Category Archives: Theological reflection

Full Circle

Posted on by Standard Reply

Today is the second and last time this century that Good Friday and the Feast of the Annunciation fall on the same day. Historically, though, they’re linked. In the earliest centuries of the Church, the death and resurrection of Christ were observed, but Christ’s birth was not. However, the symbolic value of placing Christ’s conception – the Feast of the Annunciation – on the same calendar date as the day he died is actually where the date of Christmas came from: nine months after the Blessed Virgin Mary said, “Let it be to me according to your word,” Jesus was born.

God Incarnate sojourned with us, moving through the entire mortal circle of life, from conception to death. For us, that’s all there is. No immortality, no rebirth. The natural cycle for the whole created order was fulfilled by Christ on Good Friday.

An early Christian hymn declares Christ to be “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” We know the story, how Easter changes everything. But this language, “image of God” and “all creation” also suggests, first, that the life of Christ is not a closed circle, and further, that it has cosmic significance.

I certainly would not be the first person to map Holy Week onto the week of creation in the Genesis myth (“myth” here meaning a story with deep layers of truth beyond a literal reading). Good Friday, being the sixth day of the week…oh, dear. That’s the day God made humans in God’s image. And the day God Incarnate dies. But it’s also the day God Incarnate is conceived. So the whole mortal human life of God begins and ends with God creating human beings. That makes sense.

The seventh day, God rested.

In Holy Week, that is the full 24-hour period in which the human God is dead. In our tradition, though, he descends into hell to free all the souls imprisoned there. Well, he’s still the guy who stirred up trouble healing people on the Sabbath. Yes, Christ is indeed “the same yesterday, today, and forever!”

This mapping was not lost on early Christians, who saw that the week could not just turn over into another week as we’re used to them doing. Once God has been conceived in the Virgin’s womb, has been born, has lived a human life, and has died a human death, something new has to happen.

The Resurrection, we’re told in the Gospels, happened early on the first day of the week. But just as Christ’s conception and death can be mapped onto each other, so can the first day and the eighth day.

The eighth day is the day of resurrection – the new creation, in which, in the hypostatic union of Christ (fully God and fully human), God creates something new: a completely new way of being human. We’re baptized into that new way of being when we’re baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection. That’s why so many baptismal fonts – or their bases, or the platform/steps they’re on – are octagonal.

That adds another layer: Christ’s death on Good Friday is a new kind of conception (as if a virgin conceiving weren’t enough!). In his death, Christ’s human body becomes the seed that must fall to the earth so that a different kind of life can bloom.

 

I feel a little bad that I’m only getting to this now, near the eleventh hour (literally) when the fruitful* coincidence is almost over. It’s been a long day, in a busy week with so little time to think. And now with all those circles and cycles interlacing and intertwining, I fear I’ve made myself dizzy! But I did not want to let this day pass without remark.

 

*And, yes, that’s a pun. The coincidence of today’s fast and feast is pregnant, we might say, with meaning. Just like the Blessed Virgin is beginning this day on one arc of the circle.

Advertisement

Merry Christmas! God is with us!

Posted on by Standard Reply

Gaudete! Christus natus est! Alleluia!

Tonight God’s purpose in creation is fulfilled.

Nativity reredos painting edited

Detail of reredos in Nativity Chapel, the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Detroit. Photo by the author, who is not too proud to admit this.

I love this gaudily-colored painting from the reredos of one of the side-chapels in my church. Christ is born, and everybody, human and otherwise, has shown up to celebrate! I’m reminded of a phrase from the requiem Mass (quoting from the Psalms): Ad te omnis caro veniet—“To you all flesh shall come.” As many Christmas carols—and the Bible itself—remind us, it’s not inappropriate for the mind to turn to death on this holy night. Christ’s death was inscribed into his birth:

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.’  Luke 2.34-35

And yet, isn’t that true of us, too?

In becoming human, God the Son destined himself to die. This is no surprise if you take the Incarnation seriously: all living creatures eventually die. Through his death, however, Christ made his divine eternal life available to all flesh. No surprise, then, that “to you all flesh shall come!”

His birth, life, death, and resurrection, however, were not a “plan B” contingency for human sin, but rather the very purpose of creation: by doing the impossible and becoming a creature, the Creator, having loved creation out into existence has loved it back to Godself. St. Ireneus put it this way:

“…it was necessary at first that nature be exhibited, then after that what was mortal would be conquered and swallowed up in immortality.”

Human DNA is now in the Godhead. That is the radical truth of Christmas. Tonight (paraphrasing Ireneus), God became human so that humans may become divine.

All flesh is involved, too, because all flesh is related. By uniting creatureliness and uncreated Creator in his Person, Christ saves a cosmos that, of its own power, would tend toward extinction. Think of it as a rescue or a salvage operation; either way, creation was not meant to be disposable.

