Sunday, August 22, 2010. Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

© 2010 by Louie Crew

Today’s Lections

The Collect

Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power among all peoples, to the glory 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.

It is inaccurate to pray this collect given the current divisions in the Anglican Communion. For several years now, the Communion has manifested anything but unity.

In consternation over the Episcopal Church’s support of LGBT Christians, a majority of the Communion has anathematized The Episcopal Church (TEC). The Archbishop of Canterbury has removed all TEC members from interim bodies of the Anglican Consultative Council, and reportedly has asked Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori not to attend the next primates meeting. He would not even allow her to wear her miter when she preached at London’s Southwark Cathedral on June 13th.

We should amend the collect thus:

Grant, O merciful God, that your Church may cease its bickering and gather together in unity by your Holy Spirit so that we may show forth your power among all peoples to the glory 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 1:4-10

God told Jeremiah: “"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you.”

Isaiah reported of himself: "The Lord called me before my birth. From within the womb he called me by my name...He said to me, `You are my servant'..." (Isaiah 49:1, 3)

Prophets are not the only ones who can make this claim: so might you and I, in the words of Psalm 139: 13-14: “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.”

That’s not just for straight people anymore either; nor just for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. God has fearfully and wonderfully made every one of us even while we were in our mothers’ wombs.

When God appointed him a prophet, Jeremiah said, "Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy."

His reluctance I understand. In 1974, I called at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and said, “My husband and I are a racially integrated gay couple from middle Georgia and we would like to be put in touch with other gay Episcopalians while we are at UC Berkeley this summer. Several people passed the phone to others for me to repeat my request.

Their giggles and tittering, only slightly muffled, brought me clearly up against God’s call to do something about it. “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak church talk, for I am only a quean.”

But the LORD said to me, “Do not say, “I am only a quean”; for you shall go to all to whom I send you. .. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.”

I did not go alone. I took out ads in The Episcopalian and in the national gay newspaper The Advocate announcing Integrity as a new organization for lesbian and gay Episcopalians.


Psalm 71:1-6

What do heterosexuals think of when they read?:

In you, O LORD, have I taken refuge; *
let me never be ashamed.

Has anyone ever tried to shame them merely for being heterosexuals?

This psalm, as does Jeremiah, and as does Psalm 139, encourages those of us who face persecution to take refuge in God, certain that we are God’s creation from the beginning:

I have been sustained by you ever since I was born;
from my mother's womb you have been my strength; *
my praise shall be always of you.

If you have never been anathematized, you have blood kin who have. We have all partaken of Christ’s blood. That’s not just mumbo jumbo. That’s our common birthright. In the Eucharist we are made one not only with Christ, but with one another. When we understand this transformation, we can never rightly shut out as strangers those whom others anathematize. We are bound to them through the body and blood of Jesus.

Deliver us, O God, from the hand of the wicked, *
from the clutches of the evildoer and the oppressor

Say that when you drive your nice car to spend a day ministering with, not to, the homeless. Say that when you use your fine computer to write a letter seeking justice and proper care for refugees or undocumented citizens.

These are not tasks we do for strangers; these are ways we share blood kinship.

Hebrews 12:18-29

If my reading of Psalm 71 is too bloody for you, how will you bear Saints’ vision of our approach to heaven itself, when we come “to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel”?

Saint’s vision is full of awe at powerful actions of judgment, explicitly surpassing the terrifying sights that Moses experienced. In Saint’s vision we “come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God.” God tells us, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.”

Yet Saint stresses that through Christ “we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.”

Luke 13:10-17

It sounds like Jesus has run up against the bureaucrats of Lambeth Palace, much as Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori did. Rather than welcome her and the very good news that she preached to a huge crowd, the archbishop stressed that she should not wear her miter, but just tote it under her arm. She obeyed. He looked foolish. She spoke gospel truth. Read her sermon here

When her male predecessor Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold preached at the same cathedral, he wore his miter and no objection was made: he is a male. The Church of England does not yet allow females to be bishops, so she had to tuck her miter under her arm. See a full report with pictures of both Presiding Bishops and their miters at Episcopal Café

When Jesus healed the crippled woman, the ecclesiastical bureaucrats noticeed only that he did it on the Sabbath. The healing was of no importance to them.

Jesus reminded them that even they give water to their animals on the Sabbath! But Jesus missed their point: the letter of the law is perfect, and nothing else will be tolerated.

I rejoice that Jesus will be my judge, not some church bureaucrats. Jesus has the property always to be merciful. Jesus knitted me together in my mother’s womb. Jesus loves an old quean like me. Indeed, Jesus loves absolutely everybody!

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See also

• My Anglican Pages
  
• My Natter/BLOG
  

Sunday, August 15, 2010. Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost.

© 2010 by Louie Crew

Today’s Lections

The Collect

Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Given the texts for today, the collect is too tame. We might more pertinently pray,

Almighty God, we have prodigally devastated our environment and removed justice from our common life. We repent. Mercifully give us another chance before you send fire. Restore us. Show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved, and your beautiful creation along with us. Amen

Isaiah 5:1-7

This is one of the most powerful of the prophetic narratives in the bible. The application and the punch line are carefully reserved until the end.

