No really.
I was at an ecumenical meeting earlier this week that usually begins with some sort of round-robin check-in for all of the board members. This time, the chair asked us to respond to the question, “What is saving your life right now?” I was second in line, so I didn’t have much time to think about the question, and when my turn came, all I could muster was, “the Gospel of John.” Continue reading
We’ve all been thinking and talking and some of us have been writing a great deal about guns in the past few months. This week, with signs that various gun-control bills will be debated in congress, guns are even more in the news. Since Newtown, I have been thinking about guns, reflecting on my own experience with them, and my own attitudes about them.
Others have written eloquently about the cultural divide between gun owners and non gun owners, about the relationship between guns and masculinity, about the culture of fear that seems to lie behind much of the demand for high-powered weapons. As I’ve read, listened, and reflected over the past months, I came to realize how very different things are today than in the world I was raised.
I grew up in small-town middle America. I grew up among farmers and hunters, although no one in my immediate family was either. I have shot a gun exactly one time. I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I know I was younger than thirteen. We were visiting my grandmother on the farm and for some reason, my uncle took a couple of my sisters and I out behind the barn. He had his rifle, put up a bulls-eye target on a fence and showed us how to shoot. I aimed and fired and missed everything because of my poor eyesight. That was it.
Like most rural dwellers, my uncle had a rifle (and a shotgun, if memory serves me correctly). He used it to kill pests around the farm and after he died, my aunts kept the rifle and told stories over the years about going after groundhogs that took up residence around the house. There were hunters among my classmates at school; the first day of deer season meant a few more absences than usual, but even they were relatively few. By and large, at that time, in that community, guns were a tool used for controlling pests. They weren’t regarded as protection and even those of us who didn’t own them had internalized basic rules about gun safety–they weren’t to be played with; they were meant to be kept under lock and key.
Fifteen years or so after that target shooting, I was visiting my in-laws in South Georgia. I remember getting in a pick-up truck with someone as they moved a pistol from the cluttered seat so I could sit down. It was the first time I had seen a handgun in any other context than being carried by a law enforcement officer. I was struck then by the nonchalant attitude toward having a handgun in one’s vehicle. I was also deeply affected by the thought that such weapons might have been commonplace. We would later joke that when we moved to the South from Boston, we were moving to a much more violent culture.
That same uncle who showed me how to shoot a rifle had been a conscientious objector during World War II. He also told me one of the most famous stories in American Mennonite history–the Hochstetler massacre. During the so-called French and Indian War, a raiding party attacked the Hochstetler homestead but the father, Jacob, refused to allow his sons to shoot at the attackers. Eventually, several family members were killed and others taken captive. Jacob, the father escaped on his own and two of his sons were released after several years of captivity.
This week, we’ve heard stories about the horrors created by the ubiquity of guns. A four-year old boy killed his uncle’s wife last weekend as the uncle, a sheriff’s deputy, was showing his weapons collection to a relative. Megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s son committed suicide using a weapon he purchased illegally over the internet.
There is a great deal of cultural commentary about the ubiquity of guns in American society, about the pervasive violence in our culture, about our tolerance for horrific events like the two I just cited. There are also deep fissures that divide us on this as on so many other issues. It seems to me that a society willing to tolerate regular occurrences such as the accidental killing last weekend, a society willing to suffer mass shootings like Newtown, is a society that is deeply dysfunctional. If we can’t take rational steps to balance the safety of our populace with the freedoms we enjoy, we will continue to hear stories like those I mentioned. Most of us don’t even realize the human cost of easy access to weapons. In Utah, for example, 89% of the gun deaths in 2011 were suicides. In fact, there were more gun deaths by suicide than traffic fatalities in Utah that year.
Bishop Edward Konieczny of the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma wrote this week about his own experiences with gun violence and his evolving attitude toward the ubiquity of guns. A former police officer who has a concealed carry permit, Bishop Konieczny has this to say:
By acknowledging the complex part that guns and gun violence have played in my own life, I have come to understand that it is possible, and reasonable even, to be both inured to and incapacitated by violence.
This happens to us as individuals, and it can happen to us as a society. We get used to living with something because we cannot bear the raw emotions we would have to confront to change it.
Adam Gopnik writes:
And so the real argument about guns, and about assault weapons in particular, is becoming not primarily an argument about public safety or public health but an argument about cultural symbols. It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power.
It will be interesting to see how the debate in Congress proceeds.
Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
As though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
Equally, smilingly, proudly,
Like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectation of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!