“You hate nothing you have made…” – BCP Collect for Ash Wednesday

It’s a miracle that anything other than God should exist at all. It’s a far greater miracle that God should enter creation. Again, this is no contingency plan. It was the point all along. God made us because God wanted to be with us, and God is with us, forever, in Christ.

Merry Christmas.

“O God, you have caused this holy night to shine with the
brightness of the true Light: Grant that we, who have known
the mystery of that Light on earth, may also enjoy him
perfectly in heaven; where with you and the Holy Spirit he
lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting.”
– BCP Collect for Christmas

Lift Every Voice for Charleston

Posted on by Standard Reply

I have a friend who believes the correct response to whatever befalls a community of faith is: “What, then, shall we sing?”

This morning in church, many of us throughout the United States joined in solidarity with the congregation at Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC by singing the great hymn, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (#599 in The Hymnal 1982 if you’re Episcopalian like me; the text is by James Weldon Johnson and can be read at poets.org).

I love that hymn. Being a Detroiter, I know it by heart. But it was particularly difficult to sing today:

Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

I don’t know about heaven, but earth does not yet know the tune, much less the harmonies. We have work to do. So the triumphant-sounding words in the hymn, which sprang so easily from the tongue in 2009 when our nation elected its first Black president, felt a little flat today.

We were gathered as community to celebrate: that’s the term we use when speaking of the Eucharist. It’s a memorial of Christ’s death and resurrection, and we celebrate it. Our story, as people of the Christian faith, looks death squarely in the eyes and takes it on, in the “sure and certain hope of resurrection.” On any given Sunday, that resurrection faith is easy to sing. But this week, we were made keenly aware that we are still, in the words of the hymn, “treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.” It was difficult to sing.

Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

“No,” I wanted to reply. The hymn refers, in past tense, to “the day when hope, unborn, had died.” Yet it feels like we’re living in such a time.

Reflecting on the contradictions we were singing, I recalled the words of Harvey Milk: “You gotta give ’em hope.” Biblical scholars often encourage us to interrogate the text of Scripture by asking, “Where’s the good news?” It’s a question we should also ask while looking out at the world trying to find what the Spirit is doing, and another way to word it is, “Where’s the hope?” Today’s hymn, I think, is actually quite useful in training our vision to see hope where it seems to be absent.

There’s no denying that, even though we keep retreading the same stony road, we are “already and not yet” in a place for which our ancestors hoped. Ground really has been gained, no matter how much journeying still needs to be done. Today’s triumphant-sounding hymn carries that sense of the “already-and-not-yet” by proclaiming a bright future even while acknowledging a “gloomy past.” That in-between stretch of road that spans from hopeless past to future promise continues to be watered with tears but also continues to point us toward the consummation of our hope.

Wisely, the hymn does not end on either a mournful or a celebratory note, but with a prayer, reminding us that our hope lies in praying these words and striving to live them out, together:

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.

Perhaps the rhetorical-sounding questions earlier in the hymn are intended to evoke a mixed response. Have we arrived in the place “for which our parents* sighed”? That language is reminiscent of the biblical descriptions of patriarchs and matriarchs in the faith hoping for the fulfillment of God’s promises. We read, for example, in Hebrews 11 [NRSV]:

…By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

…All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.

Our “native land,” to which we pray in today’s hymn to stand true, is that city “whose architect and builder is God.” We’re not quite there yet, but we catch glimpses, especially when we gather together to celebrate the Eucharist. May we remain true to that native land, and bring along with us whoever we meet along the stony road.

*The Hymnal 1982 changes the word “fathers” in the original poem to the gender-inclusive “parents.” You know our mothers were sighing, too! Maybe more, even.

Being there

Posted on by Standard Reply

“I probably shouldn’t be grinning on Good Friday,” I said to the Dean after today’s Good Friday service. But one of the features of bipolar illness is that sometimes you just aren’t in charge of your emotions. On a day like today, when I’m teetering on the edge of hypomania, sometimes I just feel giddy, no matter what. I was in that state when the first of my grandparents died. I got the news, tried to be sad, and failed miserably. So I went to the store and bought a pack of cookies, and probably ate them all in one sitting. Probably giggling, I don’t remember.

Today’s liturgy was the second part of the great Triduum, the three services on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Eve, respectively. In a way, it is actually one liturgy broken across three days, and so it encompasses the full three days which it spans. The appropriate emotions would run the gamut of human experience, from the cozy togetherness of Maundy Thursday’s footwashing and Last Supper, to the pain of Jesus’ betrayal, trial, and execution, through the shocked, perhaps numb, state Jesus’ friends must have felt on Holy Saturday, to the bewildering joy of Easter’s unprecedented resurrection. But few of us can muster all those emotions in three days just by participating, however fully, in the liturgies. “Were you there…?” we sang today; and even though in a way, we were, we actually weren’t. We were in a beautiful church, fully aware of the story’s arc and what happens at the Easter Eve vigil.