The prophet Nathan used the same rhetorical strategy when he told King David about a rich man who seized and devoured the only possession of a poor man, a single lamb (see 2 Samuel 12:1-7). As Nathan hoped, his narrative greatly angered David who then called for judgment against the rich man, saying “He shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” Then Nathan said to David, “Thou are the man.”

Isaiah’s narrative is also only seven verses long. Throughout most of it he talks only about a vineyard. His original audience, mostly agrarian, would be drawn into the disappointment ‘my beloved’ experiences when his tender care and best labors produce not the good grapes expected, but wild grapes. They would well understand the beloved’s anger and disappointment:

And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

Only at the end do we learn that ‘my beloved’ is God and that the vineyard

is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
he expected justice,
but saw bloodshed;
righteousness,
but heard a cry!

It is easier for us to pass judgments on someone else than on ourselves. Over recent months many of us have paid close attention to British Petroleum, and British Petroleum has played the villain part to the hilt. We have learned that lax federal regulators intentionally treated oil company executives as pals rather than as petitioners. The regulators forgot the U.S. public whom they were appointed to serve.

Meanwhile, how many of us have reviewed our own addictions to fossil fuels? How many of those hardest hit along the Gulf Coast do themselves drive SUVs or other major guzzlers driving the deep-water drilling? How many citizens along the Gulf voted to cap the liability of the oil companies in an effort to woo them to drill the wells and bring much employment to their area?

“Thou art the man!”

“Our beloved God expected good stewardship but saw greed and prodigality.”

Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18

In Psalm 80 the Israelites call for God to restore the vineyard, almost as if in response to Isaiah’s narrative. Psalm 80 is identified as a “Psalm of Asaph,” who like Isaiah, appears to have lived in the 8th century BC, so the two passages could have been in dialogue with each other. It is impossible to know, and not materially important. The vineyard in each narrative makes its point clearly without need of reference to the other.

Psalm 80, directly addresses God, “Hear, o Shepherd of Israel,” and petitions God to restore the destroyed vineyard. Previously God “brought a vine out of Egypt” (possibly through Israelites fleeing their captivity there?). When planted in the land promised, the vineyards flourished, as did trees and other vegetation, as a sign of God’s good intentions toward Israel.

The psalm blames God for the destruction of the vineyard, not the Israelites themselves, as Isaiah does.

Why have you broken down its wall, *
so that all who pass by pluck off its grapes?

The wild boar of the forest has ravaged it, *
and the beasts of the field have grazed upon it.

Do we blame God for the current devastation in the Gulf of Mexico? What about British Petroleum? What about our own lax regulators? What about our own addictions to fossil fuels?

Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven;
behold and tend this vine; *
preserve what your right hand has planted.

And so will we never turn away from you; *
give us life, that we may call upon your Name.

Hebrews 11:29-12:2

“For time would fail me to tell of …”

But time does not fail Saint. For 141 words with great rhetorical flourish he rehearses the acts of many whom in the last section, he calls “the great crowd of witnesses.”

As is the Isaiah passage, this one from Hebrews is a performer’s dream, a grammarian’s treasure trove. The telescopic sentences in both soar with wondrous periodicity.

Each passage drives towards a dramatic conclusion. Isaiah reveals that the people of Israel are the ones who destroyed the vineyard, and that God, the planter of the vineyard, is the one who judges them. Saint stresses that the witnesses who have gone before did not receive the promise but that we will enable them and ourselves to be made complete, perfected, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

So Great a Crowd of Witnesses


I have watched God take Her love
and squeeze it through a surgeon's
precise line of vision
to save the heartbeat of a straight
who would probably vomit
to know a Lesbian operated.

I have heard God distill His grandeur
through a Brother's gay fingers
opening organ pipes in dark
ecclesiastical corners
to make even tired adulterers
tremble at the glory of the Queandom.

I have watched God twinkle
in the eye of a teacher
seducing bored minds
away from sitcoms and comics
Into Native Son or a Renoir nude,
only to have God laughed at
when the student ossifies to say,
"Teacher was a harmless bit queer!"

And I have seen God grow bald,
don a wig and sequined gown,
and cruise the streets,
even of small towns,
laughing joyfully to be God,
to understand creation,
to wait out
the slow drainage of stupidity.

-- Louie Crew, 1976

Publication chronology:

1. Integrity Forum 2.6 (1976): 6
   
2. Voice of the Turtle 5.1 (1981): 3.
   
3. Chiron Review 8.1 (Spring 1989): 11
   
4. Quean Lutibelle's Pew. Dragon Disks: Newark, NJ, 1990. Page 11
   
5. Thirst December 1996. N.P
   
6. Making Waves 3.12 (December 1996): 1-2
   
7. Voice of Integrity 13.2 (Summer/Fall 2004):16-18. A Reflection on the 30th Anniversary of the Founding of Integrity
   
8. Whosoever10.6 (May/June) 2006.

Luke 12:49-56

So much for the image of the “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” meek and mild. So much even for the image of Jesus as the Prince of Peace. So much for Jesus’ own prayer, “That you may all be one, even as the father and I are one.”

Instead:




“[I have come to bring] division. From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided…….”

Clearly this is not everyone’s idea for a peaceful mural or stained glass window, as it was for many in the 15th century, e.g. Hans Memling:


Jesus accuses the crowd of living in denial. “You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?"

