Monthly Archives: February 2010

Homily for Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2010

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Ash Wednesday

February 17, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

I love beer. I love its crisp, cold taste. I love the carbonation and the hoppy-ness. I love the finish, the way my mouth feels and tastes after I’ve taken a good swig of a good brew. I especially love IPA’s—India Pale Ales for those of you who are not beer aficionados. Now, I don’t drink beer every day, but I’ve long enjoyed them as a way of relaxing after an intense day’s work. It’s something of a ritual to have beer with lunch on Sunday or after a vestry meeting. One of the great things about Madison is that you’re never far from a bar or restaurant where you can get a really good beer.

I’ve made quite a public display of my fasting this year. I’ve given up beer for Lent. I drank my last one, last night among friends, across the street at Barrique’s. Yes, it was an IPA, Bell’s two-hearted.  And for forty days, more actually, because I won’t abandon my fast on Sundays, as many people do, my lips will not savor the froth, hops, malt, and carbonation that I love so dearly.

For Episcopalians, Lent has long been a time when people give something up—often something like chocolate or beer that we love dearly. There are people who make jokes about what they give up—rutabagas was one I remember, or someone I know well who often claims to give up church for Lent. I’ve been rather amused today a Facebook friend who announced he was giving up Facebook for Lent early this morning but had posted again by 10:00. Well, he’s Baptist, or at least used to do. If you plan on giving something up, I hope you are more successful than he was this year. And if you are planning on it, you better decide quickly, if you haven’t yet, because here we are, it’s Ash Wednesday.

Of course, none of this is serious fasting. It’s not like devout Muslims for example, who fast from sunup to sundown during Ramadan, or those Christian monks and nuns who fast for long periods of time, or Jesus, who the gospels say fasted for forty days and nights.

So why do it at all? It’s a good question and deserves a serious answer. One way to think about it is see it as a matter of discipline and becoming more aware and conscious of our relationship with God, a consciousness increased by the reality that a common activity is abandoned for a time; that alternative choices have to be made. Another way to think about is that Lent is a time of reflection and repentance, not a time for celebration and joy. We have seasons of both in our liturgical year and it is not a bad thing to move back and forth between repentance and celebration, because each helps provide perspective on the other.

Given the public nature of my fasting; given the way many of us make ostentatious shows of our piety by having ashes put on our forehead, there is rich irony in the choice of lessons for today. We hear these words of Jesus each year on Ash Wednesday: when you pray, do not do as the hypocrites do; when you give alms, do not do as the hypocrites do; when you fast….

These lessons—the reading from Isaiah and the gospel challenge us at the very heart of our religiosity. They call into question not just the ashes that will be on our forehead, but our attendance at church, our pious kneeling, and bowing of our heads, and genuflection. They force us to ask ourselves why we do these things.

But an even greater challenge are the words I will use when I cross your forehead with my ashy thumb: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” They remind us of who we are and who God is. They remind us that God created us from dust and that one day our bodies will again be dust, in the language of the burial service: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The ashes on our forehead should not be understood as a display of piety but as a statement of our finitude and brokenness.

Perhaps more important still, they remind us that nothing we do can change who we are before God. As our creator, God knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows what lies behind our every act of piety or devotion, indeed God knows what lies in our heart. We may be able to deceive others or ourselves, but we cannot deceive God.

As I’ve thought about Ash Wednesday this year, and about Lent, the concluding prayer of the Good Friday liturgy keeps running through my head. It reads in part, “we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death.”

In the end, the ashes on our forehead remind us of our humanity and of God’s judgment of us, but that’s not the whole story. As we walk this pilgrim way of Lent, let us remember our finitude and brokenness, certainly, but let us also remember the love of God that became incarnate in Jesus Christ to show us what true and full humanity means, and restores us to fellowship with God. Thanks be to God.