The Dietrich Bonhoeffer home page is here. A recent essay from the New York Review of Books on Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi
This week’s reading from Acts is the story of Paul’s encounter with the Risen Christ on the Road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-6). It’s a story that has come to define Christian experience especially in Evangelical Christianity. It’s not just the importance of conversion but the importance of a dramatic conversion, a complete reversal. John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” describes it in one way, “I once was lost, but now I’m found.” In Evangelicalism, even that can’t describe how dramatic conversion is expected to be, a turnaround from a dissipate life to a life in Christ.
Luke describes Paul’s experience in these terms. There are two versions in Acts, the one in chapter 9 and also a version put in Paul’s mouth in Acts 22:3-16. It is from the former account that the interesting details come: the road to Damascus, the blindness.
Interestingly, Paul also gives accounts of his story. One of the most important is in Galatians 1. There, Paul offers a different account of what happens after the encounter than that given by Luke. More importantly perhaps, he also uses different imagery to understand his experience. For Paul, it’s not a conversion but a 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, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles (Galatians 1:15-16)
Paul uses language that draws on call narratives of Hebrew prophets. Compare Jeremiah 1:5:
‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
Paul’s experience as constructed by Luke has shaped Christianity as well as popular culture. Christians have sought to understand and construct their experience to conform to the model of a dramatic conversion and if they’ve never experienced Christ in that way, they wonder whether their faith is truly authentic. And if they’ve never lived a dissolute life, if they’ve been raised in Christianity and consistently attended services, it’s pretty hard to have an evil past from which to convert.
Conversion is real for many people, but it’s not the only, nor even the normative category for thinking about the Christian life. If Paul understood what happened to him as God calling him in a new direction, so can we. There are times when Paul looks back on his past and sees evil but he can also boast about who he was:
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. (Phil 3:4-6)
This week’s reading, and Paul’s experience, invite us to think about how we understand our own lives in Christ and to explore imagery that helps us name that experience and invites us into deeper relationship with the One who knows us and calls us by name.
(I’ve previously reflected on Paul’s conversion here).
The gospel for the Second Sunday of Easter is always the story of the Risen Christ’s appearance to Thomas with its themes of doubt and faith. Most of us want our spiritual lives to be comfortable, our faith certain. Unfortunately, it’s seldom quite like that. Doubt is real. It can be debilitating and lead to despair. It can also lead to deeper faith. Sometimes it leads to more doubt. Thomas’ disbelief did not prevent him from an encounter with the Risen Christ; when that occurred, his doubt was transformed into faith. It’s important to recognize the role doubt can have within the life of faith, something theologians, mystics, and ordinary Christians have known and experienced for themselves over the centuries. As St. Augustine said, “I believe, help my unbelief!”
Some contemporary reflections on the role of doubt in faith (and on the need to doubt doubt):
Because in our world, much removed from theirs, none have seen as Thomas did. And while coming to belief can be a joyous, full-of-conviction experience—it can also be a rocky road filled with various potholes and doubts.
From Christian Wiman:
“Live long enough in secular culture, long enough to forget that it is secular culture, and at some point religious belief becomes preposterous to you. Atavistic. Laughable. I know this was true for me. Never mind that many of my favorite writers were quite obviously religious–Simone Weil, Marilynne Robinson, T.S. Eliot, George Herbert–or that I retained some intellectual respect for the “intellectual” side of Christianity…still, the idea of giving my inchoate feelings of faith some actual content, never mind the thought of attending a church, this seemed not only absurd to me but an obvious weakness. To be a Christian was to flinch from contingency and death, both of which were the defining realities of contemporary life. To be a Christian was death for art, which depends on an attitude of openness and unknowingness (never mind the irony of an imperative of opennness and unknowningness). It took a radical disruption of my life to allow me to see the sanity and vitality of this strange, ancient thing. There was no bolt-from-the-blue revelation or conversion or any of that. My old ideas simply were not adequate for the extremes of joy and grief that I experienced, but when I looked at my life through the lens of Christianity–or, more specifically, through the lens of Christ, as much of Christianity seemed (and still seems) uselessly absurd to me–it made sense. The world made sense. This distance between culture and Christ seems like a modern phenomenon, but I think it’s probably always been the case. Even when Christianity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not. There is always some leap into what looks like absurdity, and there is always, for the one who makes that leap, some cost.”
Reviews of Wiman’s memoir are here.