This passage inspired James Baldwin’s title The Fire Next Time.

Maybe the next time is now?

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See also

• My Anglican Pages
  
• My Natter/BLOG
  

Sunday, August 8, 2010. Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost.

© 2010 by Louie Crew

Today’s Lections

The Collect

Grant to us, Lord, we pray, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you be enabled to live according to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

I whole-heartedly pray to God for the “spirit to think and do always those things that are right,” but I have to work much harder for a spirit of self-criticism lest I glibly conclude that what I think and do is God’s will. It is important to ask for God’s help, but just as important to hold in question what we discern to be God’s answer.

That’s why I desperately need the church to test what I discern to be God’s answer to my prayers. I often find myself wrong, and I sometimes find the church wrong.

For example, I have no absolute certainty that I am right in what I have discerned to be God’s will in my life about my commitment to Ernest in marriage. If I believed God opposes our commitment, either I should leave Ernest or leave God: what an horrendous choice either way.

I am much more certain in my understanding about God, whose property is always to show mercy. I make no claim based on my own rightness, but on God’s rightness. I trust God’s manifold and great mercies.

I am absolutely certain that the church is wrong when it laughs at, mocks, degrades, devalues…. lgbt people.

When scripture, tradition, and reason seem at odds, I find myself returning to the first and second commandments, on which Jesus says all law and all prophecy must pass muster: Love God with your whole heart. Love your neighbor (lgbts and straight alike) as you love yourselves.

As best I can discern, my effort to love Ernest is not against God’s will except when I fail to love Ernest as much as I love myself; for that I must steadily repent.

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

Sodom produces in many bible readers such a fixation on sexual sin that as a gay Christian I have to resist a tendency to duck when I encounter Sodom in Scripture: so often it is the biggest brick many of my adversaries pick up to hurl at me.

Isaiah gets very specific about Sodom’s sins too, and he makes it quite clear what sodomites need to stop doing and how they should change:

I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.
Come now, let us argue it out,
says the LORD:
though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be like snow;
though they are red like crimson,
they shall become like wool.

Homosexuality is not even hinted at! The sins named here include

• oppression
  
• injustice
  
• Abuse of widows and orphans

As an Episcopalian I am chilled by the warnings in the first part of today’s reading from Isaiah. God is disinterested at best in the beauty of our worship. God is also not interested in our tithes and offerings when we do not do justice.

Should the lector today turn away from the congregation and speak directly to the thurifer with Isaiah’s injunction “incense is an abomination to me”?

I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
Your new moons and your appointed festivals
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good

Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24

This is not one of my favorite psalms. It lacks the coherence of many, and those who designed the lectionary have split it, making it appear even more piecemeal.

Summary: God yells and shows up wrapped in flame. He’s angry and calls his minions to assemble his people. God’s judgment itself is not altogether clear. He bears witness against Israel, but lets some get off the hook because they have made good sacrifices.

That’s quite a contrast with God as Isaiah describes him. In Isaiah’s account, offerings and solemn assemblies count for naught.

However, in the very last verse, the psalmist proclaims, much more tamely than Isaiah, that God is more impressed with our right behavior: “but to those who keep in my way will I show the salvation of God." Lectors would be wise to give very strong emphasis to but, lest sleepy auditors miss the contrast.


Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Some talk about their faith as certainty. They readily accept the challenge to prove right any claim in scripture, as if we will be found unfaithful if we doubt a single word of it. Some talk about faith as if it is a score card by which we will earn the right to enter heaven by believing every jot and tittle we are commanded to believe.

Will you be smacked down if you turn silent through any part of the creed? Even the filioque?

What’s the minimum iq one must have if she hopes to enter heaven? Some of these beliefs are quite complicated. Does one get an exemption for those parts of the creeds that one does not understand? And must we understand them in the same sense that those who wrote the creeds understood them? They believed the earth was flat and was at the center of the universe. We are not morally superior for knowing otherwise, but dare we pretend to the innocence persons had before they learned these facts?

Just how much are we allowed to use our minds if we also want to be faithful?

Saint offers helps with these troublesome questions. Saint does not look at faith as certainty. What you believe based on physical evidence is not faith at all: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

If you can see it, it just is; it’s not something you have to ‘believe.’

Jesus would have us test all law, all creedal statements, and all prophecy against the two greatest commandments: Love God with your whole heart. Love your neighbor as you love yourselves.

Growing up and well into my early thirties I understood faith as my gift to God, but I was wrong: faith is God’s gift to me. I have it in great abundance. I can “pass” the creeds with a lie-detector test, but I am awfully glad that I belong to a church that does not require the use of them.

It would be wrong-headed to boast about this gift: it is not based on my merits. I have not earned it, indeed cannot earn it.

I know many who live more faithfully than I do but have less faith, have many more dark nights of the soul than I encounter. I am deeply humbled by their righteousness.

Luke 12:32-40

My husband’s favorite t-shirt says it more succinctly: “Jesus is coming. Look busy!”

He wore that t-shirt when we lived in the Bible Belt deep behind the Cotton Curtain, and it was fun to stay a few feet behind him in the grocery aisles to watch the reactions. It drew far more angry looks than smiles. A few looked up as if afraid the ceiling would fall.

Yet Luke makes a point only slightly different: “Jesus is coming. Be ready!”