It’s nice to be a by-stander to controversy occasionally

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I grew up Mennonite and graduated from Goshen College, a Mennonite school. While Mennonites are most familiar to larger American culture as people who have some strange habits and practices, especially with regard to dress and the like, in fact the branch of the tradition from which I come had abandoned most of those peculiarities by the time I came along. What it hadn’t abandoned was the central conviction that at the heart of the Gospel and Jesus’ ministry was a commitment to his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, especially the commitment to peace. What that meant was that young Mennonite men who were drafted in WWI and refused to bear arms were court-martialed and sentenced to hard labor at Ft. Leavenworth. By WWII, there were alternatives for conscientious objectors and many Mennonites did alternative service in mental hospitals, national parks, and the like. Mennonites have often been vilified by other Americans for their refusal to participate in America’s wars. This was especially true when the enemy was Germany, and many Mennonites still spoke German.

Goshen College recently made public its decision to play the National Anthem at athletic events for the first time in its 114-year history. To outsiders, it may seem like a tempest in a teapot, but in fact Goshen is one of the Mennonite Church’s key institutions and something of a bellwether. You can read about the decision here. There is an online petition here. It is a controversy that goes to the heart of Mennonite self-identity and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I left the Mennonite Church twenty years ago but retain deep affection for the tradition and have friendships with many Mennonites. My theology is shaped profoundly by the Anabaptist and Mennonite tradition and my teachers at Goshen College. When I return to the church of my childhood and encounter contemporary evangelical style worship, I long for the four-part a capella hymns we used to sing and the simpler ways of forty years ago. In spite of the long journey I’ve traveled, I seem to want the church and college of my past to remain where they were, fixed in time and fixed theologically.

Such feelings are common. People who grew up Episcopalian and may only attend services on Christmas and Easter often tell me that they miss the language and liturgy of the 1928 prayer book. They expect and want the church of their childhood to remain what it was, in the midst of a rapidly changing world.

Sermon for the Last Sunday after Epiphany

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Transfiguration

Grace Church

Last Epiphany, 2010

February 14, 2010

I’m sure that by now most of you have seen or heard about the article from this week’s Isthmus about the homeless shelter. If not, it’s posted in the back and is available online. I urge all of you to read it. I knew it was coming out; I wasn’t quite sure when it would appear, and I certainly had no idea of the content. But Thursday morning I got up around early and was working on a couple of projects. I kept checking their website to see if anything was on line. Then I saw the cover and the headline: “Bleak House: Grace Episcopal’s homeless shelter is a dispiriting place.” And my heart sank. I still had no idea what was in the article, so when I came to the church, I stopped by Barrique’s to see if they had copies of this week’s issue yet. I went to the office and read the article.

I’ve preached about the shelter a good bit already in the months I’ve been here and if you visit my blog, you’ll read more of my ruminations. Seven months is not a long time to develop a perspective on one’s ministry in a new place, but it has become clear to me that right now, a good bit of my job is going to be involved in the issue of homelessness. I didn’t expect that, and I’ve had more than one parishioner say to me that they wished I hadn’t already gotten so involved in it.

I wished I hadn’t as well. I certainly didn’t expect it. Coming in, I suppose I thought that having a homeless shelter, run by an outside organization, would give me a little cache, my ministry a little edginess, without actually having to be very involved.

But I quickly learned that wouldn’t be enough. As winter came on, and as I walked past the line-up night after night, I began to be more and more troubled by what I saw, more concerned about what I heard, more passionate about what was going on. And I learned that there were others who were also becoming more involved and more passionate. Perhaps we are close to achieving critical mass. I don’t know.

The headline on the article was troubling. I immediately shot an email off to the author to complain about it, and he assured me that there would be a clarification in the next issue. For better or worse, it’s not “our” shelter. We rent space to Porchlight, but of course we bear responsibility as Christians for the treatment of the guests and for the kind of hospitality that is shared there.

The shelter is a reflection on us as a church. The conditions in it, the treatment of the guests by Porchlight, all say something about how we understand and live out our call to be Christ’s body here. That’s why that headline should bother us. My first reaction was quite natural, to get defensive, to attack the messenger. Perhaps yours was as well. Unfortunately, there’s a great deal of truth in that headline: the shelter is a dispiriting place. I hear it almost every day from the men who stay there and we at Grace share in the responsibility for what it has become over the years.

