictions to be found in this passage from Matthew.

The final sentence offers a better way around the apparent contradiction:

For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

From the perspective of the four gospel writers, the scribes and the Pharisees were a misguided lot in that they substituted ritual obedience for the obedience that springs from the heart. In the same chapter, at verse 38, Jesus says “You have heard that it has been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say whosoever strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

In amplifying “the law” Jesus changes the law. He did the same in disagreeing with Moses about divorce. Moses allowed it, but Jesus did not.

Matthew concludes his account of Sermon on the Mount two chapters later:

And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings,
the people were astonished at his doctrine.
For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.

An author originates, creates; a scribe merely copies.

After I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation*, Dr. James D. McMillan, head of the department, counseled me: “Well done, but understand this. Before your dissertation, you earned praise by showing how well you know the best of what others know. In your dissertation and hereafter others will expect you to know the best of what others know, but they will read you and respect you most for what new you can add. That will be the source of your authority. [Italics mine]

Jesus seems to be making that point regarding the law. It is not enough to know the law. It is not enough to follow every jot and tittle of the law. If you have become a new creature, the law will be written on your heart and will be manifest in your loving behavior in ways you have not even yet seen or imagined.

*Dickens’ Use of Language for Protest, University of Alabama, Dissertation Abstracts International 32 (1971): 913A.

See also

Sunday, January 30, 2011. Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

2011-01-01T05:26:00.000-08:00

Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Why did the writer of the Collect not conclude, “Thanks in advance”?

I cannot speak about God as governor of heaven, but in seeing more than a fair share of the earth, I have rarely witnessed God as the earth’s governor. Absentee landlord, perhaps; but governor?!

I care too much for God to put on God a governor’s responsibility for all the messes the world is in.

“In our time grant us your peace”? That would be nice, but has it ever happened? The United States has been at war for all 74 of my years, and I am uncomfortable telling God to make peace happen.

“Make me an instrument of your peace” would be more responsible as a petition, for the petitioner acknowledges where peace must begin.

We’re almost half way through Epiphany. In my world as an English professor, an epiphany is “an experience of a startlingly profound insight.” In the secular culture many who use the word epiphany have no knowledge of it as a liturgical season, yet in our pews many who know it to refer to the coming of the three magi have no knowledge of epiphany as used in the secular world. Each might learn from the other.

Have you had an epiphany within the last month? season? year? ever? Whom have you told about that experience?

An epiphany does not require Hollywood presentation. Often an epiphany is not even noticed by other observers standing near you.

Be Still

I met myself last night when suddenly
I saw my hand cup the moon like a lemon drop
in the warm palm of a stranger's hand.
It was my hand: but I saw
the gesture as an outsider.

I met myself last night as a voice
ventriloquizing itself to this stranger,
and what I heard myself saying I heard
not as my voice at all, but the voice
of a public me to whom
a more substantial me replied.

It was like praying while aware of angels
treading water in a mire about my head.

Mainly I told myself to hush for a while,
and when I did not obey,
at least I saw the lies
in what I had been saying, but....

Hush! I said.
And I heard the quietness of the moon,
the beady quietness,
like a radio turned on to no station
and no static: like that,
but quieter still.

--Louie Crew, 1967

Micah 6:1-8

Part 1: God is pissed.
Part 2: What do I have to do to get back in God’s good graces.
Part 3: A short list of everything that God requires.

In Part 1 God reminds the people of several of specific “saving acts” on their behalf and complains, “What have I done to you [to deserve your contention]?”

In Part 2 the people review several strategies that have not worked in the past to placate God: burnt offerings, calves, rams, rivers of oil, even human sacrifice.

In Part 3 Micah tells what God requires – a shorter list than Moses’ Ten Commandments and slightly longer than Jesus’ big two commandments.

Do justice
Love mercy
Walk humbly

That’s it, Lambeth Conference. That’s it Primates of the Anglican Communion. That’s it, Anglican Consultative Council. That’s it, Archbishop of Canterbury. That’s it, church. That’s it, fellow sinners.

And that is quite challenge enough.

There is a dangerous mistake in our catechism:

Question: What response did God require from the chosen people?

Answer: God required the chosen people to be faithful; to love justice, to do mercy, and to walk humbly with their God..” Book of Common Prayer page 847

That is not what Micah says. Look again: Micah pairs Do with justice. Micah pairs Love with mercy.

The version in the catechism tries to get us off the hook. It is much easier to love justice than to do it; it is much easier to be merciful than to love mercy.

We all know people who just love justice but do not behave justly. We need to do justice regardless of whether we like doing it.

I know many people who are in fact merciful, but I know few who so thoroughly enjoy being merciful that that objective outside observers could with assurance say, 'They actually love mercy.' Many are merciful for strategic purposes – such as being merciful for what they can get out of it, whether it be good reputation or favors. Very few are merciful because of the generosity of their character, the way God is merciful towards us.

At General Convention 2003 I submitted D003 a resolution to correct the version in the Prayer Book. Convention referred it to a committee and I have not heard of it again. (See Journal of the General Convention of… The Episcopal Church, Minneapolis, 2003 (New York: General Convention, 2004), p. 679.

Psalm 15

LORD, who may dwell in your tabernacle? *
who may abide upon your holy hill?

Abiding with God is at the heart of most religious quests. The psalm answers its own question. The one who “will win” that honor is “Whoever leads a blameless life and does what is right.”

The rest of the psalm specifies several ways that demonstrate a blameless life, but the answer makes me uncomfortable, as undoubtedly it made St. Paul uncomfortable. At the heart of the Psalm is notion that going to heaven is guaranteed by following the rules, but who can succeed in following all the rules?

By contrast, Saint Paul suggests that we will never get to heaven trusting in our own righteousness, but by God’s manifold and great mercy. It is not our righteousness, but God’s that saves us.

I have found myself highly vulnerable to sin, especially the sins of spiritual arrogance and insensitivity, when I put myself into the comfortable space Psalm 15 attempts to provide. It is all too easy to tell oneself, “I am doing the right thing. I am following the rules….”

Jesus spoke of the excesses of a point of view like that: “The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: 'I thank you, God, that I am not a sinner like everyone else. For I don't cheat, I don't sin, and I don't commit adultery. I'm certainly not like that tax collector!….” (Luke 18:11)

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

The epistle suggests limits to trusting in our own intellect or power. It strikes an anti-intellectual note, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?”

Saint suggests that the lower station, the greater the cause to boast.

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

Is there a smattering of reverse snobbery here?

Matthew 5:1-12

The word blessed easily anesthetizes an audience to the gustiness of Jesus’ series of paradoxes here. Happy works a bit better than blessed, especially if the translator reinforces the paradox syntactically. For example, here’s the Quean Lutibelle version:

You want to be happy? Be poor. Yes, be poor in spirit.

You want to be happy? Mourn. Yes, mourn, and you will be comforted.

You want to be happy? Be meek. Be timid. Be non-aggressive. The earth will belong to you even though others may never notice.

You want to be happy? Be hungry and thirsty for righteousness. Then and only then will you have the happiness of being filled.

You want to be happy? Be merciful, especially to those who by no stretch of the imagination deserve mercy. It is by being merciful that you receive mercy.

You want to be happy? ……

As a gay person, for too long I felt that Christianity eluded me, that I am not good enough for it, that I lack the boldness and forcefulness of heterosexual Christians, most of whom hold queers like me in great contempt.

In my young adulthood, I tried hard to be straight, and it just never worked, even when I sought help. After several years of trying, I gave up on myself because I felt God had given up on me.

I went to Baylor to become a Baptist preacher, but lost my faith. I lost the life that I had been raised to live. Yet in losing that life, I found life, a new life in Christ.

When people reviled me and said all manner of evil against me falsely because of my queer faith in Jesus, I found what it means really to rejoice.

Teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Stevens Point (1979-84), I had a young student who was rather attractive, but didn't have much between the ears. It became quite apparent early in the semester that Robert didn't have much chance of passing the course without special help. So I offered to have him come by my office with every paper he wrote in Freshman English. Bless Robert's heart. He did that. He was there with every paper. The next paper wouldn't be that much better (nor is mine necessarily), but we worked and we worked and we worked. Near the end of the semester, Robert got just enough better to pass that course with a C-minus, which was the best we were going to get from Robert in that subject. But he earned it, so that he could get out and do the work of the other courses. I was happy. Robert was happy too.

I didn't see Robert for maybe a year or year and a half. Back in those days I was still jogging. It very difficult to jog in the wintertime. But Spring was on its way and the world was, as e.e. cummings says, "puddle wonderful." I was out jogging around the lakes on our campus, trying to miss a puddle here and not slip there. And I looked ahead of me, and I saw Robert jogging through this wet, cold, but wonderfully bright area. And I was so happy to see him. That meant that he was still at the University! I brightened up and greeted him, "Robert!"

And at that point Robert spat in my face and said, "Faggot!"

We Christians are here for the Roberts of the world.

Can you...can you imagine what it would be like to be Robert? Can you imagine what it would be like to be Robert's wife?

Forget the spit on my face.

Can you imagine what it would be to be Robert's daughter? Coming to your father with a need... any kind of need. Anything that stretched him to reach out to her? What we know as Christians on our journey, Robert so much needs.

I knew in the moment that Robert's spit got in my eyes, just as Jesus talks about spittle taking scales off your eyes, that the Roberts of the world are vastly in need of love! We must learn how to speak that love.

See also

2011-01-01T02:02:00.000-08:00

Sunday, January 23, 2011. Third Sunday after the Epiphany

© 2010, 2011 by Louie Crew

Today’s Lections

The Collect

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

“Proclaim to all people”? Really?!

Not just to the comfortable and the well-off?
Not just to people like those in our neighborhood?
Even to drug addicts?
Even to the homeless?
Even to queers?

While the priest mouths this collect, perhaps the organist should play ecclesiastical muzak, with tremolo in full throttle as at a funeral, to anesthetize us to what we are asking God to do. St. Teresa warned, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

Isaiah 9:1-4

Isaiah dispels gloom by proclaiming light, and the psalmist today proclaims “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” What light has God brought your life? How do you share that news? Recently the Bishop of West Nile in Uganda wrote to me:

Christians are called disciples because they have to follow certain disciplines to succeed as followers of Christ. It is true we are saved by Grace not discipline, but for the church to be a witness it cannot conform to this world in order that grace might abound. The church without discipline is a church without a Lord and saviour. It can be anything other than a church.

See Bishop Obetia’s full letter

I replied:

Thank you for writing to me, dear Bishop Obetia. I agree that we should not follow Christ on our own terms, but on God's terms. I agree that the church without discipline is a church without a Lord and savior. I agree that we are to make disciples, not Anglicans.

God called me, as God calls all, out of darkness into light. I never thought anyone beside my parents could love me, yet discovered that God loves me, and not me only, but the whole world. My message has never been that gays are good, but that God is good, and God's mercy endures forever.

I wish that you were not far away. I wish that you could come and dine with my husband Ernest and me, as Jesus dined with publicans and sinners. You would not find us saints, but you would find us changed. We would share living water from Samaritan wells.

God bless and keep you. God lift up His countenance upon you and be gracious unto you. God give you peace.

Psalm 27:1, 5-13

I have always loved this psalm, but am less comfortable than I once was entering its perspective:

One thing have I asked of the LORD; one thing I seek; * that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life.

That contrasts with Jesus’ injunction: “Be in the world but not of it.” It contrasts with Jesus’ practice. He earned the reputation of being a friend of publicans and sinners by spending time with us, enjoying our company more than he enjoyed the company of the professionally religious.

Some have asked me with what authority I can speak about God. I have never sought ordination. I have not attended a seminary. I have only minors in religion and in the Greek of Christian scriptures….

The authority I have to speak about God is the authority of one whom God has loved beyond measure, the authority of one whom God forgives prodigally. Like the one leper of the ten healed, I proclaim thanks for what God has done, for what God is doing, for what God will do.

“I know in whom I have believed and I am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have entrusted to him until the last day.” (2 Timothy 1:12)

My friend The Rev. Gray Temple spent a Sabbatical several years ago living on the streets among the homeless. He started out thinking he might be God’s presence among them. He quickly discovered that Jesus had preceded him, that many of the homeless know God quite intimately.

There are too many houses of God where God can’t get in because he chooses the wrong human faces to use when shows up at their doors.

“Go ye therefore” is our great commission. The highways and the hedges are not hard to find. Meet God there. Be God’s face there. Find God’s face already there.