Jesus died at age 33, so we’ve been expecting his return for 1,977 years. While we can understand the eschatological urgency Luke proclaims, it’s understandable that generation after generation of Christians have managed to live faithfully, some even with a sense of holy urgency, without losing heart when night after night, year after year, century after century, the Second Coming has not yet happened, at least as Luke and other first-century Christians anticipated.

At 73 I am much more aware of what I am saying than I was as a child when I prayed, “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I also sleep peacefully. My God is not a slave-master cracking a whip and doing white-glove inspections.

When ends life’s transient dream,
When death's cold, sullen stream
Shall o'er me roll;
Blest Savior, then in love,
Fear and distrust remove;
O bear me safe above,
A ransomed soul!

I am ready for the Commendation:

Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant Louie. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive Louie into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen. -- BCP, 483

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See also

• My Anglican Pages
  
• My Natter/BLOG
  

Sunday, August 1. 2010. Tenth Sunday after Pentecost.

© 2010 by Louie Crew

Today’s Lections

The Collect

Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Hosea 11:1-11

Hosea sees that God is in a crisis of conscience and indecision, greatly exasperated. Israel is disobedient. It keeps turning to other gods. From God’s perspective:

I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those
who lift infants to their cheeks.
I bent down to them and fed them.

Some fathers use the same argument with their teenaged daughters determined to defy and disobey what the fathers have decided:

My restrictions were mere cords of human kindness;
the bands I used were bands of love.
I have loved her since she was a baby.
I have fed and clothed her

And what does it get me? She won’t do anything I ask; and now she’s leaving home.

My people are bent on turning away from me.

Like the father, God is very angry, but concludes “I will not execute my fierce anger.”

How did you respond to an angry parent determined to bend your will?

I was in my 20s before I discovered that a calm and loving silence worked. After a certain point, the parent had nowhere left to escalate the indignation, and I had said nothing to trouble the water further.

As Hosea describes the dynamic, it is God who turns patient, hard as it is to do so, and as a result, God expects Israel’s return:

They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt,
and like doves from the land of Assyria;
and I will return them to their homes, says the LORD.

In human families, the child is not always wrong in these struggles, nor is the parent always right.

Is the same true in our heavenly family? Is God always right? Are we always wrong when we try God’s patience?

God has freed us with a will of our own and minds of our own. Dare we not use them?

I doubt that the patriarchy in which Hosea lived would have allowed him or his readers to question fathers as I have done. But we don’t live within that patriarchy. Is God to remain captive to the image of father in Hosea’s time?

Psalm 107:1-9, 43

“God’s mercy endures for ever” or, as many African Christians proclaim at every opportunity, “God is good, all the time.

Psalm 107 counts the blessings experienced by the people of God.

Counting your blessings can be an important spiritual discipline, one which my husband Ernest masters far more effectively than I do. In the mid-1980s our employment required us to live twelve time zones apart. Required? Well, not exactly. One or the other could have sacrificed important personal growth to stay in the same place but with menial employment. We chose to live separately for more than two years. It was one of the hardest choices we had ever made. We owed our soul to the phone company and the airlines.

Too often I wallowed in depression and wrote long, whiny letters about how lonely I was. Ernest was lonely too, but rarely said so. Patiently, gently he encouraged me to get outside more, to take long walks, to visit museums more frequently, to indulge my fascination with Chinese culture and architecture. (He was in Minneapolis at the time; I in Hong Kong; then he was in Gualin, China while I was in New Jersey).

Looking back on the experience now that we are in our 37th year, I’m enormously grateful that we were willing to put our commitment to each other’s growth to a hard test. I rejoice that we passed it, bound closer not just by affection, but by enhanced respect and an even greater friendship. Picture book marriage can’t compete with the real thing.

Whoever is wise will ponder these things, *
and consider well the mercies of the LORD

Colossians 3:1-11

Christians believe in change. We expect to ‘get a life’ -- a new one. We expect to put off what is earthly. In our new life we get rid of the old life--the anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language.

In our renewal, our differences lose their power to divide. There is no longer Greek or Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, male and female, gay and straight, slave and free…… Old negative classifications like ‘barbarian’ no longer apply. We move beyond mere inclusion……

Wouldn’t that be nice?!

It can be. God expects it to be. We’re not meant to wait until heaven to live it. Let us live what we pray daily, “Let your realm come here as it already is in heaven.”

Luke 12:13-21

Whom do you know who is rich? Who in your life has ’the most toys’? Who stores up the most treasures for themselves?

Who in your life is “rich toward God”?

As a spiritual discipline, my friend Gray Temple, a priest, spent a Sabbatical several years ago living during the day as a homeless person on the streets of Atlanta. He had no illusions that his experience would match theirs; for one, he came home to his creature comforts in the suburb every night. He hoped the discipline would help him better understand the homeless and better understand himself.

Gray told me that he quickly learned he was not there to bring God to the poor and homeless. God had already beat him there. They brought God to him. They were aware of God’s presence with them far better than we who are comfortable are. We live as if we have less need of God, and summon God mainly for emergencies.

Gray did not romanticize the poor, nor minimize some of their own dysfunctional and destructive behaviors. Nor does God, who is always there as one of them.