Again, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not placing blame or criticizing the past clerical or lay leadership of Grace, nor Grace’s membership. I’m not interested in exploring or analyzing the history of the relationship between Grace and Porchlight. I learned quickly that Grace is a complex institution that requires a great deal of energy, time, and commitment to keep going. We can’t do everything that needs to be done. We don’t have the resources: financial, human, spiritual, to do everything. So people have to make difficult choices about where to spend money, where to invest time and talent. You might have called a rector whose passion for the gospel and ministry lay elsewhere and would have focused her energies and your attention on different projects. Instead, you called me.

The story broke as I was thinking about my sermon for today and beginning to look ahead to Lent. As I pondered Luke’s gospel for today and thought about the situation of the shelter guests I remembered the quotation from Matthew’s gospel that I was quoted as referring to in the article: The church’s job, I said, is to clothe the naked and feed the hungry. I was alluding to Matthew 25 to the parable of the sheep and goats, and Jesus words’ “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” I’m perfectly comfortable thinking about encountering the face of Christ in the homeless, the hungry, in victims of violence and oppression, even in the faces of those suffering in Haiti. Yet I wonder whether my comfort is too comfortable, whether I fully understand what it means to encounter Christ in those faces.

I’ve said repeatedly these past weeks that Epiphany is a season during which we celebrate God’s glory and presence in the world, and above all the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who makes God’s glory and presence manifest in himself. The season of Epiphany always ends with a reading of the gospel story of the transfiguration, that eerie, otherworldly encounter of Jesus with Elijah and Moses on top of a mountain.

I’ve never found this story particularly compelling, probably because I’m not generally fond of those stories that emphasize Jesus’ divine nature or his miraculous powers and this one has nothing to redeem itself like the healing of someone who is blind or deaf or possessed. Instead, it seems to be all about the divine and kind of gratuitous at that, with the appearance of Elijah and Moses.

That might seem to contradict much of what I said last week about experiencing God, as Isaiah did in his vision, as Paul did on the road to Damascus, and as Peter did in the miraculous catch of fish. Each of them was transformed by the experience, each was humbled, each was called. They were other-wordly experiences. The difference, it seems to me, is that in the transfiguration we have two odd and unbelievable events—the first is the transformation of Jesus. Luke doesn’t call it transfiguration, saying only that the appearance of his face changed and his clothes became dazzling white. The second event was the sudden appearance of Moses and Elijah.

The Transfiguration confronts us directly with the problem and the mystery of Jesus Christ’s divinity. But it does so in a curious way. On other occasions, with the miracles, for example, the demonstration of Jesus’ power is on behalf of someone else, to heal them, to restore them. In this case, the demonstration of Jesus’ divinity is for no reason, or perhaps only to show forth Jesus’ divinity.

But to focus only on what happens to Jesus is to miss some of the significance of the story. Luke’s version is unique in several respects. First, only Luke mentions what the three talked about—“Jesus’ departure.” Literally, the Greek reads “exodus.” So not only are we put in mind of the children of Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness by the presence of Moses and the mountaintop setting; there is a connection here as well. And of course it is important that even in the context of a transcendent event like this, we are reminded of what is to come, of the cross and Jesus’ suffering. Another important point made by Luke is in the description of the disciples. It’s not at all clear what is meant here. The NRSV reads “they were weighed down with sleep, but since they were awake they saw his glory. Again, one is put in mind of Gethsemane, and of the same three disciples in Luke, sleeping, because of grief. In the midst of this glory, we have a foreshadowing of the cross.

Indeed, just a few verses along in the gospel, Luke will write: “And Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem.”  It’s a journey we will be walking with him in the coming weeks—the journey to Jerusalem. Lent is a time of reflection, penitence, and preparation for Easter. The glory of Christ that we experience in the resurrection, the glory of Christ of which we have a foretaste today in the story of the Transfiguration, is also the glory of the cross.