You’ll know you have brought news genuinely good when the drunkards, the tax collectors, and the sinners proclaim you as their friend. Imagine the witness for Christ if the church could become a place safe for sinners.

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Last Sunday we read Saint’s introduction to this letter (verses 1-9) in which he compliments the Corinthians. He praises them. He says they “are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.” He says, “In every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind.”

Having buttered them up, as it were, now Saint turns to criticize. “It has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.” Paul makes his agenda plain, “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement.”

Here we observe one of the early fights in the church.

Never have all Christians been in agreement. We might like complete unity in the abstract, but who among us wants to default on our obligation to think for ourselves even when doing so makes us disagree?

Paul is clearly upset. Even his rhetoric reveals that. He starts to make a point about whom he has baptized. “ I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius”; but then he remembers others parenthetically: “(I did baptize also the household of Stephanas…” and backtracks further to admit his memory fails him: “beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.”

Suppose you lived in Corinth and remembered when the famous apostle baptized you, and now you discover he does not even remember doing it. In your baptism you were sealed as Christ’s own forever, and Saint does not even remember it!

Jesus’ great commission is for all disciples to go absolutely everywhere proclaiming the gospel but also to baptizing the new believers; yet here, in perhaps a lapse of memory, Saint disavows baptism as his calling, “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel” and adds, perhaps because he’s aware that his rhetoric is not as tightly ordered as usual, to proclaim the gospel “not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.”

How would the cross be emptied of its power if Saint proclaimed the gospel with eloquent wisdom?! Often he does. Why not here?

Initially Saint called the Corinthians “enriched in speech and knowledge.” Does Saint strike an anti-intellectual note here intentionally to warn the Corinthians against trying to think their way into grace and salvation?

The reading ends, “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Is Saint suggesting that the Corinthians are perishing, or at least warning them of that risk if they trust in their intellect rather than in the power of God?

Matthew 4:12-23

We lose much of the drama of Matthew’s narrative by taking it only in the short sound bites of the lectionary. For a stretch longer than any of the single readings Matthew juggles two separate, but related stories -- one the story of John the Baptist, who in the reading last Sunday baptized Jesus and in the reading today (still in the same chapter) is imprisoned. The second story is an account of Jesus choosing his disciples.

In the reading last Sunday he chose Andrew and Peter; in the reading today he calls those two again and adds James and John. The four follow him in his ministries of preaching and healing. Matthew is strangely silent about Jesus’ reaction to John’s imprisonment. That’s a political hot potato.

When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea

Is Jesus heading north to reduce his risk of falling into the hands of the authorities as John, his first cousin, did? Matthew does not say so; he merely juxtaposes the two facts.

Maybe Matthew expects first-century readers to be politically savvy and recognize that Jesus’ compass is influenced by the risks.

Matthew throws up a smoke screen to that reading: he says that Jesus’ move was to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy that the Messiah would show up in Capernaum. Matthew quotes the same passage from Isaiah that we have read today, making it clear that a Christian reading of Hebrew scripture sees Jesus as the Messiah.

See also

January 16, 2011. Second Sunday after the Epiphany.

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Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ is the light of the world: Grant that your people, illumined by your Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ's glory, that he may be known, worshipped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Isaiah 49:1-7

I find Isaiah’s pride in Israel distracting. He speaks out of Israel’s experience of being deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers. He expects the savior to redress all of these national grievances. He expects God to give Israel its come-uppance, and quotes God saying:

"Kings shall see and stand up,
princes, and they shall prostrate themselves,
because of the LORD, who is faithful,
the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you."

Yet when Jesus, whom we Christians take to be the Messiah, came, Israel and the Romans rejected him. In his resurrection, the Christ, while consummately Jewish, was not just, or even primarily, the “glory of Israel” but instead is proclaimed as the “Savior of the whole world."

To his credit, Isaiah himself sees the limits of God if God is viewed merely as the savior of Israel:

"It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."

As a member of the lgbt tribe, I appreciate how important it is to proclaim that God redresses the hate. God loves all who are “deeply despised, abhorred by the nations.” I too know that hundreds, perhaps thousands of people have taken hope that God might indeed love them when they see Christians so changed that they dare to love and value folks like me.

But I expect this process not to stop. It is not ultimately about our vindication or our ratification. It is not ourselves whom we proclaim, but Christ Jesus as Lord with ourselves his servants.

Salvation does not occur to make the formerly despised the new rulers over all. Salvation make us all servants of Christ. As Christ loves us, we too must love the next group of the deeply despised and abhorred – and the next, and the next, and the next.

God came into the world not to condemn the world, nor to make one better than another, nor to be the glory of Christ’s followers, but that the world through Christ might be saved.

Psalm 40:1-12

How do you expect the conversation with God to go when at the end of your life you meet God face to face?

I turned 74 in December, and I find myself thinking about that scene more often than I would like. Older people have long told me to expect such concerns to increase, and I have been content to put them off for the most part until they insisted on moving nearer to the top of my agenda.

“Heaven’s my home,” a neighbor’s gardener told me when I was six or seven; “but I ain’t homesick right now.”

I find myself getting a touch more homesick in old age. I wonder what I will say to God and what God will say to me.

Some arch conservatives love to write the script for that scenario. For years once about every six months I would treat myself to single-malt whiskey while I Googled for my name on sites such Standfirm.com, Titusonenine.com and Virtue Online. For a recent example, see David Virtue’s article Episcopal Liberals Rip Anglican Primates over Covenant.

David dubs me “the Episcopal Church's emeritus homosexual.” That’s a bit of a come-down: he used to call me the chief sodomite of the Anglican Communion. When I encountered him at a church meeting a few years ago, I confided in him that the appellation provided me with a rush cheaper than Cialis or Viagra. Thereafter, the added the “emeritus,” as had Rutgers when I retired.

Note the verbal inventiveness of David’s mostly anonymous respondents. They’re particularly hard on our Presiding Bishop:

Great article, David, and you've pointed out the attitudes which are so typical of the liberal heretics who have deliberately caused so much havoc in the Communion.

They've made it abundantly clear that everyone who doesn't share those attitudes is not at all welcome among them unless they kowtow to them, and as for those 15 primates....those 15 Judases....who once were among the 22 who refused to share communion with Mrs. Schori, but who have since switched positions, I wonder how many 'pieces of silver' they took from her to betray their people?

Was it 30 pieces of silver, or was it much more than that? Was it the cost of their souls?

Nor do they spare me:

Dr. Louis Crew, and his ilk, have modeled lying and manipulation as life-long modus operendi. That alone is sinful enough, without the obvious perversions that backs (and fronts) their every claim.

He (they) should shut their mouths AND go away!

The orthodox primates are the heroes of our day, standing for Christ and his word. Whatever effectiveness they have had is actually 'getting to' the Crew Crowd - which includes the ABC

Another says:

Louie Crew is about as disingenuous and hypocritical as a person can get.

Another adds:

Louie Crew? He's just an old pervert with a seared conscience. Why should any Christian care one whit about this man's opinions on matters of faith, theology, and morals?

When I face my maker, should I present myself as “just an old pervert with a seared conscience”?

The psalms frequently offer models for talking to God in show-down moments. Today’s psalm suggests that we should flatter God by proclaiming His [sic] greatness publicly, not concealing God’s love and faithfulness from others. The psalmist says that money won’t impress God. God wants our obedience, and even more, wants the law written in our heart so securely that we love to do God’s will. Then we can pray with confidence

Do not withhold your compassion from me;*
let your love and your faithfulness keep me safe for ever.

All that is a bit too iffy for me, as it was for Saint. If I can get into heaven only by keeping the law perfectly, I haven’t a chance. Face to face with God I shall say,

“Be merciful to me, a sinner.”

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

1st Corinthians is a locus classicus for passive aggressiveness. In it Saint excoriates the Christians in Corinth for their lax sexual morality. He wants them to move into a new place spiritually. Yet he does not drop so much as a hairpin of this agenda in his opening gambit. One has to know the rest of the book to expect the strong but! that will follow his opening compliments. You have to pay very close attention indeed to detect an undertone when Saint says God “will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Dr. Hudson Long, head of the English department at Baylor when I was an undergraduate English major there (1954-58) was one of the primary editors of the Norton’s Anthology of American Literature, used at that time in most American universities. Dr. Long frequently said, “Do not ever expect a helpful answer when you ask a gentleman to give an opinion about a work of art. All that a gentleman can say about anything is, ‘It’s nice.’”

Saint does not usually come across as a gentleman and he won’t maintain that pretense very far into his first letter to the Corinthians, but enjoy the ruse while you can.

Expect the same heightened intensity when God tells you that you have been marvelously made, as indeed you have been. Enjoy the reality of that! It will sustain you when push comes to shove, when a strong but! shifts to harder counsel to “strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

John 1:29-42

Does the question, “Are you saved?” sit well with you, uneasily, or offensively?

Where were you when you were saved? Was anyone else there? Were you surprised?

Or did you recognize that you were saved more slowly, after the fact?

Or do you see yourself in the process of still being saved?

Do you feel a ‘calling’ to be a Christian? If so, how do you perceive the call?

As John watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, "Look, here is the Lamb of God!" The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.
…. They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon.

What is your story? What time was it for you? How have you “found” the Messiah, the Anointed one?

See also

January 9, 2011. First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of our Lord

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Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen

Isaiah 42:1-9

In proclaiming the messiah, Isaiah has God to say:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights

and later:

I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
a light to the nations

There’s an old Jewish joke which says, “Every Jewish mother thinks her child the chosen one of God.”

That was no joke for my Southern Baptist parents. One of my earliest memories as a child is their telling me again and again, “You are God’s child and our child only on loan.” They said that not as they would tell me about Santa Claus, but as they would tell someone about a momentous event. They took it as a matter of fact with serious consequences for themselves and for me.

My parents had no illusions of a miraculous birth; as my parents, they were well aware of the physical terms of my arrival. They already had a messiah, and they did not expect me to be one. Yet as Christians, they were well convinced that all life comes as God’s precious gift. They took seriously God’s trust in them.

My parents did not try to raise me to be divine, and they certainly did not impart to me any delusions of grandeur. Instead, they lived with great expectations, and more important, they prompted my own great expectations.

I am much blessed, and wish such blessings for all others as the universal entitlement made possible by the love of God.

Psalm 29

Ascribe means “to refer to a supposed cause, source, or author.” The psalm is saying, ‘Credit Yaweh, all you other gods.’

But who are these ‘other gods’?

Scripture itself shows traces of polytheism in many places such as this one. When it does, it always gives top billing to Yaweh, but this reference explicitly holds out that there are other gods to be addressed.

Acts 10:34-43

Maybe this first Sunday after Epiphany should be called “Unorthodox Sunday.” The psalmist accepts as a given that there are many gods, not just one; furthermore, the psalmist describes god in terms very like those used by pantheists:

The voice of the LORD breaks the cedar trees; *
the LORD breaks the cedars of Lebanon;

He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, *
and Mount Hermon like a young wild ox.

The voice of the LORD splits the flames of fire;
the voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness; *
the LORD shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

The voice of the LORD makes the oak trees writhe *
and strips the forests bare.

Add to those strains on narrow ‘orthodoxy,’ Peter espouses universalism, considered by some to be heresy:

God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.

Even Buddhists who fear God and do what is right? Even those in the Nation of Islam who fear God and do what is right? Even lesbians, gays, bisexuals and the transgendered who fear God and do what is right?

Yes. God shows no partiality. Full stop.

The Israelites long held that God is partial to them, but God no longer gives them first place.

Matthew 3:13-17

Why did Jesus need John’s baptism? John baptized those who repented. John’s baptism was a picture of death to sin, burial, and resurrection to new life.

But Jesus had nothing for which to repent.

John himself first objected when Jesus came to him for baptism:

"I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" [Italics mine—Quean Lutibelle]

But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness."

How does Jesus’ baptism “fulfull all righteousness”?

When Jesus says, “Let it be so now,” is Jesus saying his baptism is an important statement for right now but not for all time? Is he being baptized not to repent, but to connect himself publicly with his cousin, John the Baptizer?

John was far better known than Jesus at this early part of Jesus’ ministry. John, far more than Jesus, directly challenged the political and ecclesiastical authorities. In fact, that is why Herod had John beheaded.

By having John baptize him, Jesus received John’s imprimatur, as it were.