From Lauren Winner:
I didn’t really know, even when writing the book, that many Christian communities in times gone by would have said “Oh, this is normal, this dark night of the soul, this doubt. This is part of the expected choreography of a Christian life.” If I had known that, while writing Still, there probably would have been a chapter: “dark night choreopgrahy,” or somesuch.
From Ryan Dueck:
I recently read a delightful little book by Rainer Maria Rilke called Letters to a Young Poet. In one of his letters to a certain “Mr. Kappus,” Rilke offers these wise words about the nature and purpose of doubt.:
And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don’t give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers—perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.
In other words, make sure that you include “doubt” in the category of things that you doubt. Demand answers from doubt. Press it, interrogate it, require an account for the privileged status it is so often assumes for itself. Insist that it justify its presuppositions, ask it to construct in addition to the much easier task of deconstructing. And, above all, remember that there are higher goals for a human life than doubt. It can be useful, yes, even essential in the building and maintaining of a life; but it must be disciplined and trained. It must be reminded frequently of its limits and of its value as one tool among (many) others in the task of becoming a genuinely human being.
On this Friday after Easter, I’ve been pondering the resurrection. Perhaps because it’s because I was working in the garden this morning and was amused by the images I encountered. Up by the house, there was still snow and two inches of ice on the path that goes around the side of the house. In the front yard, crocuses are blooming and the daffodils will be very soon. Overhead, a lonely sandhill crane flew and called.
We were cleaning up after a long and very snowy winter. Signs of new life were all around; the bulbs shooting up through the mulch; buds on the trees. But there was also a lot of death and decay. We removed branches that had broken under the weight of ice and snow. There are still some evergreen branches that we can’t deal with because they are frozen in bent the lingering snow and ice.
I’m not sure I saw Jesus Christ in the garden today, unlike Mary Magdalene on Easter. Perhaps a sandhill crane and a robin searching for food on a snowy bank will have to do. And my muscles’ aching after several hours of work remind me of the frailty of my aging body. But the very physical reality of how I spent my time today, the very physicality of the soil, decayed plant material and the new life that is springing up around it is a reminder that the physical world matters in Christianity and that the resurrection of the body matters, too.
I’m not preaching on Sunday but the gospel is one of my favorite texts–the story of Jesus’ appearance to Thomas. It’s wonderful because it faces head on our doubts as well as our faith. Thomas gets a bad rap in the tradition; “Doubting Thomas” he is called. But his refusal to take others’ words for Jesus’ resurrection is not that different than any of the other disciples; Peter and the Beloved Disciple run to the tomb to make sure when Mary Magdalene tells them it’s empty. Thomas expresses what we would all express when he refuses to believe unless he can see it for himself.
A couple of other things to point out in the story: First, although he demanded that he touch Jesus’ wounds, he doesn’t actually touch them; seeing was enough. Second, his confession, “My Lord and my God” is in many ways the gospel’s climax. It’s the clearest confession by any of the disciples of the identity of Jesus Christ and God. Although Jesus had been talking about it throughout the gospel, it’s not apparent that anyone understood what he meant until this point.
Some others’ reflections on the resurrection of the body. From Greg Carey, “Bodies Matter:”
Whatever we believe about the nature of resurrection — how it works, whether the language is metaphorical — early Christians insisted that the resurrection involves bodies.
Very early in Christian history, some believers argued that the Savior could not have inhabited a real human body. Bodies, they argued, come with problems. We all get sick, experience limitations, decay and eventually die. Therefore, what matters is not the body but the spirit. These “docetists” believed Jesus only appeared to be human and to die.
The larger church rejected the docetic view. Bodies are important, the church testifies. When we say the Apostles’ Creed, we do not say, “I believe in the immortality of the soul”; we say, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” To put it simply, we believe that God redeems all of creation. The resurrection embraces all of who we are, body and soul. Indeed, it’s probably a mistake to think of body and soul as separate categories. Bodies matter.
From Sam Wells: Easter and the resurrection of the body tie together forgiveness of sins and everlasting life:
But the resurrection of the body is about us as well as about Jesus. Remember where I began: there is no such thing as the present tense. Well, there isn’t any present tense if there is no forgiveness and no life everlasting. But if there is forgiveness – if the past is a gift – and if there is everlasting life – if the future is our friend – then we really can live, we really can exist, we really are a new creation. Every detail of our lives is then precious and meaningful, rather than passing and pitiful or feeble and futile.
This is our present – God’s present to us, God’s presence with us, now and forever. This is resurrection. This is Easter.
