MariaGwyn

Division on Behalf of the Vulnerable

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Are We Being Neighbors?

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A sermon on The Good Samaritan, Luke 10:25-37. Preached at St. Philip the Deacon Episcopal Church, Portland, Oregon, on July 10th, 2022 by The Rev’d Maria Gwyn McDowell.

So Much Left to Learn: A sermon for the Burial of Richard “Dick” Huneke

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition (2021)

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Instructor: The Rev’d Maria Gwyn McDowell, PhD Winter 2021

This course introduces the field of Christian ethics by (1) studying major theoretical approaches focusing upon Anglican conceptions, and (2) exploring liberative ethics as critique and expansion of ‘traditional’ conceptions. The course aims to advance students’ theoretical knowledge in a way that provides resources for contemporary moral and liberative decision-making, pastoral leadership, and praxis. This course requires a willingness to see an issue from a variety of facets, listening primarily to those who are made vulnerable by the systems and structures in which we live, and the biases many of us share.

The structure of the course will combine lectures with class discussions throughout. Evaluation will be based on short reflection papers, a final paper, and class participation.

Course Details:

Dropbox Link to all course files

Primary Texts:

These texts will be read in their entirety and should be purchased or checked out from a theological library.

Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God
Tisha M. Rajendra, Migrants and Citizens: Justice and Responsibility in the Ethics of Migration
Selected Articles (listed in weekly reading sections) *

Suggested Texts

Selections from these texts will be made available online via PDF. Purchasing the book is worthwhile, but not required.

Victor Lee Austin, Christian Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed *
Miguel De La Torre, Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (2nd Edition) *
Traci C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics *

Grading

Each assignment will be graded according to the following criteria:

Writing Quality: Write as if your work will be made available to parishioners with whom you will work, whether printed in a church newsletter or as a part of adult formation. These are essays intended to help you communicate clearly. Use professional grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Focus: Make a single argument. Answer a specific question, wrestle with a particular text, method, or issue. Stay focused. The goal is not necessarily to address all related issues, but pick something and think about it well.
Content: Ensure your work engages with the content of the class. Pick an ethical method or framework discussed in class or addressed in the reading. Your essays should not simply state what you believe, but why, and how your reasoning fits within or is challenged by an ethical framework.
Format: All written material should be in 12pt, Times New Roman, double spaced. Papers that go over the required length will be graded down a half a grade for every portion of page over the required length. There will be no exceptions to the length requirement.
Due Dates: Late work is either not accepted or graded down. “Critical Engagement Responses” will not count towards final grade if they are late (four days before each class session). These responses are meant to help us all reflect together and so require time to read, reflect, and inwardly digest. Project proposals are not graded, but if they are late, I may not be able to give the feedback you want. Final projects will be graded down a half grade for every two days they are late; exceptions are granted only with discussion at least one week before the final due date.

Assignments:

Critical Engagement Responses:

Four days before each session submit a 2 page critical engagement and read the papers of your colleagues.

We will discuss these papers in class; they are a crucial part of the success of each session.

This paper can address any single aspect of the reading. These papers are short for a reason: no parishioner wants a five-page answer to a question. They want a concise, thoughtful response that helps them continue thinking through a dilemma. The point is not to cover every aspect of the readings, but focus on an element that stood out to you for its insight, interest, inadequacy, or controversy so you understand how a particular author or method helps you think through ethical questions.

This critical engagement is evidenced by asking questions of the text itself, discovering or inferring an author’s assumptions and assessing them, considering the strengths and weaknesses of an author’s argument, and considering the text’s relevance to our developing understanding of ethics in your ministry context.

Critical Engagement papers should be uploaded to Dropbox using link provided for each session at least four days before each session. Please clearly title your paper: your name, the session day, and a short title (optional). For example: “mcdowell-session1-whyIjustcantwithKant.docx”.

You may read all the engagement papers here.

Final project:

Participants taking the course for credit will propose a final project from among the choices below. Your choice should be informed by which will be most useful to your ongoing educational development.

Projects proposals due: April 8th. A 1-page description of project summarizing topic, approach, and format. These will be discussed and reviewed in class.
Final project due: May 8th.

Project Options:

Option 1: write a 10‐12 page paper on an ethical issue of your choice. The paper should summarize the key ethical dilemmas, and then make a case for a particular ethical response based on the thoughtful engagement with scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.
Option 2: design a 12‐week Christian education course on Christian ethics, which might be taught at your home church. Write session titles and descriptions, what readings or media you might draw from for each session, and give an idea in 4‐5 sentences of what each session would hope to cover.
Option 3: write a series of 3 sermons on a single contemporary issue. As in any sermon, these should be prepared with worship in mind (in other words, they are not primarily academic). Each of the three sermons should focus on a different scripture passage, but each should in some way illuminate some facet of the ethical issue you are preaching on. It may be useful to choose lectionary texts to focus on in these sermons. Your sermons should be no more than about 1800 words.
Option 4: propose your own final project! If none of the three options named above strikes you as helpful, propose another project.

Week 1 (9 January): A Crash Course in Ethical Frameworks

Upload Critical Engagement paper.
Read the work of your colleagues.
Lecture Slides.

Required Reading:

Harrison, Beverly Wildung "Doing Christian Ethics" in Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004.
Wells, Samuel, Ben Quash, and Rebekah Eklund. Introducing Christian Ethics, Second Edition. 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
- Universal Ethics, ch. 5
- Subversive Ethics, ch. 6
- Ecclesial Ethics, ch. 7

Further (Optional) Reading:

Beverly Wildung Harrison, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics

Austin, Christian Ethics, Ch Intor, 1 and 2:
- “Intro and Ch1:”
- “Ch. 2: What is Christian about Christian Ethics”

Week 2 (6 February): Baptized into Virtue

Upload Critical Engagement paper.
Read the work of your colleagues.
Lecture Slides.

Required Reading:

Austin, Christian Ethics, Ch 3 and 4:
- “Three Approaches to Being Fully Human”
- “How to Succeed as a Human Being””
Mattison, William C., “Why Virtue? The Moral Life as More than Actions” from Introducting Moral Theology, 2008.
Maurice, Frederick Dennison. Excerpt from The Kingdom of God in Forell, George W. Christian Social Teachings: A Reader in Christian Social Ethics from the Bible to the Present. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2012.
Sedgwick, Timothy F. “The Anglican exemplary tradition.” Anglican Theological Review 94, no. 2 (2012): 207-231.
Greenman, Jeffrey P. “Anglican Evangelicals on Personal and Social Ethics.” Anglican Theological Review 94, no. 2 (2012): 179–205.

Week 3 (27 February): Whose Liberation?

Upload Critical Engagement paper.
Read the work of your colleagues.
Lecture Slides.

Required Reading:

De La Torre, Miguel: Doing Ethics from the Margins, Chs. 1-3.
West, Tracy: Policy: The Bible and Welfare Reform from Distruptive Christian Ethics.
Boff, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff: Key Themes of Liberation Theology from Introducing Liberation Theology.
Gibson, Elizabeth McGovern. 2012. “Ethics from the other side: postcolonial, lay, and feminist contributions to Anglican ethics.” Anglican Theological Review 94, no. 4: 639-663.

Week 4 (20 March): White Supremacy and Black Bodies

Upload Critical Engagement paper.
Read the work of your colleagues.

Required Reading:

Douglas, Stand Your Ground

Week 5 (10 April): Immigration and Citizenship

Upload Critical Engagement paper.
Read the work of your colleagues.

Required Reading:

The Berkely Forum, “Rethinking Religion and U.S. Refugee Resettlement”. Read all Editorial responses.
Rajendra,Tisha Migrants and Citizens

Week 6 (1 May): Public Safety and Just Policing

Upload Critical Engagement paper.
Read the work of your colleagues. NOTE: This section is still being developed, please check back for updated resources.

Required Reading/Watching:

Just & Unjust Policing: Reflections from a Catholic Ethicist and Ex-Law Enforcement
- Watch: Winright, Tobias on “Just and Unjust Policing,” 10/20/20
- Watch: Davila, MT - Response to Winright
- Watch: Q & A with Winright & Davila
Fisher-Stewart, Gayle. 2017. “To Serve and Protect: The Police, Race, and the Episcopal Church in the Black Lives Matter Era.” Anglican Theological Review 99, no. 3: 439-459.
Paul, Dwane David. “Reforms don’t work. The police must be defunded.”
Winright, Tobias Don’t abolish the police. Reimagine law enforcement.
Read or Listen: ‘CAHOOTS’: How Social Workers And Police Share Responsibilities In Eugene, Oregon
- CAHOOTS FAQ

Fear and Resurrection: 'The Fear of the Jews' and its Aftermath

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Christ is Risen!

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Are there any who are devout lovers of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!

Are there any who are grateful servants?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary from fasting?
Let them now receive their due!

If any have toiled from the first hour,
let them receive their reward.

If any have come after the third hour,
let them with gratitude join in the feast!

Those who arrived after the sixth hour,
let them not doubt; for they shall not be short-changed.

Those who have tarried until the ninth hour,
let them not hesitate; but let them come too.

And those who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let them not be afraid by reason of their delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.
The Lord gives rest to those who come at the eleventh hour,
even as to those who toiled from the beginning.

To one and all the Lord gives generously.
The Lord accepts the offering of every work.
The Lord honors every deed and commends their intention.

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!

First and last alike, receive your reward.
Rich and poor, rejoice together!

Conscientious and lazy, celebrate the day!
You who have kept the fast, and you who have not,
rejoice, this day, for the table is bountifully spread!

Feast royally, for the calf is fatted.
Let no one go away hungry.
Partake, all, of the banquet of faith.
Enjoy the bounty of the Lord’s goodness!

Let no one grieve being poor,
for the universal reign has been revealed.

Let no one lament persistent failings,
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death,
for the death of our Savior has set us free.

He who was taken by death destroyed it.
He descended into Hades and took Hades captive.
He put Hades in uproar even as it tasted of his flesh.

Isaiah foretold this when he said,
“You, O Hades, were placed in uproar when he encountering you below.”

Hades was in an uproar having been eclipsed.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar for it is destroyed.
It was in an uproar for it is abolished.
It was in an uproar for it is made captive.

Hades took a body, and discovered God.
Hades seized earth, and encountered heaven.
Hades took what it saw, and was overcome by what it could not see.

O death, where is your sting?
O hell, where is your victory?

Christ is risen, and you are cast down!
Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!
Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is risen, and life is set free!
Christ is risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead.

For Christ, having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Christ be glory and power forever and ever. Amen!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Notes:

This is an excerpt from a longer sermon, traditionally ascribed to St. John Chrysostom (“Golden Tongue”). It may not be by him, but as is common in ancient practice, texts ascribed to famous theologians indicate the respect given to the text. This sermon has been preached at the Easter Vigil services for centuries (if not a millennia and a half), and is, in the East, the only sermon preached at the Great Vigil.

Typically, the word “uproar” is more accurately translated “embittered.” This is a reference to Jonah, read on Holy Saturday (the whole book) in the East (and at St. Philip, read as a part of the Great Vigil). Like the whale, Hades spits out Jesus because the flavor of the-human-who-was-really-God was bitter. However, not only do we not typically read Jonah in the Episcopal Church, the word “embittered” is a bit odd. “Uproar” captures the sense of the utter turmoil in which Hades is thrown by the unexpected presence of the God-Human, captured in the icon of the Anastasis in which the very gates of Hades are destroyed and Adam and Eve are being pulled forth by Christ. This sermon is all about call and response! When the preacher says “uproar” and “risen”, the congregation shouts those words back. If your congregation is not aware of this practice, it is worth explaining before hand. It makes for a very energetic moment in the vigil.

Maundy Thursday

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Ash Wednesday

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Beginning. Again.

Sun, 30 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Christ is Born!

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Birth God!

Sun, 23 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Waiting Together

Sun, 02 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Giving our Joy

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Smelling Like the Saints

Sun, 04 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Seeing Power: Jesus or White Supremacy

Sun, 28 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Divorce and Creation

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Cutting it Out

Sun, 30 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Glory of Being Fully Human

Sun, 05 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Mary Magdalene: Apostle to the Apostles

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Look at My Hands

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Easter Sunday

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We Want to See Jesus

Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

For God So Loves

Sun, 11 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

My first sermon as Priest-in-Charge at St. Philip the Deacon.

Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition (2018)

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Instructor: The Rev’d Maria Gwyn McDowell, PhD Spring 2018

This course introduces the field of Christian ethics by (1) studying major theoretical approaches focusing upon Anglican conceptions, and (2) exploring liberative ethics as critique and expansion of ‘traditional’ conceptions. The course aims to advance students’ theoretical knowledge in a way that provides resources for contemporary moral and liberative decision-making and pastoral leadership. The structure of the course will combine lectures with class discussions throughout. Evaluation will be based on short reflection papers, a final paper, and class participation.

Course Details:

Dropbox Link to all course files

Primary Texts:

Victor Lee Austin, Christian Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed *
Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God
Tisha M. Rajendra, Migrants and Citizens: Justice and Responsibility in the Ethics of Migration
Miguel De La Torre, Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (2nd Edition) *
Traci C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics *
Selected Articles (listed in weekly reading sections) *

Texts marked with an asterick will be made available online via PDF. Purchasing the book is worthwhile, but not required. Other books should be purchased or checked out of a library.

Grading

Each assignment will be graded according to the following criteria:

Writing Quality: Write as if your work will be made available to parishioners with whom you will work, whether printed in a church newsletter or as a part of adult formation. These are essays intended to help you communicate clearly. Use professional grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Focus: Make a single argument. Answer a specific question, wrestle with a particular text, method, or issue. Stay focused. The goal is not necessarily to address all related issues, but pick something and think about it well.
Content: Ensure your work engages with the content of the class. Pick an ethical method or framework discussed in class or addressed in the reading. Your essays should not simply state what you believe, but why, and how your reasoning fits within or is challenged by and ethical framework.

All written material should be in 12pt, Times New Roman, double spaced. Papers that go over the required length will be graded down a half a grade for every portion of page over the required length. There will be no exceptions to the length requirement.

Assignments:

Critical Engagement Responses:

Each session, a 2 page critical engagement paper is due. This paper can address any aspect of the reading, and engagement questions are suggested for each session. These papers are short for a reason: no parishioner wants a 5 page answer to a question. They want a concise, thoughtful response that helps them continue thinking through a dilemma. The point is not to cover every aspect of the readings, but focus on an element that stood out to you for its insight, interest, inadequacy, or controversy so you understand how a particular author or method helps you think through ethical questions. This critical engagement is evidenced by asking questions of the text itself, discovering or inferring an author’s assumptions and assessing them, considering the strengths and weaknesses of an author’s argument, and considering the text’s relevance to our developing understanding of ethics in your ministry context. Please email the whole class at least four days before each session. Please send an email to all member with a subject that includes your name, the class name, and the session day. Please DO NOT reply to someone else’s email as a way of sharing your paper. Please read the paper of your colleagues before you come to class! These papers will discussed by fellow students as a part of discussion sessions and so are a crucial part of the success of each session.

Final project:

Projects proposals due: May 19th. A 1-page description of project summarizing topic, approach, and format. These will be discussed and reviewed in class.
Final project due: JUNE 20th. Project Options:
Option 1: write a 10‐12 page paper on an ethical issue of your choice. The paper should summarize the key ethical dilemmas, and then make a case for a particular ethical response based on the thoughtful engagement with scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.
Option 2: design a 12‐week Christian education course on Christian ethics, which might be taught at your home church. Write session titles and descriptions, what readings or media you might draw from for each session, and give an idea in 4‐5 sentences of what each session would hope to cover.
Option 3: write a series of 3 sermons on a particular ethical topic. As in any sermon, these should be prepared with worship in mind (in other words, they are not primarily academic). Each of the three sermons should focus on a different scripture passage, but each should in some way illuminate some facet of the ethical issue you are preaching on. It may be useful to choose lectionary texts to focus on in these sermons. Your sermons should be no more than about 1800 words.
Option 4: propose your own final project! If none of the three options named above strikes you as helpful, propose another project.

Week 1 (10 February): Human Flourishing

Required Reading:

Austin, Christian Ethics, Introduction, Chs. 1-3:
Harrison, Beverly Wildung "Doing Christian Ethics" in Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004.

Engagement Questions:

Which of the three approaches to 'being fully human' resonates with you?
Do the three approaches stand alone? How might they support or detract from one another?

Further (Optional) Reading:

On Ethics: Beverly Wildung Harrison, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics On Kant:

Johnson, Robert and Cureton, Adam, “Kant’s Moral Philosophy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/kant-moral/.
Immanuel Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Immanuel Kant, The Fundamental Principlies of the Metaphysics of Ethics

On Mill:

Macleod, Christopher, “John Stuart Mill”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/mill/.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women
John Stuart Mill, “The Negro Question”

Week 2 (10 March): Baptized into Virtue

Required Reading:

Mattison, William C., “Why Virtue? The Moral Life as More than Actions” from Introducting Moral Theology, 2008.
Austin, Christian Ethics, Ch 4: “How to Succeed as a Human Being””
Sedgwick, Timothy F. 2012. “The Anglican exemplary tradition.” Anglican Theological Review 94, no. 2: 207-231.
Greenman, Jeffrey P. “Anglican Evangelicals on Personal and Social Ethics.” Anglican Theological Review 94, no. 2 (2012): 179–205.