Lent has been most often seen as a time for individual focus and reflection, an opportunity for each of us to deepen our relationship with Jesus Christ. It is appropriate, however, that we thank of it as a communal experience as well, that our journey is not one we make alone, but with our brothers and sisters in Christ. It is fitting, then, that as part of our Lenten devotion in the coming weeks, we reflect together on our shared responsibility for Madison’s homeless. I would like to begin that process of reflection by inviting you to join me next Sunday at 8:45 in the library for an initial conversation. I don’t know where that conversation will lead us but I pray that together we will discern where God is leading us.

Peter wanted to build booths on the mountain so that he and the other disciples could continue to bask in the glory of the presence of Moses, Elijah, and the transfigured Christ. He wanted to linger there, as we want to linger in the joy and glory of Epiphany. But the memory of this event will have to suffice for a time, as we make our way through Lent toward Easter and the greater glory of the sorrow and suffering of the Cross transformed into Easter.

Bleak House: Grace Episcopal’s Homeless Shelter a dispiriting place

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That’s the headline I woke up to this morning. Here’s a link to the front page. Rather dispiriting, don’t you think? I shot an email off to the author of the article before reading it; it wasn’t yet on the website. By the time I got to the office, copies of The Isthmus were available. The article by Joe Tarr was well-researched, well-written, and balanced. He spent a night in the shelter to get some first-hand experience of what goes on there.

In a return email, Joe assured me they would make a clarification in next week’s issue, but anyone reading the article would quickly realize that the shelte is run by Porchlight, not us; and that it is ours only because we rent the space.

Still, part of the headline is true. The shelter is a dispiriting place, and we need to shoulder some of the responsibility for that.

There is a great deal of energy bubbling up in the downtown area around the issue of homelessness and the shelter and I am very hopeful that there will be some substantive changes. Several innovative ministries and outreach programs have developed recently and the growing concern over conditions in the drop-in shelter may lead to some change there too.

veils, mirrors, and faces

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I’m working on my sermon for this Sunday, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany. The gospel is always the story of the Transfiguration. This year we hear Luke’s version, which is notable because it does not use the word transfiguration. Luke says only that “the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Lk. 9:29). While Luke refers to Jesus’ face, both Exodus and Paul talk about a veil. Moses needs a veil to protect himself when he approached and talked with God. Paul uses that image to draw a contrast between the direct experience of the believer with God.

It puts me in mind of another image from Paul. In I Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face.”

I’ve been reading Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. Traherne was a seventeenth-century Anglican priest who wrote extensively. Little of what he wrote was published in his lifetime and manuscripts have been found within the last decade. The Centuries of Meditation were discovered in a used bookshop in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

I came across this in the Centuries yesterday:

O let me so long eye Thee, till I be turned into Thee, and look upon me till Thou art formed in me, that I may be a mirror of Thy brightness, an habitation of thy Love, and a temple of Thy glory. That all Thy Saints might live in me, and I in them: enjoying all their felicities, joys and treasures.” 63

I hope to write more extensively and seriously on Traherne at some point, but I’m intrigued by that statement “O let me so long eye thee till I be turned into thee.”

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In the Year the King Uzziah died

Grace Church

Epiphany 5, 2010

February 7, 2010

The liturgical calendar moves on. We are nearing the end of Epiphany and already the staff is looking ahead to Lent—we are busily putting the final preparations to the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper, working on bulletins for Ash Wednesday and nailing down the final pieces of our Lenten programming. Tomorrow, I will be heading off for a two-day clergy retreat. I don’t know what they are like in this diocese, but in Upper South Carolina, our January or February retreat was clearly a pre-lenten retreat; it was designed for us to prepare spiritually for the season, so that in turn we might nurture the spiritual lives of those in our care.