Then there was me, feeling giddy…able to rein it in, but unable to keep my mind from wandering throughout the service.

Which is one reason I truly appreciate our sacramental tradition. My spirituality is not something that happens in my head, or what my emotions are doing (emotions actually being much more bodily than we tend to acknowledge). Even when my mind is wandering, there is my body, in the church, sitting attentively, or standing, or kneeling, or kissing the Cross, or bowing, or, most importantly, receiving the Sacrament.

Today, we received the Sacrament under the species of bread only, reserved from Maundy Thursday’s Eucharistic celebration. Traditionally, Episcopal and Catholic churches keep Reserved Sacrament, in which we believe Christ is truly present, somewhere in the church at all times. However, on Good Friday, it is all consumed. There is no Reserved Sacrament in the church. I was reflecting on this after receiving Communion. Very dramatically, we see that Christ is now only present in the bodies of the faithful who are gathered there. Yes, we believe in resurrection, and we are preparing for it in ways Jesus’ disciples and other friends could not have done after seeing him crucified. But in his dying, as in his Incarnation, he gives himself so fully to us that we have a responsibility to be his body in the world.

And for that, as for worship, it doesn’t matter how we feel. What matters is what we do with our bodies. Show up, do the good work God has given you to do. Put one foot in front of the other and trust that God is directing your steps. Proclaim the Resurrection this Easter not only with your words, but with your body. This side of death, we already share in Christ’s resurrection in our mortal flesh, even if it’s broken or diseased (bipolar, say), even if we aren’t feeling it, even though we can’t break all our bad habits. Show up, put one foot in front of the other, do the good work God has given you to do.

Resurrection is coming.

The ordinariness of God

Posted on by Standard Reply

I work in a church—literally, in the church, not in the offices attached to it. My work is mostly preparing for worship services.

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, which involved a fair amount of preparation. But that’s not what I want to write about.

Because the church where I work combines all our Palm Sunday services, so that there is only one big service in the morning, I was able to ready the side chapel today for Monday’s 12:10 Eucharist. As I was setting the chalice (dressed with paten, purificator, host, pall, and corporal), water and wine, and lavabo bowl on the credence table, I noticed that I was barely paying attention to what I was doing. I’ve been doing this for over eight years; it’s fairly automatic.

Credence

I did this in my sleep.

Working in a church, you develop a very intimate relationship with the sacred space and its vessels and furnishings. When we think of intimacy, we usually think first of special moments of tenderness and delight shared between persons in a close relationship. But as anyone in any kind of intimate relationship (romantic or otherwise) knows, they are also full of the mundane. No matter how hard we may try, we will at times take the other for granted. We’ll fail sometimes to pay full attention; we’ll miss seeing the love and grace and beauty that really are always there.

The vessels for daily Mass are among the plainest that we have. They also pretty much never get put away, and so they tarnish a bit, and sometimes are duller than they ought to be. Those of us who wash, dry, and re-set them tend to take them for granted and treat them as utilitarian objects. It’s one more task to wash and re-set them. Even the Reserved Sacrament does not automatically arouse a sense of awe. You have to be paying attention.

So when I noticed I was working on auto-pilot, I first felt a tinge of…not quite guilt, but a sense that maybe I should be working with more reverence. I thought about how a hypothetical visitor or attendee at Mass might respond if given the object to handle these sacred objects, how they might react to see me treating these items so casually.

But quickly my attention turned instead to one of the things I value most about the Sacraments:

My awe or lack thereof is actually as immaterial to the Sacrament as it was to the prep work I was doing. No matter how carefully I were to line the vessels up neatly, turn the chalice with the cross facing forward, or adjust the linens—or how carelessly I might have performed the same task—these relatively humble vessels will fulfil their function, and they will contain the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ. Similarly, when we receive Communion, our attention or inattention does not alter the objective reality of what is happening: we are receiving Christ and being incorporated into his Body. Our devoted mindfulness benefits us, to be sure, but either way, Christ always shows up, is always there, always receives whatever we offer, and always gives of himself to us fully. Even if we don’t notice.

This isn’t to encourage inattention this Passiontide—on the contrary: recognizing God’s generosity and condescension to be so ordinary, to risk going unnoticed, can clearly be seen in Jesus’ dwelling and walking with us, even through suffering and death. Christ’s willingness—eagerness, really—to enter our world, and there shed his tears, his sweat, his blood into whatever matter would receive them (clothing, the wood of the Cross, the thin air), his willingness to entrust his body to the tomb—this very human humility of Christ can inspire us to value and imitate his self-outpouring all the more.