Yet according to Matthew’s account, at his baptism Jesus received an imprimatur far more dramatic than John’s reputation could provide:

This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.

--beyond which there can be no better letter of reference.

I founded Integrity, the ministry of lgbt Episcopalians in October 1974, and in the lead up to General Convention 1976, some of us in Integrity met with Commission on Human Affairs, then chaired by Rt. Rev. George Murray, Bishop of the Central Gulf Coast.

We asked the Commission to propose the first resolution of the Episcopal Church to offer hope to LGBT people. The resolution was very short, and they used the precise wording which we suggested:

The 65th General Convention recognizes that homosexual persons are children of God who have an equal claim upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral care of the Church” (A069 – 1976).

I mistakenly thought that ended the matter. It seemed to me that the resolution said all that the Episcopal Church would ever need to say about lgbt people. I rejoiced, but was disillusioned when most of the barriers to lgbt persons remained in place.

My close friend The Rev. Carlisle Ramcharan counseled me: “Louie, when the Indian government told us that we could no longer refer to the ‘untouchables,’ do you know what we then began to call them?”

“No,” I responded.

“Children of God,” Father Ramcharan said, “as in, ‘God love them; we don’t have to.’”

From 2000-2008 my friend The Rev. Prince Singh was rector of St. Alban’s in Oakland, NJ. He is a leader in Dalit movement worldwide, calling for justice for India’s Dalits, the “untouchables.” In May of 2004, the Singhs invited me to their home for a reception for Rt. Rev Rev. V Devasahayam, the Bishop of Madras. Refreshments followed the bishop’s formal presentation, and Father Singh introduced me to Bishop Devasahayam. With eyes twinkling Father Singh asked him, “Bishop, what is your position on gay people in the church?”

Not missing a beat, Bishop Devasahayam replied, “Those who don’t want gay people in the church should not baptize them. Full stop. End of discussion.”

With a great smile the Bishop Devasahayam offered me a delicious spicy pastry.

In 2008 Prince Singh became The Bishop of Rochester in the Episcopal Church. I was honored to be one of his presenters. I was especially grateful for the host of Dalits present at that holy occasion.

When Martin Luther became depressed, he found that he could endure the depression by repeating again and again: “I have been baptized!”

I too have been buoyed through many a dark night saying again and again, “I have been baptized!”

See also

Sunday, January 2, 2011. Second Sunday after Christmas

2010-12-20T01:45:00.000-08:00

O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Recently I read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a brilliant novel focused mainly on Thomas Cromwell, sometime secretary and chief operator for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, thereafter chief minister for King Henry VIII from 1532-1540 and close confidant of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533-1556. Cranmer wrote many of the collects in our Book of Common Prayer.

Almost all politicians in England in those days were church politicians, given the Church of England’s increasingly tenuous relations with the Church of Rome while Henry, with wife after wife, desperately attempted to sire a male successor to the English throne.

Archbishop Cranmer had wife issues of his own. As a clergyman he had taken a vow of celibacy; yet in “Cranmer’s Box” he secreted his wife as he carted her from place to place. With many other machinations Cranmer served his king and country.

We might find Cranmer’s machinations in some ways encouraging, reminding us that our own machinations do not cut off our access to God nor to language that effects for us candid transport to God.

We have no way of knowing who wrote any one of the collects, but if Cranmer wrote this one, surely he understood the humility God required in sharing Cranmer’s own humanity.

If God can make so great a movement towards us, there is indeed hope that me may, in spite of manifold sins and wickedness, share Jesus’ divine life.

God’s incarnation as Jesus makes Christians’ relationship to God symbiotic, not merely loosely spiritual or a synthetic imitation. The dignity of human nature “wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored” indeed! Come, let us adore Him!

Jeremiah 31:7-14

For weeks we have read Jeremiah’s steady pessimism, his great sorrow at how bad everything has been going. His own name gave us the English term a jeremiad,” which means ‘a doleful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes.'

In Jeremiah 31, the gloom dissipates:

Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,
and raise shouts for the chief of the nations;

and again:

I will give the priests their fill of fatness,
and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty,
says the LORD.

God wants us too to experience such an epiphany. Into the midst of all the dolor that we might muster, the baby Jesus arrives as a major counterstatement.

Psalm 84: 1-12

The lectionary gives the option of omitting the last four verses. Please don’t.

Given the grand musical fare and many other events going on in the life of parishes during this holiday season, you might well be tempted to take the shorter version, but please resist. Keep the psalm intact, especially in Episcopal Churches at this time, when the eleventh verse works with marvelous double entendre:

9
For one day in your courts is better than a thousand in my own room, *
and to stand at the threshold of the house of my God
than to dwell in the tents of the wicked.
10
For the LORD God is both sun and shield; *
he will give grace and glory;
11
No good thing will the LORD withhold *
from those who walk with integrity.
12
O LORD of hosts, *
happy are they who put their trust in you!

At the 1994 General Convention in Indianapolis, Rt. Rev. Edward MacBurney, Bishop of Quincy, famously complained in the House of Bishops that Integrity, the organization of lgbt Episcopalians, had managed to cut verse 3 when the convention had sung Hymn 645, “The King of Love My Shepherd Is.”

Integrity did no such thing. Both the third and fourth verses of this hymn are marked with an asterisk in The Hymnal, indicating that they may be treated as optional. The liturgist of the day took this accommodation.

The Good Bishop was quite exercised not to be able to sing the words to damn lgbt Christians: “Perverse and foolish oft I strayed.” He seized his bully pulpit to highlight these words about us.

I too regret that the liturgist for the day elected to omit verse 3, thereby denying the Good Bishop and the rest of us an opportunity to hear that phrase in full context:

Perverse and foolish oft I strayed,
but yet in love he sought me,
and on his shoulder gently laid,
and home rejoicing, brought me

That is good news for lgbt Christians indeed! It is good news for absolutely everybody. “The King of love my shepherd is, whose goodness faileth never. I nothing lack if I am his, and he is mine forever.”

In June 2009, at 81, Bishop MacBurney renounced his orders in the Episcopal Church and joined a breakaway group. I miss him.

Psalm 84 assures Ed MacBurney and all the rest of us,

No good thing will the LORD withhold *
from those who walk with integrity.

Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a

Even Saint is on a tare for joy today! His prayer is a model for all of us concerned for the spiritual health and maturity of our friends and of ourselves:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.

Yes, God, give us eyes to see all the glorious inheritance you intend for us and for absolutely everybody.

Luke 2:41-52

How did Luke know this story? Most likely Mary told it. It was she who “treasured all these things in her heart.”

Luke stresses, as Mary with the gift of hindsight must have stressed, that she and Joseph did not understand the child’s explanation, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Like most parents, they must have been near panic after three days of searching for him.

“Why have you treated us like this?” they asked him.

Luke stresses, as Mary, again with the gift of hindsight must have stressed, “Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them.”

Luke is writing long after Jesus’ adulthood, death, and resurrection. He carefully collects all the stories he can from those close to Jesus. Imbedded in Mary’s memory, if indeed it is her story Luke shares, is her own epiphany:

Ahhh. So that’s what was really going on! At the time I noticed only my own panic about my son. He was really God’s son, on loan to me. And I had nothing to worry about at all.

See also

December 26, 2010. First Sunday after Christmas

2010-12-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Isaiah 61:10-62:3

Isaiah pulls out the stops so frequently that you might want to discipline yourself to notice that he has done so here too. That’s likely why those who choose for the lectionary placed this passage for the first Sunday after Christmas.

It’s also a fine piece to illustrate similes and metaphors.

Selected similes

has clothed me in the garments of salvation
has covered me with the robe of righteousness….

until her vindication shines out like the dawn
and her salvation like a burning torch

As a bridegroom decks himself….
As a bride adorns herself
As the earth brings forth its shoots
as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up

Selected metaphors

The mouth of the Lord will …
You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord
and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

Notice also the careful periodicity (parallelism).

Less attractive for me is Isaiah’s choice to boast for Jews and Jerusalem to be first place in any line up for God’s attention. Isaiah was writing in the time of King Uzziah, who died in the 740s before Christ.

Jews do not give this passage a Christian reading. They still expect a messiah.

Christians who see Jesus’ birth as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy risk falling prey to an exalted sense of our exclusive importance in God’s plans for all creation. Remember that Caesar is to sack Jerusalem from March through September in 70 AD, a mere 38 years after the death of Jesus. According to Josephus, there were 1.1 million casualties. The conquerors celebrated its capture on the Arch of Titus in Rome.

Jerusalem was outside Jewish control from 70ad until 1948, when the Allied Forces re-established Israel.

Not to be a spoil sport, I remind myself that this “crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord” was short-lived, and even its recovery from 1948 has meant disenfranchisement for Palestinians. I try to remember the current political reality of Israel and Palestine even as I celebrate Christ’s birth in Bethlehem.

Psalm 147 or 147:13-21

The psalm is in synch with Isaiah 61 in singing praise for Jerusalem and for God’s preferential treatment given it.

He has established peace on your borders; *he satisfies you with the finest wheat.

The psalmist asserts an exclusive Jewish franchise on God:

He declares his word to Jacob, *his statutes and his judgments to Israel.

He has not done so to any other nation; *to them he has not revealed his judgments.Hallelujah!

Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7

For several months this year I used a signature file for email that added to my contact information this quote from today’s reading:

But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian.

The church violates Saint’s claim if it requires lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered to live under the law no longer required of hetero Christians. All are justified by Jesus’ righteousness, not by our own. Jesus stretched out his arms on the cross for absolutely everybody, indeed for the whole world.

Saint pushes his claim with legal terms for a Christian’s inheritance:

So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

In Romans 8, Saint went even further:

Now if we are children, then we are heirs--heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

We are co-heirs with Christ, all of us.

I know that it is uppity of me to say so, but say so I must, not just for lgbt Christians, but also for the health and sanity of heterosexual Christians: heterosexual Christians are flat out wrong when they behave towards lgbt Christians with no respect for the fact that we are co-heirs with Christ.

On October 1st I preached at St. Andrew’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan at a service to honor the 10th anniversary of the Oasis Ministry in that diocese. The Rev. Joe Summers is on the Oasis board, and he retold my story in a sermon titled “Joy” which he preached at The Episcopal Church of the Incarnation in Ann Arbor, Michigan on October 10th, 2010

Louie was born and grew up in Anniston Alabama, the town made famous because it was there that in 1961 the Freedom Riders were so viciously attacked and their bus bombed. Louie met his future spouse Ernest, an African-American man, in the fall of 1973 in Atlanta. Louie lived in a small town called Fort Valley, Georgia. After courting for five months they were married and then lived together, a gay inter-racial couple in Fort Valley until 1979. When Louie moved to Fort Valley he went to the Black Episcopal Church in town. (At this point Ernest wasn't an Episcopalian). But Louie's growing notoriety led the priest and vestry to ask him to leave. Knowing it was God who had invited him to the church--he couldn't in good conscience. Thankfully, three women on the vestry who had voted against asking him to leave organized the other women in the church to make made sure that each Sunday there was always someone sitting with him.

The priest was furious. Finally, the Bishop intervened and issued a summons for Louie to appear before an ecclesiastical court. William Stringfellow heard about this and arranged for Louie to have a pro-bono lawyer. When they got before the Standing committee of the diocese the lawyer pointed out that there was nothing in the canons that allowed a Bishop to call a lay person before a church court unless they were on the vestry and Louie was not.

The Bishop was clearly humiliated and apologized explaining that he had acted in anger. Later, this same Bishop, went on to sponsor a resolution that stated that marriage is the standard for holy relationships which was then used to discriminate against gays and lesbians in our church for decades.

But throughout this time Louie kept loving and kept praying for this Bishop and the day came when this same Bishop, presided at the Eucharist at a national Integrity gathering and said to those gathered: "For decades Louie Crew tried to tell me that God loved him as much as he loved me but I couldn't believe it. But he was right and I was wrong." [bolding mine – LC]

Later this same Bishop [the late Rt. Rev. Bennett J. Sims, Bishop of Atlanta] wrote in his autobiography how it was coming to know Louie and Ernest that transformed his ideas about sexual orientation and loving relationships.

Love your enemies--how crazy that sounds till you hear something like this.

I treasure +Bennett Sims. He and I became friends long before we agreed about homosexuality. He was generously vulnerable even in our arguments. I was profoundly moved when, at his request, I was a reader at his interment at Church of the Redeemer in Baltimore on August 5, 2006. I hope that I will have his grace to grow and change even in my old age. I hope that I will have his generosity to make myself vulnerable by loving well even those with whom I disagree. I look forward to being with him in heaven.