I’m looking ahead to Lent, but we’ve still got two Sundays in Epiphany to get through and both of them have as their scriptural focus peak spiritual experiences. You have already heard me criticize the editors of the lectionary for various decisions they make, and no doubt I will make similar comments from time to time. They were more than occasionally ham-handed in the way they dealt with scriptural texts and injudicious in their editing. Still, on this fifth Sunday after Epiphany in Year C, they got it exactly right.

The season of Epiphany offers us the opportunity to reflect on God’s presence among us; God’s presence in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, but also the ways in which God manifests Godself in the world and in our lives. The Psalms are full of reminders of God’s glory—“The heavens declare the glory of God” our hymns of praise repeatedly have us singing about the glory of God. We read about that glory in the story of the wedding at Cana and in the coming of the magi.

In today’s lesson from Isaiah, we hear one of the most familiar, and most transcendent experiences of God’s glory in all of the biblical tradition. The prophet Isaiah has a vision, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lofty.” It is so important to the biblical tradition that the song the seraphim sing has become our song in the Eucharistic liturgy. For many scholars of religion, the vision described by Isaiah and his response to that vision, have become something of a paradigm for understanding religious experience in general, not just Jewish or Christian.

Isaiah describes a vision in such vivid detail that it may seem to us as if we are with him in the temple. He claims to see God, but the vision itself is of God’s throne and a being so vast that the hem of God’s robe filled the temple. Seraphim were in attendance, flying and singing. As Isaiah looked on, he felt the temple shake as if it were in an earthquake and the temple itself filled with smoke.

Isaiah’s response to that awesome vision was to recognize the vast gulf that divided him from God. He described himself as lost, a man of unclean lips, unable to perform the tasks to which God might be calling him. It is an experience similar to the one we heard the prophet Jeremiah describe in last week’s reading from Hebrew Scripture: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah’s response to God’s words is to protest, “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” But God insists and reassures Jeremiah, just as God reassured Isaiah, that God would put words in the prophets’ mouths.

Paul described a very different sort of experience in I Corinthians 15, the experience of the risen Christ. It is one of the key passages in all of Paul’s writings, a key passage for understanding Paul and a key passage for understanding New Testament Christianity. Paul cites for his readers a long list of all those who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He seems to be saying, if you can’t take my word for it, here’s a list of everyone to whom the risen Lord appeared, go talk to them. The accounts of the encounters with the Risen Christ in the gospels as here in Paul seem unable to explain the radical transformation that took place; changing a rag-tag bunch of disciples into a group of men and women who took the gospel to the ends of the earth. That’s the important point.

As with Isaiah and Jeremiah, what matters is not so much the experience itself, it is the response. Isaiah and Jeremiah became spokesmen for God, prophets of Yahweh, and Paul’s experience of the Risen Christ was also a call, as he says in Galatians. In fact, the language of Jeremiah echoes in Paul’s understanding of his own call: “But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased 16to reveal his Son to me.” For Paul the appearance of the Risen Christ to him was less significant for affecting his conversion than it was in establishing his authority as one of the apostles.

Speaking of which, the gospel story of Jesus calling the disciples is easily the least dramatic of all of the call narratives we have before us today. Jesus is by the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The crowds pressing in upon him, he seeks refuge from them in Simon Peter’s boat and teaches from that place. When he concludes, he tells Peter to put his nets back in the water, and there is a miraculous catch of fish. Jesus uses this to invite Peter, and the others, to follow him, and thus they become Jesus’ disciples and, to use the words of our gospel, “fishers of people.”

So Peter, Paul, and Isaiah each had pretty spectacular things happen to them, and their response in the end was to set about on the tasks that God had given them, to respond to God’s call.

I mentioned in my sermon last Sunday that one of the challenges facing Grace today, indeed one of the challenges facing Christianity as a whole, is the lessening importance of religion as a factor in people’s lives. A series of surveys has shown the growing number of people who identify themselves as belonging to no religion. Often, when this answer is probed, respondents mention that they are “spiritual, not religious” that they have spiritual lives, even nurture them, but they do that outside of traditional religion. My guess is that for at least some of you, something similar is true. You may come to church, but if asked to describe spiritual experiences, you might mention something that had no connection with traditional worship or life in community.