Week 3 (14 April): Whose Liberation?

Required Reading:

De La Torre, Miguel: Doing Ethics from the Margins, Chs. 1-3.
West, Tracy: Policy: The Bible and Welfare Reform from Distruptive Christian Ethics.
Boff, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff: Key Themes of Liberation Theology from Introducing Liberation Theology.
Gibson, Elizabeth McGovern. 2012. “Ethics from the other side: postcolonial, lay, and feminist contributions to Anglican ethics.” Anglican Theological Review 94, no. 4: 639-663.

Week 4 (12 May): White Supremacy and Black Bodies

Required Reading:

Douglas, Stand Your Ground
Fisher-Stewart, Gayle. 2017. “To Serve and Protect: The Police, Race, and the Episcopal Church in the Black Lives Matter Era.” Anglican Theological Review 99, no. 3: 439-459.

Week 5 (9 June): Immigration and Citizenship

Required Reading:

Rajendra, Migrants and Citizens

There is No End to God’s Beginnings

Mon, 25 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The Outer Darkness and The Good King?

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ ¹

Your phone pings, you open Facebook, and there it is, the invitation to that dread reunion you knew was just around the corner. Who is coming? The ones we like? Or the ones that don’t like us? Maybe the food will make it worth it? Maybe people have changed, maybe we won’t feel like outsiders anymore. Hey, open bar, free alcohol, what is the harm?

Maybe we just ignore the conversation, we have moved on. Or we make some polite sounding excuse. Maybe we ‘leave’ the group someone added us to without asking if we actually cared enough to be a part of it, slightly worried that we are offending folk, but gambling that they just don’t notice. But they keep adding us back to the invitation and our feed is cluttered with reminders for an event we don’t care about, and people we don’t actually want to see. And then, the day we see everyone gushing over the fact that the “favorite” is coming home from the big fancy city to grace us with her presence, we make a snarky comment about trivial popularity contests that only the shallow ever win, and start a little social media war that feels so good all these years later.

We all know what it is like to receive an invitation we don’t really want, to have to pretend to be happy about it. To have the popular kids gush over you without actually even seeing you, to wonder if the bully is still the bully and you the butt of his jokes. To know how sad or angry it makes to you be stuck at the receiving end of the generosity of someone who just wants you there to make them look good.

Some invitations are meant to be resisted.

The traditional interpretation of today’s Gospel story is that God is the king, the son is Jesus, the servants are the prophets sent out to warn Israel of its failures, and Israel rejects God’s invitation, God rejects Israel, invites the gentiles to share the feast, and rejects those that fail to be proper disciples, to have faith, to practice good works, or to be virtuous. There are variations on who represents whom, but what remains consistent is that this story is about who is in and who is out, who properly responds to God’s invitation to celebrate, or who fails to do so.

It is not hard to see how this story has set Christians against Jews and fueled the fire of anti-semitism for generations. It is not hard to see how this story encourages endless anxiety and condemnation within the church trying to discern who is in and who is out, who is called, and who are chosen.

In all of these variations however, a thread of discomfort persists in almost every interpretation: Is the king really behaving like God? Is burning down an entire city a reasonable response to the death of servants, even if they were beloved servants? While it might seem great that the king then invites the good and bad to his dinner, a first-century audience is all too familiar with being dragged off the street by Roman occupiers to think this is some sort of benign generosity. Worse, the king fails in his fundamental duty as a host to provide for his guests, and then proceeds to accuses a guest for a his own failure to provide an appropriate garment. This king is a violent tyrant. Is this our God? This uncomfortable question is drowned in assertions that God’s justice is greater than our justice, that vengeance is the Lord’s, and that unworthiness is rightly rejected by God.

But maybe we should listen to that niggling question that has plagued this story for its entire existence, and really ask, where is God in this story? What if this king is all wrong, and our discomfort with his violence is not meant to be ignored?

In the Gospel of Matthew, rulers are bad news. They slaughter children (Matt 2:16), they behead prophets (Matt 14:3-11), they order the death of innocent men (Matt 27:15-26). Kings are to be resisted and avoided. The three Magi fail to follow the request of a king (Matt 1:12), Joseph hides his family from the same king (Matt 1:13-14), and John the Baptist loses his head denouncing another king (Matt 14:3). Violence is the tool of despotic rulers. In Matthew, blessed are the merciful and the peacemakers, (Matt 5:7-9). Disciples are those who love their enemies (Matt 5:44).

The only person in this story who actually lives out the Sermon on the Mount, who refuses to worry about what he will wear, who trusts that God will provide (Matt 6:25-31), is also the one who stands speechless, perhaps not even allowed to respond in a culture where one is not actually allowed to talk back to kings, the one who is silent in the face of an unfair accusation. He is the one who is thrown out into the darkness.

In the Gospel of Matthew, it is Jesus who seems to care little for what he wears, or who he offends. It is Jesus whose eats with the wrong people, and who brings the wrong people into homes where they would never have been welcome (Matt 26:7). It is Jesus who stands, speechless, before his religious and royal accusers (Matt 26:63). And it is Jesus who dies as a result.

Maybe the Kingdom of Heaven is not like this king, but rather, the Kingdom of Heaven exists within a cruel and violent world, and is present in those who resist cruelty and injustice, and who suffer its violence.

Let me say that again: the Kingdom of Heaven is present in those who resist cruelty and injustice, and who suffer its violence.

Like all rich stories, we can see ourselves in each character.

Maybe we are the King, so angry at rejection that we want to hurt those around us. Maybe we are guests who have better things to do than go to a party. Maybe we are ones who resist an invitation from an unjust ruler, with or without violence. Maybe we are the ones who stand silent in the face of false accusations and are condemned.

The horror of this story is the madness of our world, a world where tweets threaten nuclear destruction, where a culture of violent self-defense makes owning weapons of massive destruction a fundamental ‘right’, where somehow it makes sense to condemn an island to death because the infrastructure we failed to provide isn’t working in the face of a hurricane. It is a world where people live in fear that they will be detained by the government, that loved ones will be picked up and bussed to detention centers as the first stop on a trip back to a home that is not actually, and may never have been, their home.

It is a story that paints a picture of the worst of ourselves, and there is virtually no one in the story we want to be like. We don’t want to be the violent host, the ungrateful guests, the resisting guests, or the one thrown out.

It is a story of judgement. No interpretation can, or should, make this passage not about judgement. After all, we are in the midst of the Sundays leading to Advent, and this is the season of judgement in the church year. We read these stories now to remind us why it is that we wait for the presence of God. Advent is a time of expectant waiting for the coming of a promise, a promise of hope in the shape of a little baby boy who will, one day, stand silent before his accusers and be subject to the very same violence which causes us to weep and gnash our teeth every time we read the news.

Yet every story of judgement, every story of every prophet who stands up and cries out into a wilderness of despair and violence and destruction is a story of hope and promise. The God we follow did not destroy the Israelites for their idolatry. The God we follow, who is worthy of our worship, is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (Ex 34:6). Prophetic stories are not primarily about the future, but a critique of the present. Every cry of judgement is a call to change, to recognize that the madness of this story is a madness we carry within us, a madness we inflict on one another. Together, we confess, “The sins of our private lives have become the sins of the world.” The violence we carry within us, the violence with which we respond to those around us, the violence on which our nation and world is built, all is judged in this story. Our hope lies not in a God who just does violence more fairly or justly or reasonably than we do it. Our hope rests in a God who calls us to refuse to participate in the injustice and cruelty, who stands with us as we suffer violence, who calls us to be a people of peace precisely because we follow a God of peace.

God is not like king in this story. Our God would rather be silently cast out than comply with injustice. That is not an easy God to follow, because mercy and peace, gentleness and rejoicing are often very hard to actually do. But as Paul reminds us, it is by doing these things that the God who is peace, is with us, and through us, is with the world.

Footnote:

1: I owe the bulk of this interpretation to the work of Marianne Blickenstaff. She summarizes her argument in “Matthew’s Parable of the Wedding Feast (Matt 22:1-14)” in Review and Expositor, 109, Spring 2012. Her full argument can be found in ‘While the Bridegroom is with them’: Marriage, Family, Gender and Violence in the Gospel of Matthew (The Library of New Testament Studies).

Shouting at Jesus: The Canaanite Woman

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It is hard to know where to begin with this story. Is it a story of a woman whose great faith is something we are supposed to imitate? Is it a story of a woman who repeatedly beseeches Jesus for help, humbly accepting silence and insult with faithful trust? Does this story reveal a tone-deaf Jesus who insults a woman, or is she a teaching moment for his disciples who just don’t get it? Who is learning in this story, the woman? The disciples? Jesus?

I have to admit that I love this story, though not with a particularly happy love. A foreign woman, and outsider, approaches Jesus and asks for her daughter to be healed. She calls him all the right things, and he responds with silence. She continues shouting and Jesus’ disciples ask him to send her away. Jesus comments that he has been sent not for her but for his people, and she still asks for his help. He says something obvious to all of us, something that sounds pretty mean in this context: you don’t take food from your children and feed it to the dog. And again she comes back at him and says, but even the dogs get the leftovers.

This is one of those stories I resonate with in a way that makes me angry and sad all at once. I am sure that many of us know just how frustrating it is to have our demands met with silence. When I would argue for female priests in Eastern Orthodoxy, it wasn’t the theologically poor arguments that made me despair. It was the resounding silence with which they were met by anyone in power, anyone with authority. You can respond to a bad argument, but silence is just a black hole from which nothing returns. I understand what it is like to get the crumbs precisely because I am a woman and like this woman, I have spent a lot of time in a world where women are expected to be content with less. I suspect there is not a woman in this room who doesn’t know what it is like to be expected to settle for less, and be happy about it.

This story, or interpretations of this story, too easily blur the line between humility and humiliation, and often manage to imply that faith and humiliation ought to go hand in hand.

But really, think about it for a moment. This woman shouts at Jesus and his disciples. How many persistently shouting women are described as humble? How many civil, intelligent, articulate, but doggedly persistent women are considered paragons of humility? They get a lot of words thrown at them, but humble isn’t ever one of them.

This woman shouts so much that Jesus’ silent treatment annoys the disciples who want him to rebuke this woman and send her, a foreign woman, away. She is not one of them, and there is no reason that Jesus should be obliged to respond to her. Their world, like our own, is divided up by political, cultural and religious institutions that both help, and insist, that we all keep to our tribe, our people, our class.

Our news is full of the semi-shocked coverage of whites who violently insist that we should have our own homeland, memorialized by heroes pulled straight out of a book of revisionist history about “Lost Causes” and benevolent slave masters. We call these White Supremacists “evil” and disavow its horrific tenets. But White Supremacy is just one brutally honest name for racism in North America, and we have been warned about racism. Unfortunately, we have not been listening very well to the many voices that have prophetically called out North American whites for the way racism permeates our culture, our social and legal structures, our policing, our educational institutions, our churches.

We, that is, those of us with the privilege to walk through the world without worrying about being pulled over for driving while black or brown, just don’t listen very well. We wanted it to all be settled with MLK, or perhaps Cesar Chavez and the grape boycott. We don’t want to remember that part of the reason Portland has so few people of color is because until 1926, blacks weren’t allowed to live in the state. Brown people were here to build and plant things and then leave when the season was done, or, if they were among those unfortunates who lived here before Manifest Destiny won the continent, we just expected that they would contently remain on their lovely Reservations. We don’t talk about how whites can now legally sell marijuana, but people of color still disproportionally suffer from arrests and convictions for the very same actions.

Our world is riven by a fear of not having enough, and so we fight tooth and nail to protect what we have. We firmly believe in a zero-sum game where safety and stability for one group often means, regretfully, insecurity for another. Maybe we are tolerant enough to try to figure out how to live together, but rarely do we do so in a way that respects that the “other,” whoever that is, might have something to teach us, to offer us, to change us.

Yet this woman, this foreigner, this stranger with a disturbingly ill child, sees something in the preaching and teaching of this itinerant Jewish rabbi that even his disciples did not see: God is not just for “us.” God is for everyone.

She hears this in the stories of God providing food not just for the Israelites, but for Egyptians through the brilliant administration of the slave Joseph who staved off a famine through some good long-term rationing. She understands that God sends rain on the land of the just and the unjust because it is the nature of God to provide for all the world, not just some of it. She sees a God who is abundant, extravagant, who has created enough for all.

She understands that the whole idea of a zero-sum game, where feeding pets means taking food away from children, is false. She has no patience for the argument that first we just need to fix this problem over here and then we can get around to fixing your problem over there. She understands that scarcity is not the problem, but our fear of it. She takes the language of the culture that refuses to welcome her, and turns the story around: it isn’t about who gets it first, it is about a God who is abundant now, generous now, overflowing with mercy, now. There is enough of God to go around.

And this is what I love about this woman: her faith is not a quiet, passive, accepting faith. It is an insistent, persistent faith that refuses to be silenced or to be sent away. She argues with Jesus. Let me say that again, she argues with Jesus. Anyone who knows me knows why I love this about her: there is nothing more interesting to me than a good, productive, theological argument.

And Jesus, he actually listens. He sees her, he hears her, he listens to her. He is not afraid of her persistence, he is not afraid of her challenge. He is not afraid of her story or her need. He sees in her a creation of God, who is to be loved and nourished as God loves and nourishes all of us. So he responds. He acts out of the abundance of God and gives her what she needs.

We will, at various times in our lives, stand either in the place of the woman or Jesus and his disciples. Sometimes, we will insist on being heard, we will refuse to be content with crumbs, we will persistently point out that the world is not what those with privilege and power say it is. We will speak out of abundance, and it will be hard. We may do it in our jobs, our families, among our friends.

At other times, we will be on the receiving end of someone else’s persistent cry for justice and mercy, and like the disciples, we will not really want to listen.

I hope that we can have the persistent faith of this woman, and that we can listen like Jesus.

By Our Scars We Heal

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

When I was in college, my Christian friends and I spent a lot of time examining our family or relationship issues. We were trying to fix them on the assumption that somehow divorce or abuse or loneliness broke you. We spent a lot of time examining real pain and loss, examining our issues as if they were scars on our psyche that we needed to heal, which often meant making them go away. I remember after a particular conversation with a friend about some of the problematic practices in our college campus fellowship that it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps my particular mix of struggles made me more aware, more able to see, more sensitive to when communities go awry. It occurred to me that I was who I was because of those scars, not in spite of them.

I had this conversation over twenty years ago, but it came to mind as I thought about Thomas and his insistence that he would not believe the ridiculous claim of the women at the tomb that Jesus was not dead, or the that he had just missed a visit between Jesus and his friends. Thomas needs to see to believe, to touch a living body to believe that it is not dead.

What stands out to me though, is not Thomas’s doubt, but Jesus’ body. Not that Jesus has a resurrected body, though that is certainly one of the more incredible claims Christianity makes. Or even what a resurrected body is like, though Jesus simply walking through closed doors introduces the possibility that resurrected bodies may behave a little differently than ours behave. Ask my sister what happened the day she thoroughly cleaned a sliding glass door which I then I attempted to run through thinking it was open. Children, please, don’t run in the house.

What stands out to me in this story is that Jesus’ body has scars.

You see, on the one hand there is a strand of Christian interpretation that sees in the Resurrection a promise of future perfection where tears are wiped away, where suffering is no more, and all we need to do now is wait and endure. Our hope is in the promise of an end where all things are brought to a final, perhaps cataclysmic, conclusion by the divine Christ, who is the beginning and the end. In this vision, there are no scars left.

On the other hand there is the narrative which sees in this pie-in-the-sky vision an encouragement of passivity. It rightly rejects the idea of passive endurance and focuses on the life and compassion of the human Jesus. In this story, there may be no resurrected body.

But Thomas’s reaction to the risen Jesus, “My Lord and my God,” challenges both of these narratives, because of the scars. The disciples are literally cowering behind closed doors because of those scars, terrified after a week of triumph that ended in horrible violence. Only the women, who have so little to lose, venture out to care for Jesus’ body, and they return with a story so outrageous they are dismissed. The disciples have reason to be afraid, because they saw how those scars were given to Jesus. And they have reason to be ashamed, because as they saw the scars being given, they said nothing, did nothing. They allowed their friend to die, melting away in fear and silence.

Can you imagine what it must have been like to suddenly have Jesus standing next to you? To not believe it is him until you see the scars? It is by the scars that the disciples recognize that this person is indeed their friend.

Jesus didn’t get those scars because he waited around for the coming of the reign of God. He got them because he embodied the reign of God when he brought good news to the poor, gave sight to the blind, freedom to the captives, and challenged economic, political and religious oppression and servitude.

Thomas reaches out and touches the physical consequence of injustice, of state-sponsored violence, of the silence and desertion of friends. By those scars, Thomas comes to believe that this person really is the friend that he travelled with, the Jesus who loved and laughed (I hope), who wept with his friends, drank at weddings, who taught crowds and argued with lawyers. And Thomas’s response is to see in this human person the God who is always and forever for us, with us, even to the point of being scarred by us.

The scars are both our grief and our hope.