John 1:1-18

Matthew, Mark and Luke are known as the “synoptic gospels.” syn means ‘alike’ and optic has to do with “seeing.” The synoptic gospels use the same way of looking at a story. Each gives basically a chronological account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Each shares many of the same stories.

The gospel of John breaks out of that mode. While it contains some of the same stories, in John’s book meaning trumps narrative.

John is studiedly, deliberately philosophical. He begins, “In the beginning was the Word….”

The Greek term λόγος ’logos’ appears in hundreds of English words, such as psychology, biology, anthropology, eschatology….” Meaning, ‘the study of’ –-the study of the psyche (soul or mind), the study of living organisms, the study of human kind and culture, the study of the end times….”

John amplifies what he means by λόγος :

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Only then does John get specific and personal:

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.God was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all wrote their gospels before John wrote his, and they steadily focus on concrete details. John privileges abstraction.

In all four gospels, God, the immortal one, the creator, enters creation and takes on our mortality. He lives and dies as one of us.

Recently Ernest and I visited the Grand Canyon. A friend described it as “God’s coloring book.” It is awesome to face in all its grandeur and splendor this physical record of millions of years in the life of the Colorado River in a place relatively recently known as “the state of Arizona.”

“What is man that thou are mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:4).

Saint John changes that awesome focus to ask, “Who is God and how can we mortals know God?” He answers, “From the beginning, God is λόγος ’logos "The Word.”This λόγος became flesh, as Jesus, and dwelt among us mortals.

Do you believe that?

What does it mean to you?

Merry Christmas.

See also

December 19, 2010. Fourth Sunday in Advent

2010-12-01T03:27:00.000-08:00

Today’s Lections

The Collect

Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Isaiah 7:10-16

Ahaz is King of Judah and an adversary of the prophets Isaiah, Hosea, and Micah. At one point he wickedly sacrificed his own son to pagan gods. He also added an idolatrous altar to the Temple (See 2 Kings 16).

In this passage, Ahaz refuses Isaiah’s request that Ahaz ask God for a sign. It is likely that Ahaz did not want any outside interference and feared that Isaiah might persuade people to believe God wants them to rebel.

When Ahaz won’t take Isaiah’s bait, Isaiah supplies the answer:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.

Christians see this passage as talking about Jesus. Those who chose it for the lectionary for today, the last Sunday in Advent, did not do so haphazardly. “The young woman” (or if you insist on Matthew’s version of the Isaiah text, “The virgin”) is getting ready for the end of this week.

Yet there is nothing in the text itself that forces the interpretation that Jesus is the messiah. Many Jews still expect a messiah but do not view Jesus as the one.

Dr. John Gibbs notes regarding this verse:

The main emphasis of Isaiah 7:10-16 is that "God is with us," which is what the Hebrew word "Immanel" means. God is present not only to the prophet in a special way inside the temple (Is. 6). God "the Lord" over the depth of Sheol and the height of heaven (7:11) is no less present in blessing (7:16; cf. 7:17) within the entire "house of David" (7:13).

A fundamentalist obsession with virginity does not exist in the Hebrew text, for the child's mother appears there as "a young woman" (rather than as a virgin, as the Septuagint Greek has it). Instead, the all-important "sign" is the "son" named "Immanuel." It is by the presence of God in a society that it "knows how to refuse evil and choose the good," and the function of this son is to maintain that distinction within "the house of David.

Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

One of the great treats of the psalms is that you can find several that will match your need for any occasion. If you are sad or depressed and God seems afar off, today’s Psalm 80 will fit the bill.

O LORD God of hosts, *how long will you be angereddespite the prayers of your people?

If you are festive and feeling blessed, Psalm 146 (page 803 in the BCP) will fit the bill: we used it last Sunday.

The Book of Common Prayer manifests this same versatility. When close friends or family are sick or in any other adversity, we can go to church certain that something in the liturgy will speak to their condition and to ours. Just as certainly will we also encounter something in the liturgy that counterstates our condition, that witnesses to the reality of joy even if we are sad and to the reality of sadness even if we are joyful. The liturgy honors our experience but not does not put it at the center of all attention.

Poet W. H. Auden (a gay Anglican) made the same point about contrasting reality manifested in the art of Old Masters:

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

At any moment what we see clearly and completely in focus may not be the reality seen by the person standing next to us focused on a different part of the same scene.

We desperately need one another.

Romans 1:1-7

These seven verses make up only one complete sentence (129 words). The selection is an elaborate salutation which begins with “Paul…” and closes with: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

In the lead up to this apostolic “hello” Saint lays down his credentials to be addressing gentile Christians in Rome. Note how the passage looks when we break out the grammatically subordinate material and restate it in declarative sentences:

I am a servant of Jesus Christ.
I am called to be an apostle.
I have been set apart for the gospel of God.
God planned good news before any of us were born.
The prophets foretold the gospel in holy scriptures [i.e., the Hebrew bible, a.k.a. “The Old Testament.”]
God’s son Jesus descended from King David according to the flesh
Jesus was declared to be the Son of God.
Jesus has power according to the spirit of holiness.
Jesus’ resurrection from the dead demonstrates that he is the Son of God.
We received grace and apostleship through Jesus Christ our Lord.
I am called to prompt the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles.
I work for the sake of Jesus and in his name.
I call you Romans to belong to Jesus Christ.
You Romans are called to be saints.

Saint’s 129-word sentence is an elaborate rhetorical set up for the serious concerns he will express to the Romans in the rest of this chapter and in the fifteen other chapters of this long letter.

Today is the last Sunday of Advent. Next Sunday we Episcopalians will be able to use the “C” word that most other protestants have been using since Thanksgiving, some even earlier.

I am not talking about “He knows when you have been good or bad so be good for goodness sake!” We’re not poised for our God to come down the chimney on Friday night. We are poised for God to enter our hearts. Saint’s opening salvo to the gentile Christians in Rome sets us up for the Arrival we will celebrate here on Friday night and all day on Saturday.

This is the beginning of “C” week. One t-shirt puts it flippantly: “Jesus is coming: look busy.”

Matthew 1:18-25

The birthday party which we will celebrate Friday night, Saturday, and all day on Sunday the December 26th and Sunday January 2nd is not a surprise birthday party. Matthew deliberately spoils any surprise effects for the “C” word by beginning” Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way:…”

Matthew uses only 201 words to tell the entire “C” story: compare that with the 129 words that Saint uses just for the salutation in his letter to the Roman Christians.

Matthew’s narrative is lean and pointed. In it he does not duck controversy. Some in Matthew’s original audience surely would have noticed that Jesus’ birth came less than nine months after Mary and Joseph married. Matthew emphasizes that Joseph married Mary because as a religious person he did not want her to be disgraced as an unwed mother. Matthew stresses that Joseph had no sex with Mary before Jesus’ birth. We do not know whether they had sex afterwards. Joseph quietly steps out of the biblical narratives at that point.

The Inn Keeper’s Focus on “C”

The Bethlehem Holiday Inn, 9th Janus, 0001

Joseph Carpenter,

I hereby evict you, effective tomorrow noon, for obvious reasons:
You did not father the baby, as you claimed.
You and your woman have kept up a perpetual racket in our stables, disturbing our animals.
You have wasted hay not required by your small donkey.
You have lured undesirables to the neighborhood, including mephitic shepherds from the hillside, some of whom had the audacity to hide on the roof and sing as "angels." Many of our better guests complained.
This week three rich sissy foreigners (one of them black!), who should have booked in the Inn, slummed out back with you, to avoid paying us.
We hear that Herod is out to get anyone who traffics with parents of new-born boys.

Be on your way back to Nazareth by noon if you know what's good for you. Let's have no more talk or singing of Joy to the World.

Quean Lutibelle’s Take on “C”

There is crying in a stable
on a cold winter night.
There is crying at the bosom
of the lonely world.
A small, red baby
has now seen the light
as the bloody little boy
of a scared young girl.

Joy to the world!

--Louie Crew

“The Bethlehem Holiday Inn has appeared :

Whosoever 6.1 (July 2001)
Ruach 27:1 (Winter 2007): 25
South Jersey Underground Issue #5 (2009
Studio [Australia] No. 38 (Autumn 1990): 15. Used penname Li Min Hua

See also

December 12, 2010. Third Sunday of Advent.

2010-12-01T01:07:00.000-08:00

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

Can I expect God to hear this prayer if I don’t divorce Ernest, my husband of 36 years, and promise to limit whatever sex I might have to the confines of heterosexual marriage?

Have I played a trick on God, saying that I come to God only as I am, not ready to behave as a heterosexual or a celibate homosexual?

I spent most of a day recently trying to track down a small bit of correspondence that I remembered writing sometime between 1985-1995. Since I save every email message that I write and much of the email I receive, the search took me through hundreds of messages from adversaries as well as from friends. Many ‘adversaries’ were themselves friendly, genuinely concerned for my soul, and trying to call me from the brink of destruction. Others seemed only slightly concerned for my soul, but greatly concerned for the souls of those whom they felt I might be leading astray by my witness.

I am still humbled by their challenges. I do not seek to defy God, nor do I wish to lead anyone astray.

I turned 74 on Thursday. I expect to arrive at heaven’s gate not too long from now. I do not plan to bang on the door saying “I am Erman Louie Crew, Jr., and I am right about homosexuality! Let me in! Let me in!”

That scenario seems obscene. It puts me into the position of making final judgments for God. I know already what I will say, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

If you are heterosexual, do you expect to knock at heaven’s gate saying, “Thank you, God, I am not like Louie and Ernest. I have lived in a faithful heterosexual union. Please let me in.”

Are you absolutely certain that your choices for yourselves are God’s choices for me?

We run an even greater risk if we ignore other criteria that Jesus has stated explicitly for the "Great Gittin Up Morning.” He tells us we will be judged by how well we have treated those we consider the least among us. Are we there for them when they are sick, hungry, naked, in prison? For as we treat the least of them, so we treat God.

Ours is a strange religion, where the first are last and the last are first.

My bishop (Rt. Rev. Mark Beckwith) is fond of saying, “The opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty.” He points to the many dangers we incur when treat those whose faith differs from ours with certainty that we are right and they are wrong.

I have tried to do what is right in my marriage to Ernest. Through it I have experienced much grace and many other blessings. The sin I see in our marriage is not that I love Ernest, but that I do not love him enough, namely as much as I love myself. For that sin I steadfastly repent and seek amendment of life.

Just as fervently I pray to be forgiven for sins unknown.

Am I absolutely certain that a life-long committed relationship between two of the same gender is right in the eyes of God? No. I have faith that it is, but not certainty.

And even if we are wrong in our marriage, I have faith (still not certainty) that God’s property is always to show mercy.

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us. Amen. Amen.

Isaiah 35:1-10

Isaiah’s vision of safety and joy has few parallels in literature. Note that that he localizes his vision: he names Lebanon, Carmel and Sharon -- places familiar to his listeners. The realm of God is not remote: it’s right here in East Orange where I live, right here in Newark and New York City, both visible outside my study window as I write.

Jesus asks us to pray, “Our Father, may your realm come on earth as it is in heaven.”

George Bernhard Shaw warned, “Beware the man whose God is in the skies.” Jesus gives the same warning.

We too must beware lest we put off working for justice and peace thinking, there will be pie in the sky by and by.

Canticle 15

Mary’s canticle marks her as an uppity woman, a champion of the poor and down trodden. Here she is not docile and submissive, dressed in soft blue and standing silent and beatific. Rather, she is sassy and abrasive.

“In 2000 the United States accounted for only 4.7 percent of the world’s population but 32.6 percent of the world’s wealth. Nearly 4 out of every 10 people in the wealthiest 1 percent of the global population were American.” (Eduardo Porter New York Times, December 6, 2006, Business Sec., p. 3).

Those of us who have ears to hear require huge globs of spiritual ear wax to to be comfortable listening to the Magnificat.

My adversaries frequently complain that I give far too much attention to church politics and not enough attention to the Gospel. Two Episcopal bishops, Bishop Charles Carpenter and Bishop George Murray, joined other religious leaders to write the same complaint to Dr. M. L. King when he was organizing protests in Birmingham. He named them when he wrote his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Why do you need to tell people that you are a “gay” Christian, some ask me: “I don’t say that I am a ‘straight Christian’” they add, to underscore their point.