I have no doubt that those of you who fall into that category have authentic spiritual lives. In some respects we have been culturally programmed over the last two centuries to seek spiritual experiences outside of traditional religious institutions. Many of us might find ourselves as likely to pursue meditation practices that have more in common with Buddhist techniques than with traditional Christian forms of prayer.

Even more important than the “spiritual not religious” idea is the notion that we are seekers, each of us in some way on some sort of spiritual journey or quest. From time to time, we may find ourselves in pursuit of deeper and more fulfilling spiritual experiences, trying to quench a thirst that never seems to end. We might desire ever greater highs without taking the time to understand them or their effects on us. For most of us such quests are deeply individualistic, often occurring entirely in solitude.

As we come to the end of the season of Epiphany and begin to look toward Lent, making a connection between the experiences of the sort we read about in today’s scriptures and the hard work of deepening our faith, may be what binds Epiphany and Lent together. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Paul did not satisfy themselves with the religious high of their experience. For it was not just a high, it was also a low. Each of them responded to the glory of God with an awareness of their own finitude and inadequacy and each of them came out of their experience on fire to do God’s work in the world.

The quest for spiritual experience is not enough. Our communal worship, the Eucharist, and our individual experiences may be ways of encountering God, but we should never allow them to become ends in themselves. Our lessons make the case that spiritual experience should lead to a sense of call and mission, a new awareness not just of our finitude or even a deeper sense of our relationship with God. As we end Epiphany and look ahead to Lent and Jesus’ journey toward Jerusalem and the cross, may our experience of the glory of Christ become strength and nourishment for the journey ahead.

More on Holy Women, Holy Men

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I’ve continued to think about my reaction to Holy Women, Holy Men. My earlier post is here. It was initiated on Friday when I went on Episcopal Cafe and found no mention of the Martyrs of Japan and instead a quotation from a work on Anne Hutchinson. I think I’ve figured it out. I’ve not read it carefully. It’s not available in print and I haven’t been interested enough to go back to the materials presented at General Convention. So, my only exposure to it is through Episcopal Cafe.

Speaking to the Soul provides no historical context for Williams and Hutchinson, no discussion of what influenced them. There’s nothing that would help a non-expert make any sense of their relation to Anglicanism, why they are worth commemorating, and how their commemoration might enrich our current life as a communion.

To me, that reeks of arrogance–assuming that anyone who is of interest religiously or spiritually is inherently worth recognizing by Anglicans and worth coopting.

Granted, I come to this as someone from an outsider background whose academic specialty was religious outsiders. Still, I think it more hubris than humility to pay lipservice to the diversity within Christianity without acknowledging it, and without acknowledging the deep differences that persist between the Anglican tradition and others, like the Baptists, of whom Williams was one of the leading lights.

Holy Women, Holy Men

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I suspect I posted something on this last summer in the run-up to General Convention. There is a major revision in the works for Lesser Feasts and Fasts, which is the liturgical book dealing with commemorations of the saints and other notable figures in the history of Christianity and the history of the Episcopal Church. There has been some debate about the inclusion of this or that figure (John Muir, who wasn’t a conventional Christian by any stretch of the imagination), people who left Anglicanism for the Roman Catholic Church, like John Henry Newman, and many more.

My sense when I first looked through Holy Women, Holy Men was that it was something of a politically-correct attempt to acknowledge everyone who has made an important, or not so important, contribution to contemporary religion and culture. There are two aspects of it that deeply bother me. First, the expansion of commemorations. One of the things the Protestant Reformation did was simplify the religious calendar, removing the commemorations of many saints from the annual ritual year. Now we are back where we were in the Middle Ages. Perhaps that’s not so bad, but on the other hand a proliferation of commemorations might lead to the lessening importance of the whole enterprise.

