Hunting for Love?

Thanks to all for the glorious Easter capitalization of a deep and meaningful approach through Lent and Holy Week into Sunday's celebration.  The image of a churchyard literally strewn with eggs redefined the concept of hunting.  What fun to be a kid with a basket!

I'm taking a break and enjoying time with my daughter Mary Carson who is visiting the rectory for the first time before we retreat to the mountains.  While I'm away please visit something I wrote last year.  It continues to speak to me and names the hope I have for us as a community of faith.

Start by comparing God's love with what a churchyard full of eggs looks like to a 4 year-older.

Resurrection is Love Set Free

It's all about love.  That's what Lent led us into.  It was love turning into love, especially as we followed the story through Holy Week.  The Triduum, those three days of Maundy Thursday's close, Good Friday's silence and Holy Saturday's discovery, is a love story.

Jesus' love washes the disciples' feet.  Jesus' love breaks the bread and shares the cup.  His love forgives those who crucified him and reminds us still that they did not know what they were doing.  Mary's love embraces His body.  God's love -- of love itself -- sustains the world against the silence of the tomb.

Nothing else explains the resurrection better.  "For God so loved the world . . ."  Just like the love shared between lovers, it sets us free.  Love is the highest expression of freedom.  You can't have one without the other.  No wonder the tomb was empty.  Love.

Love can teach us so much!  But we have to let it teach us.  We forget so quickly and our listening is constrained by something less than love itself.  We listen to respond.  We listen without breathing.  We listen as if we could save our own lives.  We listen to beguiling serpents and think ourselves freed by power.

Listening in love allows the good news to take root, fills our emptiness.  We are set free by God's love and no longer need to defend, to hunt, to hide.  We can surrender to love.

Thanks be to God!  Love has the last say.  What will we do with this new freedom?

Lenten Choices: Personal and Corporate - Part 2

From last week: "Deep needs wide. High needs long. Personal needs corporate.  Remembering that God says more than anything "Do not be afraid" we can trust the interplay between personal and corporate.   Trust matters.  Jesus will show us how."

The interplay of personal and corporate is one of embodiment.  And when we are thinking about Jesus in his last days this embodiment is dramatic and meaningful.  It speaks of a reality that connects us to God.  As a drama it plays out with others, with the powerful, with pretenders, with onlookers, enemies and pawns.  

Because the drama is meaningful it is played out purposefully.  It witnesses to truths about us and truths about God.  Like the Fourth Gospel the miraculous acts of Jesus are called signs because they are witnessing to more than changing water into wine so a party can continue, more than the new view of life had by a man born blind being healed, and more than a multitude of people getting a good meal from a meager collection of fish and bread.

Always accompanying these signs is a conversation about listening and hearing, about blindness and seeing, about physical hunger and spiritual food.      

That's why trust matters.  When we follow a drama to a painful ending or when we are made aware of meanings that we have previously not known there is a displacement.  It starts as surprise or curiosity.  Sometimes it feels like the ground is shifting under our feet, like none of the rules we learned will work, or like our friends are abandoning us. 

No wonder God keeps saying "do not be afraid."  This embodied and meaningful drama is not just about a Jesus of Nazareth disappointing expectations and confronting the powers of first century Roman occupied Jerusalem.  It is about us, too.  It is personal.

Remember the other word for embodiment is incarnation.  For us that means that the death of Jesus of Nazareth on a cross is also a moment in the drama with meaning.  When he says "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." he is speaking as one of us. He is showing the world how to die and in so doing creating meaning that informs our dying nearly 2000 years later.  It is about us, too.  It is corporate.  

Our lives can't be lived otherwise any more.  Our lenten choices aren't either/or choices.  They are both/and choices.  The drama is now our drama, both personal and corporate; the meanings are now for us to know, both deep and wide; the story for us to tell now and forever.  Fear not.

Lenten Choices: Personal and Corporate - Part 1

Like the previous Lenten Choices an either/or approach will miss too much. That is to say each pair attempts a comprehensiveness of expression and doesn't finally beg us to choose between the two.  A practice of faith that chooses wide over deep ends up shallow or if deep over wide and you have a life of faith that is dark and private. 

The same should be said about today's pair.  At it's best that is exactly what the church is: individually -- read "personal" -- we grow as we share and interact with the others of the group -- read "corporate."  Neither is enough by itself.  Without the leveling and context framing of a shared faith our personal pursuits risk sinking into idiosyncrasy. 

Robert Bellah outlines this trap in his study of Sheila in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) Her practice is to avoid fanaticism and "in defining what she calls 'my own Sheilaism,' she said: 'It's just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think God would want us to take care of each other.'"

None of this is wrong but she is missing any partnering with others.  For her there is no tradition, no leadership, no community, nothing to say to her "stop" or "go" or "help" or "listen" other than her own thoughts.  She is all on her own.