They seem never to notice the scores of ways they openly and freely communicate they are straight. “My wife and I….” , “When my husband said….” Nor should they feel any restrictions about doing so.

I look forward to the day that husbands kissing each other goodbye
will stand out only because we block the traffic (see Lutibelle Speaks as the Poet)

Louie, queer for Christ’s sake! (See 1 Corinthians 4:10)

James 5:7-10

Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors!

Is this what is meant is meant by Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”?

Did your parents peek through the keyhole to your room, listen to your conversations on another phone, sift through your drawers for evidence of your wrong doing?

Does your heavenly father keep a master computer and the best spy ware in all the universes to keep records of your slightest thoughts and actions?

A lie detector costs only $250-$500 and you can purchase one from Brick House Security Might your parish welcome one as an Advent gift? Would you use it just for the creeds? Should scores be used to validate people for confirmation? Should we put off baptism until one is old enough to be held accountable to the lie detector?

I wish that James had stopped with “Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.“

Watch yes, but be not afraid.

I looked over Jordan, what do I see,
Coming for to carry me home.
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.

Swing low! Sweet Chariot!

Matthew 11:2-11

Jesus might have visited John himself. If John’s disciples had access to him, surely Jesus did too. After all, they are first cousins, born less than a year apart.

Yet Jesus and John appear not to have been in touch much.

John tells his disciples to ask Jesus whether Jesus is the messiah. Jesus does not say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but cryptically tells them to report to John what they hear and see:

The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

These are action that might mark the messiah. Jesus intends the actions to speak louder than words. He also is minimizing the risk of publicly proclaiming himself as messiah, lest he forewarn and enrage the Roman occupiers or the indigenous religious establishment.

Jesus seems to know more about John than John does about Jesus. He tells the public that John the Baptist is the one mentioned in scripture as forerunner to the messiah. Yet he does not explicitly name himself as the messiah. Again, he is cryptic, even cagey, likely in response to the political tensions.

It is not clear whether those in the crowds even know that Jesus and John are first cousins. The only time we see them together in scripture is at Jesus’ baptism.

Some see in these texts the suggestion that the disciples of John and the disciples of Jesus might consider themselves rivals. At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, John is clearly better known and more directly involved in political confrontations. The texts carefully allay such fears and show them as mutually supportive.

Later John is to say that he is not worthy even to unlace Jesus’ shoes. Here Jesus stresses, “Among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist.” This mutual admiration is quite public. Do they intend to calm fears by it?

We have no surviving texts written by John’s disciples, nor do Christian scriptures say more about them. Did they become Jesus’ disciples after Herod had John beheaded? Did John’s disciples continue a separate ministry even after John’s death?

Why is Elizabeth, Mary’s sister, not mentioned again after the birth narratives? She drops out of the scene as inexplicably as Joseph does.

See also

December 5, 2010. Second Sunday of Advent

2010-11-27T09:13:00.000-08:00

Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Why the past tense? Why not accept as a faithful challenge:

Merciful God, now as in all times, you send your messengers as prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us wisdom to distinguish between true and false prophets and grant us grace to heed true prophets’ warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Isaiah 11:1-10

Guess who’s coming to dindin!

Advent is a season of anticipation. Someone is coming.

Isaiah writes many portentous messianic texts. Christians see him pointing to Christ. Jews see Isaiah as pointing to a messiah, but not to Jesus.

Isaiah portrays a messiah who makes the world safe. Even asps, adders, wolves, and leopards will pose no threats.

Isaiah’s messiah will not judge just by fact, not just by what he sees and hears, but by an overriding and abstract sense of justice. The messiah will not be just right: the messiah will be righteous.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth

We have enemies, the wicked; and the messiah will take care of them with dispatch:

He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

Psalm 72 is a political psalm, a prayer for the ruler. Well might we use this psalm to pray or our President:

Give President Barak Obama your justice, O God, *
and your righteousness to Vice-President Joe Biden;

That President Obama may rule your people righteously *
and the poor with justice;

That the mountains may bring prosperity to the people, *
and the little hills bring righteousness.

President Obama shall defend the needy among the people; *
he shall rescue the poor and crush the oppressor.

The next verses present a challenge if we say

President Obama shall live as long as the sun and moon endure, *
from one generation to another.

Even the Israelites did not expect their king to live forever. The psalm deliberately employs hyperbole. Given our polity, we might more comfortably say:

May President Obama live out his full elected term(s).

Possibly some people in biblical times balked at the near omnipotence the psalm attributes to “the King” and to the “King’s son.” It is not unreasonable to suspect the psalmist of currying favor.

Romans 15:4-13

When Saint mentions “Whatever was written in former days” he does not refer to Christian scriptures. He has no idea that he is in the process of writing what will become a book of the Christian bible more than 300 years later.

Saint is talking about Hebrew scripture. He quotes Hebrew scripture to approve his own mission to take the gospel to the gentiles. His argument is subtle: “Some think I am doing something outrageous and novel in bringing the gospel to you uncircumcised Romans, but actually I can show you in Hebrew scriptures some instances in which the promises of God seem to extend to gentiles.

Obviously most Jews of his day did not agree with Saint. They thought the messiah would be messiah for Jews alone, but Saint glosses Hebrew scriptures to find support for his point of view.

The first and last first verses of this passage emphasize that “we might have hope,” “that you may abound in hope.”

He is speaking to gentiles, bringing them good news right out of the Hebrew scriptures. “I am not making this up,” he might have added: “it’s in the Book!”

I constantly see in Hebrew and Christian scriptures reasons for great hope for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Christians. Although those who wrote the scriptures did not see us as heirs to Scriptures' promises, like Saint, I find cause for our hope within scripture. Consider these examples:

John 3:16 does not say “that whosoever is straight and believes in Him shall have everlasting life,” but “whosoever believes in him shall have everlasting life.”
Romans 8:28 does not say “All things work together for good for straight people who love the Lord” but “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord”
Isaiah 55:1 does not say “Come all you straights that thirst, come to the waters…..” but says “Come all you who are thirsty, come to the waters….”

Those heterosexuals who try to seal a bargain just for themselves, cut themselves off from the wonder and majesty of God, who loves absolutely everybody.

Matthew 3:1-12

Don’t you love the rough candor of John the baptizer?! He calls the religious establishment of his day, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, a G*n*r*t**n *f v*p*rs! [censored].

That is not sweet middleclass Sunday School talk. And John says it to Pharisees and Sadducees coming to him for baptism, as if it is the newest trendy way to be Jewish and God’s chosen elect.

Today I suppose these Pharisees and Sadducees would go to Neiman Marcus for kinky Christmas presents -- a jar of gourmet locusts in wild honey, or a camel’s hair coat designed by Polo Ralph Lauren with a wide leather belt.

“G*n*r*t**n *f v*p*rs!” John shouts at them.

Ah, but “We have Abraham as our ancestor” they’re thinking, and he calls them on it.

Ah, but “We are straight,” they’re thinking, and he might call them on it:

“God is able from these stones to raise up children of Abraham.” Do you dare think that God cannot love the lgbt persons whom he has made?!

See also

November 28, 2010. First Sunday of Advent

2010-11-01T04:02:00.000-07:00

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Isaiah 2:1-5

Isaiah is clearly a dreamer:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

When was it ever so?

What word might you say concerning the days to come for Washington and the United States?

Steadily we make war “to secure the peace” – war which kills thousands and thousands of innocents, who remain largely out of sight and out of mind.

Bob Woodward reports that our President, our commander-in-chief, has been exasperated by the machinations of the military-industrial complex, about which President Eisenhower, himself a General, issued dire warnings half a century ago.

The Romans once ruled the world. They are much nicer folks now that they have abandoned such pretensions, grow fat, and eat pizza.

What a blessing to the rest of the world if we would abandon many of our national pretensions.

The Lord’s House, Episcopal style, is now established in full view as the National Cathedral atop Mount St. Alban’s in Washington. All the nations stream to it from time to time, to eulogize our fallen leaders, to pray for the world in times of crisis….

"Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths."

That would be Advent in deed, not just in words. So be it.

Psalm 122

Compare:

Pray for the peace of Washington: *
"May they prosper who love you.

Peace be within your walls *
and quietness within your towers.

For my brethren and companions' sake, *
I pray for your prosperity.

Because of the National Cathedral of the LORD our God, *
I will seek to do you good."

Romans 13:11-14

The licentiousness of the Romans persisted even among the Roman Christians. Saint warns them against such behavior by pointing to the end of the world, which he expects soon.

For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.

Why is the flesh so much the enemy for Saint? Rarely does he rant or rage against intellectual sins. Here he closely identifies “the works of darkness” as works of the flesh.

Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.

In my favorite movie of all times, Babette's Feast the title character escapes to Denmark from trouble which she has experienced in Paris. To survive, she selflessly serves for many years a parsimonious Christian sect much dedicated to Saint’s proscriptions against gratifying the desires of the flesh. Their lives are dull and boring, and they are caught up in petty recriminations, trying to preserve the purity espoused by the founder of their sect.

Much of the film is devoted to Babette’s preparation of a scrumptious feast, which she serves devotedly to everyone in the sect – a major break with their bleak purity and unlove. The feast is Babette’s personal gift to them, in gratitude for the safety they have provided her. She also holds close a secret that they do not know. In feeding their flesh, Babette feeds their souls. Little acts of reconciliation begin to break out around the table as they relish the very long meal.

What would you include if you were to re-write Saint’s injunction showing how we me might truly “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light”?

What works of darkness do you perceive threatening our world right now? How might we put on the armor of light in response to them?

Matthew 24:36-44M

Like Saint and most other Christians in the first century, Matthew expects the world to end soon, without warning. He quotes Jesus to make his point.

I will turn 74 eleven days from this Sunday. Today is my Mother’s birthday, and were she alive, she would be 105 (five percent of the entire Christian era). Such transitions inform how I receive the urgency in Matthew’s text. I might meet my maker at any moment now, with no additional advance warning. I must be ready, “for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

The same is true for you too, be you 6 or 60.

We memorialize Christ’s first Advent anticipating his coming again. “Therefore we all must be ready.”

Poem Found on Cinder No. 3--2000 A.D.

The tree, the sky, and the water were ours,
we presumed, for us to use as we pleased,
as if we had a Visa card or Mastercharge account
in God's name with no payment to make in our generation.

This is a recording is a recording is a recording
is a recordingisa recordingisarec....

-- Louie Crew, 1981

See also

November 21, 2010. Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King

2010-11-01T02:14:00.000-07:00

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

In other words, “Clean up our messes, God. That’s why we call you ‘Almighty.’”

What if, instead of praying this collect, each of us committed to spending one hour a day for the next year working at specific projects to end divisions -- in our families, among our friends, in our local community, in our county, in our state, in our nation, and in the world. Take your pick, but commit to stay at it.

Do you already have the contact addresses of your congressional delegation? See the Directory of the 111th Congress
Have you read, marked, and inwardly digested the gray pages of your phone book?
Have you checked the website of your local government to study the announcements and calendar for opportunities that will best engage your talents to influence public discourse and to be informed by it?

I have not stopped talking about prayer; all of these suggestions are part of prayer, as is all specific work towards bringing God’s realm on earth as it is in heaven.

If we are not careful, we can easily allow the sonorous collect to divorce us from God’s work rather than to engage us as God’s collaborators. It is too easy to treat the collect as a tip of the hat to God, as if to say, “Here is your work, God. You do your thing, and I will do mine.”

Jeremiah 23:1-6

As the commencement speaker at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in May 2004, I audaciously told the graduates that I know the foolproof way to become a successful priest: “Feed my sheep!”

All other responsibilities are subordinate to this one, “Feed my sheep.”

Being a successful priest has little to do with building a good résumé, going to the right colleges, getting the plum appointments……

“Feed my sheep” wherever you find yourself, regardless of how long you are put there. Don’t consider yourself stuck.

We don’t choose where we will pick up our cross and follow Jesus.

The ‘acceptable day of salvation’ is always today.

It would be easy to love our neighbors as ourselves if we could just pick and choose them. Instead, God gives them to us, just as they are, and our assignment is to love them as much as we love ourselves.

Appearances of some Christian congregations to the contrary notwithstanding: God’s realm is not a gated community. God loves absolutely everybody.

“Feed my sheep.”

Jeremiah complains, speaking for God:

It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the LORD

Feed my sheep in season and out of season. Feed my sheep.