They are our grief because what we want is to not have scars, to not inflict scars. We don’t want to have to learn from our ‘issues,’ we want suffering and loss to go away. We spend an enormous amount of time in our culture protecting ourselves from suffering and loss. We spend perhaps even more time refusing to believe that our lives as they currently exist require the suffering of people of color, of people without wealth, of our planet.

The Christian message is not one of health and wealth, that is a lie which only serves the privileged and powerful. The Jesus movement was born from an eternal vision of just love that was met with rejection and violence. We cannot avoid suffering. We have scars. We will inflict scars.

But in the Resurrection, scars do not have the last word. They can become our hope. We are who we are because of what we have been through, what we have done, good or bad, considerate or neglectful.

In the Risen Christ we see that even death does not have the last word. And so, instead of cowering in fear, we can, like Jesus, speak peace to one another and to our world. Each one of us will do so in different ways and different places, but our best moment of speaking peace will most likely arise from those places where we have been scarred the most, where we have suffered or caused to suffer. We are our bodies, we are our relationships, and every body and every relationship is where and how we love one another, how we join with Jesus Christ, who trampled down death by death so that we could become to one another what God is to us: the embodiment of justice, mercy, peace, hope and joy. AMEN.

Maundy Thursday, 2017

Thu, 13 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I got into my truck this morning, I turned on the radio, and the first thing I heard was that we dropped the second largest bomb that we have dropped since the atomic bomb. It has stuck with me all day. We had the effrontery to give it a nickname: MOAB, mother of all bombs, as if somehow that makes this display of power and and violence okay, it makes it better.

We live in a world full of violence, and we know this. I think for many of us the last months have been an acute and painful experience of a world that maybe we thought was safer and better than it was, and it isn’t. The reality is we live in a world where our laws are geared to keep some of us safe and not others, where our laws are geared to welcome some of us and to exclude others. What we’re seeing now is simply the enforcement of those laws that have been on books for a long time. Laws which say that it’s legal to tear apart families based on old crimes, send people away. We see that and experience that viscerally in a way right now that I think we may not have experienced in quite that way before, at least for those of us for whom those laws have not actually applied. We haven’t had to worry about them.

Most of us probably worked today. We come from ordinary jobs. Maybe it’s a good job, maybe it’s a job that is unsatisfying, is incomplete. Maybe we don’t have a job, maybe we wish we had a job, maybe we’re not able to work and we would like to.

The world around us is difficult. It is full of suffering, it is painful.

This is a world that Jesus understands. Jesus understands what it is to come into a world, to speak grace, and kindness, and love, and hope, and to have people be angry, to have people reject his generosity, to reject his hospitality. Only a few days ago we here gathered in church and said “Blessed is he comes in the name of the Lord!” We cried “Hosanna!” because that is the reception that Jesus stirs in all of us. There’s something beautiful and amazing about this person who has come, who has fed the hungry, who has cared for the sick, who says that the prisoner should be set free, who speaks in the language of the prophets of his people and says “I have come as God to be with you, so that you are free.”

And so on the one hand we sing Hosannas, we sing a joyous welcome of the King as he comes in riding a donkey. And yet tomorrow we will stand with the crowd and we will say “Crucify him!” We will look at this one who has come to love and be among us, and we will say, “No, we do not want this. We reject this.” And we will respond as we have been taught to respond, with violence as it somehow that is the norm, as fi that is how we are to be as people.

And it’s not just the world around us. Holy Week has always stood out for me as a weak when the impatience and frustration of our lives together reaches a head. Perhaps it’s because we’re just spending more time together. Perhaps it’s because we have all these things that we need to do and we want them to go right. We want them to be beautiful, we want people to enter into the beauty of these services and of this time together, and you know what? It just clashes. That’s what happens when we’re together. We are impatient, we are frustrated, we are moody, we are harsh, we speak unkind words to one another.

Jesus knew this as well. He sat with a group of his friends. The disciples at this point have been with him for three years. They are his friends. Judas is Jesus’s friend. Judas has walked with Jesus, eaten with Jesus, slept with Jesus, bathed with Jesus, gotten dirty with Jesus. Judas is his friend. And Jeus understands that the risk of the friendship that he has offered to those around him, to this group of people that have followed him for so long, the risk is that they will be angry. That they too will be disappointed. That somehow what they expected Jesus to do, whether it was to bring down the oppressor Rome, whether it was to start a new community somewhere in the desert, whatever their expectations were, Jesus is going to disappoint them.

He understands that and he knows that the cost of that is betrayal. He knows that his most adamant and outspoken, loud and kind of obnoxious friend Peter is actually going to publicly, with the same energy that he enthusiastically endorses Jesus, is going to deny Jesus. As a matter of fact, the third time he’s going to be upset, he’s going to be angry, that he keeps being asked if he knows this Galilean that he’s obviously spent time with. Jesus know that that’ whats about to happen. Jesus know that his beloved friend is going to stand silently next to his mother and he dies on the cross.

Jesus gets that this is what’s happening, whether he knows it in explicit detail, he understands that the cost of being with us as God, of being with us as God wants us to be, is betrayal, it’s loss, it’s disappointment.

But Jesus’s response is not the response that we have. It is not the response of violence. It’s not the response of destroying. It is not the response of taking the lives of those around him.

His response instead is to do what we just did. We gathered together and had a meal. And at that meal everybody was welcome. It was not a complicated meal, it was a beautifully done meal. It was a tasty meal. It was a simple time when we come together to do what it is that changes the world. We eat together, we break break, or tortillas in thi case, we eat soup, we share simple foods, wine, together.

Jesus, celebrating this upcoming week of Passover, a celebration that for the Jews is a celebration of liberation, of freedom from slavery, an acknowledgment that the world is a violent and harsh place, but that God says, “This is not the life that I want you to live, I call you to this life of freedom, of caring, of community, of sharing.” Jesus understands that, as he gathers his friends together, he stands as the one, or sits more properly, as the one who is the lamb that will be sacrificed.

That is what is happening this week in the lives of all of them, those friends and those people around that have come to Jerusalem to celebrate together. They are celebrating a story of liberation. But what Jesus understands is that the story of liberation means going through suffering.

I wish, desperately, that being a Christian meant going around offering, or it meant avoiding suffering but it doesn’t mean that. It may mean resisting the things that cause of suffering, but we resist by going through it together.

So Jesus has a meal with his friends, he breaks bread and he shares that meal with the one who betrayed him, with the one who is going to deny him, the one who is going to stand there silently, the ones who are who are just going to disappear, the are just going to run away.

Tonight we gather and celebrate the thing that we do every Sunday. Every Sunday we take the Eucharist together, we eat bread and we drink wine, and we do it in remembrance of this night. But this night is in between the Hosannas of the glorious coming of Jesus, and the horrific crucifixion that will happen tomorrow. And Jesus response to that is to say, “Come, let’s eat together. In preparation of eating together, I am going to do something that is going to horrify you. I am going to wash your feet. I’m going to have you take off your dirty sandals, and I am going to kneel before you, I’m going to hold your foot in my hand I am going to poor water all over it and I’m going to clean your feet. I’m going to do something that in that society that was only done by a the servants, slaves.” And Jesus says, “My response to what is coming, my response to the violence of the world, my response to the ways in which God is rejected, my response is to invite you to eat, to invite you to have your feet washed, to do this tender, loving, beautiful thing that reminds us that this is who we are called to be.”

When Jesus says they will know you by the love you bear for one another, what he is saying is that this is how the world changes, this is what it means to be a follower of God. This is what it is to be God with us. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and we are called to be God to other people. We are the hands and the feet and the voice and the eyes of Christ.

In this meal, and in this time of washing feet together, where we wash one another’s feet, we are doing what we are called to do all the time, every day, whether it’s here among those who are our friends who mostly love us. Whether it is to strangers we do not know at all. Tonight is the night when we do the thing, not simply remember, but do that thing that makes us who it is that we are called to be as a community, as lovers of God, as lovers of our creation, as lovers of our neighbor.

We are called to be the kind of people who lovingly, caringly, wash it, feed it, give it drink. So tonight, come. Come and have your feet washed. Come and wash somebody else’s feet. Come and eat bread and wine, the body and blood, knowing that we do together the thing that we are called to do every day throughout our lives. AMEN.

Basics of Faith: The Image of God

Sun, 19 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Tradition holds, that every human being is in the image of God, but it does not define exactly in what this image consists. - Epiphanius of Salamas (d. 403)

The human person is an icon of God, a finite expression of God’s infinite self-expression. – Kallistos Ware

[Likeness is] the entire path along which the image develops the agency of the human will stimulated and assisted by the grace of God. – Dumitru Stăniloae

Our conscious self-awareness; our powers of reason, introspection, and intuitive insight; our conscience; and our sense of good and evil. – Kallistos Ware

No single component of the human being possesses the quality of being image by itself alone, but only in so far as the whole person manifests himself through each part and action. – Dumitru Stăniloae

Arcing Our Lives

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We are arrows in the quiver of God, shot forth to arc towards justice, mercy, peace, and love. The arc of the universe does not bend itself towards justice. We bend it. We are the universe into which God in Christ enters, and it is our lives, our choice to persistently love one another, to make the beloved community present every day and in every place, that bends the arc of the universe towards justice.

Nothing belies this conviction faster than five minutes on Facebook, or thirty-seconds reading the comments section of any article on virtually any topic. Our world appears violent, unjust, and full of changes that threaten our jobs, and jeopardize the safety of our families. Our fear, often fear motivated out of concern for those we love, is easily manipulated, turning us against, strangers, those who are different, anyone we perceive as a threat.

So when Jesus says that anger is not so different than murder, that objectifying another person in your mind is not so far from non-committal sex, we may only hesitantly agree. What we hope is that really only the big ones matter. After all, most of us probably haven’t murdered someone recently. But I bet many of us, have fairly recently engaged in some name-calling, Even using the word “fool.” Frankly, for some of us, that might be the most benign term we have used in the past few months. How many of us haven’t snapped at a loved one in the last week? We want to think that name calling, irritation, our private moments of lustful daydreaming, the casual promise we make with no intent to keep, are small things, banal, unthinking moments that don’t really matter in the greater scheme of things.

Yet I think we are aware that small things really do matter. Only a few weeks ago I listened to a state department employee noting that despite recent executive decisions with which many department employees disagree, most of the career bureaucrats will stay and do their jobs. After all, they worked hard to get this job, they are deeply dedicated to it, and frankly, it is food on the table, a roof over their heads, school for their children. As she described that at best some may choose to obstruct policies with which they disagree by engaging in some classic bureaucratic slowdowns, a little warning alarm started to go off in the back of my mind. That alarm started clanging loudly when 109 people traveling to the U.S. were “temporarily inconvenienced” because we are afraid of who they might be. Federal employees went to work, and just doing their job, they handcuffed a possible 5-year-old security risk, and detained a woman for twenty hours without food. This week, in the name of our national safety, ICE raids swept up immigrants all over the nation regardless of their criminal record, apparently targeting Sanctuary cities like our own. Once again, here in Portland, , all in the line of duty. Not one of these people went to work and thought: I am going to do something terrible to another person today. They just went to work to do their jobs.

Hannah Arendt, a brilliant 20th-century Jewish political theorist called this out with the phrase, “the banality of evil.” Sent by The New Yorker to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, she was astonished that this man, who created a shockingly efficient system of railways, stations, guards and camps, delivering with clocklike precisions jewish bodies to labor and die, serving as Hitler’s architect for the “final solution,” didn’t seem very horrific. What astonished Arendt was how ready he was to simply not think about how his job was to implement genocide. Arendt argued that evil is not dramatic and exciting, but often starts with boring, every-day, unthinking, uncritical actions that by themselves seem harmless.

When Jesus says that anger results in the judgement just like murder, or that name calling puts us on a path straight to that place that those listening to Jesus knew as the valley of ben Hinnom, Gehenna in Greek, “hell” in this English translation, he was not declaring God’s judgment on humanity, but holding up a mirror. The valley of ben Hinnom may have been an ancient site of human sacrifice, a perfectly horrific image for the consequences of seemingly little things. Small acts of verbal, emotional, and social violence that can, without check, destroy relationships, and put us on a path to horrific, creation-destroying violence.

Today, Jesus confronts us with the reality that small things matter, and says that the only response is to identify whatever it is in us that is at the root of our anger, our dishonesty, our betrayal, and get rid of it. He uses the strongest possible language: it would be better to be without a part of our body than to contribute to the sacrifice of yet another person, to use our fear to justify yet again violence towards another, to normalize it in the name of safety for our families, our friends, our nation.

But Jesus’ reaction isn’t simply about stopping our descent into destructive behaviors, but about redirecting us towards what it is to be human beings. When we sin, we miss the mark of what it is to be a human being created in God’s image. There is not a single reference to sin in scripture that is not also a call to change direction, to correct our course, to re-aim so that we can hit our mark. We are created in the image of a God who is love, and so we are created to love. Every reference to sin and the pain and death to which it leads is also, always, a call to choose life. Moses, concluding his farewell speech to his people, calls them recommit themselves to God, to “choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” Every prophet says the same thing, over and over again: Stop your injustice, and instead, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and body, love your neighbor as yourself; choose life by doing justice and loving mercy. Jesus stands in this same prophet line when he reminds us that blessedness and joyful are the peacemakers, the comforters, those that hunger and thirst for righteousness and justice.

Just as small things get us of track, small things get us back on track. A kind word, a promise kept, a patient deep breath. We gather together on Sundays and celebrate a liturgy that sets before us our call to become persons of peace and justice, mercy and love, and teaches us how to get there. Every liturgy, after the sermon, we pray for all those we have been called to love, including our enemies. Every liturgy gives us an opportunity to acknowledge the ways we have failed to love. We set aside a time to identify and grieve those moments of anger, disrespect, and objectification, known, and unknown to us, things we have done and left undone. The liturgy we celebrate together gives each one of us the time and space to examine our conscience, to reflect on the reality of how we have treated one another, to acknowledge that we have missed our mark. Then, the presider stands and reminds us that in God, we are forgiven.

The liturgy then gives us the opportunity to do exactly the thing that we have been offered, to take Jesus at his word: before we offer our gifts of time, talent, bread and wine, we are to put them down and make amends with those around us. The Peace is an ancient practice where kisses of forgiveness were exchanged between community members. It is a beautiful acknowledgment that, in community, we will in all likelihood offend, dismiss, and hurt one another, but that in our life together we recognize our failure, and make every effort to grant and receive mercy, to forgive. In the Peace we can make our amends so that together, we can choose life. Every liturgy gives us a moment to reconcile, do exchange peace rather than violence.

But the liturgy does not stop there, because sin and forgiveness are not the beginning and end of our lives in God. Someone once told me that the most important thing I can preach is that we are forgiven. But that is only true if the most important thing about us is that we are sinners. Forgiveness is a necessary part of the journey, but not actually our goal. If it were the end, our celebration together would end at confession and forgiveness. But it doesn’t end there. Instead, we bring forward the fruits of our labor, money, bread and wine, everyday common items, set them on a table in our midst, and together invite the Spirit to transform them and us into the body and blood of Christ in the world. That is our mark, that is our target, the goal and the life for which we were created: to work together in God’s universe, to be “little Christs” in the world, to bend our lives towards justice, mercy, peace and love as God’s beloved community.

Fragile Repentances

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Essay

Every Orthodox person who loves someone of the same sex risks hearing the following:

“I can no longer offer you the Eucharist. While I cannot tell you to leave this parish, I would prefer you no longer attend.”

Few words are more painful to hear.

We can argue endlessly over proof-texts from scripture or the tradition, wielding verses and canons and quotations like scalpels cutting out a cancer, or swords lopping off limbs. How many of us, though, stop to wonder what it is like to be a partnered lesbian woman or gay man in an Orthodox parish?

Do you invite your partner to the choir family potluck? Do you express your grief at the death of your mother-in-law? Do you share the hysterical antics of your step-son? Do you cover your car with “My daughter is an honor student …” stickers? As you struggle in your relationship, as do all married people, do you go to friends at church for comfort and advice? Do you approach the wise men and women in your church to ask them how they sustained their marriages?

Everything that seems a given for Orthodox safely married to someone of the opposite sex is fraught with anxiety for the coupled gay Orthodox.

Imagine this conversation:

“Father, I would like to have my girls baptized in the church, will you do so?” “Are you married? “If it were legal here, I would be. We have been together for over two decades.” “But you are unmarried?” “Yes, Father, unmarried.” “Well, I will baptize your girls only on the condition that you leave your current relationship, confess your sins, and commit to a life of celibacy.” “You would like me to leave my partner of over twenty years? Their mother?” “Yes. Others choose to remain celibate.” “On your recommendation?” “Of course. I recently told another woman who struggles as you do that she too needs to remain celibate or she will burn in hell.” “…”

After admirably collecting her wits:

“If I find a priest who is willing to baptize my daughters, will you welcome them into this parish?” “Of course. But you will never find such a priest.”

Since not all priests are unsympathetic to partnered lesbians and gay men, and even more priests would never withhold baptism based on the “sins” of the parents, your children are baptized. But this is still your local parish priest. So now, you attend Sunday school with your daughters so you can be there if and when homosexuality, same-sex marriage, or the parenting of children by same-sex couples should arise. You want to be present in case your children are attacked because their parents are two women; you want to be able to explain to them that not everyone can see how much you love and enjoy one another.