Secondly, I am deeply concerned about what I suppose I should call religious imperialism. One of my most memorable moments from the time I spent teaching History of Christianity in an Episcopal Seminary was when a student commented after our discussion of Erasmus, “He was an Anglican.”

Well, no.  He wasn’t an Anglican, he remained a Catholic and died one. As I was reading on Episcopal Cafe the entry on Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson yesterday, I sensed the same thing. To adopt or assimilate members of other denominations or Christian traditions, or even from other religious traditions, seems to me rather arrogant. Williams challenged not only the Puritan orthodoxy of colonial New England, he would have been equally vocal against the Church of England. To learn from and respect those who would have had deep disagreements with Anglicanism is one thing, to place them in our ritual calendar is quite another.

I presume the goal is to honor their contribution and their faith; but how can we do that authentically by eliding the deep differences between themselves and us?

The Martyrs of Japan, 1597

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February 5 (in the “old” calendar of the Episcopal Church) commemorates the Martyrs of Japan, Franciscans who were crucified in an act that marked the beginning of the end of the remarkable expansion of Christianity in sixteenth-century Japan.

Few American Christians, especially non-Catholics, are aware of the missionary expansion of Christianity across the world in the sixteenth century. Perhaps that expansion is best exemplified by St. Francis Xavier, a Jesuit who was one of Ignatius Loyola’s first companions and who took up the missionary enterprise when Ignatius himself was unable to do so. He traveled first to the Portuguese colony of Goa in India, then to the Philippines, and finally to Japan. He died as he was preparing a voyage to China.

Christian missionaries met with great success in Japan. It’s estimated that by the end of the sixteenth century, there were some 300,000 Christians. Unfortunately, competition between the religious orders and conflict between Spain and Portugal contributed to the ultimate rejection of Christianity by the Japanese state and Christianity’s virulent suppression. Part of the story is told brilliantly in the novel Silence, by Shusaku Endo.

Perhaps most remarkably, in spite of intense persecution, Christianity went underground and survived in Japan. Indeed, when Japan was forced open in the 1850s and European missionaries arrived, they encountered small groups of Christians who had maintained their faith through the centuries. Some of them adopted the Christianity they now encountered, others maintained the faith and practice that had evolved during the centuries of persecution. Their story is told in a moving documentary Otalya: Japan’s Hidden Christians.

Can we talk?

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I’ve been in Madison for over six months now, and one of the things I’ve learned is that agencies, organizations, even communities of faith don’t talk together. For example, there is apparently no structure for clergy to meet regularly and share information and support one another. Presumably, this is done on the denominational level. Certainly we Episcopalians meet regularly. But even though Grace is within three or four blocks of two Lutheran churches, a United Methodist church, and a Catholic church, I have met only one other member of the downtown clergy.

What that means is that it is difficult to find out what other churches are doing, especially in terms of social services. Are we duplicating one another’s efforts? Are there ways we might cooperate on larger projects? Such questions can’t be asked because there is no one to whom one might ask them.

Take homelessness for example. It turns out there are conversations going around all over the downtown area, that involve homeless men and women, clergy, social service providers, and advocates. At these conversations many of the same topics come up: conditions in the drop-in shelter, the availability of social services, etc. People want to mobilize to do something, but the first thing they think of is to develop a new program or organization. It might be better to broaden the conversations and above all, gather the data about programs and problems.

To that end, we at Grace have done something fairly simple–compile a list of meal programs in the downtown area. Sure, such lists exist, but when we began to compare the list with the programs that homeless men and women actually know about, the list suddenly became much longer. So here’s what we’ve come up with: Free Services.

What surprises me most is that more than 25 years ago, when I was doing Field Education at a downtown church in Boston, one of my jobs was to create a roster of services provided by downtown churches, and to develop a way for those churches to communicate what they were doing with one another. Perhaps such efforts took place in Madison’s past, but today, we churches are the proverbial “left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.”

To be honest, I have reached out to other clergy and most of those whom I have contacted have been welcoming and gracious in their response. So perhaps we have the opportunity of turning things around.