Canticle 4

Israelites longed for freedom while enduring the Roman occupation. Zechariah’s Canticle proclaims the baby Jesus to be “a mighty savior” someone who will “save us from our enemies, from the hands of all who hate us.”

Those great expectations are a heavy burden to lay on the baby Jesus. Zechariah does mot mean them to be “merely spiritual.’ How could anything genuinely spiritual be ‘mere’? Zechariah expects the spiritual to have political consequences.

I did not understand this when I lived as a presumed heterosexual with male and white privilege intact. Then it was easy to think that Zechariah was a convenient minor character in the drama that secured my comforts. My perception changed when I came out as gay and married a man of color. Previously I did not perceive that I had any enemies, and no one hated any group of which I was known to be a part.

In embracing my wholeness, I embraced the stigma, the hatred, and the enemies. Zechariah’s canticle seemed less like service music for an interlude, and more like what scholar John Searle would call a speech act, a performative utterance that in itself makes things happen.

The Canticle became less like “This is a nice wedding’ and more like ‘By virtue of the authority vested in me…. I thee wed.’ Zechariah’s canticle as speech act initiated the baby Jesus, and can initiate us into core commitment and activity:

In the tender compassion of our God *
the dawn from on high shall break upon us,
To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, *
and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Christ as King indeed, and us, as Christ’s friends and heirs.

Colossians 1:11-20

Saint picks up where Zechariah left off, imparting not to Jesus, but to Jesus’ heirs, the same power to act:

May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance

Guide our feet into the way of peace, O Lord, from this understanding that you enable us “to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.” You place us where our enemies can destroy only our bodies, but not our souls.

Luke 23:33-43

Note what Jesus did not say to the second, empathetic criminal:

"You in my father's kingdom?! Do you believe in some kind of cheap grace? Get real. Now repeat after me, very slowly and clearly, 'I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and .....'"

Nor did Jesus say, “Go to hell!” to the first criminal, the one who taunted him.

Why is it that so many of us Christians have more trouble loving sinners than Jesus does?

See also

November 14, 2010. Twenty Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

2010-11-01T00:55:00.000-07:00

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

How thoroughly Episcopalian! We not only hear Scriptures, but also “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”

Do we have to critique Scripture as part of the inwardly digestion? I believe so.

While God “caused all Holy Scriptures to be written,” God did not write them, and it is hard to believe that God said everything attributed to God, hard to believe that God considers holy every thing written in Scripture.

For example, does God treat as holy Psalm 137’s petition for vengeance?

O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one,
How blessed will be the one who repays you
With the recompense with which you have repaid us.
How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones
Against the rock.

For a second example, did God inspire this passage from 2 Kings 2: 23-25?

[Elisha] went from there to Bethel and, as he was on his way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, "Get along with you, baldy, get along" He turned round and looked at them and he cursed them in the name of the Lord; and two she-bears came out of a wood and mauled forty-two of them. From there he went on to Mount Carmel.

As an old baldy myself, I have little difficulty considering this passage inspired, but I seriously doubt that it was inspired by God!

We must put fresh Duracell’s in our thinking caps when we read scripture. We must use our traditions and our reason to help us understand it.

The Ethiopian eunuch was reading Isaiah when the apostle Philip joined him in his chariot. He told Philip that he did not understand parts of it. Philip responded that the eunuch needed an interpreter; and then Philip interpreted the text for him. (See Acts 8: 26-40)

Clearly Philip was an Episcopalian, not a Southern Baptist. It is dangerous to believe that Scripture trumps intellect.

We don’t have the option of whether to use our minds: the first and greatest commandment is to love God with them.

Isaiah 65:17-25

Several times through my forty-four years as a professor, I asked students to assume they were God for a few minutes and plan a new design for the human body. You might pause for a moment, and jot down your own new designs.

Some of my students’ suggestions were interesting and in time, predictable – adding an eye in the back of the head; making the body self-cleaning without the heat of a self-cleaning oven; adding the organ of the opposite sex as well as the organ one now has….

Without my prompting, almost all suggestions were merely variations on the bodies we now have. No one proposed starting all over from scratch. Nor did students manifest wide-spread enthusiasm for their classmates’ re-designs, in part because aesthetically the new designs conflicted with what we already know and adjust to. Even current limitations have staying power; they are complications we’re used to.

I did not ask the students to read Isaiah 65 before the exercise, but sometimes invited them to compare Isaiah’s new designs with theirs after they had made their choices. Of course, Isaiah does not limit his imaginings to the body alone, but designs, in the voice of God, new heavens and a new earth.

How would you improve on Isaiah’s designs? How would you improve on God’s original design?

If Philip were sitting beside you as a passenger on a city bus, what interpretation might he give to Isaiah’s designs, and to your designs?

Canticle 9

A friend on wrote on his Facebook page recently:

It wouldn't surprise me if we as a civilization are on the edge of a new Dark Age where Science & Philosophy are hidden away in Monasteries so they won't be forgotten.

We have caused global warming, and we are facing other ecological messes as a result of our abuse of the planet. The earth is fast running out of the fossil fuels on which current way of life depends. Many current military conflicts are driven by competition for the dwindling supplies. Few with great political power are waging peace, and those who try, have a low success rate.

In this context, can we say Canticle 9 with conviction, or only as a fantasy out of touch with our reality:

Surely, it is God who saves me; *
I will trust in him and not be afraid.
For the Lord is my stronghold and my sure defense, *
and he will be my Savior.

Does God promise to save us from the results of our prodigality?

Surely we can “Sing the praises of the Lord, for he has done great things,” but we will be most cynical if we sing praises to placate the Lord, as if to distract God from what we might have done and still might do to remedy our own messes.

For example, all people on the planet could rescue the planet and themselves by committing to reduce the population by birth control to one-fourth its current size within just three generations. We would then have resources aplenty! Why has no one even mentioned such a proposal?

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.

This is not from the Republican platform. This is not from millionaires trying to cut Social Security. This is not from the Communist Party.

A first-century tent-maker wrote this principle and sent it to a congregation of Christians that included shirkers and free-loaders.

How applicable is this to your own household? to your parish? to your diocese?

How does Saint’s principle square with Jesus’?

Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You’re thinking of Jesus.”
— John Fugelsang

Luke 21:5-19

Jesus’ vision of the apocalypse is grimmer even than the ecological disaster which I have considered. Jesus’ view of the end times is replete with violent destruction, “wars and insurrections,” with “great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues, [with] dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.”

Only those who endure to the end will be saved, will “gain their souls.”

See also

November 7, 2010. Twenty Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

2010-10-25T10:52:00.000-07:00

O God, whose blessed Son came into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil and make us children of God and heirs of eternal life: Grant that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves as he is pure; that, when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom; where he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

That’s rather grandiose. I prefer

O God, grant that, when Christ comes we may be good friends of him forever. Amen.

Does Jesus love us as we are, or only if we become purified?

Why did he choose to live with sinners if he had a preference for those who were not?

How much of Jesus’ earthly life did he devote to purification?

How much power and great glory did Jesus seek and relish? Why assume that he wants power and great glory now?

The grander we conceive him, the greater distance we set between ourselves and God. Jesus came to break down those barriers. He did not address God as “Omnipotent God” but rather as “Father.”

Nor does it make much sense to blame our sins of the Devil. When I was child, I had an imaginary friend named “Bowback.” Whenever my parents asked, “Did you do this prank,” I responded, “No, Bowback did it.” When I grew up, I put away that childish attribution. As adults, we need to take responsibility for our actions and not blame them on Bowback, the Devil or any other source.

Haggai 1:15b-2:9

The Episcopal Church had its most dramatic growth from 1875-1915:

For almost 100 years now we have lost rather than gained ground, in terms of the number of our congregations.

Some argue that we have also lost much of our respectability and grandeur. J. P. Morgan used to fund a special, one-of-a-kind printing of the Book of Common Prayer, as the official edition on which all other copies were based, albeit with less gilt, leather, and other “touches.” Mr. Morgan also contributed generously to the building of a ‘bishop’s palace’ for the Bishop of New York so that the bishop could “live like other people.”

We now count far more of ‘the great unwashed’ among our membership, more of the huddled masses ‘breathing free.’ We are no longer “The Republican Party at Prayer”; and there is less cache to the rich of any party to be associated with us. Far more of them spend Sunday on the golf links.

Many of our grand old buildings are now vacant or barely hanging on. A burst boiler or any other major unbudgeted expense puts many of our edifices in mortal danger.

“Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?”

Is it?

Do we expect God to show up soon to say?:

Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts. The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the LORD of hosts.

Is prosperity the most reliable measure of God’s presence among us? How high a priority should we give to the real estate of The Episcopal Church? How much time does God spend hanging out in “God’s House” anyway? Whenever I presume to take God into the streets, I find that She has always beaten me there, especially among the poor, the homeless, and the dispossessed.

Psalm 145:1-5, 18-21

The Presbyterians and other Puritans like to proclaim,

Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him [sic] for ever.

Psalm 145 offers a model way of doing that. The grandiosity of today’s collect is muted by comparison.

I refuse to be a consistent sourpuss. I can sing the bass line of Handel with competitive vigor when he borrows from the divine Saint John to proclaim,

Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.

--Revelation 5:13

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

So anxiously were Christians expecting Jesus’ imminent return, that some, in Thessalonica and elsewhere, wondered whether Jesus were already back. Saint cautions them that some conditions have not yet been met for Jesus’ return:

the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God.

Now two thousand years later, if you’re still expecting Jesus’ imminent return, you have Saint’s clear instructions on what you must see first. Or do you?

Theologians use eschatology to name the study of (‘logy’) the last days (‘eschatos’). Clearly Christians in the first century expected Christ to return soon. After More than three hundred years, that expectation still survived and was memorialized in the Nicene Creed:

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

Is Jesus living incognito near you? Have you seen someone who acts a lot like him? Has he used your face from time to time? Are you willing to allow that?

Saint was miffed that some Thessalonians were overly concerned with whether Jesus had already returned. Saint urged them to invest their energies in their mission to spread the gospel: “God chose you as the first fruits for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth. For this purpose he called you through our proclamation of the good news.” Saint charged them: “Stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.”

Many dissenters in The Episcopal have taken this last verse to name the mission in their dissent. See their website.

Every Episcopalian has in her or his DNA a huge respect for tradition. Consider the old saw,

Question: “How many Episcopalians does it take to put in a light bulb?”

Answer: “Three. One to screw in the light bulb. A second to make the martinis. Another to proclaim how much prettier the old light bulb was.

A stool wobbles fiercely if it has only one leg. Richard Hooker (1554-1600) insisted on three legs for the Anglican stool: Tradition, Scripture, and Reason. We cannot safely obey the first commandment, to love God with our minds, if we think and do only what we have been told.

Often Jesus said, “You have heard that it has been said….., but I say to you.”

Jesus invites us into that kind of discourse as his friends.

Scripture and tradition are profitable for instruction, instruction that rigorously challenges us to look again, to re-think how best to understand God’s challenges to us in our times.

Luke 20:27-38

Mormons believe that in the afterlife every man [sic] is the God of his [sic] own planet. On that planet each man lives with all of his children and with his wives. If he had only one wife on earth, he may have as many as he wants in heaven.

The next time Mormon missionaries knock on your door, invite them in, offer them cookies and a soda, and ask them about that belief.

My friend Kim Byham and I visited the Mormon temple across from Lincoln Center in New York City after it was completed but before it was consecrated. After its consecration, only Mormons would be allowed inside.

It is quite splendidly built. There is no large central meeting space, or at least we were not shown one. Instead, we visited parlor after parlor, some large but many medium or small. A major use of these parlors is for weddings.

Kim asked the pleasant young man who served as our guide, “Since every man will be God of his own planet, how will any man with sons live on that planet with all of his family? Won’t each son be away to serve as God of his own planet?”

“I need to check with one our leaders,” our guide responded. He returned a few minutes later to explain that the person who knows the answer was not on duty that day.

Jesus answers a similar question from the Sadducees: The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection any more than Kim and I believe that in the afterlife each man will be god of his own planet. They tried to expose the ridiculousness of Jesus’ belief in the resurrection much as Kim tried to expose the ridiculousness of the doctrine regarding families of each man as the God of his own planet.

Jesus did not have to check with one of his leaders. He turned the Sadducees’ question on its head in terms as troubling to Mormons today as to most Jews of Jesus’ day: there won’t be marriage in heaven.