One of the greatest tragedies of our current theological predicament is the way it robs lesbians and gay men of the freedom of repentance. We seem to think that it is pastoral and caring to describe homosexuality as a sickness from which one can be healed, equating it with an addiction (usually alcoholism) against which the afflicted must faithfully struggle against for the rest of their lives through “voluntary” celibacy. We glibly target homosexual acts as if same-sex love is just a problem of misdirected genitals.

A theology that simultaneously characterizes homosexuality as a disorder and a disease encourages the following confessional situations:

A gay man who broached his homosexuality was calmly reassured that the priest would do his best to keep him from the company of little boys, as if gayness and child molestation go hand in hand.

Or how about this recommendation for a cure:

“You just need a really good fuck with a woman, then you will be fine.”

How can your confession be genuine when the recommendation given to you is to leave your partner and dissolve your family, suggestions that would be abhorrent in any circumstance other than abuse?

It is easy to identify these situations simply as confessions gone wrong, as blaming children for the sins of their parents. Perhaps these priests are just terribly confused. Surely there are kinder, gentler priests.

But the problem is not with the method of delivery, it is with the message: this relationship that is for you a source of faith, hope and love is in reality “the result of humanity’s rebellion against God, and so against its own nature and well-being.”

No kindness in the world can undo this message, and it takes every ounce of your being to fight its pernicious effects.

It is almost impossible to silence the clamor of the Orthodox blogosphere or the tirade of a priest:

It does not matter that your relationship is monogamous; you are blamed for promiscuity. It does not matter that you do not care for hard-core pornography; you are blamed for its increase. It does not matter that it would never occur to you to have sex with a goat, a relative, or a child; your relationship grants permission for bestiality, incest or pedophilia.

Your straight brothers and sisters may or may not be questioned about their sexual continence; it is assumed that you have none. The culture of promiscuity and hookups that straights can resist is presumed irresistible to you. Worse, YOU are at fault for the rise of promiscuity and sexually degrading relationships. Homosexuality is as much a cause as it is a sign or symptom.

While there may be something humorous in witnessing the discomfiture of a priest as you agree with him that promiscuity is a problem, that you too dislike the rise of degraded sexual relationships, there is nothing funny in the truth that these topics are being broached by him because you stated your attraction to people of your same sex, or confirmed that you are indeed living with your partner and really would rather be married to them since you too are uncomfortable with your extra-marital status. Your relationship is by its very existence a capitulation to a whole host of perversions and a guarantee of your eternal damnation.

It simply isn’t possible to have an edifying conversation about how your relationship can continue to be a place of joy and delight in one another and God if every time you must wade through the detritus of someone else’s misperceptions of you and “your people.”

No one ever asks, how is this relationship a blessing to you, to your family, to your neighbors, and to your relationship with God?

You cannot express delight that you have come to love and trust another person enough to share your life with them, to invite them not simply into your bed (despite the rhetoric otherwise), but to wash dishes together, trip over one another’s shoes, move the sweater that is always left on your favorite chair, to share a meal with each night. This is the companion with whom you share your life, you argue with, are challenged by. He or she is someone with whom you grow into the likeness God, the one with whom you practice theosis (it is a practice friends, an ongoing process, not a state).

The Orthodox liturgy is permeated with the language of sin and repentance, a constant call to turn away, to “hit the mark” and become more fully a human person made in the image and likeness of God. This stream of call and response which shapes you into a person of prayer and of love becomes a torrent which you suddenly find yourself swimming against. After being invited out of a community through the denial of the eucharist and in some cases the suggestion (or insistence) that you leave entirely, the liturgy becomes an agony and your attempts to better love your neighbor are lost in the constant, breathless defense of your own life which is such a joy to you and a horror to others. You stand, praying, no longer asking for healing, but desperately insisting that you are not sick.

You are so busy fighting against the current to stay alive, to remember that your relationship is a source of life and joy, that you hardly have the energy to recall the ways you really have failed to be human. You are so busy gasping for breath that you cannot enter into the necessary process of acknowledgement, repentance and change which is the heart of the Christian life.

If you mention the fight you had the other day, and how it was really because you were tired and irritable, not because your loved one yet again failed to turn off the lights, will the response spring out of an awareness that all relationships suffer from trivial selfishness, or is this seen as merely a manifestation of the selfishness upon which your entire relationship is supposedly built? Will every struggle you have with your relationship be turned into a struggle over your relationship?

It is horrible to realize that you cannot repent because you are afraid that admitting to one sin is a concession to something you cannot with any integrity concede: that your life of joyful partnership is actually a sickness, an addiction, a perversion. To desperately realize that you no longer feel like you have the room (or even permission) to learn to be a Christian with your sisters and brothers through shared liturgical practices because you are too consumed with wondering if you are even worthy to stand in their presence, much less eat at the same table as them.

How ironic that the denial of the eucharist, meant to inspire repentance, results in the inability to repent.

Some will interpret this anguish as typical of someone who refuses to acknowledge their sinful relationship. Certainly many men and women have followed the counsel of their priest, and struggled to remain celibate. Some succeed, others fail. There is an irony though, that those who agree to see themselves as sick and in need of healing are welcome no matter how often they fail to remain sexually continent, but those who choose to engage in a faithful and life-long relationship have capitulated to their disease. In the tangled web of our theology, promiscuity is better than commitment because the possibility remains for the only option open to a lesbian or gay man: life-long celibacy. The promiscuous person can still repent, the partnered (or worse, married!) person has by their commitment shown they are unwilling to consider the possibility.

The person who asks these questions, who will not forsake their partner or disrupt the only stable household their children have known, is ostracized, silenced, and exiled. The one who will not visit the emotional and spiritual equivalent of divorce on themselves, their beloved or their children is rejected.

My point here is not to engage in a debate over the clobber texts, or argue about canons and their applicability or interpretation. It is also not to claim that same-sex relationships were ever blessed in our liturgical history. Substantive historical work is almost entirely absent within Orthodox theology. Interesting work has been done by Mark Jordan, Eugene Rogers, Bernadette Brooten, Martti Nissinen, and John Boswell (note: “interesting” does not mean agreeable).

Rather, my point is threefold. First, we need to seriously consider the possibility that our efforts at theological kindness are pernicious, destructive of the very thing that we want to encourage: repentance. By calling diseased, evil, disordered and destructive something that is experienced as a source of faith, hope and joy, we create a dissonance that is sometimes impossible to unhear. We call what is good, evil. In doing so, we deafen someone to those parts of their lives (we all have them) that truly are destructive and from which we are invited to turn away.

Second, we need to be aware that the our current theological position creates a fragility for lesbians and gay men who simply never know how they will be received. The stories above are real–some many years old and perhaps the consequence of youthful priests, some very recent. Even those men and women who have found welcoming communities live with the reality that their beloved priest will not live forever. Faithful and “out” gay and lesbian longtime members of churches have been denied communion upon the arrival of a new priest dedicated to eradicating the scourge of “casual” Christianity. A new priest might refuse to recognize that the commitment of a gay person to a community whose theology at best mis-characterizes them and at worst actively seeks to destroy their most cherished relationships is anything but casual. Orthodoxy is full of wise same-sex oriented individuals who have spent decades loving God, their partners and the Orthodox Church, often to their great suffering. The reality is that for these women and men their life in community is often dependent on the whim of a priest and the willingness of their friends to defend them when necessary. Even priests who are sympathetic may be too frightened (of their jobs, their colleagues, or rumor and spite) to openly commune known lesbians and gay men (this conundrum is worth a blog post of its own, though perhaps better written by a priest in this position).

Finally, the Orthodox community must allow lesbians and gay men to make the same appeals to relational experience that undergird Orthodox theologies of marriage:

“In Christian marriage, it is not selfish ‘pleasure’ or search for ‘fun’ which is the main driving force: it is rather a quest for mutual sacrifice, for readiness to take the partner’s cross as one’s own, to share one’s whole life with one’s partner. The ultimate goal of marriage is the same as that of every other sacrament, deification of the human nature and union with Christ. This becomes possible only when marriage itself is transfigured and deified.”

The belief that marriage is, like all relationships, a vehicle for transformation into the likeness of God comes from the experience of men and women who have seen themselves become more virtuous, more neighborly, more joyful, more hopeful, more loving through their marriage. Orthodox theologians have attended to the practice of marriage, examined its fruits, and found it fertile ground for becoming more like God.

Homosexuality is not at all like alcoholism or diabetes, favorite comparisons among those Orthodox who are trying to be gentle. Diabetes can, untreated, kill you. Literally. Alcoholism given full reign kills your relationships (metaphorically), then kills you (literally). A life shared in love with another person is exactly that, a life. It does not kill, and it may very well be the vehicle for growth into God that is most potent, most transforming, most salvific.

What would really happen if the the Orthodox church, its people, its clergy, its theologians, were to likewise look at those same-sex relationships which most closely pattern themselves after marriage and use them as a measure for considering same-sex marriage? How is discovering that God is present and active among these men and women a detriment to anyone or anything?

At best, we may be astonished at the creative movement of the Spirit which blows where it wills, and humbled yet again as we realize we do not own or direct its works. At the very least, perhaps we can allow lesbians and gay men to repent along side us, to recognize their true struggles rather than bear our perceptions of their struggles, and to celebrate together the God who gives “us these awesome and life-creating Mysteries for the good and sanctification of our souls and bodies.”

Life-Bearing Love: A Too Risky Vision

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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An independent, invited essay. First published online at Public Orthodoxy in a series sponsored by the Orthodox Theological Society in America’s Project on the Holy and Great Council.

Essay

The upcoming Great Council, decades in the making, is an opportunity for Orthodoxy to present to the world a vision of the fruitfulness of love ripened through relationships in which we are simultaneously co-workers in one another’s deification and co-workers with God through whom all creation bears life. The Synod is an opportunity for the Orthodox Church to posit a vision of relationships as the very means through which human persons grow in love in the image of God and towards an ever deeper relationship with God. God is love, and it is in love and by love that we come to know God.

Orthodox anthropology unapologetically asserts the goodness of the human person. This notion of goodness, rooted in creation and telos, beginning and end, is made evident and possible through the Incarnation. The Incarnation underlies the possibility of deification, the practice of embodied virtue through which we attain the image and likeness of God. As beings created in the image of God who is ever-in-relation, we too become who we are in relationship. Not just any relations, but relations marked by the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal 5:22-23). God’s presence is evidenced in the fruit borne by the one who acts (Matt 12:33). We are to be known as Christians by our fruit, especially by the fruit of love (John 33:35). These fruits of the Spirit are given by God, and therefore an indication of God’s presence (1 John 4:16), and require our participation, our appropriation, our co-working with God. As co-workers with God, the mission of the Orthodox Church could be framed as an ongoing effort to recognize the work of God in the world and join that work wherever it is in solidarity and service. This can be done secure in the knowledge that to nourish the fruits of the Spirit wherever they are is to enter into God’s already existing work in creation. Love bears life, and God’s own nature of love overflowing into life is the model for this.

Such a vision recognizes that all relationships are loci for theosis, and provides criteria by which Christians can affirm the many relationships in which human persons engage: Does this relationship nourish, ripen, and harvest the fruits of the Spirit? Does it help its members become better lovers of God and neighbor? Is it life-bearing? Different relationships require different practices to encourage fruitfulness. Monastic relationships are shaped by commitments to a particular community, the sharing of all goods in common, and sexual abstinence. Married relations are shaped by fidelity to a single spouse, as well as by supportive commitments to a wide range of family members including but hardly exclusive to children. These two relationships hardly exhaust the relationships through which God works: we are all members of families, ecclesial communities, and societies, as well as residents of particular regions and countries. We are workers, caretakers, friends, and acquaintances. Each of these relationships can be a place in which love bears life.

Yet such a vision is too risky for “The Sacrament of Marriage and Its Impediments,” as such a vision allows for relationships which stretch the narrow terms by which the document defines marriage, asserting that marriage without sacrament is merely “State-recognized cohabitation” (I.9). A broader vision may be an avenue to recognize the life-bearing fruitfulness of relationships which are a significant target of this document: same-sex marriages. The “free union of man and woman is an indispensable condition for marriage” opens the document. The phrase “man and woman” is repeated seven times. The document decries secular society which threatens Orthodox Christians by its insistence on recognizing “new forms of cohabitation” (I.8) and explicitly rejects all same-sex civil unions (I.10).

So great is this perceived homosexual threat, a threat which in some traditionally Orthodox countries is met with state- and Church-condoned discrimination and violence, that the many relationships in and through which God works are not recognized as deifying: non-procreative relationships entered into by the elderly; the adoption of children by choice rather than need; religiously mixed marriages in which love, joy, hope, and even faith, flourish. The very possibility of allowing that same-sex relationships may be a place in which God works results in a statement that treats as collateral damage all relations that do not conform to its canonical strictures.

As a result, the document elevates the “institution of family” (I.1), later capitalizing ‘Family’ as if it is a platonic form to which all families must correspond. Restricting the legitimate family to only its “traditional” (I.8) boundaries, it fails to account for the varied family formations found in society and Church. Further, this elevation of family signals no awareness that family is often a primary source of violence.

It is notable that the establishment of sacramental marriage between the tenth and twelfth centuries coincides with the emergence of a new paradigm for female sanctity: the battered wife as the saintly ideal. Lest we imagine this is merely a thing of the past, it is worth pointing out the recent resistance to legislation which protects women and children from family violence by the Moscow Patriarchate, which views such legislation as a guise for “an anti-family ideology of radical feminism.” Almost one-third of women experience violence at the hands of an intimate partner, who also commit over 38% of all female homicides. This is a reality of family and marriage which cannot be adequately addressed by pastoral tools which are more focused on purging the church of same-sex relationships than caring for the complex family situations lived out by Orthodox Christians everywhere.

Without a vision which seeks to participate in God’s already-present work in the world, which nurtures the fruits of the Spirit wherever they are found, the Church simply fails to be Church, a loss that God’s world simply cannot afford.

Response to the Pre-Conciliar Document on Marriage and Its Impediments

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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A collaborative essay from Fr. Robert M. Arida, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, David Dunn, Maria McDowell, Bryce E. Rich, and Teva Regule. First published online at Public Orthodoxy in a series sponsored by the Orthodox Theological Society in America’s Project on the Holy and Great Council.

Excerpt

The document on marriage does not refer to its long and complex history and accompanying theology. What is offered to the faithful and to the world is a statement that bases marriage on a particular understanding of natural and divine law (sec.I, par.2 and 6). Resting upon this foundation the authors attempt to protect marriage and its inextricable bond to the family from the encroachments of secularism and moral relativism (sec.I, par.1). However, in doing so, the authors appear to have constructed a paradigm of marriage based more on a particular ideology than its theological underpinnings. They present an image of the Church that can only speak of marriage as it is related to the law and not as a bond forged and nurtured by love and divine grace. By virtually ignoring the Church’s emphasis on grace the authors have restricted the Church’s dexterity in responding to the myriad of pastoral issues related to globalization, not the least being inter-religious marriage. In addition to minimizing the place of love and grace, the authors have also presented marriage as a bourgeois institution without taking into account the safeguarding of children or women in cases of domestic violence, and the possible need for dissolving the marriage bond.

Marriage, Family, and Scripture

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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A collaborative essay from Bryce E. Rich, Fr. Robert M. Arida, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, David Dunn, Maria McDowell, and Teva Regule. First published online at Public Orthodoxy in a series sponsored by the Orthodox Theological Society in America’s Project on the Holy and Great Council.

Excerpt

The title of the working document “The Sacrament of Marriage and Its Impediments” appears to promise a meaningful teaching on the spousal relationship. Instead, much of the document is devoted to a particular, modern vision of family. Beginning with the central claim of §I.1 regarding the dangers posed by secularization and moral relativism to the institution of the family, over half the paragraphs of Section I address relationships deemed incongruous with the purported Orthodox model of family, mixed with claims about the welfare of civil society. While much can be said, the following essay offers a cursory examination of the scripture passages supporting this view, along with an exploration of biblical passages that belie this facile model.

Defending Human Dignity: A Response to the Pre-Conciliar Document ‘The Mission of the Orthodox Church in Today’s World,’

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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Description

A collaborative essay from Fr. Robert M. Arida, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, David Dunn, Maria McDowell, Teva Regule, and Bryce E. Rich. First published online at Public Orthodoxy in a series sponsored by the Orthodox Theological Society in America’s Project on the Holy and Great Council.

Excerpt

The authors of ‘The Mission of the Orthodox Church in Today’s World’ are to be commended for framing our shared ecclesial mission as one of making present the eschatological hope of the new creation in which “race, gender, age, social, or any other condition” are no bar to shared eucharistic celebration. The document rightly reminds us that “the purpose of the incarnation … is the deification of the human person” which establishes the dignity of all persons, and demands its protection. As co-workers with God, the church and its members enter into “common service together with all people of good will,” seeking to establish peace, justice (3, 6), and social solidarity (6.4, 6.5, 6.6), gifts of the Holy Spirit which come from God (3.2) but “also depend on human synergy” (3.3). These gifts, and this work, is required for the flourishing of human dignity.