After I earned my master’s, my first two teaching jobs were in prep schools, both quite good. I had gone to a fine prep school myself. I enjoyed the work immensely, but realized that I was using asssignment to keep on hold my coming to terms with my sexuality…...

In London I decided to work in the slums. I was interviewed for five jobs in the first week, was offered all five, and took the one in the most challenging school, a secondary modern school in Penge, just below the Crystal Palace in South London . It was a challenging assignment indeed. I taught five different large classes a day, and they had no textbooks, except for a few dusty Latin books which hadn’t been used in the many years since Latin was taught there. Often I reproduced texts which I had taught in prep schools, but sometimes those proved highly ineffective.

For example, F. Scott Fitzjerald’s story “The Rich Boy” was very popular in prep schools, because it addresses the subtle tensions Fitzgerald experienced in his attraction/repulsion to the very rich. The story begins, “The rich are not like you and me.” That had riveted some of my students in prep school. Those in Penge wondered why anyone would waste time on such an obvious reality. End of story.

But give the lads in Penge an opportunity for uninhibited invention, and they flowered. I brought an exercise to class that I had seen in a workshop led by actors at the old Vic. In it, one character wears a hat. The other character must get the hat from the first one; and the first one must try to keep the hat. The hat must be obtained not by physical force, but by wit, each actor staying in character and working up a situation where the wearer of the hat will give it up.

At the start, the first one to speak, the one with the hat, assigns his character and the character of the other by what he says. For example, he might begin: “I say, James, do you have the car ready to drive me to Westminster?” The second can stay stuck as the servant he has apparently been told to be, but with invention he can stay in character and still draw an opposing inference, saying ‘Just who do you think you are, little brother? I’m using the car to go to my soccer match….” On and on, until one works a way to get the hat while fully in character.

Some of the lads in Penge could get the hat from the other within 3-4 rounds with brilliant flashes of wit and imagination.

There are many ways to be rich. Do you prefer to end with the most toys or to be ‘rich toward God‘?

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See also

• My Anglican Pages
  
• My Natter/BLOG
  

Sunday, July 25, 2010. Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

© 2010 by Louie Crew

Today’s Lections

The Collect

O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Is this prayer meant to be talismanic? Are we merely asking, “Help us through this ordeal”? Or, do we expect our petition itself to do the trick, as a kind of magic merely because we say the right things?

We might ask the same of all our prayers. What are our expectations? Is prayer efficacious, and if so, how?

Like many other collects, this one suggests that flattery might work with God. In it the petitioner speaks not to a friend, but to a ruler, and a strong one at that, on whose mercy any success depends in the ordeal of moving through this life in a way that will get us into heaven.

Where is Saint when we really need him, to remind us that our salvation has already been accomplished?

Groveling sometimes appears much easier than accepting and living into what has already been forgiven.

Hosea 1:2-10

Sexual candor came at a huge price for Hosea, a price that he paid publicly. He saw his whorish wife and their three children as defining a problem bigger than their family alone; for him they became a metaphor for all of Israel’s unfaithfulness. In Hosea’s account, God keeps his original promise to multiply Abraham’s seed like grains of sand on the seashore, but does so with cynical bitterness. God offers the sand no quarantine from radical oil spills.

Rt. Rev. William Wantland Wantland was one of the ten diocesan bishops who brought the initial presentment charging their colleague Walter Righter for heresy in ordaining as a priest Barry Stopfel, an out gay man living in a committed gay relationship. See my account of the trial in which Bishop Righter was exonerated.

Bishop Wantland married in 1954, but later annulled that marriage. Like Hosea, Bishop Wantland and his wife had three children. Did he annul the children as well?? He married a second time in 1985.

Some of us had trouble respecting Bishop Wantland’s contempt of gay unions given his own marital record. At one point I asked him if he could help me with that apparent contradiction. He replied that he would be willing to discuss his marriage privately. I told him that I did not want to invade his privacy. I wanted only what he was willing to say as publicly as the presentment against Bishop Righter.

On January 15, 2009 the House of Bishops deposed Bishop Wantland for abandoning communion with The Episcopal Church. He is now affiliated with the Anglican province of the Southern Cone.

Similarly The Rev. David Roseberry, rector of Christ Church in Plano, Texas, is a strong adversary against lgbt Christians. He hosted a large conference to object after General Convention 2003 consented to the election of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, the first election of an out gay bishop in the Anglican Communion. Bishop Robinson is married to Mark Andrew and the two had been together openly for 14 years at the time of Robinson’s consecration. Roseberry too is divorced. On September 15, 2006, Roseberry left The Episcopal Church for the Province of the Southern Cone.

The Rev. Earle Fox read a long list of specific erotic offenses which he attributed to homosexuals when he protested at the consecration of Bishop Robinson on November 2nd, 2003. Chief consecrator, Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, interrupted Fox’s litany at one point saying “Spare us the details.” In The Clerical Directory Fox continued to claim he was married long after he was divorced. Earle Fox was deposed on May 26, 2009.

Instead of hiding his wife Gomer’s infidelities, Hosea proclaimed that God had planned it that way. He said that God made him take “a wife of whoredom.”