So much for family values! As a queer Christian I had best say no more about Jesus’ theology on this point, lest he get tarred with stigmas intended for me and my tribe.

See also

October 31, 2010. Twenty Third Sunday after Pentecost.

2010-10-01T05:07:00.000-07:00

Almighty and merciful God, it is only by your gift that your faithful people offer you true and laudable service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Post Script: And be patient, God, with those of us too fat and/or too feeble to run at all, waddling or crawling our way to your heavenly promises. Amen.

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4

Unlike mere propaganda, Scripture encourages, yes, even enjoins us to have candid conversations with God.

If God is not answering your prayers, if you are a victim of injustice in a system that rewards your abusers, yell at God about it. This passage gives you a model to use, as do many of the psalms.

Listen up, God!

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you "Violence!"
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see wrong-doing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law becomes slack
and justice never prevails.
The wicked surround the righteous--
therefore judgment comes forth perverted.

Behold! The prayer is efficacious! God not only listens, but answers:

Write the vision;
make it plain on tablets,
so that a runner may read it.
For there is still a vision for the appointed time;
it speaks of the end, and does not lie.
If it seems to tarry, wait for it;
it will surely come, it will not delay.

Look at the proud!
Their spirit is not right in them,
but the righteous live by their faith.

Listen up, lgbt folks. Look at your abusers, those who end their own marriages with prodigality but refuse justice for your holy unions . Their spirit is not right in them.

Listen up, you poor and homeless. Look at the greedy legislators who give tax breaks to themselves but remove from you many basic social services. Their spirit is not right in them.

“Look at the proud!” God tells Habakkuk. Really look at them. Read them between the lines. See what they don’t want you to see: Their spirit is not right in them.

Before my husband Ernest became an international flight attendant, he worked as a ticket agent in the Newark Airport. One evening, the airport was packed with passengers delayed because of bad weather. An African American colleague at the counter next to his busily worked away to re-book several flights affected for a Russian couple traveling on a world tour with their two children.

Many others tried to switch to some of the same flights; her task was tedious and hectic. Yet patiently she typed away while the father seethed at the inconvenience.

In Russian several times he told his family, “Dumb cow! She doesn’t have a clue to what she’s doing.”

Still she typed away for the better part of half an hour.

She listened closely to the spirit in him as he oft repeated in Russian, “Dumb cow! She doesn’t have a clue to what she’s doing.”

At last she received confirmation for the new flights that would speed them on their way. As she handed the new tickets to the father, with a gentle smile, she said “Moooooo,” and in perfect Russian she told the mother, “It has been my pleasure to serve you.”

“Mooooo!” The ticket agent’s father was Russian and she had grown up in Moscow.

“Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them.”

“Mooo.”

There is still a vision for the appointed time;
it speaks of the end, and does not lie.
If it seems to tarry, wait for it;
it will surely come, it will not delay.

Psalm 119:137-144

Is this a simple prayer by a humble person? So it seems.

The speaker is a bit like Robert Browning’s Pippa in the poem “Pippa Passes,” who proclaims, “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world,” yet not as glib. The person has experienced ‘trouble and distress.” On occasion, indignation has consumed the person, but not now, not while praying this psalm.

The speaker in the psalm attributes the quiet confidence to life under the law of God: “The righteousness of your decrees is everlasting”

You are righteous, O LORD,
and upright are your judgments.

You have issued your decrees
with justice and in perfect faithfulness.

In relation to that greatness, the speaker asserts a modest claim:

I am small and of little account,
yet I do not forget your commandments.

This is basic Judaic understanding of how to relate to God through God’s law.

The law was not sufficient for Saint Paul and most of the Christian writers. They felt we could not possibly attain salvation through the laws demands. This reading from Psalm 119 invites us to challenge the Christian perspective. It models how to stand in simple faithfulness and certainty before God’s justice and God’s “perfect faithfulness.”

Be a good Jew today, for Christ’s sake! Jesus chose to be one too!

2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12

Compare the Queen Lutibelle Version:

Paul, Louie and Ernest,

To Anglicans in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

We wish we could give thanks to God for the love all of you for one another, but that love is dramatically decreasing. We wish that we might again boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith, and occasionally we can boast when your endure persecutions and afflictions on behalf of the faith, but too often we see you demonizing other Anglicans, condemning lgbt Christians and threatening them with huge prison sentences, even with death in some provinces. We see you trying to expel from the Communion provinces which have stood on the side of the humble and the meek.

You have become so obsessed with homosexuality that you allow it to distract attention to vital human needs in your own provinces -- where corruption abounds, where AIDS and other diseases flourish, where poverty reeks devastation.

To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make us all worthy of his call and will by his power help us focus ourselves to every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Luke 19:1-10

Suppose Bernie Madoff had climbed the sycamore tree. Suppose he was so excited to have the celebrity Jesus come to his house to dine that he repented and gave back not only all the money he had stolen, but four times as much.

Suppose BP executives climb the sycamore tree. Might they give not only money to cover the losses due to their mismanagement but four times as much, to improve the health and education available to all affected by the oil spill in the Gulf.

Suppose you and I climb the sycamore tree. What unmerited privileges do we hold at cost to others? Might we not only give to those who are harmed by our bounty, but also four times as much, to extend our privileges to others?

Wee little man up a tree indeed!

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven

Or as slaves knew: “Everybody talkin bout heaven ain’t going there.”

See also

October 24 2010. Twenty Second Sunday after Pentecost

2010-10-01T04:46:00.000-07:00

Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Joel 2:23-32

For most of this passage Joel rejoices that God will restore the plenty. He blames God for sending the swarming locust and quotes God claiming to have done so; yet Joel emphasizes that the hard times are gone for good and that the Israelites will “never again be put to shame.”

In his ecstasy for the new prosperity, Joel puts into God’s mouth great expectations:

I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.
Even on the male and female slaves,
in those days, I will pour out my spirit.

“Even on the male and female slaves,“?!!

Yet again one of our spiritual ancestors dumps his own prejudice on God. “Even on” suggests that Joel thinks it extraordinary, not ordinary, that God would bless slaves with his spirit. From a Christian perspective in the 21st century, one finds it extraordinary that God would bless the slave owners. Mary’s song proclaimed that God is on the side of the humble and the meek, that God sends the rich empty away.

Quoting God is part of the prophet’s job description, indeed, is the prophet’s daily bread. It’s a perilous exercise, however, and from the long arc of history, some words imputed to God seem ill chosen.

Let Aunt Hazel’s tongue do more than speak to this issue. I based her on Ernest’s Aunt Jesse, who really did lick all the Limoges dinnerware before the bishop’s entourage arrived.

Quin Jordan's Prayer

Funny how some white folks
still act like this space
belongs to them exclusively
just because they built it, God,
forgetting it was their parents
who paid the mortgage
which their grandparents had taken out
to build this mound of stone,
wood beams, and stained glass.
They even put your name on the banknote:
saying "Christ's Church, Middletown."

Help me not to worry
so much about them, O God.
Anyway, Miss Simcox
may have changed pews
only so that
she could hear or see better.

I hope that I can give a baptistery
like that one
to the parish in Pinebluff,
someday when I get through dental school
and have established my practice.
I'll dedicate it to the memory
of Great-grandmother Watson,
I think,
who bore for her owner
six mocha children
in his slave quarters
and who sat in the balcony
with at least one of them
every Sunday for 30 years
looking down on him
with his sickly wife and mean sister....

Or maybe I should dedicate
the baptistery to the memory
of Aunt Hazel,
who worked in the parish rectory
long after the rest
of the family had turned A.M.E.
They let her worship
only as a servant at white folk’s
weddings and funerals.
Otherwise she couldn't even sit
in the balcony
where once she had sat
with her grandmother Watson
looking down on her white grandfather
who never ever would recognize
those children, the only ones he sired.

Maybe the sculptor can capture
the way Hazel's tongue
moved across the whole china set
of twelve dinner plates once,
in the kitchen, hidden from view,
after old Bishop Caldwell
told her that the colored help
should use only the everyday ware.
And she licked
every one of the finer plates!
It's time everyone now found out,
her tongue in marble
saying "No!" for ever and ever. AMEN

--Louie Crew

Has appeared:

Plumbline 9.3 (1981): 11-15.
Thursday Stories 11 (1982): 32-38.
The Covenant Journal No. 32 (April 2010): 6

Psalm 65

This is a model for how to talk to God when everything is going well. Thank God, and name your blessings one by one. Behold God as the benefactor. He actively makes all of these good things happen.

“You make safe.” “You still.” “You cause.” “You visit.” “You water.” “You prepare.” “You drench.” “You soften.”

Caveat: If you are in the middle of a great drought or famine, select a different psalm, or tune out while you focus on a stained glass window.

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

“I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come.”

What an image of fullness and completion, “being poured out as a libation.” Irma Bombeck echoed it:

When I stand before God at the end of my life I would hope that I have not a single bit of talent left and could say, "I used everything You gave me."

Many hoard their treasures, even their graces; but life is meant to be spent, to be used up, not preserved.

Saint mixes his metaphors gloriously:

I have fought the good fight, [the boxer or the soldier]
I have finished the race, [the runner]
I have kept the faith. [the religious devotee]

This is part of his farewell to Timothy. He addresses it to Timothy, not to the gatekeeper of heaven. He is not saying

Let me into heaven because (1) I have fought the good fight, (2) I have finished the race, (3) I have kept the faith.

Saint is still earthbound when he summarizes his life and declares his great expectations:

From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day,

Twice Saint is explicitly generous and gracious to others. The crown will be given “not only to me but also to all who have longed for God’s appearing.” He recalls: “At my first defense no one came to my support; all deserted me”; but he adds, “May it not be counted against them!”

At his first General Convention as Presiding Bishop (in 2000 in Denver), ++Frank Griswold canceled all business during one morning session and following the Eucharist asked all present to spend the time in the work of reconciliation. “If you have harmed someone here, seek out that person and ask for forgiveness….” he counseled.

I was amazed by the steady stream of persons, many whom I did not know, who sought me out to apologize for things they had said about lgbt people. Many apologized for not speaking up when others had made unkind remarks about us.

In no way was I holding these behaviors against them. I understood my role as that of a reverse scapegoat, a surrogate for all the lgbt people whom these folks had abused. It was emotionally exhausting but even more spiritually strengthening to share the good news that their sins had already been forgiven, from the same source of my forgiveness, from the source of everyone’s forgiveness.

So I was rescued from the lion's mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and save me for his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Luke 18:9-14

When I arrive at heaven’s gate, I do not plan to say, “My name is Erman Louie Crew, Jr. Please let me in because I was right about homosexuality”!

Instead, I shall say, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Have heterosexuals struck a better bargain?

I may be completely wrong in what I sincerely believe about homosexuality and homosexuals, but I am certain that I am not wrong about God, “whose property is always to show mercy.”

See also

October 17, 2010. Twenty First Sunday after Pentecost

2010-10-01T02:31:00.000-07:00

Almighty and everlasting God, in Christ you have revealed your glory among the nations: Preserve the works of your mercy, that your Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen

Jeremiah 31:27-34

Wanting to be just, early in our relationship I asked Ernest to tell me whenever he noticed that I am not doing my fair share of the dirty work.

He refused. "I am your husband, not your parent or police person," he explained gently; "I take responsibility for my contributions and I'd like a husband who takes responsibility for his.

"And domesticity is not 'dirty work,'" he continued. "You will enjoy it more if you rejoice in the blessing of being able to do it."

That’s what God is saying through Jeremiah. God does not want to be our disciplinarian. God wants us spontaneously to know and to do what is right.

Through the Holy Spirit God wants to write his law on our hearts.

Ernest and I celebrated our 36th anniversary on February 2nd, 2010 and rejoiced to take another reckoning of our solemn vow "to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part."

Psalm 119:97-104

I am uncomfortable praying this part of the 119th Psalm.

I have more understanding than all my teachers, *
for your decrees are my study.

I am wiser than the elders, *
because I observe your commandments.

Am I really? I doubt it.

Yet I risk imposing contemporary criteria on the ancient text here. Likely the psalm writer is doing no more than inviting us to live into the internal security and certainty that Jeremiah was later to herald as God’s new way of making covenant with us. Jeremiah’s way of putting it sits more easily with me.

Also, my negative reactions to this snippet from Psalm 119 derives in part from Saint’s derogatory treatment of those whose who strive for righteousness as an achievement by following the law rather than receive righteousness a free gift by from God. Recall the Sunday School acrostic

Gift
Received
At
Crist‘s
Epence.