Perhaps I might as well have been pre-setting a table in a low-end restaurant with placemats and ketchup bottles. Instead, I was setting a credence table for the celebration of the Mass, and was suddenly caught by the profound significance of those vessels.

Shouldn’t we also be caught by the profound sacredness of all matter? The cosmos, after all, was created for Christ to inhabit, and we are told in Scripture that Christ “fills all things.” His presence in such ordinary things as ketchup or a sock is certainly of a different character than his presence in the Eucharist. But, whether we notice it or not, he fills all things.

The Spirit of Detroit and Christian Hope

Posted on by Standard 1
Photo by the author

Statue informally known as the “Spirit of Detroit,” by Marshall Fredericks. The sculpture sits outside the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center at Woodward and Jefferson Aves. Photo by the author.

The Detroit city motto has become better known in recent years, thanks to the proliferation of books—about the city’s history, and, yes, about the ruins, by authors who live in the Metro Area and love the city—and of merchandise such as bookbags, t-shirts, postcards, and other items you might find at City Bird, the Detroit Merchantile Company, Pure Detroit, various Eastern Market vendors, pop-ups, or other local boutiques. Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus—We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes. These words were penned by Father Gabriel Richard, a Catholic priest and a major figure in Detroit and Michigan history, after fire destroyed the city in 1805.

What does it mean to “hope for better things”? Is it the same kind of hope as when children hope for a snow day, or when you hope your favorite team will win the game?

I think the fact that it was written by a priest in the context of city-wide disaster suggests that Fr. Richard was thinking more along the lines of Christian hope, which I would define as the confidence we have in virtue of our trust in God, whom we know to be trustworthy. That’s a very different kind of hope.

Which is well and good and quite encouraging, really, for Christians, and perhaps for other religious theists. But in today’s pluralistic context, even in a predominately Christian city like Detroit, I think it’s important to find where a similar kind of hope is accessible to all.

Confidence from trusting in that which is trustworthy—where can we find that today? Not in City Hall, not in Kevyn Orr or Gov. Rick Snyder, not in Dan Gilbert or the Ilich family; not in the economy, certainly not in the strength of the U.S. Dollar. Not even in the ideal of democracy, which is so clearly broken. I would suggest we find that secular version of confident hope in the people of Detroit: in its people of good will, whose civic identity and spirit, I think, is characterized by strength, loyalty, pride, and resilience. “Detroit hustles harder,” as they say.

The religious meaning of hope is, I think, primary; but it’s important even for those of us who consciously place our trust in God to also discriminate among those objectives vying for our hope in the world around us. We’re fooling ourselves if we think we place our trust in God, and also place it in an earthly savior, such as a corporate benefactor or a politician. We’re fooling ourselves if we think we “seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness” but also chase after economic security before all else. But for people of faith, hoping in God is always done in community, as community. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are people of covenant. We believe God calls peoples into covenant with Godself, and so we simply cannot fully trust in God without each other. To trust in the human spirit—in this case, the spirit of Detroit—requires civic engagement, concern for one’s neighbor, and holding virtues like charity, commitment, and forgiveness above the shiny distraction of money. It requires creativity, sharing, peacemaking, and hard work—but not just the individualistic hard work of earning one’s own living. It is entirely congruent, I think, with trust in God, because God’s dwelling is among the people. (If you don’t believe me, go read James Cone or Jim Perkinson, or any of the Liberation Theologians.) If we are to trust in one another, though, we must work, as a people, to be trustworthy—to be worthy of this confident hope. Thankfully, we bear this task together.What kind of city do we want to build? What Detroit do we want to be?

Official city seal. Photo by the author.

Official city seal, also at city hall (visible on the upper left in the image above). Photo by the author.

The LORD brings the will of the nations to naught;
he thwarts the designs of the peoples.

But the LORD’S will stands fast for ever,
and the designs of his heart from age to age.

Happy is the nation whose God is the LORD!
happy the people he has chosen to be his own!

The LORD looks down from heaven,
and beholds all the people in the world.

From where he sits enthroned he turns his gaze
on all who dwell on the earth.

He fashions all the hearts of them
and understands all their works.

There is no king that can be saved by a mighty army;
a strong man is not delivered by his great strength.

The horse is a vain hope for deliverance;
for all its strength it cannot save.

Behold, the eye of the LORD is upon those who fear him,
on those who wait upon his love,

To pluck their lives from death,
and to feed them in time of famine.

Our soul waits for the LORD;
he is our help and our shield.

Indeed, our heart rejoices in him,
for in his holy Name we put our trust.

Let your loving-kindness, O LORD, be upon us,
as we have put our trust in you.

(Psalm 33:10-22, BCP)

Christmas and Martyrdom: St. Stephen’s Day

Posted on by Standard Reply

Happy second day of Christmas! And happy St. Stephen’s Day.

Icon of St. Stephen.

