Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)

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Today is the commemoration of Teresa of Avila who is a rather odd inclusion on the Episcopal calendar. She’s one of the most remarkable and most important figures in the Catholic Reformation. She led an intense reform of the Carmelite order (both female and male), but she is better known for her mysticism and her spiritual writing. The Interior Castle and The Autobiography.

Teresa is interesting to me because of my double experience of her. As a historian of Early Modern Christianity, and as someone who taught The Reformations of the 16th century numerous times, I have read her as an example of a remarkable woman  with deep spiritual experience and important for the developing institutional church. To read her autobiography is to encounter someone who is caught in the midst of history. A descendant of converted Jews, a woman who sought to create for herself an authentic religious life, and sought to force other women into that life, who submitted to and challenged authority, Teresa’s autobiography is a wonderful lens through which to examine the 16th century.

But she is more than that. Reading and rereading her autobiography and The Interior Castle I am reminded at each reading by the depth and breadth of her spiritual experience, and surprised by her psychological insight, into herself, her fellow nuns, and the nature of religious experience. I used her work once in a course on Theological Anthropology in the Christian Tradition, and reading her in light of earlier authors from Pseudo-Dionysus and Athanasius to Luther and Descartes was quite illuminating.

creative prooftexting

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I always wanted to teach a course called “Creative Prooftexting,” the premise of it finding the most absurd and outrageous ways to take individual verses of the Bible out of context. Here’s a prime example:

6a00d8341c730253ef0120a5e967c0970b-800wiIt’s a tattoo quoting the Christianists’ favorite verse against Gays. Of course Leviticus prohibits tattoos:

“You shall not make any gashes in your flesh for the dead or tattoo any marks upon you: I am the Lord.” Lev. 19:28

Congregational Development Oddities

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New Rectors and Vicars in the Diocese of Milwaukee participate in Fresh Start, a nationwide program that seeks to help us make the transition into our new ministries. It’s a wonderful opportunity to develop relationships with other clergy in the diocese, to create camaraderie and to share experiences. But of course there is also programmatic stuff.

I have learned a great deal from congregational development gurus over the years and I’m a big fan of the Alban Institute but occasionally there are things that simply seem misguided or flat-out wrong. Today we did something that seemed very much the latter to me.

We were given two questions on which to plot our responses from 1-10. The first was a choice between “The only way to know God is in a one-on-one, direct relationship” and “The only way to know God is in the midst of God’s people.” So far so good.

The second set of alternatives was between “The end and purpose of life is so to live that I am reunited with God in my death” and “The end and purpose of life is to participate with brothers and sisters in building a human society of shalom, where peace and justice and love reign.”

The problem for me was the latter alternative. No mention of God there at all, and indeed in the graphic we later saw, that end of the axis was described as “secular.”

Now, I have no doubt that many people would have a problem with that second alternative. But the vision of the “Kingdom of God” articulated by Jesus was just that, a kingdom, reign, where God was present, and human community was also a crucial part. It may be that some clergy might be comfortable with a vision of a “human community of shalom” that excluded God, but I’m not sure why they would stay in the business.

The grid is from the work of Loren Mead. No doubt there is something in what he was trying to get at, but even in the examples he used, comparing Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, using MLK as someone who used the “secular style” seems to me misguided. King may have worked in the public  sphere, but his “style” and language were theological and religious.  The copyright date on the material is 1994, and I’m curious whether it reflects an different era.

Wendell Berry in Madison

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Wendell Berry gave a reading in Madison yesterday. He was the keynote speaker for the Wisconsin Book Festival. Taking his cue from the Wisconsin Humanities Council’s program called “Making it Home,” Berry read his story of the same name. It is the tale of a soldier returning home from World War II and walking the last miles. Berry is a poet, essayist, and writer of fiction who has a great deal to say about the relationship between people and the land. In his introduction to the story, he spoke of the destruction of WWII, and of how in the years following 1945, a parallel destruction took place in the American landscape with the rise of industrialized agriculture and wanton removal of our natural resources.

Berry’s writing is suffused with a sense of the sacred; he has a keen eye for the landscape and for the landscape of the interior self. His language has the cadence and imagery of the biblical text. And occasionally there is a direct or close paraphrase. For example, the last sentences of the story he read are “Honey, run yonder to the house. Tell your granny to set on another plate. For we have our own that was gone and has come again.” That last is of course an allusion to the words of the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son

In the question and answer period that followed, Berry stressed again the central themes of his life’s work, the importance of place, of the relationship between the people and the land, and the notion that communities are not virtual or digital, but rather created and maintained in place. That is something of theological import, given the long struggle within Christianity over the nature of community and the idea that the body of Christ transcends the local and particular.

Berry is a profound thinker and a beautiful writer and hearing him read brings the people and the land of the Kentucky hills to life.