…

Thus, the document’s claims to solidarity, shared anxiety and commitment to compassion for all of God’s creation are undermined by its selective understanding of human rights and its refusal to acknowledge the shortcomings of Orthodox in these areas. It undermines the longstanding engagement of Orthodox theologians and pastors with the world, shaped by the world, so that it may exist and live for the life of the world. Unfortunately, by repeated contrasts between the church and a secular, violent, morally-lax world, this document tends to encourage a church turned in on itself rather than turned outward to engage truly in service. It is unfortunate, but perhaps telling, that “freedom understood as permissiveness” (8.13) is corrected simply by a reminder that freedom comes with responsibility. Rather, in light of the deifying purpose of the Incarnation, and the hope it offers, would that this document offered a vision of freedom for the other, freedom not to fear the “infinite anxiety” (2.2) which fills humanity, but freedom to love the other with “joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

The Home that Joy Built

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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Excerpt

For as long as I can remember, the church has been my building, my home, my ekklesia. Its sounds, sights, and smells—no matter where I heard, saw, or smelled them—would assemble themselves around me, as if I were there, as if I were touching its walls, kneeling on its rugs, kissing its icons. Always. Still.

It is my home. It just isn’t necessarily there anymore.

Balanced precariously with the older kids on the steps to the altar, I watched our priest describe his vestments. The cords to the cuffs were so long! At five or six years old, I didn’t understand, but I remember that each item meant something. I remember wanting to understand.

A few years later the same priest came to find me and my friend. He walked us past the people hanging icons on the bare walls, unrolling rugs across empty floors, reassembling stands for music, icons and candles. “I want to show you the altar,” gesturing us in. He took us around all three sides of the altar, showing the table of preparation, the menorah-like candlestick, the place where the altar boys stored the processional items. He described everything on the altar table. I was enthralled. I remember him saying, “I want you to see this now, before you aren’t allowed in here anymore.”

As a teen, my Sunday School teachers asked us to memorize John 3:16. This seemed like a very nice verse to pick. (I knew nothing about the particular Protestant fascination with this text.) Our teachers challenged us to find the verse in the liturgy. I listened for it, avidly. There it was! Tucked away in the prayers the priest said quietly while preparing communion. For the first time, it occurred to me that the liturgy is full of scripture. I was intrigued. Intrigued enough that at summer camp, I looked forward to the extra assignments, usually in the form of knowledge scavenger hunts, searching from icon to book and back again. Peter was a few years older than me. He was nice enough, popular with everyone at camp. I wasn’t so sure about him since he teased me about my curiosity when the priests weren’t around, but he sure seemed eager when they were around. We both asked questions, we both shared what we knew, and the priests—they liked our interest, our enthusiasm, our curiosity. Everyone said he would make a good priest.

When I was thinking about college, I told a friendly priest that I was interested in seminary. I wasn’t sure why. I just knew that was where you went to learn about church and God. I wondered what he thought. He said I should go to college first.

When I finally decided to pursue a doctorate in theological ethics, I did so fully aware that theology is done from within a praying community. In Orthodoxy, the theologian is one who prays, and prayer is corporate as well as private. In my new city, I found a priest who knew my interests, my beliefs, and welcomed me wholeheartedly into his parish. He offered me the willingness to converse about difficult issues without reactive fear, scolding, or vague dismissals to just be content with all the wonderful things I could do in the church. More than that, to the extent that he was permitted within the bounds of acceptability, he gracefully and consistently sought to encourage the fullest possible participation of women and girls of all ages, recognizing and encouraging their gifts. He saw that, like boys, girls can and should be nurtured in their love for all parts of the church and its life, and that love is best nurtured through welcome and participation.

Yet he could not fix the underlying problem: women were excluded for any number of reasons from full participation in the ecclesial life of the church. Even as Orthodox seminaries enroll women, and some in the church make heroic efforts to place these women, such positions are few and far between. Even were they a dime a dozen, some gifts possessed by women simply cannot be exercised with any consistency in the Orthodox Church. Female participation, from reading the epistle, to chanting, to holding the communion cloth, to teaching, to preaching, is entirely up to the whim of a particular priest in a particular parish, and can change almost without warning.

My point here is not to argue for why this practice of exclusion is actually a failure of Orthodox ecclesiology and theology, not its natural outgrowth. I have done that elsewhere. Rather, it is to speak to its effect: the abrogation of joy, and the failure to love.

I grew up in a church whose theology emphasized joy—in particular, liturgical joy. The liturgical theology of Alexander Schmemann, who taught most of the priests of my youth, was motivated by a relentless pursuit of liturgical joy since “joy is the only really transforming power in the world.” But my experience, as a girl-child always outside the altar, gifts passed over for a boy who chided her for sharing his inclinations, was of growing joylessness. I experienced moments when the liturgy was rich, glorious, and full of joy. Yet my joy lasted only until I looked up from my choir book, or away from a beautiful icon, and my gaze was filled with the iconostasis, that barrier I was never allowed to cross except for that once, as a child, before the space it contains was consecrated, made too holy for my female body. Once I was in a large church with an ample supply of altar servers. Looking up from my music, my eyes widened as I watched thirteen men and boys come out of the deacon doors in exact formation, coming together in the middle, perfectly lined up, candles ablaze as the gospel was a carried out by the priest. All I could think was, “I am watching a phalanx of men” and I could not help but cynically wonder at what point the liturgy became a parade ground for military maneuvers.

Then there was the evening I was chanting the overwhelmingly beautiful and mournful Holy Week burial service, a perfect expression of “sorrowful joy.” When the time came for the lights to be lowered, the chanters did what they had always done: they joined the priest in the darkened altar, ready to bear the body of Christ while chanting the funeral hymn. Suddenly I was alone at the chant stand, the only woman chanting that evening. It wasn’t that I was any less capable than the men with whom I had just been chanting, but that I was a woman and women do not go in the altar during liturgy. When a woman (or even a man) dares to question this custom some defender will patiently point out that only those that are necessary go into the altar. Yet here I was, unnecessary when every male peer was necessary. I was immobilized with horror and shame, unnecessary simply because I was woman. Others, of course, will point out that it is not that women per se are not allowed. After all, nuns enter the altar in their monasteries during the liturgy. These brilliant interlocutors don’t seem to notice that the requirements for women to engage in the most basic of liturgical altar service far exceed anything demanded of males, from committed priest to wavering altar boy.

Over and over again, the liturgy reminded me that I was a woman who was not permitted to participate fully alongside my male peers who shared my interests, my gifts, my joy, but not my body. That niggling sadness I had experienced, knowing that I was only allowed to see the contents of the altar because it wasn’t yet consecrated, or grief-laced jealousy (quickly suppressed and never admitted to until now) that Peter would get to spend a whole summer being thoughtfully encouraged to consider the priesthood, or the catch in my throat every time I glimpsed a woman in a clerical collar, became insuppressible grief and rage.

The Church has Left the Building:
Faith, Parish, and Ministry in the Twenty-First Century

Sat, 01 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Description

The origin of the phrase “the church has left the building” lies with Elvis. In order to clear halls of his riotous fans after concerts, it was announced that “Elvis has left the building.” Here, the expression highlights intense change within the church. Not only does the church change for its own existence, it also does so for the life of the world. The church cannot avoid the many past and future changes of our constantly transforming society, demographic changes long in process. What you have before you is a gathering of first-hand reflections–stories really–from a diverse group of Christians, lay as well as ordained. While each has a distinctive experience of the church in our time, all of them have something to say about the many changes in our society and how these are affecting our faith, the parish, and pastoral work.

Endorsements & Reviews

In The Church Has Left the Building, Michael Plekon compiles moving testimonies about what it means to depart from the structures that have held and sustained us. The voices in this book do not gloss over our situation with magical solutions or blind denial. Instead, they present real reflections of what it means to be church today. Through their honest grief, gratitude and liberation, they call out with a deeply hopeful vision.

—Carol Howard Merritt, author of Healing Spiritual Wounds; columnist and blogger for The Christian Century; senior consultant for the Center for Progressive Renewal

Michael Plekon has in recent years brought to life a wide variety of extraordinary Christian figures, past and present, and thought through their witness in the light of his richly nuanced understanding of Orthodox theology and tradition. This new book is a sort of wake-up call to all who worry about the future of institutional Christianity: the Church as gift and mystery is a good deal more resilient than the various awkward structures in which it embodies itself, and we need a voice like Plekon’s to remind us of this and to recall us to hopefulness.

—Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge

The Gospel According to Kaepernick

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Periodically, I am reminded that God has a sense of humor. For example, this weekend my parents are visiting, and I get to preach on a gospel passage that starts with Jesus’ warning, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). It is not exactly the most welcoming, family-friendly message.

Jesus isn’t trying to be family-friendly, or particularly friendly at all. Jesus is making his way to Jerusalem where we know he will be confronted by both state and religious authorities. At this moment, it almost seems as if Jesus is impatient with the growing number of people trailing him into the city, and his words are calculated to check their perhaps naive enthusiasm. He shocks them into listening by challenging the very social safety net that ensured their survival, participation in their family. Unlike today, where many of us have moved away from our families, or may have no significant contact with them, to not be in a family in Palestine was to have no food, shelter, income or support. Jesus wants people to stop, sit, and think about what it means to follow him, and so he says something shocking, something uncomfortable.

Having grabbed their attention, he puts offers two straightforward comparisons. The first is excruciatingly familiar to me. Elizabeth and I have been spent the last year discussing the addition of a bathroom and office to our home, and we have sat down many times to estimate the cost and see if we can afford to start the project. Far more significant that our house project is the deliberation a leader should take before launching into war, counting the lives that might be lost, and suing for peace before it is far too late.

Perhaps the fact that both the builder and king sit down to deliberate struck me because my news feed has been filled with the controversy sparked Colin Kaepernik, the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, who remained seated during the singing of the national anthem, because, as he later explained, he could not “stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color.” He is aware of the cost of his protest, the potential loss of both the endorsements that make him rich and playing the game that is his career. But more important to him is that he speaks out on behalf of “people that are oppressed.” To do otherwise would be, he believes, selfish.

His deliberate choice to remain seated earned him immediate and scathing condemnations for his apparent lack of patriotism. Yet it also renewed a national conversation about race and violence, and it managed to do so without the death of yet another citizen or police officer. I learned something new as a result of this conversation, something I find profoundly disturbing: our national anthem contains a verse which celebrates the death of slaves who dared to resist their masters.

Francis Scott Key, a slave owner, served as a lieutenant in the war of 1812. His troops were routed by a group called the “Colonial Marines,” a battalion of runaway black slaves who joined the British army in return for their freedom. A few weeks later after his defeat, Key witnessed the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, over Fort McHenry, the battle which inspired the song and its first verse that I sing at the beginning of every Portland Thorns game. Key also wrote a third verse, one which I have never sung:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The band to which Key is referring are the very Colonial Marines he encountered only weeks earlier, the hirelings and slaves whose bloody deaths washed away the pollution of their betrayal. Yet where is the betrayal in resisting those who have enslaved you and your families?

The legacy of slavery, the betrayal visited on black and brown bodies throughout the Western hemisphere, is given biblical support by Paul’s rather ambiguous letter to Philemon. Paul does not clearly condemn slavery in this letter. Rather he asks that Philemon welcome Onesimus back into his home, “no longer as a slave but … a beloved brother…” (Phil 1:16). The traditional interpretation is that Onesimus is a runaway slave who has converted to Christianity, and is now returning, repentant, to his rightful master. What Paul is appears to be asking then, is that Philemon welcome Onesimus back rather than punish him for running away. This interpretation not only fails to condemn slavery, it actually endorses it as an accepted part of the status quo. I think it is worth pausing and remembering for a moment that this passage was read by Christians in the United States, by Episcopalians, a mere 150 years ago, as a biblical endorsement of slavery. I am sure that Francis Scott Key, a well-educated lawyer and active Episcopalian reader and deputy to six General conventions, read this letter as support for his ownership of black human beings.

A less pro-slavery interpretation is that Onesimus did not run away, but was sent by Philemon to care for Paul in his old age. As Paul came to know and love Onesimus as a Christian, he sends him to his master as legality demands, but insists that Philemon rethink his relationship with Onesimus, not as slave, but as a brother.

Which brings us back to the Lukan Jesus who insists, over and over again, that we cannot follow him without giving up all of our possessions. Onesimus is the possession of Philemon, and Paul insists that being a Christian reshapes their relationship into one in which possession has no part. We often see our families as things we possess, or we may feel like they possess us, or frankly, both. But Jesus redefines our relationships such that possessing someone else, treating them as an object of our need or power or gratification, is not what it is to be a disciple. Instead, following Jesus, loving Jesus, is to care for the poor, free the imprisoned, heal the sick, resist (and perhaps end) oppression and restore social and economic balance. This is how Jesus opens his ministry in Luke, and it is what he does as he travels the countryside, eating with people he shouldn’t, challenging religious authorities to welcome the unwelcome, healing the sick, generally challenging all the normal ways of relating with which people were quite comfortable.

Maybe this is why Kaepernick’s actions and people’s reaction stood out to me so much this week: protesting the death and violence with which people of color live in the United States earns condemnation because it makes us uncomfortable. I think many of us in the United States are much more ready to hear that we are supposed to hate our family (some of whom we are probably perfectly happy to hate because they are so very difficult) than that we should hate our country. This is certainly not how the early church saw things. Rachel Held Evans rightly tweeted in the midst of all of this that “the early church would be utterly baffled by the idea that future Christians would shame someone for not swearing allegiance to the empire.” It is bad enough to be reminded that we sing allegiance to a nation built on the death of indigenous peoples, the slavery of black and brown bodies. It is far worse to be reminded of this by a black man. Given the vicious response to his actions, it seems that no form of protest by blacks is welcome, even a peaceful and articulate protest. How dare a man whose job is to entertain us make us uncomfortable?

We don’t like to be uncomfortable, and when someone makes us uncomfortable, we tend to get mean, nasty, and violent.

And that, that nastiness, meanness, and violence, that is the cross Jesus is talking about. Jesus’ death on the cross reveals the disturbing truth that we prefer violence and death to truth, justice, mercy and love. Questioning the status quo, challenging our loves, our allegiances, our possessions, our passions, our privileges, and can brings out the worst in us. A Catholic bishop and liberation theologian once said that “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” Dom Hélder Câmara was not a communist, any more than was Archibishop Oscar Romero who was shot while serving the Eucharist because he spoke in solidarity the poor, or Dorothy Day whom the Catholic Church can’t quite canonize because she simply refused to prioritize anything above care for the out-of-work poor in depressed New York City. But when we don’t like what someone says, when they make us uncomfortable, it is easier to call them names or tell them they should leave the country, than take to heart that perhaps we don’t really want the tired, the poor, the huddled masses or the wretched refuse of the world.

Taking up the cross shouldn’t be done lightly because it has the potential to cost us things we hold near and dear. Both good things, because even our friends and family might come to resent us for introducing discomfort into their lives, but also the terrible things that we love, perhaps without realizing how terrible they are for those around us. In the cross we see what God is like, for us, radically, always, for us. And we see what we are like, which is not so radically for us.

And so Jesus tells us to stop, sit down, and think about it, to count the cost of potentially losing, or having to give up, all those things and people we possess.

The irony is, the cross isn’t actually choosing death, or suffering. It is choosing life, choosing to work with God in incarnating a a world of justice, mercy and peace. Because the requirements for justice, mercy and peace make people uncomfortable and angry such a life may result in suffering and loss, but the goal of being with God is always life. How excellent would it be if Kaepernick’s protest serves to do more than simply continue the conversation about race in this country without the requisite dead black body. How excellent would it be if, by his peaceful, deliberate insistence that we must talk truthfully and realistically about this home, this place, this nation that many of us love, lives were saved? That is a cross that I hope all of us are deliberately courageous enough to bear.

Desires that God Honors

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A number of years ago now, I walked into an Episcopal Church, somewhat against my will. Entering the Episcopal church was, according to the religious rhetoric of my birth, deserting good theology for agreeable practice. So when, during liturgy, we sang a creed with a phrase that is indeed theologically questionable, I actually broke into tears. My wise wife suggested that I speak to a clergy person, and with great reluctance, I approached a deacon and asked in the most diplomatic way I could, “where did this creedal statement come from? Was anyone else concerned with the phrase that distressed me?” It took about 3 minutes for her to figure out that I had more than a passing interest and expertise in theology. She burst out, “you know, you should teach a class here!” A suggestion that seemed abrupt and absurd given that she didn’t know me and I wasn’t even an Episcopalian. A week later I received an email from a priest inviting me to discuss co-teaching a class over coffee. I read the email repeatedly, literally stunned. I made my wife read the email to confirm that it really said what I thought it said. I was shocked to be confronted with exactly what the church is supposed to be, a place, in Martin Luther’s words, of “conversation and consolation of the faithful.” In my case, the consolation was finally, unabashedly, being invited into a conversation that I love. Someone said to me, “you have a passion, a love, a gift, a joy, and we want you to use it for the benefit of all of us.” My desire met the needs of this church, and it was exhilarating.

Perhaps it seems strange to address this gospel passage by talking about the fulfillment of desire. After all, this week and last week confronts us with a message difficult to hear: do not waste time and energy saving up for the future while ignoring the present. Sell what you have, give away the proceeds. Selling possessions, redistributing our goods in any form, is not a message good Americans receive well. Our entire society is geared around successful ownership and the acquisition of things, where more is always better, often no matter what the cost is to those with less. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and we eat up the rhetoric that a good business investment or a lucky lottery ticket will give us the opportunity to join the ranks of the rich, or at least close-to-rich.