Icon of St. Stephen.

St. Stephen was the first Christian martyr. He was also a deacon, one of seven chosen and ordained by the twelve Apostles to serve those in need. He also preached and “worked wonders,” which made him some very powerful enemies. Accused of blasphemy, he was stoned to death. You can read his full story in Acts chapters 6-7. Today, the Church commemorates him, and, in particular, his violent end.

It’s the day after Christmas, the second of the twelve days of Christmas. We’ve just welcomed the Christ child, marveled at the mystery of God becoming human. Most of us have domestic messes to clean up—dishes, gift wrap, laundry, and so forth—and are tired but happy, full of good food, with thoughts of Mary and Joseph, angels, shepherds, and magi. Suddenly, we’re confronted with the memory of violent death: not of the babies slaughtered by Herod (that’s the day after tomorrow), but of the martyrdom of a Christian who preached Christ crucified and resurrected, and who saw, just before he died, a vision of Jesus seated at God’s right hand. That’s quite a leap in the story! It seems a strange juxtaposition.

But it’s actually what Christmas is about. Mary’s “Magnificat” had predicted that the birth of her son would turn the world upside down. The world, however, doesn’t turn upside down without a fight.

God appearing among us, in our flesh, participating in our birth and in our death, is an invitation for us to be reborn into Christ and to participate in his death. Thankfully, most of us won’t be required to face martyrdom; but we are invited to die to our selves and to our own ambitions because we are called to something better. When St. Stephen had his vision of Christ enthroned, he was seeing the end result of the Incarnation: human nature, and with it, all creation, taken into the very heart of the Triune God. In the baby Jesus, the Word of God became human. He has never stopped being human. What he is—what St. Stephen saw—is God’s design for us all: to dwell intimately with God in perfect union, not dissolved into an impersonal oneness or reabsorbed into our source, but joined to our maker in the most beautiful unity-in-diversity.

That was, in fact, the goal all along. In the Incarnation, we see that God created the cosmos in order to dwell in it and to unite it to Godself in love. The Incarnation was no “Plan B” resulting from human sin. It was God’s intention all along, the very purpose of creation. Knowing that frees us from our own little lives that end with our individual, self-shattering deaths. That freedom allowed St. Stephen not only to accept death, but to forgive those who participated in his murder in any way (among them, the future St. Paul, who guarded the coats of those doing the actual stoning).

Holy Stephen, pray for us, that we may share your vision of Christ exalted, and so gain the freedom to die to our small selves and receive with you the life of the one whose birth we continue to celebrate these twelve days of Christmas.

A brief Advent reflection

Posted on by Standard Reply

Advent’s just begun.

Ordinary Time closed with a celebration of Christ the King; now we’re waiting for that King to be born…while at the same time, looking for him to “come again in glory.” Even while Christmas preparations must be done, we hold those celebrations at bay during this strange season of remembering the eschaton and anticipating Christ’s birth 2,000-some years ago, all while continuing to meet his Real Presence in the Sacrament at every Mass we attend. Advent is “timey-wimey,” as the Doctor might put it:

Well, in the Church, we usually use the phrase, “already and not yet,” but it’s a similar idea.

The entire Church year, in fact, is like this—not just Advent. When we walk the Way of the Cross with Christ during Holy Week, we’re also busy preparing for Easter celebrations, while celebrating the Eucharist before, on, and after Maundy Thursday. We know that Christ was born, lived, died, rose again, ascended into heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit to his Church, but we mark the days of our year in ways that combine memory, anticipation, presence, longing, and participation in ways that allow us to find, afresh, our own place in the story, year after year. We sound the depths of the traditions, which have accrued and continue to grow through the centuries, and find that they echo back our own longing, fear, joy, pain, faith, doubt—whatever we might be experiencing right now. We have the opportunity to put our lives as they are this year in conversation with that story which is both historic and eternal, the story of the One who was, and is, and will be.

Blessed Advent. May the mysteries we ponder with Mary resonate in our lives throughout the coming year.

Annunciatory Angel, Fra Angelico, c. 1450-1455. Detroit Institute of Arts.

Annunciatory Angel, Fra Angelico, c. 1450-1455. Detroit Institute of Arts.

PS: I’d be remiss not to mention that today, Detroit’s application for bankruptcy protection was approved by a judge. I ask for your prayers for the city and its residents, as well as the surrounding region, and for wisdom and a spirit of servanthood in the leaders who will be hashing out a plan going forward. For more information:

USA Today’s report, which gives a general overview of today’s news on the subject.

Huffington Post’s report centering on the fate of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collections.

The Nation’s report, which considers the really bad precedent(s) that could come out of this.

Christ the King

Posted on by Standard Reply

In 1925, Pope Pius XI introduced the feast of Christ the King, which was meant as a reminder, amid the encroachments of secularization, that Christ is our Sovereign, reigning over all peoples in all places and all times—indeed, over all creation.