Rewriting History

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The Christian Right has long insisted that the Founding Fathers were all good Christians and that Constitution was written on Biblical principles. This would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerously incorrect. Washington, for example, though a vestryman in his Episcopal parish, apparently never received communion, at least according to reminiscences of Bishop White. His speeches frequently refer to Divine Omnipotence or Creator, but almost never to a personal God.

So when stuff like this comes up, it is nothing less than outrageous.

But it’s nice to see the critics at work, too. Here and here.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think patriotism is wrong, but I do think many Christians come very close to idolatry and there’s always the danger of assuming that if God is on our side, then we are fighting a holy war. I don’t think God takes sides in war, any more than God takes sides in football games–but that’s a subject for another post.

Proper 23 Year B.

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Jesus Loved Him

Proper 23, Year B

October 11, 2009

Questions, questions. Today’s lessons are full of questions, full of hard questions. In Job, we have heard part of Job’s response to his suffering. As I said last week, Job’s response to his plight was not patience, or humble acceptance. He responded angrily, and today we have heard how deep and powerful that response was. Job insisted that his suffering was not punishment for some sin he had committed, and he persisted in that conviction even when his three friends challenged him to admit his wrongdoing, confess his sin, and do penance. Instead of looking within to find the reason for his plight, Job looked elsewhere.

As he tried to make sense of his situation, Job appealed to God to help him understand. But as he pondered his situation, he went further. Job began to wonder where God was for God seemed to have abandoned him.

“If I go forward, he is not there;

or backward, I cannot perceive him;

on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;

I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.

Probably many of us have had times in our lives when we were in the same place as Job, profoundly aware, not of God’s presence, but of God’s absence. Sometimes that experience is a result of suffering, but sometimes it is also the product of profound questioning and reflection on our life and the life of the world. “Where is God” is a question that drives to the heart of our faith, and to the very heart of the human experience.

But even if we don’t most of us, most of the time, ask profound questions like the ones raised by the book of Job, still there are questions. The Christian life is full of questions, large and small, difficult and easy. Today’s gospel confronts us with two questions. The first question is asked by a rich man: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ disciples ask the second question after hearing Jesus’ words: “Then who can be saved?”

Committed Christians reside in the interstices between these two questions, seeking salvation but profoundly challenged by Jesus’ words. Because Jesus’ words are so unsettling, because they amaze us, even as they amazed Jesus’ disciples, as Mark reports. Over the centuries Christians have done any number of things to soften the edge of his words: “It is easier for a camel to go pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Those words are so difficult for us to hear, because, like the disciples, we wonder. These are hard words that Jesus says, words that put is in a hard place. If it is the case, if it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God, then salvation is impossible. So we try to weasel out of the hardness of the place. We tell ourselves, we aren’t rich, not like the really rich, not like Bill Gates. So Jesus wasn’t talking to us.

Then we look for another escape route. There’s always the possibility that Jesus didn’t mean what he said or didn’t say what Mark has him say. Maybe Jesus said rope, not camel; the two words are almost identical in Greek. Or my favorite interpretation, that there was a gate in Jerusalem, called the “eye of the needle” through which a camel could squeeze with difficulty. In other words, these difficult words aren’t meant for us, we’re middle class, not wealthy; and camels can get through the eye of the needle after all. So let’s all breathe a sigh of relief and go about our business.

But, next Sunday is the deadline we’ve set ourselves, the day we return our pledges for 2009 to the church. We are in the middle of our stewardship campaign and I’m sorely tempted to turn this into a stewardship sermon. It’s that time of the year, after all, and what better hook for our stewardship drive than to connect Jesus’ reply to the rich man to our own pledging. That would make for a remarkably successful campaign. If all of us gave all of our possessions, Grace Church could do some pretty impressive things.

But as much as I would like to, I can’t do it. For one simple reason—Jesus is not speaking to our situation at Grace. The man has not come to Jesus to offer financial support. He has come for help, for advice. He approaches Jesus because he wants to know how to attain eternal life, how to enter the kingdom of God, of which Jesus preaches. He addresses Jesus with humility, bowing down before him, calling him “Good teacher.”

Jesus’ response is challenging—not simply because he challenges the rich man, but because he challenges us as well. His response to the man is to remind him of his obligations under Jewish law. In a nutshell, Jesus is saying, keep the commandments. The man asserts that he maintains his obligations to the Jewish law.

From a traditional, twenty-first century Christian perspective, the whole of this interchange between Jesus and the man is jarring. Things don’t seem to make sense. Jesus’ response to the man ought to be, “accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior;” or “have faith in me,” or even “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Instead Jesus tells him, keep the law. Furthermore, when the man insists that he does keep the commandments, that, in essence, he is a good Jew, Jesus doesn’t respond with words to the effect that keeping the law is impossible, righteousness under the law doesn’t work. Instead, he gives him another command: “Go, sell all that you have, give it to the poor, and come, follow me.” Doing that will give the man treasures in heaven, it will bring him into the kingdom of God.