But this snippet from Jesus’ preaching as he heads towards Jerusalem and the inevitable conflict with power and privilege his arrival will bring, starts with pleasure. It is “your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” How often do we think of what gives God pleasure, what tickles her fancy, what makes him laugh in delight? Think for a moment, what gives you pleasure, real joy? What has happened in the last week or month that brought a sudden and unexpected smile to your lips?

Really, I am going to pause while you think of it, and then ask you to share with the person next to you, if you are comfortable, what that is. Just one sentence, a snippet.

How many of the things that gave you pleasure involved another person? Being with someone, enjoying the company of another? Giving or receiving from someone you love or care about? Satisfaction at doing something for someone, with someone?

According to Jesus, God’s pleasure is to come home to a household where the lights are always ready to be lit, where the table is always ready to be set. Our God arrives, fastens a belt to get luxurious robes out of the way, invites everyone to eat together, and serves us the very meal we are supposed to serve God.

We lose something, I think, when forget that Jesus rather shamelessly appeals to our desires, our pleasures, those things we love. It is God’s desire to give us those things that bring us joy, and the good news of Jesus constantly places before us the question, what is our treasure?

It is worth noting that in Luke’s telling, unlike its very close parallel in Matthew, the Greek of “your” treasure is not singular, but plural. It is not about what I want as an individual. It is about what “we” treasure, what we as a community value together, seek together. For Luke, the reign of God is not a future gift, but the fulfillment of God’s promised presence, the promise that motivated Noah, Abraham and Sarah to pick themselves up and in the most harrowing of circumstances, live in a way that relied on God’s promises of abundant life. For Luke, God’s presence is fulfilled by those who care for the poor, release captives, give sight to the blind, end oppression, and restore economic and social imbalance Luke 4:16-21. Jesus opens his ministry by declaring God’s promise in Isaiah fulfilled by practices of justice, of restoring right relationships with one another and in the world around us.

The giving of the kingdom that so delights God is the very kindness, generosity and justice that Jesus repeatedly ask that we give to one another. Jesus teaches us to pray by asking that this reign of God come, and then tells us over and over again that the reign of God is not a future event but a reality we make present by being God’s presence to one another. The treasure in which we are asked to invest our hearts are those things that allow us to be like God, to be like the one who delights in serving us, eating with us, caring for us.

The truth is though, we choose our treasures in context. We decide what we value, influenced by what those around us tell us is valuable. We both decide and show what we value by how we spend our money, where we live, what we do with our time, how we vote, and there is no shortage of opinions and arguments, fears and justifications to convince us why we should value this over that. Here, at the North end of the Willamette Valley, we live in or near the whitest major city in the United States. Perhaps it feels like the controversies raging over whether black or brown lives matter don’t touch us. But they do touch our children. I have had the opportunity to teach youth across our region, and St. Paul’s has easily one of the most racially diverse groups in the area. This means that racial injustice, and question of what and who we value, matters to these kids, to their families, and to their church family. We choose our treasures in a world where the reality is that all lives do not matter, where our politicians talk about the middle class, but ignore the poor, and avoid honest conversations about the violence and exploitation which sustain so much of what we call success.

It is in this context that talking about what we desire can be dangerous, and perhaps why so often desire and pleasure is hardly the language that characterizes Christianity. It is not any pleasure that matters, any desire that should be fulfilled. What makes a desire that God wants to honor? Desires borne out of fear are called out by Jesus, who calls us to not fear. So many of those things we are told to desire are products of our anxiety, of maintaining what we have at the expense of others. The manager who is responsible for the care of others is roundly condemned for choosing instead to live at their expense.

One of my greatest joys in being an Episcopalian is that it is a community in which my joy, my gifts, and the needs of the community coincide. The point of sharing my story however is not to highlight my personal fulfillment. Rather, it is to highlight the way in which the Episcopal church has worked and succeeded in addressing an injustice that it itself practiced for years, the exclusion of women and LGBTQ persons from exercising the full range of their gifts in service of others. This work is hardly finished in the Anglican Communion as a whole. In the United States our work as Episcopalians, as one of the historically whitest and wealthiest denominations is hardly finished, in regards to women, to our LGBTQ friends, and especially to persons of color whose lives are threatened and diminished by systematic injustice, targeted violence, and privileged indifference.

This time of transition that stretches before this community is exactly the time to ask, what are our treasures? We choose to be a member of this community because we believe that there is something in it to treasure, something in it that helps us learn to love what is good, kind, compassionate, and holy. What is the joy that is set before us, and what does it mean to give our hearts to it? This may be a time to recognize that some of the things we have treasured may not be of value in a world that hungers for love that is also just. Perhaps it is a time to put aside the fear and anxiety that blinds us to the treasures already present, and with an assured hope that God is present with us, join God by spending the greatest treasure we have, love for one another and our neighbors.

Who are We, Sinners or Lovers?

Sun, 12 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Someone close to me is currently in one of those horrible situations where no matter what she does or says, she will be told she is failing, constantly being accused of ill intention. I suspect we have all been there, whether at work, or in our family, with a teacher or a friend, in some relationship where you feel constantly criticized, judged, and dismissed. One of those no-win relationships where the other person always sees the worst in you, thinks the worst of you, no matter how hard you try to meet their expectations.

When I know I am going to need to interact with that person in my life, I begin to mentally gear myself up, thinking about how I will respond, what I will say, how I will defend myself. If you are like me, your stomach knots up just thinking about that person.

Now, think about someone else. Think about that person who, no matter what you did, how silly, dumb, mean, thoughtless, absent-minded or even cruel you were, always loves you. Always welcomes you, always listens to you, is always your friend. Yes, you argue with them, and sometimes need a break from them, but you know that you will get over the argument, you can apologize for the insensitive comment, for forgetting an important event, and your life together will go on. You know that with them, friend, coworker, boss, partner, you can let down your hair, be yourself, and relax in their company.

The woman Luke tells us about today braves the first group, the folks that see her only for her failings, so that she can be with someone in the second group, the one who knows perfectly well what she has done but still says, “go in peace.” Simon’s friends and associates accuse Jesus of being a “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (7.34). This woman knows they are right: she comes to Jesus knowing that he is already her friend.

Her response to his friendship is … awkward. This woman, unnamed, unwelcome, unwanted by Simon, crashes his dinner party, places herself behind the reclining Jesus, and begins to cry. It is bad enough that she made it into the room at all. But imagine, for a moment, sitting at a meal with friends, family, acquaintances, and suddenly, someone just bursts in to tears. So many tears that she makes a mess all over the person so unfortunate as to be seated next to her. Then, no hanky available, she begins to clean up those tears with what she has available, her hair. She uses her hair to clean his dirty feet, and then, perhaps noticing that they were dry from the dust of the road, she bathes them in ointment. Can you imagine deciding to rub lotion on the feet of a houseguest? And then, kissing them? Can you imagine the pause in conversation as this happened, the staring-without-trying-to-stare, perhaps the sudden need to go powder a nose or check your phone messages? Feet. Tears. Ointment. Hair. Awkward. (Thanks to Debie Thomas for this emphasis.

Super Awkward. Awkward because it is so … extreme, dramatic, bodily, extravagant. Though it isn’t extravagant in the way that other gospel writers emphasize. There is no consensus among interpreters if this story is the same story also related by Matthew, Mark, and John. Every telling has in common a woman, an interrupted dinner party, and anointing with oil. The anointing with oil in those other stories is often interpreted as a foreshadowing of preparing Jesus’ body for burial. Yet in this story, Jesus’ passion is still far in the future. And, unlike the other stories, the outrage is not at the extravagant waste of expensive ointment. The outrage is at the extravagance of the woman’s behavior, and Jesus’ willingness to be interrupted by tears, hair, kisses, oil.

We don’t know if this woman is still doing whatever it is that gave her such a notorious reputation. We don’t know if this woman and Jesus had met before and Jesus had pronounced forgiveness. Perhaps she only knows him by reputation, the one who is a friend of sinners. We only know that she is so grateful that Jesus is who he is, a friend, that she brings to him all that she has on hand: herself, her tears, her hair, her gift of oil.

It is her response that we too practice, every time we gather together in response to the friendship that Jesus offers us. We have sanitized our response a bit, but in every liturgy, we do to one another what this woman did to Jesus so many centuries ago. In a few moments, we will politely turn to one another, shaking hands, exchanging “the Peace.” This moment was not always a shaking of hands. Its full ritual name is called “The Kiss of Peace,” which is exactly what Christian’s have done for centuries. They turned to one another and exchanged a kiss, a kiss of repentance, of forgiveness, of peace. Ancient theologians have long seen in the kiss of peace the kisses given by this woman to Jesus.

As with everything we do in the liturgy, we don’t do this because we are necessarily at peace with one another. It is possible that you don’t know the person next to you. Perhaps you know them, but might not be all that comfortable with them. If you know them well, perhaps you are a bit annoyed with them. It happens. We grant peace to one another often out of hope that we can have peace, not because we have it right now. We offer it to one another in an effort to be the kind of friend that Jesus already is to us.

Soon after the peace, we follow yet again in this woman’s footsteps: we offer what we have in the form of the bread and wine brought forward for the Eucharist. It is no accident that the gifts of bread and wine are brought forward by members of the community, with the phrase, “and from thine own have we given thee.” We give what we have out of the abundance of what God has already given us. The eucharist is our thanksgiving (literally, that is what the word means) for the friendship God offers to us in Jesus. And the stuff of that eucharist is made up of the everyday stuff of our lives.

What the woman offers Jesus is the equivalent of offering a guest something to drink when they arrive, a place to wash their hands before sitting to dinner, a chair to rest on after their trip over. It is the bottle of lotion next to the soap to moisturize your hands after washing. Bread and wine, like scented ointment in a world of chronic smelly feet and dry skin, are the stuff of normal, everyday life. Bread and wine are not exceptional foods, they are (at least for Palestinian Jews) a normal, mundane meal.

I think it is worth dwelling a bit on just how normal are the gifts we bring to the table, and how important it is that we see ourselves as people who gratefully offer those gifts. I think it is particularly worth it for all of us here, at St. Paul’s, to think about this, now, in this time of transition and change. St. Paul’s is filled with gifts. Its longevity in Oregon City is a gift. The hospitality you show to strangers on a Sunday morning, or to neighbors from down the street on Thursday evenings is a gift. The presence of Octogenarians and teens is a gift.

Change is difficult, and this congregation has had a great deal of it over the years. From the moment I arrived, many of the stories I heard were stories of change, of unexpected loss and transitions. I know that for many, the departure of Davis and Dan is a frustrating and disappointing change. It will be a loss, there is no way around that.

Maybe, one of the greatest gifts that St. Paul’s has to offer is a resiliency in the face of change. Everything about our world is full of change, and being a place that knows how to offer a home to people for a year, or three years or three decades may be your gift.

But that is the question that I hope all of you, individually and together, can ask: what is our gift? What is it that we at St. Paul’s can offer? What is that everyday thing that we do that makes us who we are? What are the gifts we don’t yet have, but want to offer?

Knowing the gifts that you have, the gifts that you want, will help you find the person who can encourage those gifts in you. It will help you find the priest that is the right fit for this place, in this time.

Most importantly, it will help St. Paul’s be the kind of place that people come to knowing that they will be received as friends.

Toward Good News

Sun, 08 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we stand in between two major feasts of the church, Ascension three days ago, and Pentecost next Sunday. We stand between the final leave-taking of Jesus and the promised arrival of the Holy Spirit. For forty days, the resurrected Jesus walked, talked, and ate with his friends. Friends who, with one exception, broke their promises and left Jesus to face his accusers alone. For forty days, Jesus patiently and kindly restored them to themselves, calling them to love one another to the best of their limited abilities. He did so knowing that even such partial love is the only path to a love that fully enables each person to glorify God as Jesus has glorified God, by doing the work set before them. Forty days of conversation where all the strange stories and allusions Jesus had been making for three years were suddenly given new meaning, greater dimension, in light of crucifixion and resurrection.

And then, Jesus left them. Again. Ascending to be with the Father, leaving them to show God to the world through their love. And again, the disciples waited, though certainly with more joy this time than the last. They waited at the border between a leave-taking and a promised arrival.

Into this waiting space which we share with the apostles, we are offered a story whose focus is Paul, Silas, and the dramatic conversion story of the first fully Roman, that is, completely pagan, convert to Jesus. Only days before, Lydia, a "God-fearer," a gentile who worshipped the "Most High God" of the Jews, had eagerly listened to Paul and Silas, welcomed them into her home, and was baptized along with her whole family. Lydia and the jailer, named Stephen according to some commentators, are the seed of the church at Philippi, the first church established in a truly Roman city, not a Jewish city occupied by Romans. They are model converts who immediately engage in paradigmatic Christian behavior: they share their home and their food with strangers. Paul remains ever grateful to them as they alone of the churches in the "early days of the gospel" financially supported his work for the many years that followed (Phil 4.15). As free citizens of the Roman empire, they used their stature and wealth to ensure the spread of the good news.

Sandwiched between these two dramatic conversion stories is a slave girl. She is a source of annoyance, a distraction from the mission, clamoring her truth day after day as Paul spends his time at the outskirts of a Roman city among fellow Jews and "God-fearers," the only place he could legally preach and teach. Given that up to this point most gentiles members of what would eventually be called "christian" communities had come from among the "God-fearers," Paul likely thought that it would be among them, where they met and prayed, that Christ would receive the best hearing.

This place of prayer, outside a pagan city committed to its own gods, was where they had met Lydia. In every way she is quite different than the slave-girl: Lydia is a free-woman, the girl is a slave. Lydia runs her own business in purple cloth, the slave-girl generates business for her masters. Lydia is a God-fearer, the slave-girl is a mouthpiece for pagan deities, and her oracular power echoes the famous priestesses at Delphi. Lydia eagerly receives the truth preached by Paul and Silas. The slave girl clamors the truth at Paul and Silas: “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation,” (Acts 16:17) she cries, over and over again.

Her insistence, her persistence, annoys Paul. He turns and, addressing not the girl, but the spirit within her, commands it to leave. Like Jesus, Paul understands that even the demons speak truth (Mk 1:25 and Lk 4:35). Even those who profit in deception, vague language, trickery and obfuscation can, at times, speak truth. John Chrysostom, writing in the 4^th century, wisely notes that truth from a false source is too easily turned towards deceit. Every time we check a politicians record and decide exactly how far we can trust them, we confirm that truth from a liar is always suspect.

For Paul, this slave girl may speak the truth, but she speaks not as a representative of God, but as a representative of all that Judaism (remember, Paul here is a Jew) stands against. This is Paul's first trip after the Jerusalem church and its leader James agreed together that God was clearly welcoming the Gentiles into their community. There is a great deal at stake, and this slave girl's truth-telling clamor is the perfect moment to make a point: God is God over all. All gods, as the psalm says, bow before the One.

Paul's annoyance earns himself and his companion a kangaroo court, a severe beating, and a night in jail where their refusal to escape when given the opportunity literally preserves the life of their jailor who like Lydia, gratefully listens to their words and is baptized, with his family, that very night.

The slave girl, sandwiched between these two paradigmatic believers, is never mentioned again.

And that silence is profoundly disturbing.

She is a slave. We know nothing about whether she used her clairvoyant abilities voluntarily, or at the demand of her masters. We know nothing of her intent in dogging at the heels of Paul and Silas, shouting their own truth at them. We don't even know if it was her speaking, or the compulsion she carried within her. We do not know if she understood that Paul and Silas could be her salvation, freeing her from a power that enslaved her to greedy men. We do not know if she hoped to provoke Paul to do that very thing.

What we do know is that she did indeed provoke Paul. The girl speaks truth from a dubious source, and Paul frees her with dubious motivation. The problem though, isn't really Paul's motivation: God does amazing things through people with minimal understanding and poor motivation. That is the story of our relationship with God.

The problem is that her freedom is incomplete. The good news she understands and receives puts her in a precarious position. She no longer has the very thing that made her valuable. As a female slave of unscrupulous masters (even the Romans thought that what the masters were doing was unseemly), her future looks dim. Certainly she highlights all that is disrupted by the call to love God and neighbor: idolatry, power, greed, a rigged legal system. But she is also a person made in the image of God who is called by the very nature God gives all of us at creation, to be and become a person who seeks justice and mercy on the path of love.

This girl, this slave, owned and obligated to use her gifts for the profit of others, is the very person for whom Jesus lives, dies, and is resurrected.

In Paul's response, we recognize how incomplete our efforts to love others are. We live in a world where sometimes there seems to be no perfectly good choice. We all know that it is probably better to eat organic if only because by doing so we support farm workers whose health is compromised by the use of pesticides. But that does not mean we can afford to do so. Maybe we should all join the environmentally conscious bike-riding hoards of Portland, but age, ability, and simply a lack of time sometimes make that just impossible. Yes, we should acquaint ourselves with the scourge of sex-trafficking, except that some of us can barely emotionally support, or survive, our own families and exposing ourselves to that level of tragedy is simply overwhelming. Not all of us share the capacity of Ann Reeves Jarvis, the Civil War peace activist and advocate for public health issues whose memory inspired the first celebration of Mother's Day. What better example of incompleteness is Mother's Day, a day when we rightly honor those who have loved us well, grieve the failures, loss or non-existence of that love, rejoice in our ability to offer that love, or weep at the opportunity lost or simply never had.