Psalm 85 or Psalm 85:7-13

It is always instructive to look closely at text which the lectionary makers make optional. In this case the full text is Psalm 85, but the lectionary creators make verses 1-6 optional. The psalm is much ‘cleaner’ without them, for if you omit those verses, you remove references of God’s wrath and indignation. If you keep the verses, God can easily seem a big, bad blusterer, especially in verses 4-6:

4
Restore us then, O God our Savior; *
let your anger depart from us.
5
Will you be displeased with us for ever? *
will you prolong your anger from age to age?
6
Will you not give us life again, *
that your people may rejoice in you?

At Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey, for many years I taught two courses on The Bible as Literature, one on Hebrew scripture and the other on Christian scripture. Many of my students were not Christian, and few regularly attended any religious worship. Most took the course out of intellectual interest; and by law, the course could not promote a particular religion. We brought to the bible the same objective criteria that we bring to any other literary text: we did not privilege the bible as ‘holy,’ and if any went away thinking it holy, the text on its own had to persuade them of that claim.

As with any other narrative, we looked closely at the characters. Few found the character of God in Hebrew Scriptures appealing; many found the character of Jesus appealing. One of the major put-offs for the character of God is his volatile and prolonged temper. “Will you prolong your anger from age to age?”

Probably without intending to do so, the psalmist comes off as much more likeable than God to modern readers, by strongly urging that God cease and desist. “Cool it, God,” is what many hear in these omitted verses.

Perhaps it would help to keep those verses intact. They allow us to express our displeasure with God's overwrought emotions and our sense of abandonment. Undoubtedly those verses offered a way to cope, even if an inadequate way to cope, for those enduring The Holocaust. They might also give solace to any who dare to believe that those who imprison lgbts for marrying are acting, as some claim, in God’s will. “Cool it, God. Let up already!”

But as air-conditioning isolates from the summer’s excesses, we have the option to stay just with the second half of Psalm 85, in which God “is speaking peace to his faithful people.”

Colossians 2:6-15 (16-19)

Again, look closely at the verses which the lectionary suggests as merely optional, 16-19:

Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.

Put more simply: “You don’t have to sweat the petty rules that some will want to impose on you.”

Attention: lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered!

Attention: all others who desperately long for God but are still not sure that God loves you. God does, infinitely more than you could ask or even dream!

We don’t have to get it right; God has made us right.

Don’t let people intimidate you by complaining that you are not circumcised. Through Jesus God has given you a spiritual circumcision

Don’t let people intimidate you by complaining that you are not heterosexuals. Through Jesus God has made you spiritual heterosexuals, or whatever. I prefer to think She has made heterosexual Christians into spiritual Queers, for Christ’s sake!

As Quean Lutibelle amends it: “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to heterosexual tradition, according to the hetero-normative spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.”

Luke 11:1-13

I have not found a collect in the Book of Common Prayer that is as direct as “The Lord’s Prayer,” especially in Luke’s version, leaner than the others:

Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.

In my private prayer, I prefer the clearer challenge of Quean Lutibelle’s rendering: “God, use the same standard in forgiving me that I use in forgiving others.”

The Lord’s Prayer is deceptively simple: I should not risk praying the prayer unless I am prepared for the consequences.

Like many others, I am uncomfortable with “Do not bring us to the time of trial.” We know for certain that times of trial will always come. I prefer, “Be with me in the time of trial.”

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See also

• My Anglican Pages
  
• My Natter/BLOG
  

Sunday, July 18, 2010. Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

© 2010 by Louie Crew

Today’s Lections

The Collect

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.

The sonorous periodicity of the collect might dull us to its questionable assumptions about who we are and who God is.

Does God really expect all this humility? Does God enjoy it when we grovel? Did God really make us unworthy? And even if God did, did not Jesus change all that? Are we supposed to bribe God through Jesus’ worthiness?

Compare the Quean Lutibelle alternative to this collect: “God, please give us what we need. Thank you, Jesus.”

Amos 8:1-12

Recently I listened to Heathcote Williams perform Benedict Flynn’s translation of Dante’s Inferno. With almost sadistic delight, Dante, at age 35, becomes ex officio the CEO of hell. Dante is not only the narrator but also the author, and as author he alone arranges hell. He creates nine descending circles of the damned, and he chooses who gets put into each circle. He also gets to choose the punishments -- each becoming more and more bizarre.

If you were hired as temp CEO of hell for a month, whom would you consign there and where would you put each using Dante’s template to account for all the wicked whom you have observed or heard about over your lifetime?

A few of the tortures which Amos imagines are tame by comparison to Dante’s:

I will turn your feasts into mourning,
and all your songs into lamentation;
I will bring sackcloth on all loins,
and baldness on every head

That fashion statement for punishment could stand a make-over, something to gussy it up a bit, something to match the concluding prophecy:

I will make it like the mourning for an only son,
and the end of it like a bitter day.
The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD,
when I will send a famine on the land;
not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the LORD.
They shall wander from sea to sea,
and from north to east;
they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD,
but they shall not find it.

Do not let the details of punishment distract you from noticing the behavior, which according to Amos, deserves such dire consequences:

Hear this, you that trample on the needy,
and bring to ruin the poor of the land,
saying, "When will the new moon be over
so that we may sell grain;
and the sabbath,
so that we may offer wheat for sale?
We will make the ephah small and the shekel great,
and practice deceit with false balances,
buying the poor for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals,
and selling the sweepings of the wheat."