It also will not work for any individual to allow the church do all the work for them either.  Blind allegiance to the body (latin - corpus) can not hope for the development of persons. There really is no other way. 

Without the body/corpus there is no like minded "other."  Something else is missing when Sheila is all alone and when the corpus requires total abeyance; it is the moral standard that helps us to know what sin is.  By herself Sheila cannot presume that authority, besides she's afraid of being branded a fanatic.  Without an interest in the autonomy of persons the corporate definition of sin fails and is based on utility or how one serves only the whole -- think Star Trek's BORG.

Again these are worst case scenarios but they demonstrate the necessity of interplay between the personal and the corporate. Deep needs wide. High needs long. Personal needs Corporate.  Remembering that God says more than anything "Do not be afraid" we can trust the interplay between personal and corporate.   Trust matters.  Jesus will show us how.  More next week.

Lenten Choices: High and Long - Part 2

The logic of the seasons starts with Easter.  Without that part of the story our seasonal tradition has no base, no anchor, no movement and no calendar.  All our seasonal traditions hang on Easter and serve our telling especially that part but throughout each season eventually all of the story. 

Year after year we work our way through the story and our traditions help us do that.  Our traditions sustain us and are how we "go long."  The high part is the story itself.  The gospel John tells it best: "In the beginning was the Word. . . " It is "high" because it comes from God.

Those first century Jews-become-Christian congregations understood Easter, with Jesus and his reconfigured messiahship -- accomplished by his death and resurrection -- as the centerpiece of the new story, the good news.  As they expanded the story both backwards by remembering the signs of healing, calming storms, feeding the multitudes and forward through Emmaus, the Galilean shore, the Mount of Olives a consensus emerged. 

With this expanded story new ways of prolonging community life around it emerged as well.  Baptism became the tradition of new inclusion, gifts of the spirit empowered community ministries of all sorts and the laying on of hands marked members for leadership and missions.

The core story never lost its height, as demonstrated by the language of the fourth gospel and the magnitude of the last of the Christian canon's works, the Revelation to John.  One of the measures used by those early congregations to determine whether a text could be included along with the core story was how it repeated or expanded on that loftiness of God's reconciling the world to God's self through the person and work of Jesus who died and was raised.  To conflict with or avoid that claim almost insured exclusion from the emerging canon of scripture. 

High and long are still working principles in the church.  We still listen for God's voice especially in that core story and understand the seasons encircling Easter as informed and measured by it.  And year after year we repeat the traditions to point us toward Easter and to help us to continue, now reborn by it. 

Really, high and long aren't separate choices.  We must let them collaborate and promote each other and call us forward.  As a lenten activity it is only the choice or not to practice a mindfulness of the reconciling God revealed to us in Jesus of Nazareth and to be equally mindful that we are tradition-bearers for those who come long after us so that they too may hear God's high calling.

Lenten Choice: High and Long - Part 1

All of the seasons of the church have largely two sources of input in how they are shaped and expressed. There are those things that have come primarily from the story of the 1st century life, death and resurrection of one Jesus of Nazareth, son of a man named Joseph and a mother named Mary. To get to and from that core story we rely on older and newer uses of history and tradition that have been practiced before and after the story of Jesus was being lived by its characters.

The newer components emerge in the history and traditions of every other human who has so chosen to respond to that story and its history. Because there are humans, who live and die, involved with the refinement and sharing of that history and story the accompanying tradition has diversified and drifted apart.  Now it's traditions.  The western parlance is denominations.

Our traditions have produced a liturgy of liturgies.  In order to best tell the story as gospel for others and ourselves over time we have developed a liturgy of each year and with seasons made sure to repeat all the sources of the story.

Easter season is that time of the liturgical year when we are consumed by the best part of the story.  "Alleluia, Christ is risen!" begins and ends our worship on every Sunday in that season and we nearly bathe in the parts of the story that remember that marvel and mystery of Jesus being raised from the dead. The traditions that accompany the telling of that part of the story include how the church is dressed, our posture in worship, the words of our worship and on and on.

Every season gets to take its turn with its own dressing, postures and words that help expose their parts of the story we need to rehearse so that we are best prepared for Easter.  For example, in the season of Lent our practice is more about preparation than any other theme.  We read those parts of the story that have to do with how Jesus prepared for his death and resurrection.  And our traditions help us to prepare, as well.

The logic of the seasons starts with Easter.  Without that part of the story our seasonal traditions have no base, no anchor, no movement and no calendar.  All our seasonal traditions hang on Easter and serve our telling that part of the story with how they expose the story in their turns.

Year after year we work our way through the story and our liturgy helps us do that.  That's the long part.  The high part is the story itself.  The gospel John tells it best: In the beginning was the Word. . .