In her, we recognize what it is like to be at the receiving end of perhaps thoughtless good intentions, the receiving end of someone else's help that may be true, but isn't enough, or just isn't what you need. The friend who is sure that one more visit to their favorite physician will surely fix your cure your incurable disease. The friends who agree with you, but won't speak up for you because challenging the powers that be is simply to much.

Today we come together bracketed by a leave-taking and a promise, standing exactly where that slave-girl stood two millennia ago. We hope for the completion of what God has started, we wait, we are thirsty (Rev 22:17).

Perhaps this is why Jesus' final words at his final meal are not an exhortation to better behavior or more pure motivation, but a prayer for us, that we "may be one" (John 17:21). This is not some abstract unity in God, but the very means by which our efforts, individually incomplete, are possible together. It required a unified effort to abolish legalized slavery, granting to others the freedom that the Philippian slave girl likely never experienced. It is a unified effort on the part of the members of this community to do what Christians have always done: welcome people in to this home with dignity and flavor each week at St. Paul's Place. We come together incomplete, unfinished, today, do what it is that Christians have done since the beginning: welcome one another, sharing our gifts of bread and wine with one another, so that, by being one, we can together come to better love, and be loved by, God and our neighbor.

Maria Gwyn McDowell is a member of Trinity and a postulant for Holy Orders. She is doing her Field Education at St. Paul, Oregon City.

The Nicene Creed

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A visual and informational timeline on the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed:

View the Timeline in Full Screen

Created with Timeline^JS

Dancing with God

Sun, 31 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This icon is traditionally entitled “The Hospitality of Abraham.” It depicts the visit of three angels to Abraham and Sarah. Abraham was resting in the heat of the day, likely recovering from his recent covenant with God which resulted in the circumcision of all male members of his household. Upon the arrival of “The Lord,” says the text, Abraham and Sarah immediately welcome their three guests, wash their feet, and provide them with fresh bread, meat, curds and milk. These mysterious guests confirm the covenantal promise that Sarah will bear a son, their descendants will be as numerous as the stars.

This passage, early in the long story of salvation, has long been interpreted as a visitation of three angels who are representatives of ‘The Lord’, the Holy One of Israel.^⁠ Christians, looking back at Scripture in light of their experience of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, have seen in this passage an indication of the Trinitarian nature of God. They interpret this passage as typological, and ancient prefiguring of something made more clear much later. It is not that there are simply three visitors which creates this connection, but because of the hospitality given and received, a hospitality which gives us a window into God’s very self.

Look again at the icon. Take it out, hold it in front of you, look closely. Each figure is the same size, each figure holds a rod indicating shared authority. Each wear blue symbolizing divinity, though the central Christ figure wears red as well, the color of humanity. These figures are without clear sex, distinct from one another, yet similar in look and demeanor.

Follow for a moment their gazes and the tilt of their heads. It forms a circle flowing from one to the other, symbolizing their unity of will but distinction of persons. It is a visual depiction of perichoresis. The first part of the word, peri, means “around.” The second is a root from which we get our word ‘choreography.’ This is an image of a divine dance, a movement of perpetual and reciprocal motion, where each person permeates the place, the space of the other. Think for a moment of line dances, where each person holds the hand of the person next to them, following in their footsteps , perhaps with the same pattern, perhaps spinning in a moment of exuberant creativity, but always moving together in a circle which winds its way around the room. This vision of a dance is an ancient, though hardly exclusive, image of one God in three persons, perfectly united in will, distinct and unique in persons, moving together in joyful love.

Look again at the image: take your finger and trace the circle between the faces of each. When your finger moves directly between the figures on either side, the circle distorts a bit. The line between left and right is no longer curved, the circle flattens. This is hardly a circle, barely even and oval.

Now, look again, but this time, imagine yourself in front of a life-size version of this icon, sitting at the table opposite the central figure. Draw the circle again, including yourself. This time, the circle is full, complete.

This is not an accident, some artistic conceit. Rather, icons are written so as to draw us in, to invite us into its activity. Our presence, our participation at this table is required if the circle is to be complete. This theological point lies at the heart of the Christian understanding of God: we experience God as the Holy One whose trinitarian life together, a life which we see but hardly understand, is the way in which God is present to us, and the way in which we are drawn into relationship with the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.

Isaiah, who catches a glimpse of the awesome holiness of God in the clouds of temple incense, a holiness from which even God’s messengers the angelic seraphim hide themselves, is terrified because he understands that he is among those who have forgotten God. In a scorching moment, he is reminded that God will be remembered, and eagerly volunteers to be sent out to speak God’s reminder. As a prophet, Isaiah cries out the judgment of God, which for us is so easily associated with a wrath that burns away sin, uncleanliness. But remember, Hebrew prophets do two things without fail: they point out our lack of justice and mercy towards those without privilege and security, which of course, makes their listeners uncomfortable and angry, since who likes to have their privilege and power exposed for what it is. But then they extend God’s constant invitation to live as God lives among us, with justice and mercy. What God desires, evident in the persistent pursuit of God, ever seeking his forgetful and unfaithful lover, is to draw us into the dance, to remind us that we are a part of God’s life, that we are called to dance these steps with God the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.

This is no abstract and fanciful dance, like faeries in some Shakespearean wood. Look again at the icon: the three figure are seated around a table set with food. As angelic messengers they accept the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah. As an image of the Trinity, they invite us to join them at the table, feasting with them. This table is clearly eucharistic, a chalice holds a sacrificial lamb. This is what we do when we gather together and share the eucharist, we receive the hospitality of God. Paul reminds us that we are welcomed not as slaves or even servants, but as daughters and sons to whom, as we were reminded at Pentecost last week, God grants dreams and visions through the coming of the Holy Spirit.

This Spirit is the one who comes along side us, comforts us, advocates for us, birthing us as John tells us, not ‘again’ but ‘from above.’ We, anyone upon whom the restless Spirit descends, are birthed, as an ancient Syriac baptismal prayer says, from “the womb of the Father.” The imitable Julian of Norwich (whose words we will soon hear) reminds us that we are knit together in God the Father, remade and restored in God our Mother.

Our celebration of the Trinity today is not a celebration of seemingly abstract creedal statements. Rather, the Creed is the result of carefully, thoughtfully, daring to speak of the awesome holiness of God who persistently invites us into the divine dance which is the life for which we are made, to which we are called.

We are made in the image of this God, who dances, births, knits, remakes, restores, who burns and blows where she will, all in order that we might be saved, that we might live as we are made to live. Salvation here is not from a wrathful God, but an invitation into being like God, to enter into a life of constant, joyful, dynamic hospitality. Being like God is to take God’s hospitality, and to be God’s hospitality.

The word ‘hospitality’ sounds so pleasant, so very nice, perhaps even a bit trite. But I suspect that every one of us can readily recall a dinner where our inclination for hospitality was stretched. Think of holidays with family or friends where the pleasant camaraderie familiar faces erupted into awkwardness, fear or anger in the face of unexpected, unpleasant, or even downright objectionable differences. Some of us may wisely anticipate such unpleasantness, and hatch an escape plan with our significant other, complete with eyebrow wiggles and suddenly recalled early morning appointments allowing for our immediate departure. We all have moments where we wished to be anywhere but here, with these people, or where we knew we were unwelcome to even darken the doorstep. It is much more comfortable to live and eat amongst our own, and we are quick to punish, ostracize or even kill those who dare to disrupt our smoothly flowing private dance. The truth is, this hospitable image of God is often not what we are actually like.

Welcoming the other, especially those that are already unwelcome, causes suffering. Paul and John do not separate the life of Jesus from suffering with Jesus. Lives of loved ones are disrupted, our neighbors resent the noise and dirt. Our friends, our neighbors, sometimes we ourselves become angry, cruel, and violent. To restore peace and quiet, we cast out, or perhaps we are cast out. We reject the hospitality of others, we deny hospitality to others.

In a world where justice seems only for the strong, and judgment is too often condemnation rather restoration, there may be no greater witness to the Trinitarian nature of God than to be a people who are hospitable. To be those folk who welcome one another as God welcomes us, welcoming friends and foes, strangers and the strange, as if they are themselves divine visitors born of the same womb, caught up by the same wind, brothers and sisters invited to dance and eat at God’s table.

Seeing Gender: Orthodox Liturgy, Orthodox Personhood

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract

Eastern Orthodox theology affirms the liturgy as an anticipatory icon of God’s reign that establishes a pattern of relationships by which Christians are called to live in and for the world. Taking at face value an Orthodox theological claim that the liturgy is the sole source for deriving ethical actions, Orthodox theologians typically address the question of female priesthood within the existing visual parameters of the liturgy in which it is men who exercise authority. Given patterns addressed by both aspects of ritual theory and contemporary anthropology, the articulation of anthropologies that likewise limit the authority and capability of women are to be expected. However, these defenses of the exclusion of women from full participation in the liturgy, including sacramental ordination, are the result of a reductionistic view of the priesthood, the liturgy, and human persons. Neither Orthodox personalism, its ethical implications, nor a few rarely glimpsed snippets of the Orthodox tradition support such reductionism. Rather, recognition of the unique capabilities of women by the community and their welcome participation within the community encourages the joy which underlies the transformation of a people who live for the life of the world.

The Iconicity of Priesthood: Male Bodies or Embodied Virtue?

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract

Late-ancient theologies of the priesthood frame its tasks, virtues and metaphorical relationships around its chief task: encouraging a common life of theosis as embodied virtue. Metaphorical relationships are used to evoke the manner in which, and the virtue with which, priestly tasks are to be practiced. In the priest, we hope to see an icon of the deified humanity to which all are called. This theological structuring allows the participation of women in the sacramental priesthood. Modern Orthodox arguments, in their efforts to defend an exclusively male priesthood, subvert this structure. The language of relationship and virtue is used to define the priesthood according to specifically gendered tasks. This theology results in, and derives from, a reduced view of the full personhood of women and the breadth of the priestly task, undermining the priest’s role of embodying and encouraging all the virtues of the deified life.

Toward the endless day: the life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Book

Toward the Endless Day: The Life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. By Olga Lossky. Edited by Michael Plekon. Translated by Jerry Ryan. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. xvi + 340 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

Embodied Virtue: Male and Female Priests

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract

Justice as Asceticism

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Full Text
Published on the website of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese.

I recently spent a week at Project Mexico, where fasting came up a number of times. It started with the effort to find food in the airport which did not contain meat, inspiring a few conversations about the idea of ‘travel mercies,’ the leniency granted to travelers who may not be able to find options which fulfill the fast. The conversation continued at the Orphanage. Due to government regulations imposed by the Mexican government, a certain amount of meat must be served each week at Orphanages. Our host made it clear to us that the primarily Catholic staff of the orphanage would do their best to make Lenten meals for us, but may at times forget, and for us to be gracious. He further pointed out that our presence in building a house was itself a fast, a ‘work of mercy.’

As we discussed the particulars of fasting, I learned, for the first time, that we are supposed to fast from animals which have a back bone. I heard this, thought for a moment, and realized that for the first 16 years of my Orthodox life, the only times my family kept this version of the Lenten fast were the days my mother made spaghetti with Clam Sauce, about the only way you could ever get a clam into me. We survived the rest of lent eating $1/pound whole Tuna that my mother would buy at the coast, fillet, and freeze until lent. Every member of my Russian Orthodox Church ate fish, it was our Lenten food. I had no idea that fish were eliminated from the fast because they have a backbone. I asked why the backbone was the issue, and the answer seems to be that animals without a backbone are a lower form of life. Ironic, given that the economy of Maine is sustained by this $15/pound form of ‘lower life.’

What struck me in these conversations was not the content, but the very fact that we were spending so much time talking about fasting. We pick apart the phrases ‘fast’ and ‘abstain,’ wondering if one means the type of food, the other the amount of food. We wonder whether on Sunday, as a day of Resurrection, we can break the fast, or do we just not abstain. Underlying all of this is a different conversation. What we are really discussing was not whether or not we should eat this or that, how much we should eat, when we should eat and when we should abstain. Rather, we are struggling with what fasting means for us today in a culture of abundant and varied food, where it is not beef or poultry that is the luxury, but those very forms of ‘lower life’ which we are permitted.

Fasting is not meaningless today. Kerry SanChirico pointed out in his talk last year, “Lenten Transformation,” that the money saved on meat both enables almsgiving and reminds us that most of the world survives without meat, not by choice, but by necessity: meat is expensive. Schmemann argues that fasting, the feeling of hunger, is a physical reminder that we ‘do not live by bread alone, but by every word that flows from the mouth of God.’ Fasting as practiced in the monasteries was in part intended to create more time. In certain monastic communities, the weekend fast specified uncooked rather than cooked vegetables. Why? The time saved by not cooking is spent in more prayer. In each of these examples, fasting is never intended as a goal in itself. Fasting is meant to lead to something more.

The question is, what more does this lead to? Fasting saves money, and makes us conscious of the ¾ (no longer 2/3) world which is malnourished; fasting reminds us of our dependence on God; fasting gives time for prayer. We do one thing, which leads to another. Hopefully. I say hopefully, because often fasting may lead us nowhere. I think our debates over various canons, traditions and customs can easily turn into a debate over exactly how much mint and cumin we tithe, without ever addressing the important question, what does fasting lead to?

Prayer, fasting and alms-giving, the three main characteristics of the ascetical life, are understood throughout the tradition of the Church as the means towards our transformation, as our participation in the process of becoming who we are, the image of God. Debates have raged over the centuries in the effort to specify the image of God in humanity. Short cutting all of these debates, and in agreement with particular strands of thought that run through a variety of our Church Fathers, I am going to summarize and say that the image of God in humanity is anything in us which is a reflection of our Creator. When we love, we express the image of God; when we are generous, when we are trustworthy, when we act with fidelity, when we are encouraging, when we are truthful, when we are servants. Notice that all of these require other people. We can only be the image of God in relationship with other people. You must love another person to be loving. You must serve another person to be a servant.

I think there is a real danger that our fasting, our prayer, and even our alms-giving, becomes self-serving. These elements become our own private discipline, focusing on our own inner change, our own ‘salvation’ which may or may not press us to become people of greater love. I have often heard the argument that these disciplines are social because we do them together. We fast together, supporting and encouraging one another to walk past that oddly appealing hot dog. Our time in church increases, adding in Wednesday liturgy as well as the Friday akathist. While the encouragement of the community is crucial to Lent, simply doing things together does not necessarily make us less self-focused, less individualistic. Lent can still be all about me.

This focus on ourselves, this focus on what is good for me, maybe my family, or perhaps (in a generous moment) I extend it to my group, ethnicity, nation, still has me and ‘mine’ at the center. The reality is that we live in a world and a culture that is particularly ‘me’ focused. We all know that, we all experience it. It is a genuine danger. Yet it is not a unique danger; it is not new with the advent of the ‘West.’ The ascetical life of the East, by which I mean the Orthodox East, can run the same danger. Time spent in fasting and prayer, the life of the desert, is often done alone. But if Mary of Egypt had never met Fr. Zossima, would we benefit from her wisdom? If the monks of the desert had not settled themselves at the edges of cities, would we even have the ‘sayings of the desert fathers and mothers’? It is only in the return to one another that whatever we have learned comes to fruition, enabling everyone to experience greater transformation, greater deification. By the return from the desert, the whole community is blessed, and thus the community can bless the world.

But let me complicate this further by pointing out that most of us are not called to a monastic life. We are not called to years of strict fasting and prayer. Monasticism is a calling, but it is not a calling given to everybody. Frankly, it is not a calling given to the vast majority of the members of the Church. Most of us are called to live embedded in this world, embedded in business and chaos, living lives as mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, workers, commuters, students…leaving the world is not an option.

So the question is, what does asceticism look like for us?

Remember, our transformation involves one another. Not only does transformation require being together, it requires doing together. No love without loving, no service without serving. What if we re-thought what fasting meant? What if, instead of our fasting being the means to something else, the saving of money, the discipline of the body or the creation of more time, our fasting is itself who we are to become? What if what we do by fasting is exactly what we are supposed to be?

Let me read to you from Isaiah 58, where Isaiah is speaking as a messenger of God:

58.6 Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. [1]

In this passage, our fast is to do justice. Fasting is not first and foremost a ‘giving up,’ unless of course, one must first give up injustice to do justice. Fasting in Isaiah is focused outward, it is focused on those in need. Jesus, according to Luke, opens his ministry by quoting Isaiah 61:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Lk 4.18-19).

Justice in scripture is not simply about giving a person their due, which is the classical definition of justice. Justice is not procedural regulations which enforce and individual’s rights and duties, and punish those who break the law. Justice is not primarily about retribution. In scripture, justice is about restoration. Justice is about restoring the land to those who have lost it, about placing a limit on the length of time over which a debt can be called in. Justice is both providing for those in need, the sick, the poor, the blind, the captive, the oppressed, as well as enabling them to care for themselves. It is not only about restoring people to their full abilities, but restoring people to their full roles as beloved members and participants in their communities.