Here this, Members of Congress, who bail out the banksters but exact fierce penalties from widows and orphans if they are undocumented, who reward hypocrites and adulterers but terminate talented soldiers if they dare tell you of their committed relationships.

Hear this, you who exact over 20 billion dollars a year in overdraft fees, but refuse to cap the salaries and bonuses of officers of your own financial institutions.

Et cetera.

Prophecy 101 is a breeze once you get the knack of it. But it is risky if you learn to do it well and come face to face, or youtube to eyeball, with those whose behavior you bewail.

Psalm 52

What a gem!

Do you have a boss who behaves like a tyrant? A mayor, or other elected official? An overpowering and evil family member? Send them a framed copy of Psalm 52 printed in Olde English Script.

Or better yet, use Psalm 52 to yell at God. She’s used to it, and it will make you feel much better to get the rage out of your system in a way that does not put you in yet further jeopardy.

However, don’t expect God to jump to honor your petition:

Oh, that God would demolish you utterly, *
topple you, and snatch you from your dwelling,
and root you out of the land of the living!

The psalm has you talking in the second person to the offender, not directly to God. This psalm intends God to be an eavesdropper until the very last verse, in which you speak to God:

I will give you thanks for what you have done *
and declare the goodness of your Name in the presence of the godly.

Caveat: beware of the smug self-righteousness into which this Psalm entices anyone who reads it:

But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God; *
I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever.

Don’t set you mouth to claim such a thing unless a trusted independent source can publicly certify your extra-virgin olive oil.

Colossians 1:15-28

Or as Quean Lutibelle would put it:

I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. I became its servant according to God's commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

Luke 10:38-42

I belong to the minority group put out with Jesus because of his rebuke of Martha. It’s easy enough for him as the guest and as a male never required to do housework, to dismiss Martha’s faithful domesticity, but does he himself not eat her food and enjoy the accommodation that she works to keep clean and orderly?! There is no McDonalds nor KY Fried Lamb establishment to which they might retreat so that all three could feast on conversation without let or hindrance.

True, even in this village all three could get to treasured conversation expeditiously if all three of them committed to clean the house, cook the meal, and wash up. Grab a mop, Jesus! It will enrich your conversation.

Theologian Carter Heyward has proclaimed, “Love with out justice is cheap. Sentimentality!”

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See also

• My Anglican Pages
  
• My Natter/BLOG
  

Sunday, July 11, 2010. Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

© 2010 by Louie Crew

Today’s Lections

The Collect

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.

Early in our marriage, but well after the ‘honeymoon’ was over, I realized how difficult it is to behave justly towards Ernest, given my own selfishness and my decades of learning how to mask it even from myself.

“Please tell me when I am not doing my fair share of the work of our life together,” I urged Ernest. “Tell me if I miss my turn to buy the gas, clean the bathroom, wash the dishes……”

“I don’t want to monitor your behavior,” he replied gently, “but only my own. I want you to take responsibility for yourself, and I will do my best to take responsibility for myself.”

Very likely God would like to say the same thing to us when we pray the collect today. The collect makes us sound so honorable. It implies we want to do what is right, but the collect sets us up with a ready excuse when we do not: “I asked God to show me what is right about….[women’s ordination, racial integration, lgbt marriage, undocumented citizens…….], but God never gave me a clear answer. I tried. I really did.”

“I don’t want to monitor your behavior and tell you what to do at every turn,” God might gently reply to our collect. “I will monitor my own behavior to see that I am generous and patient even to a fault. And I want you to take responsibility for yourself to be the same.”

Amos 7:7-17

Amos does not think of himself as a prophet but as a ‘herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees.” Prophecy is not his profession, as he sees it, but his faithful response to God’s command.

When we experience dramatic insight, it is often difficult to claim it as our own. Often it arrives as if revealed, from outside us.

In my classes on the Bible As Literature, I have often begun a class with a ‘wake-up’ exercise before getting into the meat of the day’s reading. In one such exercise, I begin by giving each student ten 3x5 index cards. “On every card, at the top right, use the same numeric code that only you will know as your own. End the numeric code with “M” or “F” to indicate your gender.

“Next, put on each card one of 10 things that are wrong with Newark (or Rutgers, or New Jersey, or the United States….). Do this quickly without editing your thoughts.”

As soon as students are no longer writing, I then ask them to rank items in their list, on a scale of 1 to 10, “1” being the most egregious or most urgent, “10” being the least egregious or least urgent.

When they have finished, I collect the cards, shuffle them, divide them into four stacks, and then give a stack to each of four groups of the students.

“This is Lesson One in Prophecy 101,” I explain.

“But we are not prophets,” I imagine many of them thinking. “We are merely students. I am a major in _____ (sycamore trees? Tending herds?)”

“Take your packet and write a monologue for God to use in speaking to Newark (or Rutgers, or New Jersey, or the United States….). Use the text on the cards as a prompt, but edit where you think you can make it more forceful or cogent as you imagine God might say it.”

Later we can look at any one of the biblical prophets and compare their own rhetorical strategies with those of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, or, as in today’s reading, Amos.

Many of the prophets do more than tell what is wrong; like Amos they name dire consequences to follow if the people do not repent. My students need no prompt to imagine dire consequences.