And from Beth Maynard, John Updike’s Seven Stanzas for Easter
I suppose I am not alone in saying that Roger Ebert taught me how to watch movies. I was a huge fan of “Siskel and Ebert” from the first time I saw it back in the seventies. As a kid from a small town without a movie theater and limited to whatever came to the small towns near us, or if we were really adventurous, to the early multiplexes in Toledo, Siskel and Ebert gave me a critical lens through which to think about the films I did see. I don’t know when I fell in love with the movies; it was probably in Boston in the early eighties, with the wonderful series at the Janus cinema, and the great double features at the old Harvard Square theater. Ebert remained my guide after the arrival of the vcr and video rentals. His paperback guide to the movies helped me negotiate the vast catalog of foreign films and Hollywood films from before the seventies that I had never seen.
For a few years, I was an amateur movie critic as well. That was well after the emergence of the internet. Ebert’s reviews were a crucial first-read when dealing with movies that I’d never seen but had to write about.
I always found his insights into the spiritual and religious aspects of film enlightening. Although not a conventional believer in any sense of the term, he had a keen sense of the deeper meaning of movies and the deeper questions that human beings ask, and he could write eloquently about both.
In 2011, he wrote about his own death here in the essay, “I do not fear death”
A few weeks ago, he wrote about Cathoiicism on the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation:
I consider myself Catholic, lock, stock and barrel, with this technical loophole: I cannot believe in God. I refuse to call myself an atheist, however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable. My beliefs were formed long ago from good-hearted Dominican sisters, and many better-qualified RCs might disagree.
His review of Terence Malick’s Tree of Life is beautiful, insightful and self-revelatory.
At some point during the height of the political turmoil in Wisconsin during 2011 and 2012, a parishioner told me after the early service one Sunday, “I’m so glad you don’t preach political sermons.” After the 10:00 service that day, another parishioner enthused, “That was a wonderful political sermon.” The two people heard the very same sermon (I almost always preach from a manuscript) but they heard it very differently
I was reminded of that day when I heard of the hullabaloo over the Rev. Luis Leon’s Easter sermon at St. John’s, Lafayette Square. In the presence of President Obama and his family, the Washington Post reports that Leon said the following:
Quoting from John 20:1-18, Leon said in the same way Jesus told Mary Magdalene not to hold onto him, it is time for conservatives to stop holding on to what he considers outdated stances on race, gender equality, homosexuals and immigrants.
“It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling us back … for blacks to be back in the back of the bus … for women to be back in the kitchen … for immigrants to be back on their side of the border,” Leon said.
Leon said people instead should use “Easter vision” to allow them to see the world in a different, more “wonderful” way.
This aroused the ire of political conservatives who accused Fr. Leon of “politicizing” Easter.
I make the following observations. First, President Obama’s attendance at the service was a political act. It was a photo-op to demonstrate his personal piety in the context of continued claims that he’s a Muslim.
St. John’s very presence opposite the White House is also a political statement. Perhaps less meaningful now than in previous centuries, its proximity to the White House is a symbol of the close ties between the Episcopal Church and the United States government. It prides itself on the fact that over the decades many presidents have worshiped there. Any sermon preached from its pulpit to a president sitting in one of its pews is a political act. The president’s presence at services offers legitimacy to St. John’s and St. John’s offers religious legitimacy to President Obama.
I would also point out to those who criticize Fr. Leon’s “politicization” of the Easter message that he was targeting a particular religious position. In the summary provided by the Post, he did not mention the GOP, he referred to the Religious Right. Those who complain that he was being political at this point overlook the fact that he is actually debating doctrine. For what is at stake in the issues he raises are different understandings of human nature, of Jesus Christ, indeed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. From those different doctrinal positions proceed different political perspectives. Easter has always been a day when preachers have debated doctrine, offering their own perspective on the nature and meaning of resurrection and criticizing those preachers and theologians with whom they disagree.
I’ve not taken the time to listen to the podcast of the sermon but from what the Post reports, I find what Fr. Leon said rather innocuous. I would have hoped an Episcopal priest would have taken the opportunity to offer a prophetic message reminding all of those in attendance, including the president, where they have fallen short of using “Easter vision” to see the world in a new way, rather than taking potshots at others.
I’ve written before about the problematic relationship between the Episcopal Church and the US government, most recently in connection with Obama’s inauguration in January here and here. I’m glad I’m not the Rector of St. John’s Lafayette Square; I find negotiating the difficult terrain of Christianity and politics difficult enough from my vantage point on Madison’s Capitol Square.
Preaching Grace on the Square 