While we could spend hours talking about any one of these elements of justice, I want to focus on one that I think is crucial for us as Orthodox Christians and citizens of the United States. All you have to do is stand by the gleaming, 20 foot tall, high-tech U.S. border fence, look to the south over the 5 foot corrugated iron fence of Mexico, and you can see that we are wealthy. The U.S. consumes 80% of the used resources in the world. We have a fraction of that population. We are wealthy. Not all of us are terribly wealthy, and we are good at hiding the poor who do live among us in ghettos, but most of us reading this have some level of wealth, even if it is only the opportunity to gain wealth. Wealth is not just money. It is capital, it is the opportunity to gain an education, to work in a productive manner. I live on a student stipend, and I have lots of school debt. But I live in a beautiful apartment, I have a car, I eat regularly, and I know, that someday in the future, hopefully a long-time in the future, I will inherit from my mother a beautiful house on the Pacific Ocean. In the world we live in, I am wealthy.

It may surprise us to hear that for St. John Chrysostom, fasting is not the highest virtue. Rather, it is:

“almsgiving, our excellent counselor, the queen of virtues, who quickly raises human beings to the heavenly vaults” (CATV 1.5). [2]

Chrysostom, in a series of sermons on repentance and almsgiving, points his listeners down the many roads to repentance. A sinner may confess, mourn the sin, practice humility, pray, and give alms (CATV 1.5, 4.15), but the greatest of these roads is clearly almsgiving. Almsgiving is so great a virtue that it surpasses virginity! The five virgins who neglected to fill their lamps with oil, which John interprets as their desire for money over the poor, fail to enter the wedding banquet. Their travail in maintaining their virginity was of no account as they failed to act in mercy and justice as well. Over one such virgin John exclaims,

“I wish that you had longed for a man, for the crime would not have been so severe, because you would have desired matter of the same essence as yourself. Now, however, the condemnation is greater, since you desired foreign matter. Truly, even married women should not display inhumanity with the excuse that they have children” (CATV 3.13).

The refusal to give alms is not simply a neglect of the poor, but a valuing of material things over the image of God, and as a result, is a display of inhumanity.

Chrysostom goes further. He compares the existence of the poor to the gladiatorial games of the day. The rich, debating over the ‘deserving poor,’ set themselves up as judge over the needs of others like

“those who set up those games and give no prizes at all until they see others punishing themselves” (1Cor 188B). [3]

John accuses the rich of being unwilling to

“lend an ear to people who are quite modest, who weep and call on God” (1Cor 188C).

More concerned with checking the accounts of the poor than being generous, the rich force the poor to clearly demonstrate their misery. It is not enough for the poor to appear to have a need, to be cold, weak from hunger, or half naked; the poor need to make it obvious. They need to mutilate themselves, chew on old shoes, perform in the streets. John mocks this attitude, asking why a person would choose such an appearance:

And even if they are pretending, they’re pretending because of necessity and want, thanks to your cruelty and inhumanity which require such masks (and) aren’t inclined to mercy. For who is so wretched and miserable that, in the absence of a pressing necessity, they would submit to such disgrace, bewail their lot and put up with a punishment of that magnitude for the sake of a loaf of bread? [4]

The poor are not merely an object of pity. According to John, they have dignity, the same dignity the rich believe themselves to have. Nobody chooses out of pure pleasure to beg for bread, to endure the blank gazes or shameful stares of passersby, to be openly scolded for laziness or deceit. John does not hesitate to use sarcasm: the ‘pretence’ of the poor announces for all to hear the inhumanity of the rich (1Cor 187B). John asks the rich: Why do the poor go to such great and gruesome lengths?

“Since you haven’t learned to pity poverty but take pleasure in misfortunes, they satisfy your insatiable desire, and both for themselves and for us they kindle a fiercer flame in hell” (1Cor 187D).

Chrysostom says two things about wealth. First,

“our money is the Lord’s, however we may have gathered it” (OWP 49). [5]

Second, God allows us wealth

“not for you to waste on prostitutes, drink, fancy food, expensive clothes, and all the other kinds of indolence, but for you to distribute to those in need” (OWP 50).

Wealth is theft not because it was stolen as a means of gaining wealth, but because keeping it is to deprive others of their needs:

“To deprive is to take what belongs to another; for it is called deprivation when we take and keep what belongs to others” (OWP 49).

St. Basil echoes this thought:

“The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry man; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the man who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the man who has no shoes; the money which you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.”

St. Basil, himself a monk, chose to create a small city outside of his city, a self-sustaining community whose purpose was to care for those left out in the cold. His monastery was a vibrant community of justice, a home for the widow, the orphan, the sick, the needy, as well as a community of worship.

As Christians living lent in a world surrounded by need, how is it possible for us to do anything less than seek justice? This does not mean that we do not fast from food. But perhaps it is not fasting from food that is the most important. Isaiah is addressed to those of us who

“serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers” (Is 58.3).

We must fast from injustice, and do justice. Remember that for Chrysostom, watching the poor is the same as contributing to their suffering. If our fast does not include works of mercy, our effort might not matter. If our fast is not primarily about works of mercy, it might not matter. Lent is about our transformation via repentance, fasting, the doing of mercy, and praying. In the words of our Mexican host, we are to do and be a ‘work of mercy.’

Bishop Phillip Brooks once said,

“Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for power equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work will be no miracle; but you shall be a miracle.”

The miracle our world needs is not people who can live on bread alone, but people who embody the justice of God. As people with wealth, a wealth of money, of capital, of talents, of opportunity, how will we use it to benefit those who do not have what we have been given?

[1] A biblical translations taken from the NRSV.

[2] “Concerning Almsgiving and the Ten Virgins,” [CATV] 1.5, in John Chrysostom, On Repentance and Almsgiving, trans. Gus George Christo, The Fathers of the Church, a New Translation ; V. 96 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998).

[3] “On 1 Corinthians Homily 21,” [1Cor] 168-176, in Wendy Mayer, John Chrysostom, and Pauline Allen, John Chrysostom, ed. Carol Harrison, The Early Church Fathers (London ; New York: Routledge, 2000).

[4] 1Cor 187A-B

[5] John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1984), 109-110. [OWP]

Ambiguity and Mystery: The 'More' of God

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Full Text

This talk, presentation, lecture, whatever you want to call it, stems from a growing sense I have that we, as human beings, as Orthodox Christians, need to take seriously a changing and ambiguous world in light of the mystery of God. It is a work in progress, and so from my perspective, is the beginning of a conversation that I hope will continue both in the time we have for discussion, and perhaps beyond. I have often been frustrated with how the word ‘mystery’ is used in certain Orthodox discussions. ‘Mystery’ appears at times to be a catch-all phrase which labels the things we don’t understand about God. Mystery becomes a codeword for the ‘irrational.’ Yet reading the writers of our church, one cannot help but notice how reasonable, logical, rational they are trying to be. How rigorous they are in using the brilliant minds and compassionate hearts that God gave them to articulate the strange reality of God becoming human, and by this incarnation, enabling humanity to become gods. This central mystery of our faith, is what the Sunday of Orthodoxy, just passed, is about. The Sunday of Orthodoxy is not primarily about icons. Rather, icons are the vehicle, the symbols, which point us to the greater reality of the incarnation. Fr. Antony said it well on Sunday: “we gather together this day to celebrate the central event in the history of the universe: the coming of God in the flesh, the glorification of matter, the deification of the human race. We are unashamed to preach this message even though it sounds absurd. For us the incarnation of the Son is proof positive that God loves His creation.”

What makes this particularly shocking, to the minds of both our Greek predecessors, and to our own more ‘modern’ instincts, ‘world’ into which God became incarnate is ambiguous. The world changes all the time, our lives change all the time. There is nothing predictable about you or me, or the world we live in. My guess is that for most of us, hearing that the world is ambiguous does not put us at ease. It does not cause us to sit back, relax, and breathe a sigh of relief. Instead, a little knot of tension appears in our body, maybe we sit up a little straighter, we fold our arms in front of us in order to resist this uncomfortable idea that the world is ambiguous. But it is true, change happens. And rather than resist change, or automatically assume that change and ambiguity means ‘bad,’ we need to really think about what ‘ambiguity’ really means.

First, lets be honest. We like order, and we like a God who is orderly. We prefer to think of the world as organized and orderly. The opposite of order is chaos, a disintegration of stability, normalcy, calm. Ambiguity is often synonymous with chaos. It is deeply embedded within our Christian tradition, East and West, that God created order out of chaos. That is what Genesis 1 tells us. God took nothing, or ‘chaos’ depending on how you understand the Hebrew, and, in an orderly fashion, created a world in which the sun rises and sets like clockwork. Early Christian authors were deeply suspicious of change. Change implies imperfection, because if you were perfect, you wouldn’t need to change. That God is unchanging is a central tenet of Greek philosophy and subsequent Christian theology.

Yet one of things science and experience is telling us is that the world God created is not as orderly as it appears. Science is more and more realizing that we don’t know how things happen the way they do. We can describe processes, but we don’t always understand the reasons for them. Order exists together with change, and what changes is the order we perceive. We can see that one thing affects another, which in turn affects another thing, but we are unable to account for every cause and effect in the world. Too many things are happening at once, always creating something new, which can be interpreted in a variety of ways. And while we can bring some order to our world, at any moment, that order can change. Perhaps it descends to disorder and becomes chaos, or, perhaps, it simply becomes a different way of understanding the world.

For example, I can clean my room, straighten my desk, bringing nice, neat order to everything around me. Then, maybe the next day, my roommate picks up the mail from mailbox, and puts my mail on the corner of my desk. I come home, am in a hurry, and I dump a few books on the desk, ignoring my mail. And because I am usually very busy, and I hate paperwork and cleaning, the mail piles up, the books pile up, and where there was order, there is now chaos. This is a chaos that at some level, I am responsible for, and it only bothers me. In another scenario, my roommate can, and does, wash and put away her dishes after every meal. In comes Maria, the force of chaos in our house, and washes all her dishes, but forgets to put all of them away. My roommate created order in the kitchen, I create disorder. And unfortunately, she is the one who has to live with my disorder. As much as she or I would like to have a clean desk or neat kitchen, we are affected by those around us, who we cannot control.

Every one of us is trying to order our world. We do so by pursuing an education which we think will help us get a job that we might enjoy and which will provide for our needs. Or perhaps we get ‘on-the-job’ training because that seems a more direct path to our goal. We seek to make friends and find relationships that give us the love and care we need. Perhaps we marry, hoping to create a stable home in which we can raise children. And yet in each of these situations, change is always a possibility. Perhaps the education we were seeking leads us to a completely different area. In my case, I went from history and theater to ministry and theology, a change that still confuses my mother. Perhaps the job we have is a great job, but due to a sick family member, the health benefits aren’t enough. Perhaps as a manager we may need to fire, or ‘let go,’ perfectly good workers simply because the company is not making enough money to keep them. Or the person we marry turns out not to be who we thought they were. Maybe we lose a child or are unable to bear children. Or the angelic little baby turns into an adorable monster who simply cannot sit still.

We bring order to our world, but that order is never guaranteed to last. We do not have complete control over our own lives, and we really have no control over the lives of those around us. At every moment, things can change. Most often, this change can appear negative. Someone loses a job, becomes sick, dies. We live in a world of horrendous poverty, and we argue endlessly over who is to blame. We have to make decisions which affect other people, without knowing how everything will play out. The Terry Schiavo case is an excellent example. It is not clear what sort of state she is in. It is not clear that recovery is possible. It is not clear that recovery is even relevant to her right to live. It is not clear that she wants to continue to live. It is not clear what the motivations of her family nor her husband are. It is not clear what the public, the judiciary, or the executive branch considers ‘life,’ when it should continue, and when it should be allowed to end. Or, in Orthodox language, to move on to its next stage. Part of the ambiguity of the world is that we don’t know. The world changes, we change, as we make decisions, the best decisions we can given what we know, in the midst of change, in the midst of ambiguity.

Maximos the Confessor sees change as an opportunity. According to Maximos, humanity is created to change, to move. We were not created perfect in the garden, we were created to grow. The tragedy for Maximos is if we could not change, if we could not move from our present imperfection to a slightly lesser imperfection. In pop-psychology, we seem to think that whatever happens to us between the age of 0 and 18 is it, makes us who we are, and we stop growing and developing in any significant way. Whatever we had or lacked as a child will permanently benefit or scar us. Yet it is a constant thread through the writings of our theologians that we are always growing, maturing, changing. What we did not have as a child we get in a different way as an adult. For Maximos and Gregory of Nyssa, growth and change never end. Ever, even in eternity. Why? Because for both of them, we are growing towards God. We are becoming divinized, we are becoming little gods, little christs. We are constantly growing in the image and likeness of God as we see it in Jesus, a growth made possible by the reality that God took on human flesh so that we might become like God. And while we are becoming more and more like God, we are at the same time realizing how much more there is of God than we can ever know.

It is here that we come face to face with mystery. Mystery is not the irrational or illogical or unreasonable, though mystery is inexplicable. Mystery is the “more” of God. For Maximos, Gregory of Nyssa, for Simeon the New Theologian, John of Damascus, to know something completely is to be able to control it, to mold it to your will. They all agree that we can and never will be able to fully know, and therefore control, God. God is mysterious. Not irrational, not contradictory, but more. God is always more than we can express, more than we can explain. This experience of God is not irrationality, but simply ‘more’ than we can explain. Dionysius the Areopagite has an entire tract on the Divine names of God, each of which tell us something about God, but also illustrate how little we know of God. God is a thundering tower of flame and a quiet, whispering breeze. God is a warrior leading his people into battle and mother hen gathering her chicks. God is both at the same time, even though we think of these is opposite images. God is never just one thing. Listen to our hymns during lent. On the one hand, we are entering into the passion of Christ, in to the suffering and death of Jesus. But if you listen carefully, you will be reminded of this throughout the season that we are also moving towards resurrection. We move through a somber darkness sprinkled with light..

We intersect with this mystery in at least two ways. First, as creations made in the image and likeness of a mysterious God, we too are mysterious. Every one of us reveals something of God, and none of us can ever be completely known by another. For those of you that have been married for years, how often does your spouse surprise you? How often to children surprise us by doing or saying something completely unexpected? I can no more contain one of you than any one of us can contain God. There is something unique and indefinable about every one of us. Second, the world in which we live is itself mysterious, open to change. Paul Florensky states that “This world is a semi-being in perpetual flux, constantly evolving, never still; and beyond, the attentive ear is attuned to another reality.” There is ambiguity in each of us and the world we live in. The person we love can, sometimes more than anybody else, do something that hurts us deeply. And sometimes, it is the person we really dislike that can show us something of God. A person can be wise in one area, and foolish in another. No one is ever purely good all the time. We are constantly moving, constantly changing. And change can go either way, it can be constructive or destructive, but change never stops.

It is into this world, not some imaginary, perfect world, that God enters. It is into this messy, ambiguous, ever-changing world that God enters in the person of Jesus. And we are called to participate in God by our participation in the world God has created, moving not only ourselves, but the world itself towards that other reality to which Florensky referred. The French Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement says that it is only humanity which “can bring out the secret sacramentality of the universe.” He continues by saying, not only is humanity “its hope of obtaining grace and being united to God” but we are “also its risk of failure and degeneration…” (110). Participation in God, theosis, divinization, is not about being perfect, it is not about making perfect decisions in a perfect world, with perfect consequences. Participation in God is our movement towards the ‘more’ of God. It is a movement to that joy we experience in the midst of darkness, that tasting and seeing that God is good, even if it is only for a moment. Participation in God is us grappling with changing circumstance, and become transformed into people who love God and love our neighbor.

Just as we participate in God, God participates in us, through us. God is not afraid of our ambiguous world. God is not limited by our ambiguous. God in the person of Jesus, and in the continuous world of the Holy Spirit in and through each and every one of us, participated in this world. On the one hand, this is the dangerous freedom of morality that Christos Yannaras and Metr. John Zizioulas speak of, the freedom we have to participate or not participate in God, which in turns influences the ways in which God participates in the world. On the other hand, this is what I find most comforting about the mystery of God. Whatever the mystery of God is, whatever more there is for us to discover of God, what we know is that God is with us, God is for us, in our real and messy lives. God does not demand that we do it all perfectly, God merely calls us to participate.

My favorite encounter of Jesus with the Syrophonecian woman. There are many reasons I like this story. I like it because Jesus deigns to converse with a woman dismissed by his disciples. I like it because she argues with Jesus, she disputes his interpretation, and she gets it right. More precisely, she gets Jesus right. Jesus, when asked by this woman to heal her daughter, articulates a common view that the work and power of God is for the children of Israel, not for the gentile ‘dogs.’ “But she answered him, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’” (Mk 7.29). In other words, she recognizes that there is enough of God to go around. That the leftovers of God are enough for what she needs. She recognizes in a way that the disciples do not, that there is always ‘more’ to God, that our world and our lives never exhaust the possibilities of God. This ‘more’ of God does not mean that our lives become less ambiguous, less prone to unpredictable change. The ‘more’ of God does not mean that we will not experience loss or tragedy. But like lent, God is present with us in the darkness. God enters into our flesh through Mary, Jesus lives and suffers and dies as we do, and Jesus is resurrected.

Not only do we enter into the mystery of God, but we are the mystery of God. We are ambiguous, we are changing, and it is in that ambiguity that there is even the possibility of change. Whether it is change for the better or worse is up to us.