And many of the prophets, like Amos, get into trouble with those most indicted by their judgments.

In recalling this assignment, I find myself longing for an Amos or a Jeremiah to speak the truth to BP, Halliburton and Transocean about oil spills; for an Amos or a Jeremiah to speak the truth to all three branches of our federal government.

It is extremely important to us as Christians not merely to hunker in the security of our sycamore trees. Prophecy is not nearly so hard to understand as it is to do. Speaking truth to power takes courage, especially if you do it really well.

Prophesy! Prophesy!

Psalm 82

Psst! Be sure that someone sings the psalm in hopes that the congregation does not pay critical attention to the words of it. If you must say it instead of sing it, intone it so as to draw attention to your manner rather than to the theology.

Be grateful that this is mid-summer, and many will be on vacation.

Otherwise, you might risk letting far too many people notice that Scripture itself does not proclaim just one God, but a “council of heaven” where Yahweh “gives judgment in the midst of Gods.”

It is not altogether clear whom Yahweh addresses when he accuses, “How long will you judge unjustly and show favor to the wicked?” The nearest grammatical referent for “you” is “the gods” with him in the council of heaven. It appears these other gods have great power and they exercise it unfairly.

God then prophesies to these rival gods,

Now I say to you, 'You are gods, *
and all of you children of the Most High;

Nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, *
and fall like any prince.

For right now, there are many gods, but at the last judgment only one will survive?

As the French would say, “C’est tres interessant.”

Colossians 1:1-14

Elsewhere, Saint is quite outspoken that we are saved by faith, not by any good works, not by our obedience to the law. Here, as in many other places, he points to good works favorably, not as a means of grace, but as evidence that we have already received grace. Good works, according to Saint, are a very good measure of the Spirit at work within us.

Good works are the fruit of the Spirit.

Saint particularly rejoices in the strength of the Colossian Christians, who are “prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father.” Any present suffering is quite worth the costs when God has enabled us “to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”

General Theological Seminary included me in a 2009-2010 lecture series "Identity, Community and the Church." Specifically I was asked to compare the life of lgbts in The Episcopal Church now with the way that it was in 1974 when I founded Integrity. I tried to balance my personal experience with the corporate experience as more and more of us organized to share the good news of God’s love of absolutely everybody. I pointed to the steady additions of protections of lgbt persons now in the canons

I told of being laughed at by several on the switchboard at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in the summer of 1974 when I called asking them to put Ernest and me, recently wed, in touch with other gay Episcopalians. I described how that mockery, so clearly not of God, prompted me to start and organization and to name it Integrity, as a way to reclaim what the Church had violated.

I included details of some of the hostile responses through the years:

• I was accused by Bishop James Dees of causing a tornado in the tiny town where we lived. 1975
  
• The vestry of my own parish asked to find some other place of worship. 1975
  
• A GTS dean told me that my rector in Wisconsin bragged about his attacks on Ernest when they med on the street: “You are living in sin!” he would tell Ernest.
  
• A large apartment complex in Macon, Georgia denied housing to Ernest and me, as a federal investigator documented.
  
• Teenagers pelted our apartment in Fort Valley, GA with stones every spring….
  
• The Bishop of Atlanta summoned me for discipline using the Atlanta Journal.
  
• Vestries in Georgia and Wisconsin threatened me with excommunication.
  
• A dean at American University overruled the unanimous decision of AU’s search committee to hire me.
  
• A department secretary at Wisconsin mocked me to a scholar calling from California; a secretary in a dean’s office in Rutgers left an obscene phone call on my answering machine unaware that I had one of the first caller ids -- which identified the phone number of the dean‘s office……
  
• Bullies threatened to run over me when I jogged….

On and on the list could grow. Fortunately this hostility did not happen all at once, but was spread over three decades. But reMembering these narratives, I found myself rejoicing, in the same sense that Saint talks about the Colossian Christians, because like them, I have been “rescued … from the power of darkness and transferred … into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

In my head is a tape my family and my community in Alabama had prepared as the script for my life. In it I grow up to be a Southern Baptist preacher wielding a bible to thump everyone who does not live life as a good Southern Baptist. The tape is bestrewn with azaleas and whiteness. No person of color appears except an occasional servant….

I rejoice that God made me gay. Otherwise, very likely I would have dwelt in darkness without self-knowledge, unaware of the rich diversity of God‘s creation. Only by being cut off from presumptive hetero privilege was I challenged sufficiently to take on the hard, life-long work of my own education. Any hostility that I have endured because of my work as a gay Christian brings me immense joy as a “share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”

Luke 10:25-37

I was a part of the group of seven lgbt persons who met with the Archbishop of Canterbury when he attended the 2009 General Convention in Anaheim. Each of us had only 80 seconds to speak. I told him that I understood that as Jesus could not take on the Samaritan cause front and center as he brought the gospel to the Jews, the Archbishop probably could not take on the lgbt cause front and center as he serves the Communion. “But you, like Jesus,” I told him, have an obligation to pepper your conversation with reports of ‘good queers’ ‘good lesbians’, ‘good gay men’, who as the rejects of the Communion nevertheless live as faithful witnesses of what it is to ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Prophesy! Prophesy!

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See also

• My Anglican Pages
  
• My Natter/BLOG