But of course, the man finds those commands much harder to follow than the 10 commandments. Now we learn something new about him. Mark tells us for the first time, that he has great possessions and he can’t give them up. So he leaves Jesus. His desire to share in the kingdom of God, his desire to walk with Jesus, to be a disciple was not as intense as his desire to continue living the life he had, to enjoy his possessions.

But in the course of the story, Mark tells us something else. “Jesus loved him.” At first hearing, we may find such a statement completely unremarkable, but in fact, it is almost unique. Only one other time in the gospel of Mark, does the writer use the word “love”—that is when Jesus recites the two great commandments, to love God and to love neighbor. In other words, Mark never says elsewhere in the gospel, that Jesus loves someone.

Jesus loved him. These simple words challenge us, and challenge every interpretation of this encounter that we might have. In the first place, Jesus doesn’t simply tell the man, follow me. No, he adds conditions. In Mark’s version of Jesus’ calling of the disciples, Jesus words are simply, follow me. But here, Jesus adds conditions, demands. Go, sell, give, come and follow me. For this man, it seems, it’s not enough to follow Jesus, he must also turn his back on all that he has, publicly renounce it.

But then, even though he turns away from Jesus, we are told that Jesus loves him. Does it mean simply that Jesus feels sorry for him, that he has compassion on him? But no, it isn’t because the man turned away in shock after Jesus’ words. Jesus loved him and then said to him, Go, sell what you own.” Jesus commands were in response to his love of the man.

The man stood on the edge of a great opportunity. Having asked Jesus a question of eternal significance, he received an answer of equal significance. But it wasn’t simply a matter of the man’s eternal fate. It was also about a relationship. To have given up his possessions would have meant to accept, in radical and complete openness, the love of Jesus Christ.

Jesus has invited the rich man to follow him, to become his disciple, and the rich man turned away, he turned back from the possibility of that life. But this encounter challenges us to the core of our being, to the core of what matters most to us. In these weeks, we have been learning a great deal about what Mark, and Jesus, understand by discipleship. And each week, we hear the same message. Following Jesus changes everything.

So we are back to stewardship and we are back to discipleship. We, like the rich man, are facing a choice, a life-changing moment. We confess our faith in Christ, we claim to have personal relationships with Christ, we call ourselves his disciples. But Jesus stands in front of us. Jesus loves us, and asks us to give up what matters most, to live in radical openness and complete commitment to him. How will we respond? Will we try to weasel out? Will we, like the rich man, turn away in grief and shock? Or will we accept Jesus’ challenge?

Grace’s Past

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I’ve been delving into Grace’s history in the last week or so. There were two ostensible reasons for this. One was that I read The Deacon, by Robert Gard, who taught theatre at the University of Wisconsin and was a Deacon at Grace Church for many years. Written in 1979, at a time of incredible change in society and the church, The Deacon is a novel about a plan to sell the land on which Grace stands and build a more modern facility in the suburbs. Gard has a fascinating voice, for while he is deeply elegaic about Grace’s magnificent building and history, he is also well aware that cultural and religious change has a profound effect, good and ill, on people and institutions. For example there’s a chapter in which he discusses the ordination of women, and offer measured criticism of it while recognizing the gifts that women bring to the priesthood.

We’ve also been doing some historical research into the cookbooks of Grace. 2009 marks the 125th anniversary of the publication of The Capital City Cookbook, published by the women’s guild and the first cookbook published in Wisconsin. We’ll be having a celebratory coffee hour on November 1 to honor that anniversary, the women who over the years have published other cookbooks, and have offered extravagant hospitality to Grace and to the community.

William Tyndale

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Yesterday was the commemoration of William Tyndale. He was executed for heresy on this day in 1536 in Antwerp, Belgium. Tyndale is of enormous significance for the history of Christianity in England, and indeed for the history of the English language.

At a very early age, he took it upon himself to begin translating the New Testament into English. In England, unlike the continent, it was illegal to translate the Bible into English, or to possess an English translation. Tyndale made his way to Wittenberg in the early 1520s where he came under Luther’s influence. His translation of the New Testament, which was published in 1525, included English translations of Luther’s prefaces to the books of the New Testament.

Quickly, Tyndale moved away from Luther theologically, to a position that emphasized the importance of the divine law, and of human actions (good works). It may have been through Tyndale’s influence that the English Reformation was shaped more by Calvin than by Luther

Tyndale was a polemicist and engaged with Thomas More in a lengthy polemic that showed neither of them at their best. Ironically, both were executed in 1536–More by Henry VIII and Tyndale by Catholics in Belgium.

It is said that at least 80% of Tyndale’s translation made its way into the King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611.