Such a small vision, really.

True, it’s a step beyond the old nationalistic thinking—prevalent in antiquity (according to the biblical record, at least)—that pits one people’s god against another people’s god to see which god wins. The winning god, of course, is determined through the spilling of human blood.

But with several millennia of monotheism under our belt, we know better than to think there are different gods backing different peoples and prodding them into war. We’re a little better than that. A little. The confession that Christ is King ought to help us see our unity under the one and only Lord, but instead, we want to test which of us the one Lord really favors. We want to use Christ the King to conquer our enemies and to put others in their place. If Christ is King the way human kings are king, then he might be swayed by our deference, our flattery, our lip-service, or even our genuine loyalty and obedience. As God, he’s the biggest, baddest king of them all, so we know we’re on the winning side, if we tactfully side with him:

Such a tiny, tiny vision.

Many today are uncomfortable with the language of saying that Christ is “King” or Jesus is “Lord,” and with good reason. Those words represent the kind of earthly power that Christians are being called to relinquish. Calling Jesus “King” or “Lord” can easily be misused to re-shape Christ into the image of Caesar. It has historically been used to justify social hierarchies in which the rich dominated the poor, men dominated women, clerics dominated the laity, and whites dominated people of color. These dominations and others, as we know, are still going on.

But the Gospel writers intended a much more revolutionary meaning when they said, “Jesus is Lord”—even more than the simple fact that if Jesus is Lord, Caesar isn’t. John, in particular, spelled out the insane Christian claim that the Cross of Christ is his throne, that true power is seen in self-emptying. Jesus wasn’t going to take over Caesar’s office, but rather to reveal that office’s inadequacy—irrelevancy, even. This is one of those radical reversals we find throughout Scripture. What on earth would Jesus even do with Caesar’s supposed power? It would be like a surgical nurse handing a neurosurgeon an AK-47. Or a fish.

To assert that Christ is King, or that Jesus is Lord, is to say that Kingship looks like Christ, not the other way around. Lordship looks like Jesus: it is cruciform. It takes the form of a servant. True power lays down its life and welcomes vulnerability. In the video clip above, the character of Jesus in the film, Jesus Christ Superstar, tells the crowd of his followers (in the Twitter sense—fans, really) that they don’t know what power is; that true power comes through death. Or, as the Book of Common Prayer words it, Christ has “made the way of the Cross to be the way of life.”

This is liberating news for the downtrodden and marginalized, but it is terrible news for those who hold worldly power—something most of us enjoy to some degree, if we live in the developed world. Christ’s Kingship should, for most of us (think the “99%”) be both comforting and unsettling: comforting, because we know that the powers of this world, which too often subjugate us, cannot claim ultimate victory; but unsettling, because in order to be fit for the reign of Christ, we will need to unlearn many habits. Habits that we like very much.

Habits like acquiring cheap consumer goods, the production of which most likely polluted the earth and quite possibly enslaved some worker somewhere (maybe even a child). Habits like demanding our own rights but neglecting the rights of others, or holding on to privileges we obtained through no real fault of our own. Habits like putting ourselves, or our own families, ahead of others and their families. Habits like judging others, and justifying ourselves. In other words, pretty much every habit we inherited from our pre-human ancestry. Even our good habits aren’t good enough, or they’re wrong-headed, motivated by self-interest. Christ’s self-emptying might make him seem harmless, especially when we look at a crucifix and see him nailed down where he can’t do any harm, head bowed in submission to the Father. But that self-emptying is the radical reversal of the self-interest that seems to have been one of evolution’s primary engines. Christ the King threatens to unravel everything we know and trust.

The good news, though, is that Christ is King: no other power will ultimately stand against him, not even the powers that bind us in our bad habits and keep us from reaching our full human potential. Because Christ is King, we are liberated from ourselves and toward each other. Our King has conquered death, by showing us that the path through death is the way to life—so that the fears and struggles for survival that shaped us as a species and as individuals ultimately hold no true power.

In the Gospel lection this year, one of the two “thieves” (read: political troublemakers, threats to worldly “power”) who is crucified with Jesus recognizes the truth we celebrate this last Sunday before Advent. He asks Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” What a strange thing for one dying man to ask another! Especially when their deaths, according to Rome, would expose them as frauds, whose aspirations to power had been thwarted by the great power of Rome that ruled the whole world!

Yeah, no. Rome had it entirely wrong.

Worldly power rewards those who worship it and punishes those who work against it. If we imagine that Jesus is aspiring to the kind of power we humans, cousins to bonobos and chimpanzees, find alluring—the power, e.g., that destroys its enemies, rewards its cronies, and makes a name for itself—then we’re trying to shoehorn Christ the King into the worthless role of Caesar. Even worse, when we aspire to that kind of power, we are swearing our allegiance to Caesar, not Christ.

And that is such a myopic vision.

Good thing Christ is King, and we aren’t.

 

Meeting Jesus on the Street (Costs More than Taking the Bus)

Posted on by Standard Reply

Tonight, I walked home from the train station—just under a mile, in the dark—to save $2.10 on bus fare. I’m counting pennies, sorta. I’m admittedly rather lousy with money, and, according to my math, my earnings over the next year won’t…quite…cover my expenses, which are pared down as much as they can be. So I feel the need to hang onto any money I can…except that on another level, I don’t really feel it. This is the time of year I earn the most. I feel like I have the amount I actually have in the bank, not like I have to squirrel away whatever I can for when it’s needed in a few months.

So I walked home in the dark to save $2.10 bus fare, because I discovered (while doing the aforementioned math) that I spend a lot more on transit than I’d realized – more than the $85 in pre-tax transit dollars I purchase each month.

But on that walk, just under a mile, I wound up giving away all $9 I had left on me to three different beggars.

Oops.

Except, not oops. These were beautiful people made in God’s image who asked me for help. How could I say no? Sure, spread out over the course of a year, I don’t have enough to be giving money away. But right now I do, and right now, that woman was standing in front of me, wrapped in a blanket, asking for help. Or that man, hauling off something he said he would be selling tomorrow (it looked like just a wooden crate to me)—he wanted a burrito. He was the first, and I regretted giving him only $2 when I saw the real gratitude in his eyes. He sped off with his crate before I could change my mind. He was in a really good mood, I could tell.

See, the thing is, I take it seriously when I hear Jesus, in the Gospels, saying things like, “Do not refuse anyone who begs from you,” or “What you have done for the least of these, you did for me.”

Except I don’t, really, do I? If I took those sayings completely to heart, I’d be on the street begging myself, having given away the resources I do have. It might be just me, but it seems like the line between “Yes, I can afford this,” and “No, I can’t afford this” is pretty arbitrary sometimes. When I set out walking tonight, instead of springing for bus fare, I honestly felt it was a matter of what I could not afford. How, then, did I have $9 in my pocket, and how was I able to hand it to strangers on the street? Will I ever miss that $9? Would I have missed the $2.10?

I really don’t have an answer to such questions. I’m not sure I want answers. Sometimes I think struggling with these questions keeps us more honest. It would be easy to fabricate answers that would satisfy me one way or the other – most likely to allow me to say “No” to the stranger while maintaining a clean conscience. What is a comfortable answer worth, anyway? $9? $2.10? Enough to make rent in a lean month?

Knowing my penchant for saying “Yes” to the stranger who begs, I guess I should’ve known that spending the bus fare was actually the more fiscally “responsible” thing to do.

But I also get quite an emotional and spiritual lift from these encounters, that I think goes beyond just the happiness you get when you give. I’ve been struggling with depression quite a bit lately, which is part of the reason this blog has been pretty quiet. But I’ve had some very graced encounters during this time.

One was with a woman named Mac. I was walking from work to the train station—in a very depressed mood—and noticed her from half a block away. She was busy sorting through cardboard in a recycling bin, as if looking for just the right piece for such and such purpose. I felt drawn to her, so I slowed my steps until we could make eye contact. I smiled and said hi, she smiled and said hi, and at some point she asked for some money.

I had a $10 bill on me, so I gave it to her. Immediately, she started into an explanation that she was only going to spend it on food and shelter, nothing else. I told her it was none of my business what she spent it on. We proceeded to have a lovely conversation, during which she thanked me several times, told me her name, complimented my haircut (!), and at one point, kissed my hand. But we did have a real conversation about stuff (including where she goes for free haircuts), and that was what I needed: a genuine interaction with another human being. As we parted, she gave me her blessing, which I commented later that night had to be worth at least a thousand blessings from a bishop or priest. “The Lord hears the cry of the poor,” the Psalmist assures us. If that’s the case, then her blessing carries an awful lot of weight. In return—as if an exchange of precious gifts—I continue to hold her in my prayers.

A couple weeks ago or three, I was feeling so down, that as I left work and walked to the train station, I couldn’t stop crying. (This actually happens more than I’d like to admit.) In typical San Francisco fashion, or—let’s give the natives the benefit of the doubt—perhaps in typical tourist fashion,  my fellow pedestrians only ever looked through or past me, even if I managed to give them a smile or nod. There were two exceptions. One beggar tried to engage me in his cheerful sales pitch, as if he didn’t notice I was crying. I have to confess, I said no that time. Maybe that was unfair, but it had nothing to do with him, really. I needed to keep moving in order to not completely lose it in public. But I did notice that he was putting on an act that had nothing to do with the person he was speaking to. Despite the fact that he was clearly addressing me, he too looked right through or past me. I don’t hold it against him, though. He’s got a tough gig.

But then as I reached the station, there was this other man—the same man who’s been out there begging or selling the Street Sheet for all eight years I’ve been out here, but whose name I don’t know. I don’t remember if we’ve ever formally introduced ourselves; I’m not good with names, so I might have forgotten. Anyway, a couple years ago, I had a small surplus of money (more than I needed), so I gave a lot of it to him. Every time I saw him, I gave him a $5, $10, or $20—whatever I had on me. We’d have brief conversations, enough so that I know he lives in an SRO and is out begging to cover his rent and some food, and that he’s been hospitalized a few times (sometimes that’s what he tells me after he’s been missing for a while).

But this night, the night where I couldn’t stop crying, he noticed. A look of genuine concern came over his face, and he asked, “Are you alright?” He didn’t ask me for money. He just asked if I was alright, God bless him. I only managed to say, “I will be,” and walk on into the station. But his response to me meant so much, and carried me through that night. When I saw him again a week or two later, I told him how much it had meant to me, that he had seen me, and expressed concern. He needed to know that. I felt like I’d been rude just walking on like I did, so I had to be sure to tell him. We then had a conversation about stuff, as you do—about my struggling with depression lately, about his trying to move to Oakland to get away from some of the problems in “the City.” He mentioned some people who were getting violent, and he was afraid of getting beaten up. I didn’t fully understand what he was trying to say about that, but I heard the same thing from another guy last night.

The man I came across last night looked terrible. He had small scabs all over his face and neck, and his hands were black with dirt. I made eye contact and smiled, as I do with everyone I pass in the street, and he asked me for money. I gave him some. He asked then if I could, perhaps, also buy him some food. He acknowledged that it was a strange thing to ask, and offered to give back the money I’d just given him if that was an issue, and asked if I was on my way to eat dinner. “No, I’m headed to Oakland,” I said. So he asked if he could walk with me a block or two. I said yes, and we continued in conversation. I realized then that he didn’t want me to just buy him food—he wanted some companionship.

So we chatted about all kinds of things for a couple of blocks, and then stood and chatted some more. At one point, he asked my name; I told him, and asked him his, but he didn’t tell me. He said he’d shake my hand, except he had “bugs”—I’m guessing fleas or lice or something. It was considerate of him to want to protect me from catching anything. And it explained all those little scabs, probably. But he too mentioned wanting to get away from people who were violent and causing trouble. I noticed he had a bruise on one side of his face. I didn’t ask questions, I just listened. He skipped around from topic to topic, and sometimes I couldn’t figure out how he got from point A to point B, but overall, I enjoyed our conversation. I think he did too.

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of all the encounters of this sort that I’ve had. It’s just some recent ones. I could go on quite a bit, with stories from San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Detroit, Ann Arbor… I’ve had a few mildly bad encounters, such as a very early experience in Ann Arbor, in college, when I was chased by a guy until I found a shop to duck into, or another man on State Street who, when I didn’t buy incense sticks from him, yelled very grumpy things at me. I’ve also had amusing encounters. There’s the fact that twice—once in Detroit, and once in San Francisco—I’ve had panhandlers ask me why I’m so pigeon-toed! Or the fact that I’m often called “Sir” by women in particular. But I’ve also been mugged at gunpoint, and, frankly, sometimes I’ve given a beggar cash in gratitude that they’re not demanding it from me! And isn’t this what it’s all about, the gifts we freely give each other? God’s economy is a gift economy, where everything given is received in gratitude, and everyone is gift, giftee, and giver. “Freely you have received; freely give”—that’s another thing Jesus says in the Gospel.

But we’re stuck, for now, in an economy of human devising: consumer capitalism. We’re supposed to be stingy with our cash, except when purchasing gifts, perhaps. We’re supposed to want to possess things. But not everyone can participate. The rules of the game have to exclude some in order for others to get rich. I see far too many people out begging in what is supposed to be a “land of opportunity,” and far too many people refusing to share their little bit of the American Dream. The common rhetoric tends to accuse the poor of all sorts of things, from laziness to fraud to addiction, as if we would all spend our days begging if we could, but no, “we” have compunctions. The truth is that poverty is criminalized in this country, in so many ways. These folks I meet are working hard to get by in a society that is very hostile toward them.

So I give. It’s not much. It’s nowhere what they need. They’ll continue struggling, and making do, and so will I, except I have it a lot easier, however little I may have. They are poor; I’m working class. To me, it’s about solidarity, and trying, failing, and trying again to live according to the economy of the Kingdom of God which is “already and not yet” here among us.

Among us. Not inside each of us individuals, much less possessed by us, but among us, in the synapses that connect us. If we’re ever to live fully into God’s reign, we’ve got to stick together. But it costs so much.