The psalmist assumes that one can live a righteous life living by the law. Saint did not share that assumption. Earlier, when still Saul, he followed the law and found himself stoning Christians.

2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

Saint mentors Timothy to live as he has taught Timothy. He reminds Timothy of the importance of sacred texts to “instruct you for salvation.”

Saint also counsels Timothy to “proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable.”

Saint is preparing the young man to “do the work of an evangelist, [to] carry out [his] ministry fully.”

Unfortunately, a part of only one verse in this counsel has often been ripped out of this context and used to make an idol out of Scripture itself.

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness…..

Note, when Saint wrote “All scripture,” he could not possibly have referred to Christian scriptures: Christian scriptures did not even exist as such. Nor does Saint imagine that those to come will include this letter itself as part of the canons of the Holy Bible. The canons were not fixed until centuries later, and through processes about which we know very few details.

Christian fundamentalists cite Saint’s claim to justify the Bible’s authority. It is the word of God, they assert, because the Bible tells us that it is the word of God. That is a faith statement, not proof. They would laugh at the same claim if they found it in the sacred texts of another religion.

Does the bible have authority as the word of God? Do all books in the bible have God’s imprimatur? Is the bible closed to any new revelations? Might new ideas that move us beyond, or even contradict some of the ideas in The Holy Bible be the Word of God for our time? Do parts of the Declaration of Independence have that status? Does Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail?

The Bible is not one book, but 66 books, written over hundreds of years for different purposes and for different audiences. Long portions of the bible (e.g., the ‘history books,’ the song books, personal letters, et al.) seem not to speak at all to the authority of the Bible as God’s word. Sometimes when passages do claim to speak for God, they contradict other passages that claim to speak for God.

Many treatises have addressed these questions, and many more will follow. This small text of Saint writing to Timothy cannot bear the burden of proof in those disputes, as interesting (or as distracting) as some might take the disputes to be.

Some of the texts in Hebrew scriptures are problematic. For example, look closely at the details of one of Elisha’s first miracles, narrated in the same chapter that reports Elisha’s succession to Elijah:

He went from there to Bethel and,
as he was on his way, some small
boys came out of the city and
jeered at him, saying, "Get along
with you, baldy, get along" He
turned round and looked at them
and he cursed them in the name of
the Lord; and two she-bears came
out of a wood and mauled forty-
two of them. From there he went
on to Mount Carmel.

2 Kings 2: 23-25

I have never heard a sermon on this text; nor do I expect to. The church politely ignores many passages. Jesus himself said that all the law and all prophecy must be tested against the two greatest commandments: Love God with all your heart, mind (!), soul, and strength; love your neighbor as you love yourself.

As an ‘old baldy’ myself, I admit the story of the she-bears sometimes seems truly inspired to me; but I would not for a moment risk being arrested by calling out wild animals to maul the boisterous adolescents who sometimes jeer at me. Nor do I believe that God inspired this text to guide us in our inter-generational behavior.

Luke 18:1-8

Jesus asks us to consider: If a bad judge will break down when you are persistent in asking for relief, how much more will God, who has actually chosen you as his own, “quickly grant justice” when you ask God for it. “Will he delay long in helping them?”

How long is long? Ask some who spent decades in prison falsely accused, praying for justice. Ask the generations who were born as slaves and died as slaves, still praying for justice.

Ask some devalued for millennia because of gender or sexual orientation.

Luke begins by explaining Jesus’ purpose in telling people the parable of the “wicked judge”: to teach his followers “about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”

Would you have given the same advice to those at Auschwitz -- not to lose heart?

Marx referred to religion as an opiate. I know that prayer can be a dangerous drug for me. I pray often, and am especially aware of the risks of substituting prayer for action.

Consider this episode which occurred shortly after I moved to New Jersey in 1989. I am glad that I resisted the temptation just to pray that the disruption would cease:

On my way to Integrity, I stopped off in Penn Station for a Big Mac. All of a sudden, two young boys, about 16, started saying in a screaming whisper, "That's a man. That's a man." The person in question, in a lovely red dress but slightly tattered wig and high black stockings, rushed with his tray to the far side of the room, and turned his back on all the commotion. "You need to shave a bit better! That's a man! That's a man! Why don't you buy a new wig! That's a man........"

This went on for at least 20 times. Most of the help behind the counter were in hysterics. Most of the customers were tired old people like me. The heckler and his side kick wore McDonald's clothing, but seemed off duty, not eating, but idling about.

Finally I had had enough. "Little boy," I said.

He was livid as he glared at me.

"Does McDonald's pay you to insult the customers!"

"Why, are you a faggot too!" he screamed.

This delighted the help even more.

"Would you like for me to call the police?" I responded.

"That's a man! That's a man!...." he continued with his litany.

The first person, apparently an assistant manager, called the people by name and said, laughing, "XXX come on now, leave." He kept looking back at the fellow in the red dress, who must have eaten his sandwich faster than a priest can say Mass when he has a hot date waiting for him in the choir room.

Finally the real manager came. I asked him for his name, but he would not give it to me. "That young boy has not grown up and for many minutes now he has been insulting customers. Do you pay him to do that?"

"He works somewhere else, at another McDonald’s."

"So you allow him to sit here insulting customers wearing the livery of your company? Will I have to go for the police to get this to stop? What...."

By this time the entire restaurant was stony silent, and the offender retreated out the door calling me a faggot once again. The manager still refused to give me his name. I shall find it out in the morning when I get all my networks plugged in.

When I walked out the door, I looked like any other fat old bald-headed man.

I can just hear my husband if I dare tell him about it. "Lordy mercy, chile, can't even get out the country more than a couple of months and you go acting like a country bumpkin. Don't you know in the city just to keep quiet and mind your own business?!"

He's right, of course. But I will never forget the kiss which the guy in the red dress threw to me as we boarded separate cars on the PATH train. It was better than all the candles and the incense and the glorious Bach as only a NYC organist can do it.

We queans must stick together, or our tiaras aren't worth a tinker's malediction.

-- Old Baldy, Newark
Originally I posted the text on GAYNET after I got home.

See also

October 10, 2010. Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

2010-10-01T01:53:00.000-07:00

Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, that we may continually be given to good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

Lesbians and Gays lived by this advice incognito for decades as putative exiles under policies dictated by heterosexuals. We built homes and dwelt in them, and made no announcements. We paid taxes like everyone else. We sought the welfare of the city in which we had been exiled. We even asked God to bless the city. We understood that our welfare comes from the welfare of our neighbors.

Slowly our exile is ending, right in our old neighborhoods. More of us feel safe enough to come out and share our wholeness.

We are not a new people invading from an alien place. We are your sons and daughters, your mothers and fathers, your doctors, lawyers and teachers. In your welfare we find our welfare.

The same is true in the church.

Soon after I founded Integrity, an international ministry of lgbt Anglicans/Episcopalians, the vestry of my parish asked me to leave, and the bishop summoned me for discipline [see The Peace of Christ is Not for Gays in Christianity & Crisis 37.9-10 (1977): 140-144].

Yet more than 35 years later, at long last our exile is ending. Witness the consecrations of Bishop Gene Robinson and Bishop Mary Glasspool. Witness the vote on
Commitment and Witness to the Anglican Communion and the vote on Liturgies for Blessings at General Convention in 2009. Tallies for both resolutions are here.

In your welfare, we are finding our welfare. Thanks be to God.

Psalm 66:1-12

These twelve verses tend to put us on automatic pilot to praise God. However, verses 9, 10, and 11 mitigate that tenor. They remind us that God tries us, tests us, brings us into ‘the snare,’ lays heavy burdens upon our back, lets enemies ride over our heads, puts us through fire and water…..and yet blesses us in the end. I am uncomfortable making God responsible for all our trials, but rejoice to find God present through them.

Addressed perhaps more to us than to God, the psalm reminds us to remember what we promised when we were in trouble and reminds us to pay the vows that we made then.

Thereby, the psalm promotes institutional stewardship. If we have been blessed by the work of God, it makes sense to give to the religious establishment that keeps that work alive.

2 Timothy 2:8-15

Avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening.

Enough said!

Luke 17:11-19

Confidential Memorandum
Leaked from the Anglican Right’s Revisionist Task Force

Don’t dare preach on the Gospel reading today. You will run a big risk of having the homosexual lobby claim that they are in the same position as the Samaritan, that they have come back to thank Jesus when others who have been healed said nothing to the healer.

You will waste your time to ask them whether they have really been healed. They’ll tell you of vague spiritual healing. They won’t claim to be healed of their homosexuality, which is truly a modern equivalent of leprosy in Jesus' day. They rejoice in their orientation, and even seek to be married. Surely you do not want to offer your straight son or daughter to one of them!

Jesus cannot possibly expect us good heterosexual Christians to embrace the lepers. St. Francis was wrong even to try; but then he was a Catholic, so what do you expect?

Do not risk becoming unclean like the homosexuals.

Luke’s passage for today is scriptural meat and should be taken out of the Deep Freeze only by clergy or by students already enrolled in a good conservative seminary with strict admission checks for orthodoxy.

It will not do for us to be risk the sissies’ Gospel that Jesus loves absolutely everybody.

That does not mean we are being hateful. It is God who asks us to shun them. We’re just being wise as adders.

Neighbor

Our neighbor's a fag and bakes good cakes,
as parents are careful to warn children.
But he's just an undertaker,
so there ain't much way
he could harm no living thing.

He even married wunts,
to a widow schoolteacher;
but their maid let out
how the two lived in separate parts
of the house right from the beginning,
and the teacher, being sickly,
conveniently upped and died real soon.

I think those boys were wrong to beat him up
when he wrote the paper about Anita.
A little sugar in his gas tank
or a few discreet breathing calls
oughta been enough to keep him scared
to make another public move.

We ain't got nothin gainst queers, really,
long's they don't do nothin or tell nobody.
We never have let the Baptists
tell us how to run our lives.

-- Louie Crew

Publication history,

Quean Lutibelle's Pew. Dragon Disks: Newark, NJ, 1990. Page 30
Gruene Street March 1997. An online journal.
Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 7.3 (1997): 106-107
Rural Gays and Lesbians. An anthology edited by James D. Smith and Ronald Mancoske. NY: Harrington Park Press, 1997. 106-107
Parva Sed Apta 2007. An online journal.

See also

Queer Eye for the Lectionary

Church Calendar 3-Year Index of Queer Eye for the Lectionary

Year A

Year B

Year C

July 17, 2011. Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 11.

Signing off

July 10, 2011. Fourth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 10.

July 3, 2011. Third Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 9

June 26, 2011. Second Sunday after Pentecost

June 19, 2011. First Sunday after Pentecost. Trinity Sunday

June 12, 2011. Day of Pentecost. Whitsunday.

June 5, 2011. Seventh Sunday of Easter

May 29, 2011. Sixth Sunday of Easter.

May 22, 2011. Fifth Sunday of Easter.

May 15, 2011. Fourth Sunday of Easter. Good Shepherd Sunday

May 8, 2011. Third Sunday of Easter.

May 1, 2011. Second Sunday of Easter.

April 17, 2011. Palm Sunday

April 10, 2011. Fifth Sunday in Lent

Sunday, April 3, 2011. Fourth Sunday in Lent

March 27, 2011. Third Sunday in Lent

March 20, 2011. Second Sunday in Lent

March 13, 2011. The First Sunday in Lent

March 6, 2011. The Last Sunday after Epiphany

February 27, 2011. Eighth Sunday after the Epiphany.

February 20, 2011. Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany.

February 13, 2011. Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

February 6, 2011. Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany.

Sunday, January 30, 2011. Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

January 16, 2011. Second Sunday after the Epiphany.

January 9, 2011. First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of our Lord

Sunday, January 2, 2011. Second Sunday after Christmas

December 26, 2010. First Sunday after Christmas

December 19, 2010. Fourth Sunday in Advent

December 12, 2010. Third Sunday of Advent.

December 5, 2010. Second Sunday of Advent

November 28, 2010. First Sunday of Advent

November 21, 2010. Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King

November 14, 2010. Twenty Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

November 7, 2010. Twenty Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

October 31, 2010. Twenty Third Sunday after Pentecost.

October 24 2010. Twenty Second Sunday after Pentecost

October 17, 2010. Twenty First Sunday after Pentecost

October 10, 2010. Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost