my thoughts about life

Such a Man

2012-01-25T18:33:00.000-08:00

Epiphany 4, January 29, 2012, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church

I'm really not this snooty, but the other day while I was working in the office I had Beethoven's 3rd Symphony in E Major playing on my iPhone. I found it delightful background music for my work. It filled the place with peace, and, though I'm usually not one to have background music going, I found it enhanced my productivity. Now, as I said, I'm not really that snooty. In fact, if you were to ask me to identify the symphony from an unlabeled list of them by listening I would be at a total loss. I just happen to have it on my phone, and I just decided to play it. And I liked it. I liked it not because my taste in music is so refined, but because it's just good music. It carries a power in it that has made us continue to play it even though the composer himself died in 1827, more than 180 years ago. There is an innate beauty about it which is compelling. I know you know what I mean.

It's not unlike other experiences we have all had. A sunset grabs us and sits us down almost forcefully on a log to watch as it blazes out the last moments of a day. A bite of food suddenly makes all your taste buds burst into full sensory flower. A fragrance wafts by and your heart is filled with the joy of a childhood memory.

Now imagine meeting someone who just commands your loyalty by his or her very presence. It might be your grandmother or a favorite uncle, perhaps a boss at work whom you admire, or a sports hero. It's not really that they have high position or command great companies of men, though they might, it's more than that, and less at the same time, something that calls you out of your small-self and into your big-self. Being with that person somehow opens all your pores and makes you breathe easier, you know that what they say is true and right and good, and you are ready to depend on it with your life. I have not met many people like that in my lifetime. I have thought I found such people many times, only to be disappointed with their feet of clay.

But in today's Gospel lesson such a person walks into church one day. His goodness is so compelling and so present that any and all things evil just have to flee. Even the evil spirit knows who he is, he rightly calls him, "The holy one of God." Everyone is left with their mouths open in amazement. Nobody they had ever known ever spoke with such inherent authority.

This kind of authority is not achieved or earned, it is given. It is given by God. It is not a uniform that one puts on, like that of a policeman, that confers the power of another, but it comes by the vesting of the heart by a heavenly uniform, that makes one into a certain kind of person. In Jesus' case, it made Him into exactly what He was anyway.

Jesus is here this morning. Some people can feel His presence, others cannot, but that is inconsequential, really. We know He is here because He promised to be present among two or three who gather in His name. We have gathered in His name, as we do every Sunday.

Before this kind of authority there are only two possible responses. Jesus got one in Jerusalem, and the other in Galilee. One can resist it, fight it, try to gain power over it, and ultimately fail, or one can surrender to it, follow and it and finally, find in it the source of life and peace.

How could one resist such goodness, you ask? Oh, but we do all the time. We tend to lash out at things we cannot control. My big one is people merging into 70-mile-an-hour traffic at 50 miles-an-hour--in front of me--makes me crazy! But you've all heard these quips, too:

·         "I'm not going to vote because my one vote won't change anything anyway."
·         "You can't trust a 'raghead,' they're all radicals who will talk nice to your face and stab you in the back when you turn around."
·         "The problem with society today is that there are too many __________ (fill in the blank.)"

We tend to try to control things we think we can control. We over-manage, we undermine, we strategize and scrutinize and double-guess. We value shrewdness over genuineness. We cause others all kinds of grief just so we will look good to someone else. And when we fail--it is always someone else's fault! Anything that has the power to pull our chains and punch our buttons has become an idol that wields an inordinate amount of control over us. Idols will always ultimately crumble under their own weight, leaving us sitting in the ashes of our own castles.

Or we can surrender. Surrendering is not the act of a spineless sap, that is abdication. Surrender is the hardest, bravest thing a person can do. It is a recognition that God is truly bigger than oneself, and at the same time incomprehensibly good, and therefore worthy to be trusted with life's quandaries and conundrums.

Surrender is what the prophets of old did when they faithfully proclaimed the Words of God.

·         Surrender is what St. Paul did when, though meat offered to idols was no issue with him, would rather not eat meat at all for the sake of a brother or sister.
·         Surrender is what happens when the Command Sergeant Major faithfully makes the General's wishes become a reality.
·         Surrender is what happens when a volunteer at the church shows up, works until the work is done, and then looks for more.
·         Surrender is what happens when you stop for the needy, extend the benefit of the doubt, and clean up after the party.
·         Surrender is when another's weakness is more compelling than our strength, another's need more than our resources.
·         Finally, surrender is not affected one way or the other by recognition.

Jesus is here this morning. What will it be? The sovereignty of the ego, or the surrender of the heart?

Sweet Surrender

2012-01-19T08:12:00.000-08:00

Epiphany 3, January 22, 2012, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church

A month ago our little Jack Russell had a puppy. I've noticed some amazing things that happen in the presence of a puppy. First of all, our little dog had never been a mommy before, but her mothering instincts kicked in incredible ferocity. With only one little one to care for that little thing was fat and content ALL of the time! You couldn't get momma dog away for more than just a minute or so or she was whining to get back to her precious charge. Overnight, this dog went from a care-free puppy herself to a dutiful mother. Now, we have enough dogs as it is, so we were looking for a home for this little one. The mommy and the daddy are really good hunters, so this last weekend when I gathered with my falconer friends in Abilene, I put the puppy in the raffle. The winner is a 12-year-old boy in Austin who can't wait to have his own dog! Here are best friends forever in the making—guaranteed! He wants to know about shots, and pick-up dates. He wants to know about feeding and care and exercise and housing...overnight this 12-year-old boy is going from a care-free boy to a responsible young man. There is a magic about puppies that really does change the world.

It’s really not magic. It’s the power of surrender. It is an innate thing in the human psyche to seek some great calling to which to give ourselves. There is part of us that would always like to do precisely what we want to do and nothing more, but a deeper, wiser part of us knows that such a life grows pointless very quickly. That wiser part seeks after something larger, some great high calling to which to respond. Surrendering to that high call is the greatest thing we can ever do. The highest and noblest of those calls is the call to a great journey, a journey into the heart of God as we know Him in Jesus Christ. All humanity is called to that great surrender. But each of us also has our own particular call, one that is ours alone. The greatest task a person can ever do is to discover that call and live into it.

Jonah had such a call. We know the story well. God says, "Go, preach to the great city of Nineveh, lest I destroy it for its wickedness." But Nineveh was one of Israel's enemies, and Jonah did NOT want to help out the enemy, so he sails the other direction, gets into a big storm, gets thrown him overboard and he spends three days and nights thinking about his call in the belly of the great fish. The story today picks up after all that. He goes, obedient to the call, and preaches to Nineveh, and the whole city repents, and God turns away from the destruction God had in mind.

Paul writes to the Christians in Corinth about such a call. It was believed that the return of the Lord would happen just any minute. In view of that, human institutions like marriage and wealthy, and the earthly experiences of loss and joy are secondary to the call of the advent of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus lays such a call before four of the disciples. Jesus walks up the shoreline and finds these men tending their nets, for they were fishermen. He calls Peter and Andrew and promises to make them fish for people. He calls James and John and they follow him. They spend the next three years learning to surrender themselves to that call. Of the original 12 only one refused.

Where did this surrender take these four men? Peter was martyred by the Emperor Nero in Rome. There’s a great legend about Peter fleeing the persecution. On the way down the Appian Way he meets the Lord going to Rome. “Where are you going?” he asks. “To Rome to be crucified again,” he replies. Peter immediately returns and is martyred, asking to be crucified upside down for he did not feel himself worthy of dying in the same manner as his Lord.

Andrew is reported to have gone to Scythia preaching the Gospel, and legend has it he died on an X-shaped cross at the hands of pagans. James was the second Christian martyr recorded in the Bible, he was killed by Herod the King in the infancy of the church. Early sources place John in Ephesus after the church was scattered from Jerusalem, where he alone of the 12 died of old age. There he mentored another great father of the Church, Polycarp.

This morning five women will lovingly surrender to a higher calling. They will be admitted to the Order of the Daughters of the King. The Daughters of the King was founded in 1885 by Margaret Franklin of New York. It is open to members of the Episcopal Church and churches in communion with it. It is a religious order, not a club or association, members pledge to live under the order's Rule of Life, which includes the rules of prayer and service. They pledge themselves to a lifelong work of prayer, service and evangelism, dedicated to the spread of Christ's kingdom and strengthening the spiritual life of the parish in which they worship. When they pass on into the larger life they will be buried with their crosses. Our own Chapter prays for the parish and for its priest, they perform work days, like they did yesterday and cleaned up the kitchen, they reach out to the needy in the community, and they run the Prayer Chain for the church.

These five women have studied, and they have prayed, and they are ready this morning to surrender themselves to the rule of the Order. It is a moment of deep spiritual power and significance; they undertake a surrender so powerful that it really can change the world.

To what will you surrender? There are false calls and there are true ones. False calls will always stroke your ego instead of your calling. There will be little sense of mystery, no calling beyond yourself, and no real long-term good. The true ones, on the other hand, will always have these signposts along the way. They will call you beyond yourself, turn you from fishing to being fishers of people. Even if they demand great sacrifice, as in the case of these four disciples, they will bring great good into the world in Christ's name. And finally, in surrendering to their call you will know the only true happiness and peace that you can know in this life.

To what does your heart hearken? What great mystery calls to you? To what will you surrender?

Sweet Surrender

2012-01-04T14:23:00.000-08:00

Epiphany 1, Baptism of Our Lord, January 8, 2012, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church

Northern New Mexico is strewn with thousands of archeological sites, many very close to Los Alamos. On a recent visit to our son and daughter-in-law Karisse and I had a chance to visit the Bandelier National Monument, and to see the adobe and cave dwellings of the ancient people of the Pajaritos plateau. Another day we went to another site, not nearly as dramatic or developed. The local Tewa tribe does not want the site excavated. It is their ancestors who lived on that small mesa 1000 years ago. It was their flesh and blood that lived and loved and finally died on that small mesa, and they regularly come back to pray. I couldn't help putting my hand on one of the petro-glyphs, as if to try somehow to reach back through a millennium and touch a people distant, but clearly not gone.

This morning we do that for the Church. Like those ruins for the Tewa, the events we read about in Holy Scripture are not just distant memories of bygone events, they lay the foundation for today. Just as the Tewa go back to pray on that mesa, we go back and touch once again the mystery of those moments. It is vital that we do so, for that is the only way we can come to know who we are, and where we are supposed to go.

The moment we touch this morning is Jesus' baptism. John the Baptist has the lion's share of the story, but he is not the central figure. More significant is what the voice of God says, "You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased."

I you are like me when I read this passage I think, "Well, of course God the Father is well pleased with Jesus, He never committed any sins. There's nothing for the Father to be upset about. I, on the other hand..." and a great rift arises between our understanding of Jesus' baptism and our understanding of our own. Such could not be farther from the truth. Let's look at just what the Father said. Jesus is beloved because He is the Son of the Father. It has nothing to do with Jesus' worthiness, though he certainly has it. It has everything to do with who he is, not what he does. We are beloved of God because He is our Father, too. It has nothing to do with our sins, or our worthiness, it has everything to do with who we are—creations of God.

God is well pleased with Jesus not because he has not committed any sins, but because He surrenders to the Father's will. He goes from here to fulfill the mission given by the Father. Baptism leads to mission. God is pleased with us, not because we have not committed any sins (because we have), but because, following Christ's example, we surrender to the will of the Father. We go from baptism into the mission and ministry given us by the Father. Baptism leads to mission.

Baptism is the foundation, the ancient story behind our mission and ministry. Like with Jesus, baptism leads to mission.

What does this mean for us this morning? We know that the life of this parish has suffered this past year. We have lost members and revenue. If God the Father were a business mogul who had St. Christopher's as a local corporate store His words would not be, "You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased." We would be answering some hard questions and working overtime to fix the problems lest we get sold to the competition!

But God the Father is not a business mogul for whom the bottom line is everything. God is the God who created us, and for that we are His beloved. The first feeling that comes into God’s heart when God thinks of us is love. It’s like having a baby. One always loves the baby born in the household (unless one is the older sibling…) Now a baby is nothing but noise at one end and no responsibility at the other, but we love the baby for who it is, not what it does. In the same way God loves us because God made us. Just relax into that wonderful news! There's not a thing we can do to earn or erode God's love for us. It is a constant we can depend on, the first truth of who we are. In and with Jesus (hear me now!) WE ARE THE BELOVED!

His pleasure in us is a function of our surrender to His will. We would like to imagine that we bring to God a bunch of capacities, and gifts and abilities that He really can't live without. These are the necessary ingredients to success in the church, and if we will just get people to engage these gifts then the church will be fine and we will feel good and all will be hunky-dory. If something is going wrong in the church it is because someone is not following the rules or engaging their gifts as they should, and if only those who cannot express these essential gifts would just get out of the way we can make this thing work! If we don't we're being lazy and God has no reason to love us.

But that is to miss the point. It's like joining the army. You don't join the army in order to do a certain job (unless you're a warrant officer.) You join the army in order to serve your country, and then the Army tells you where you will serve and what you will do. We surrender to the will of God in principle and then find out what it means. Of course, at its best the Army will also recognize what your capacities and abilities are and capitalize on those things. God, who knows you more intimately than you know yourself, will do the same. But that is not why we surrender. We surrender because it is the one thing we can do.

It is the one thing we must do. Then, and only then, do we begin to build the Kingdom. Then and only then will the peace of God that passes all understanding overflow our hearts and fill us with joy. What will galvanize our hearts is hearing the Father's words to us, “You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.”

We are about to reaffirm our baptismal vows. Some of us remember our baptisms, others of us do not. Nonetheless, the commitment is the same. As we go through this listen carefully for the words of God to you. Commit yourselves once more to this great call, and let yourself be swept up in the great mystery we call The Church of Jesus Christ.

To Bear the Name

2012-01-04T14:21:00.000-08:00

Feast of the Holy Name, January 1, 2012, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church

In 1881 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad punched through railroads in this area of Texas. They bought 350 acres of land and laid out a 70-plot town. They named it after Frank P. Killeen, the assistant general manager. That's how this town got its name.

But, what's in a name? The name "Killeen" is Irish. It is said to derive from one of three sources. O'Cillin, which is a surname, and comes from the diminutive of "Cill" or cell, church, grave, nest-egg or treasure box. The other is “ceall," variously translated as "given to disputes," or "bright-headed. (Perhaps those concepts are related!) The final one is "Colin," which means "hound," though this seems the furthest reach. St. Killian was an Irish evangelist who traveled through central Europe (Bavaria) preaching the Gospel at the end of the 7th century.

Interesting thing it is, that an Irishman would have such a post in such a big and wealthy company. Throughout the eastern US at that time signs were common that read, "Help Wanted, Irish Need Not Apply." I would imagine that those who knew him did not hold his Irish descent against him. I could hear them saying, "Oh, he's different, he's not like the others." Is it not amazing the importance we put on a name? It goes without saying that a name is more than just a verbal handle for proper nouns. Our daughter-in-law will not divulge the moniker to be applied to our future grandson, so his paternal grandmother has gone to calling him "Bubba." A name is not a name is not a name.

And so, when we look at the name of Jesus we have to assume that God had something special in mind. The variations are incredible: The name is a 1st century version of Joshua of the 10th century BC. Jesus' contemporaries would have pronounced it, "Yahoshua." We, taking the name as we do through the filter of low German, convert it to "Jesus." To the Arab we are "Isawim," to the Spanish-speaker he is "Jesús," to the Tsachi of western Ecuador, "Jeshú." In whatever language you speak it, the meaning of the name is the same. You can see the similarity between "Yahoshua" and Jehovah." Joshua/Yahoshua/Isa/Jeshu all mean "savior." The name of Jesus, the Son of God, depicts His function and identity.

In that light Aaron of old (in the Old Testament lesson) was told to bless the people:

“The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.” And then, at the end of the passage for today Moses is to tell Aaron, "So shall they put my name on the Israelites and I will bless them."

This is an interesting statement. The blessing of God has something to do with bearing His name. The feast of the Holy Name, then, is a feast of blessing. God not only names His Son, Jesus, but God gives us His name as a blessing. On this day not just the son of Mary is named, but we are as well.

What does it mean to bear the name of God? First, it tells us who we are. We are those who are called by God's name. And this is not just a handle by which we distinguish one person from another. If God is the God of the universe, the ultimate creator of all things and the ground of being itself, then being called by God’s name is to be named in our own truest and deepest selves. It is an invitation to discover just what that is and what it means.

Sounds like a New Year’s resolution to me: Discover how to live from that innermost self, that place within you where you know yourself to be seen, loved and named by God. This is the place that is not afraid because it knows itself to be radically loved. The key to hearing the truth is silence. Deep, inner silence found only through time spent in silence. Resolve to spend time in silence every day.

Second, it tells us how to live. If we are the beloved of God, then we are here to share that love with the world. But we need help getting past all the voices that shout other things in our ears and in our hearts. These things are the voice of fear:

·         Careful, love too much and you will get hurt.
·         Careful, this one will stab you in the back.
·         Careful, misplaced trust can be very painful.
·         Now you’ve been attacked, how will you defend yourself?
·         So-and-so doesn’t like you anyway, best just steer clear of her.

The one who knows in his or her innermost being that they are loved hears other things:

·         Look, here is a need, what can be done to meet it?
·         Look, someone wants our attention, of course I will give it.
·         Look, here is truth, beauty or goodness. Shall we not be incredibly grateful?
·         So-and-so is being ugly, I wonder how and why they are hurting so?

Sounds like another New Year’s Resolution: Learn to hear the truth of being loved. The key to this is compassion, not schmaltzy warm fuzzy feelings about someone beautiful or nice, but that inner commitment to the good of another, that sees them clearly for who they are, and then be there for them in a radical, personal way, for good or ill.

Now, then, at the beginning of this year, 2012, God blessed His Son by naming Him Jesus, the Savior, God blesses you by including you in the family and putting His name on you, and God sends you out into the world to share the same sort of love that we have come to know.

Expectation vs. Expectancy

2012-01-04T14:18:00.000-08:00

Advent 3, Guadalupe, December 11, 2011St. Christpher's Episcopal Church

Oh, to go back in time and redo something! You've all seen the car insurance ads on TV where you witness an accident, and then all of a sudden time stops and begins to run backward, and bit by bit everything gets put back as it was? Then the sales-pitch tells you that this insurance agency will make everything like it was before. We've all had that feeling when you start to get that queasy feeling in your stomach about all the headaches to come. Oh, if we could only... In one of the Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis, Aslan, the lion that represents Christ, says to the one of the children who was feeling precisely this way, “We're never told what would might have been." The message is clear: What happened, happened. There may be a second chance, but it is a second chance, not a first. Each and every event has its place in the fabric of time.

This is not bad news, Or even just depressing news. It is really good news. The redemption of time is not going back to redo it, it's drawing even greater truth, justice, love and grace out of the mess that we made than could ever have happened before.

Such a time might have been the 4th decade of the 16th century in south-central Mexico. The year is 1531, it is 10 years after the clash of worlds in which the Aztecs, the most powerful nation in Central America at the time, fell rather precipitously to the superior weaponry and underhanded ways of the Spaniards under Cortez. The Spaniards quickly replaced one bloody and cruel regime with another bloody and cruel regime. They imposed a foreign rule, a foreign tongue and a foreign God. Such was the suppression of the Aztec that it was not unknown for a young Spaniard to try the edge of his sword on a whim on the body of a hapless passing Indian surf with fatal results with no legal consequences whatsoever. Mass baptisms of thousands at once subjugated everyone to a new form of religion that kept the moneyed and powerful at the top of the heap. It was just not a good day to be an Indian. I wonder how many of them wished they could turn the clock back 10 years and do things differently!

Into this scenario comes a most wondrous gift. I will not walk through the story in detail, you have an insert in your bulletin for that. But to summarize quickly, Juan Diego, a pious Indian, is headed to church one dawn, and goes by the hill of Tepeyac, one-time sacred site to the Aztec. On the top of the hill he hears singing, and turns to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary, her glow set all the rocks and plants of the hill to shining in rainbow colors. She beckons him come up, in his own native tongue, and he does. She speaks words of kindness and love, identifies herself as the Virgin Mary, and then sends him to the Bishop to ask for a church on that site. What a fool’s errand: An Indian asking the Bishop for a church! Out of the frying pan, into the fire!

This season our theme is expectancy. Expectancy waits with open heart and hopeful spirit for the working of God. In spite of setbacks and opposition, in the final show-down Juan Diego takes roses the lady has given him in his "tilma" or poncho to the Bishop,

And when he spills them on the floor of the Bishop's audience hall the image of Guadalupe is emblazoned upon it. The Bishop sees the miracle and immediately is converted. He orders the church be built the very next day. Notice a most wondrous thing, and for me the most significant thing that happens. The Bishop takes orders from the Indian. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. The poor find justice and the powerful find mercy. Expectancy pays off in spades! The question of historicity aside, you see why I like this story! It is an extended parable about liberation and human dignity, not unlike the American Revolution.

And this is the wonder of the expectancy of Advent: Expectancy watches to see how God will take our mess-ups and our problems and our sin, and bring out glory and justice and peace and grace, redeeming the time and redeeming the acts.

Things are what they are. We can have all the expectations we want about them, try to force our preconceived ideas upon them, pushing and managing others into playing out our scripts for them, and end up deeply disappointed in the end, or we can live in expectancy rather than expectation. It is a silly little play on words, but let it symbolize the difference between a willful imposing of our own wills on our world, and a willingness to let the will of God manifest itself in surprising and powerful ways. Expectancy watches for how God might do something unexpected, find a way that does not leave winners and losers, but justice and mercy for all.

We would all like to be like Juan Diego, but in reality we sit more easily in the Bishop's chair. We wield resources most of the rest of the world will never dream of seeing. We have opportunities for influence that most do not have. But in many ways the Bishop is the hero. He converts, he changes, he switches from expectation to expectancy, and then he looks for ways to share in what the Spirit is doing. Expectancy watches for ways the Spirit is showing up in win-win situations. It is not concerned with preserving one's place or making a name for oneself. It is concerned only with discovering the movement of the Spirit. It draws its inspiration from John the Baptist, who came, as we see in today's Gospel, as a herald of the Messiah, one who notices, and points excitedly to what the Spirit is doing, and then steps in to fulfill his part in it.

In the end the words of Isaiah apply to us all: The Spirit of the Lord is upon us, because He has anointed us to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor!

I know that only the most ambitious of you all have all your Christmas shopping done. Few of us need more “stuff,” many in the world need basic necessities for justice and human dignity. In response, many people now give alternative gifts at Christmas. Through Heifer International you can give a flock of geese for $20. A water buffalo goes for $250. What is the Spirit nudging you to do? Maybe alternative giving is not for you. The question still stands, What wonderful unexpected surprise awaits you as you follow His lead? How can you make the Kingdom come?

Wrappings

2012-01-04T14:16:00.000-08:00

Christmas Day, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church (I know this is late, but better than never, right?)

One Christmas many years ago when our boys were small, my wife pulled the big one on me. I had ordered a book on falconry from a friend of mine. I was really looking forward to delving into his abundant wisdom on the topic, but it didn't come and it didn't come and it didn’t come. Karisse was dismissive about it. “Oh, it will be here soon enough, don't worry about it.” She said.

Well in the rush and bustle of Christmas I did forget about it. On Christmas morning there was an enormous box under the tree with my name on it. Inside the box was another box, a little bit smaller, and also wrapped. Inside that one was another, and another and another until I finally got to an envelope at the bottom of the last box--with a clue in it! Eight clues later, with all three of my boys giggling with delight, I discovered the last box, inside of which was my book! The great trail of discovery was marked throughout the house with piles of wrapping paper and empty boxes!

What is it about wrapping presents? Why do we do so? The wrapper is certainly not the point of the present, it would be a present wrapped or not. Is it not merely in-the-way, a pretty inconvenience at best, or is there more? We recently shipped Christmas presents to our son and daughter-in-law in Minnesota along with something for our granddaughter (of course!) Seems what we sent her wasn't nearly as much fun as the Styrofoam peanuts used to pack it all! How cute it is when children get more taken by the wrapper than the present, but also how obvious a sign of immaturity!

Wrapping paper really is important in the final analysis. A wrapper at once indicates and hides a surprise. It points to something and yet at the same time hides it from view. and it invites our active participation in ripping it away to reveal the real treasure. In that sense, the story of the first Christmas season is a great big present for us to unwrap. Christmas only really becomes the birth of the Christ in our hearts when we rip away the paper to reveal the present within. There are three layers of paper that wrap up God’s present in the Christmas Story, and unwrapping each of them reveals a vital truth about the treasure within.

The first layer is the Stable, the manger and the Star. This represents our outer world, the world of senses, with special music and wonderful food and beautiful candle-light services. These are all really good, and like the red and green paper on our packages at home they have a way of getting us in "the Christmas Spirit." We all like the glitter and the tinsel and the songs and the food. Yet, we also know that Christmas is much more than that. When we look beyond and behind them, when we in a figurative way rip them away to find the treasure, we find that the Stable is where the Lamb of God sleeps, the Manger is His throne, and the Star is His celestial sign. When we rip the external trappings of Christmas down from first place prominence they suddenly take their proper place, as glowing signs pointing to the Wonder of the Ages!

The second layer is Joseph. Joseph obviously loved Mary, but when she turned up pregnant before they began to live together he had a problem. Such things were punishable by stoning in that day, and so, as St. Mathew tells us, he resolved to end the betrothal quietly so as not to cause scandal. That is because Joseph is a good man, who knows how to maintain a good public image. Obviously, though he married Mary, he had overestimated her. He could not really take her to wife now. This was the wise and compassionate way out. He was, after all, just as good at maintaining his ego as we are ours.

But then Gabriel appeared to him in a dream. Mary was not to be divorced, and the child was to be named Jesus--Yeshua, like Joshua of old, who would save God’s people. All of a sudden the paper of protecting his ego was ripped away by a divine call. He was to become the guardian of the Son of God, not unlike us, if we, too, will have the Christ child born within. Our previous efforts at self-protection must fall by the wayside, and our lot must be cast with this child.

The third layer is the Shepherds and Angels. These men were good at what they did. They knew how to attend to ewes during the lambing season. They knew how to drive away the wolves and the jackals. They knew how to protect their jobs—to deliver to the owner of the sheep a well and healthy flock. Not unlike us, they were good at building their bank accounts and their retirement packages. And these things are not bad, they just last only as long as our lives, nothing more.

But the angels' message suddenly changed all that. Ripped away was their professional concern, torn from prominence were their promotions and IRAs. They became heralds of the coming of the Son of God. (If we were so bold at proclaiming what we know people would wonder as well!) When we, too, see our professions, not as self-definers, but as stages on which to discover and then proclaim our eternal hope, then in our hearts, too, will be born the Son of God.

Mary, once again, offers us great wisdom, the one who ponders all these things in her heart. She quietly opens the present and is amazed. She does not define herself as the Mother of God. (The Church would do that later and rightly so.) She was just taken up with the great mystery and drama of it all! She does not measure how good a mother she is. (We do that, mother, or father, or clerk or banker or soldier.) She just ponders these things in her heart. She is not concerned with the ignominy of giving birth in a stable. (We are the ones so taken up with circumstances.) She just gives birth to the Son of God and plays host with equal grace to shepherds and Wise Men alike.

The Great Hall

2011-11-18T09:22:00.000-08:00

I'd been there before, but the sheer size of the place still overwhelms me. You see its towers dwarfing the city around it as you approach through the narrow, medieval lanes. It's easy to forget what century it is until you see the ads for cell phone service in the windows of 17th century buildings. But even so there is an eerie feeling of having been on a long, long journey of several generations and finally coming home. And that home is Canterbury, the religious institution in England with the longest uninterrupted history. Augustine of Canterbury established it in 597.

In the high middle ages it was a place of pilgrimage, not just for the fact that it is the mother-church of the Anglican Communion, but because it is the site of a church-state conflict gone horribly wrong in the 12th century. Thomas Becket was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162. A strong-willed prince of a man, he ran headlong into the strong-willed Henry II over the rights of the church. Back and forth they went for several years. At one point Henry is supposed to have said in utter exhasperation, "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" Whereapon 4 rogue knights, seeing an opportunity to gain favor with their sovreign, murdered Thomas in the Cathedral.

T. S. Eliot in his artful play on the story called "Murder in the Cathedral" puts these poignant words in Thomas' mouth, "Herein lies the greatest treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason!"

Thomas' temptation, as Eliot creates it, is, knowing that his death at the hands of the political powers is highly probable, to respond with a humble submission to his fate just as Jesus had done--proving himself thereby more honorably humble than the recalcitrant king! Poignant words because in a sense they resound throughout this ancient church even to this day.

In doing interviews, my son Landon and I found that most of the people there had not come as pilgrims. Many of them were not even religious. They came out of an interest in history, to see this thing everyone talks about, to see ancient architecture, to wonder at the hoary halls. They came, doing the right thing, but for utterly the wrong reasons! We resorted to asking people if they had come for religous reasons before asking for an interview!

In another more sublte way Canterbury does the right thing for the wrong reason. The Nave walls are lined almost continuously from back to front on both sides with large marble slab monuments to military accomplishments around the world in the name of the English Crown. Some of them had only oblique references to God, a few had none at all. These seem to culminate a thread of thought that goes back all the way to the 14th century Black Prince. Edward of Woodstock was the eldest son of Henry III and would have become King except that he died a year before his father. He was an exceptional military leader of the English against the French, especially at Crecy and Poitiers (the French would obviously emphasize "black" rather than "prince.") He became very popular because of this and is burried in the Cathedral. Until the recent act of parliamant that allows a non-Anglican to assume the British throne, there has always been a blurry line between issues of state and issues of church, matters of earth and matters of heaven. To do the right thing for the wrong reason...

But under all that confusion is the Undercroft. Down there the hoary ages still hang in the air. Ancient columns still seem to echo the chants of the Benedictine monks who have worshipped there through the centuries. Modern monuments to social justice issues feel strangely at home with the peeling smoke of distant candles. Here somehow, the undercurrent of the Spirit is still flowing, deep and cool and strong. Perhaps this foundation is the key to this church's longevity after all.....

Altruism is officially DEAD!

2011-11-18T08:36:00.000-08:00

An add on TV this morning showed a couple of ribbons marking out a Christmas gift (mind you, this is still pre-Thanksgiving.) A gift card of the kind afixed to such packages appears in the intersection of the ribbons and the words, "To:" and "From:" magically appear on it. Then between the two words in italicized letters these words write themselves: "Get a wow from everyone!" Texas Lotto tickets sprout from behind the card like magic.

Like magic we now give in order to get--to get a wow. It's not in the giving, it's in the getting. And the ones who get the most are the people who profit from the Texas Lotto, and the people who lose are the ones who can't afford to buy the tickets but do anyway.

It's official. Altruism is dead!

Thanksgiving is Remembering

2011-11-17T14:38:00.000-08:00

When Israel entered the Promised Land God warned them: "Do not forget."

Do not forget! When your wealth increases, and your power increases, and your satisfaction with life increase, do not forget where it all came from. Do not forget the provision of God in the wilderness, for the abundance of the Promised Land comes from the same generous hands. Gratitude is the fruit of a good memory.

It behooves us, therefore, to remember where our bounty comes from. Take, for example, what is going to weigh our tables down this afternoon. Let's start with the centerpiece of it all, the turkey.

Contrary to popular belief, turkey is not manufactured in the back rooms of the HEB store. Turkey actually comes from a farm. The farm got the turkey from a breeder. The breeder got the turkey eggs from breeder hens and toms, who ultimately got their original turkeys from a Native American who had the turkeys as domesticated birds. The Native Americans got the turkeys from the woods, which is ultimately where all our turkeys come from. When you sit down to carve the great bird remember that it is a fruit of this North American continent on which we live.

Let's go to the dressing. Now, there are two kinds of dressing, and they take us two different places. There is bread dressing, which is wheat based. The wheat comes from farms in the northwest, cultivated by huge machines they used to call tractors, but now look more like monstrous transformer toys. They plant sections and sections of wheat that produce enough to feed the world. But wheat was originally domesticated in the Fertile Crescent 11,000 years ago or so. When you spoon out your dressing remember that it is the fruit of the cradle of civilization, come to us from half a world away.

Then there is cornmeal dressing. Corn is also one of those early grains, it is the most widely produced cereal grain in the western hemisphere. It was domesticated in central America, probably about the same time as wheat. Remember that when you shovel in that wonderful cornmeal dressing you are receiving a gift from southern Mexico.

And then there are the spices. Spices span the globe. Literally thousands of herbs and spices go into our foods from every corner of the earth. Most of the spices we use in dressing come from Italy and around the northern Mediterranean. When you taste their subtle flavors remember to give thanks in Italian!

Mashed potatoes come from us not from either Idaho or Ireland. They come to us from Peru. When Landon and I were in Lima last summer we went to an open air market. I asked one lady in a stall to tell me about all the potato varieties she had for sale. She quickly ran through at least a dozen and apologized because there were so many more she did not have for sale! When you drown your mashed potatoes in gravy remember the high mountain air of the Andes and give thanks to the Incas.

I could go on. Green beans were first bred by Calvin Keeney in Le Roy, New York in 1894. Pumpkin is a product of Native American horticulture of the eastern seaboard. Pumpkin Pie originated when colonists cut off the top of pumpkins, scooped out the seeds, filled them with milk, spices and honey and roasted them over hot coals. And the full feeling—it comes when the sugar in your blood reaches thresholds that tell your glandular system to stimulate you to stop eating!

Our Thanksgiving bounty comes to us from literally everywhere. It comes from places of origin around the globe, it comes from the dawn of civilization to just a hundred years ago. In a sense, when your "remembering" goes back this far, it catches up all of creation, and places it beautifully on your table, thanks to the incredible bounty of the One who created it all in the first place.

There is another time when we do the same thing. When we gather around the table of the Lord each Sunday we recognize the bounty of the Lord in our creation and redemption, and we make "Eucharist," we give thanks. Every meal in your house is a shadow of the Great Meal we celebrate here.

Let us eat, then, and be thankful!

Sheeply and Goatly

2011-11-10T09:50:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 20, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Killeen, TX

Sheep and Goats…sheep get to go to heaven, goats have to go to the other place. I'm so glad I'm a sheep…..

Isn't that the meaning of this passage? That's how we normally think about it, right? The sheep are the people who are saved, who are on their way to heaven, and the goats, well, poor guys, they drove so fast to the ball game that they missed the ticket office. Sorry, but, that's not me....

Seems to me that telling the difference between the sheep and the goats is really pretty important, don't you think? I mean, I know I'm a sheep, and I know you're a sheep, at least.....

The tricky thing is, sheep and goats are sometimes hard to tell apart. A sheep says, Baaaa...." a goat goes, "Baaaa....." A sheep eats grass and shrubs, a goat eats grass and shrubs. Rams have horns and billy goats have horns. A sheep poops little round black balls, a goat poops little round black balls. I know what you're thinking: Sheep have wool and goats don't. But some sheep don't have wool, and some goats do! I have a suspicion that if you shaved a sheep and a goat down to the bare skin nobody in here could tell which was which.

But Jesus makes it very clear that there is a huge difference—the difference between heaven and not-so-heaven. It must be that the differences that matter are not on the outside, but on the inside. Sheep have 54 chromosomes, goats have 60. And....oh, yeah, this is a parable, not a biology lesson. The differences don't really hinge on physical differences. They hinge on something else. It seems they hinge on what sheep do compared to what goats do.

I saw a herd of goats once when I was a kid in Ecuador. They were feeding along the inside of a narrow draw, nibbling whatever they could find. It was a sandy draw with steep sides, and some goats found a little ledge with some grass on it. They promptly formed a line and moved down this ledge eating everything to the ground. But the ledge got narrower and narrower until finally, to maintain footing, they were leaning against the wall beside them. Finally, it gave out completely. The first goat jumped up on his back legs and spun around to face the next goat square on, and pushed by and forced him off the ledge!

I've never seen a heard of sheep do that.

Sheep and goats really are different. Goats are smarter than sheep. They think about things and work the angles on them, they try and push and get ahead by their own incessant will, like in the Old Testament reading when God says He'll judge against the ones that push with shoulder and flank and butt the weak ones and keep them from the grass and water. Goats are smart enough to think they can figure it out by themselves. Goats, for the purposes of this parable, are willful. The goats in Jesus' parable did all the things that the sheep did, but they did them willfully, not willingly. They fed the hungry and clothed the naked and visited the prisoner and tended the sick because they could manage a personal advantage out of it. They did not do it "for the least of these, my brothers." They did not meet the Lord in the face of the weak. They met their own ambition.

Sheep, on the other hand, are lost without a shepherd. European explorers in the 14th - 18th centuries had a habit of releasing goats on deserted islands and returning later for a stock of meat. All it took was a billy and a couple of nannies, And a year later there would be 46 of them! Cabrito for supper! It was so successful that in many places their descendents have become a plague that costs millions of dollars to control.

They didn't release sheep. If they came back a year later for sheep all they would have found were fat coyotes, all dressed in Armani wool. The only exception was New Zealand, that, at European contact, hosted no land-based predators. It is the only place in the world where the natural environment is so benign that there is actually a population of feral sheep!

So sheep, for the purposes of this parable, are willing rather than willful. They do what they are led to do, the go where they are led to go, and they thrive only when under good care.

There are two very important differences between willfulness and willingness that are important for us this morning. First, whereas the willful are often well provisioned, only the willing are grateful. There are people who still say, “Give my hard-earned money to the church! Are you kidding?” “Charity begins at home, I take care of my own.” “I'm a self-made person, I deserve what I've got.” It is an attitude of pushing ahead, of forging one's own way, of working the angles. It's willful and it is goatly.

On the other hand, the sheep looks at the pasture it didn't make, and the stream it didn't channelize or dam, and the shepherd standing watch, and is full of gratitude. This is willing and it is sheeply.

This morning we are bringing in our pledge cards. This is a sheeply action, full of gratitude, willing to do what is right in the face of the needs of the Kingdom. And I'll give you the bottom line. 10% registers in God's books as "full gratitude." My wife and I tithe to the church, and then give elsewhere as well. It can be done, How grateful are you? How willing?

Secondly, whereas both the willful and the willing are surprised, only the willing are pleasantly so. The goat who is always working the angles is surprised when his efforts to control the other goats fail. I know, because I've been there myself! You find yourself trying not to say things like. “"Don't be such a horn-head, that patch of daisies is for Grass-breath over here!" And, "Oops, ledge ran out, careful, I’m comin' back through!" Sooner or later our willfulness proves inadequate to the challenges of life, leaving our goat-hood in a considerable crisis.

On the other hand, the willing depend on the greater vision and wisdom of the Shepherd. When things don't go as expected, it's OK. Thomas Merton, on the drive to the Monastery at Gethsemane, Kentucky, writes that he was incredibly aware of two things within. On the one hand an overpowering desire to enter the monastery, and on the other a complete peace if for some reason he were not accepted. Iif he had been rejected his plan was to join the Army. The willing steps onto the green pasture and says, “Wow, this is incredible! The shepherd must love me so! I wonder what is coming next?”

“I wonder what is coming next?” expresses a sense of expectancy, whose personal work is not to bring about the surprise, but to be as quiet and attentive as possible so as not to miss it when it comes! Today is not only Thanksgiving Sunday, Christ King Sunday, Parish Meeting and Parish Thanksgiving Meal, it is also the last Sunday in the Season after Pentecost, and the last Sunday before the beginning of Advent. (Yes, the year has shot by us like a patriot missile!)

Our theme during Advent this year will be "Expectancy, Preparing for the Great Surprise." Next week we will introduce a little meditation aid that will help you build that sense of expectancy during Advent, and assist that willing sheep-hood within.

Yes, I can be a sheep, and you can be one, too. By loving one another and the needy of the world for Him as He has asked us to, with humble and open hearts, our wonderful surprise will be to see him in the very faces of the ones we love on His behalf.

Ordeal

2011-10-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

In north Wales, along the coast, there is a little town called Holywell. It gets its name from a legend that dates from the 7th century about a beautiful young woman named Fride. The name is the Welsh version of "Brigid," as in St. Brigid of Ireland, and harks even to pre-Christian days when the goddess Brigid watched over the hearth, the family and the flocks.

Fride of Wales was born to a pagan chief and a Christian mother. She was baptized into her mother's faith and as she grew the call to become a nun grew apace within her. But her beauty was desired by a neighboring prince, Caradog. One day as she was in the field he found her and sought to have his way with her. She resisted, and fled toward the church where her uncle, Beuno, was saying Mass. When he saw that his intentions were frustrated Caradog flew into a rage, drew his sword and cut Fride's head off.

Beuno heard the commotion and came outside the church. He at once took in what happened and cursed Cardog, who melted into a mist and sank into the ground. He then scooped Fride's severed head and placed it again on her body. She was revived to life, became a nun and lived out her days in convents in the area. Where her hed hit the ground a spring erputed, and it soon became a place of pilgrimage and a site of healing. Beuno took to washing daily in the spring, standing on a certain stone. The prefix "wini" was added to Fride's name, which means "Glorious," and the site became known as Winifred's Well. Depictions of Winifred always show a hairline scar around her neck, something she is purported to have had to her dying day.

In the 14th century a shrine was built, and the spring was encased in a stone frame in the shape of a star. From there the water runs out into a large pool about four feet deep. The water is fresh out of the ground and is very cold. Beuno's stone is fixed to the bottom of the pool. People come from all around to seek healing. They walk around the perimeter of the pool three times saying the rosary, and then they dip themselves in the frigid water three times standing on Beuno's stone. It may sound superstitious to our ears, but the pile of crutches left behind by those who have been healed is testimony to a greater reality.

Landon and I watched people come and endure the cold-water ordeal--and it is an ordeal! I sat for a time with my legs dangling in the water. Within minutes my toes were aching and numb. It was obvious that it took more desire for divine help than for creature comforts to complete the discipline. Their faces were supplicant and patient, hopeful and supremely humble.

One young couple came with their two children, a boy of about 10 and another of about 2. The little one was in a stroller, and he had his arm in a sling. Obvously the parents had come to seek healing for the little boy. Instinctively I asked his name. "Paddy," they said. I knelt down, made the sign of the crosss on his forehead, blessed him and prayed for his healing. When I looked up mother and father and friends were looking at me with wide and expectant eyes. Would I bless them, too? "I'm Anglican, not Catholic," I protested, but that meant nothing to them at that moment. I went down the line pronouncing a blessing on each one, and receiving 100-fold in return myself.

These peoples' faith looked a bit different than mine and may be less educated than mine, but in many ways they put me to shame!

Our Rightful Home

2011-10-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

Pentecost 19, Proper 25, October 23, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

There once was a king who lived in a kingdom far, far away and a long time ago. He lived with his queen in his castle, but he was very sad. He had no children, and that made life lonely. But soon enough the queen shared the happy news that they were going to have a child. A beautiful baby girl was born to them, and they were not sad any longer.

They noticed that the baby had just the same shape of nose as her father, and everyone thought it was cute! They decided to throw a big party and invite all the important people in the kingdom. The day was set, invitations went out, and people began to arrive for the big day. The party started, and all was going very, very well. The whole kingdom was happy with the new little princess. The food was yummy, the decorations were fun, and everybody was having a good time.

But, just at the height of the party a man in a dark hood stole into the castle. He made his way to the crib with the baby princes, and before anyone could stop him he scooped up the baby and disappeared into the crowd. Police were called, they searched and searched, but could not find the hooded man or the baby princess. Heartbroken, the king and queen called off the rest of the party and sent everyone home. And they cried and cried that night for their baby girl.

The years passed, and the king and queen grew older. A son was born to them, and everyone remembered the daughter who had disappeared so many years before. They remembered her with love and longing. The son grew up to be brave and strong and handsome, everything a kingdom would want in their next king. And he had his father's nose, and people said he would have his father's wisdom and kind ways.

One day the young man was out traveling through a neighboring kingdom. He came across a young woman working in a field. Her clothes were dirty and torn, her hair was uncombed. But what caught her attention was her nose. It looked just like his. Quietly he approached her. She was a little afraid to speak with a prince, but he quieted her fears, and pointed out that they had noses that looked alike. That made her laugh. The prince asked where she was from. She said she had been sold as a slave when she was a small girl, and had worked for her master all her life.

The young man went home and told his aging father. The father immediately gathered soldiers, they went to the house where the young woman lived, there they found an old man, the one who had bought the girl. The king said, "You see your slave girl's nose? You see mine? You see my son's? You have a princess for a slave!"

But the man said, "In this kingdom slavery is allowed. I paid a high price for her. You cannot just take her away from me."

So the prince, the king's son, pulled out his money bag and said, "What do you want for her?"

“She is very expensive. She is a good worker, she will cost you all that you have in your money bag.” Gladly the son emptied the money bag on the table, and bought his sister back into freedom.

Oh, the rejoicing when the princess came back to the castle. They combed her hair, and gave her beautiful clothes to wear once again, and the whole kingdom came to welcome her home.

Well you might wonder why I told you this story. This morning a beautiful young lady is going to be baptized. Baptism is like bringing the princess home. We are all born children of God, the great and wise King of the Universe. But sin stole the human race away, and we lost contact with who we really are. We became slaves to sin, who was not our real master at all. So Jesus, God's son, came to earth, and found us, He paid a very high price to buy us back again, He died on the cross and rose again, just for us.

And now, we bring a princess back to the castle. We say, "Though we were all once slaves to sin, now, by the grace of God, we can return to our rightful home and live with our father, our brothers and sisters, and all the people of God!"

And just as the princess in my story had to get new clothes and have her hair combed, so we, in this family, share with those newly returned, what it means to live in God's family. We teach them how to say thank you for rescuing us and bringing us home by the things we think, say and do, by gathering with one another on Sundays, and by sharing what we have to help rescue and bring back other children of God who have not yet been brought back to the castle.

This morning we baptize a young lady of 10 years of age. She will become your sister in Christ, she is another princess in this castle of our King and Father. Remember her in your prayers. As you see her encourage her, walk with her, show her how to express her gratitude, and let her know how special she is.

Context, Context, Context

2011-10-12T17:36:00.000-07:00

Pentecost 18, Proper 24, October 16, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

Last weekend a significant event happened in the world of college football. A momentous game was played between the University of Texas and Oklahoma University.

Unfortunately, the game was decidedly uneven. The final score of 55 to 17 is an embarrassment to UT fans all over the world, I spoke on Monday to a former member of St. Christopher's who happens to be an OU fan, even she was embarrassed! But it is not fair to consider that this is the nature of the game between these two teams. There is a larger context into which to put this. This "Red River Rivalry" goes back more than 100 years, some other decidedly unbalanced games were:

1908: OU 50, UT 0

1952: OU49, UT20

1956: OU 45, UT 0

1973: OU 52, UT 13

1986: OU 47, UT 12

1987: OU 44, UT 9

2000: OU 63, UT 14

2003: OU 65, UT 13

The only "blow-out" in UT's favor was 1909, OU 0, UT 30. This makes it look like OU is the stronger team, but not necessarily. UT holds 59 wins over OU since 1900, and OU only 42. (5 games were ties.) To understand the Red River Rivalry one must place the games played in the context of more than 100 years of games.

Context is what we see reflected in the lessons today. In the first one, through the mouth of the prophet God calls Cyrus of Persia His anointed one. The word is the same as "Messiah." Now Cyrus is a pagan king at this point, yet what Cyrus is going to do fits into God's overall plan for him, and so from the beginning God claims Cyrus as his servant. The will of God is the context in which to understand Cyrus.

In the Epistle Paul writes to the Thessalonians. He praises them for their faithfulness, yet in the end he gives thanks to God for them, for even their faithfulness is a gift. The grace of God is the context for their spiritual lives.

In the Gospel lesson those pesky Pharisees try to trap Jesus again. They move the conversation into the realm of politics. Is it right to pay tribute to Caesar? The word is best translated "tribute," not "tax," Tax, for us, is kind of a franchise. You pay your money, you get to live here and enjoy the amenities of the place. But tribute is different.

Many scholars (though there is no solid consensus on this) identify the Tiberius denarius as the coin involved. The inscription on it says, “The worshiped son of a worshiped god.” Tribute is a statement of loyalty, loyalty to Tiberius Caesar, the emperor who declared himself to be God. And so, is it right to pay allegiance to Caesar as God?

Jesus asks for a coin. But Jesus says, Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but to God what is God’s. God alone is God, and God mints no coins nor is represented by an image. It is OK to pay tribute to Caesar, because Caesar is not God, in spite of his claims otherwise. But give to God what is God's. Pay your tribute as an act of recognizing that God is not reducible to a coin or an earthly kingdom, Much less this Tiberius upstart. The nature of God is the final context of this question.

One cannot minimize the importance of context. In real estate one says that there are three things that are important in buying or selling a house: Location, Location, and location. There are three things that are important to you as a Christian: context, context and context.

There is a delightful Zen story of a man who wanted to become the student of a certain master. He pleaded with the master until finally the master conceded. For three years the man lived with the master, watched his every move, and studied his every action. But the master said nothing to him. Finally he blurted out, “I have spent 3 years living with you as your student and you have yet to teach me anything!” The master replied angrily, “What have you been doing all this time? I have taught you every day by what I did, were you not listening?” God is our “Zen Master.” A very wise person said that God shows up disguised as your life. If you say that you do not have God in your life, in once sense you are completely correct. You do not have God in your life, God has you in His. If you do not know it it's because you have not yet woken up. The spiritual life is life that is awake. Spiritual disciplines are the process by which we wake up.

For most of us, our bodies wake up in the morning by hearing an alarm clock. That buzzer is like the spiritual disciplines of the Christian life. They call you to certain behaviors that tend to open your spirit to deeper questions and deeper movements. They get you in touch with how God has shown up disguised as your life.

This is easily illustrated with money. You can say that the context of your financial health is a combination of: Your earning power, your spending history, your capacity to save, and your values as a person. But if you look more deeply you see that God gave you the gifts you have to earn, God granted you the ability to spend, and God expects to inform your values. God is the context for your finances. So it is to God that you express your gratitude for all the above, offering back to him a percentage of what you have received, and exercising the spiritual discipline of the stewardship of treasure. Your pledge for next year is not a tax, it is tribute, tribute to God, a statement of loyalty in gratitude for showing up as the context of your life.

Remember, you do not have God in your life, God has you in His. Wake up and smell—heaven!

Fire in the Belly

2011-09-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

Pentecost 15, Proper 21, September 25, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal, Rev. Paul Moore

Beloved member of our parish, Russ Hantke, when he was growing up he always wanted to be a pony soldier. When he grew up he quit college early and joined the Army, and he became a pony soldier. We all have dreams like that, dreams of doing things and going places, and as long as we dream about them they are out there, far away, whose call forms us more than the reality. It may be the Holy Land, or Paris, or Australia, it may be to climb a mountain, or write a book or learn a piano piece. One of my dreams, ever since I knew about the place, was to go to Iona, off the coast of Scotland. I've wanted to go there more than Jerusalem or Rome. But when I actually saw the ancient Abbey across the sound it moved me almost to tears. To stand beside St. Martin's Cross that has been standing as a Christian beacon for 1200 years, to feel the ancient stones of the Abbey and to pray where so many Christians have prayed before me, was an experience that made all the waiting, all the yearning and dreaming worthwhile, and the imaginings, the dreams and the hopes cannot compare to the real, flesh-and-blood experience of the place and what it means and is.

Our faith is rooted in events that happened 2000 years ago, and we read about it in the Bible and in history books, we hear the stories preached and acted out, we study the documents that describe our faith, and we learn about the places that were formative in it. But there is just no substitute for a flesh-and-blood hands-on experience of the faith. Like being a pony soldier or going to Iona, except infinitely more important, it makes it all come alive, and grants it the power to transform our lives immeasurably for the good.

You may ask, "How can that be, since Jesus lived so many years ago?" And I can tell you that the Holy Spirit comes to live in each of our lives at Baptism, so Christ's spirit is within you, and that the moment that comes real to you is an amazing thing you'll never forget. But that still won't do it. All I can do is lead you to the water. Just like for Russ to become a pony soldier he had to join the Army, and for me to come to know what Iona is I had to get on the airplane, for you to have a fire-in-the-belly experience of your faith you have to do the things that your faith requires.

And what are those things?

There are three broad categories of things, and all you Cursillistas will understand them instantly. The first is the life of prayer. Prayer is any conversation in which God is a partner, either directly or indirectly. So prayer is an arrow prayer of gratitude and relief shot to heaven when some jerk just missed your fender in heavy traffic. Prayer is a quiet moment of silence in which you allow the voice of the Spirit to break through the business of daily living and anchor you in peace. Prayer is gathering with the faithful on Sunday mornings, Wednesday evenings, and at other times to sing the songs of our faith, to hear Scripture read and preached, and to respond to God in sacramental actions. Prayer is huddling with others of like concern and voicing a common joy or pain to God. You may feel uncomfortable with one or more of these things, but the important thing is to do what you can.

The next is the life of study. Can you tell me if these quotes are in the Bible or not?

Create in me a clean heart.

      Come, my love.
      All we like sheep have gone astray.
      God so loved the world.
      The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
      Come, Lord Jesus.

All of those are in the Bible. The first three are in the Old Testament, the second in the New. You say I’m supposed to know that, but you, could, too! It is important to know what is contained in the Bible, and in the Book of Common Prayer. It is important to maintain a diet of good godly books written about the spiritual life. But it is equally important to let the written word become God's spoken word in the secret places of your heart, to allow the words to sink in, to challenge and change behavior, and to open your heart and your mind to new dimensions of God's truth. Find it hard to get traction on this? Come to Sunday School!

Finally, there is the life of action. Putting feet on the love of God in some fashion or other in the world is an essential expression of our faith. There are those in the parish who set the example, who volunteer at social service organizations in town and abroad. Some teach anger management classes, parenting classes, or counsel with those who struggle with life. Others teach our Sunday School classes and other Christian Education events in the parish. Some sing or play an instrument or serve at the altar. Others help clean up, organize and lead, or do a host of other things. Again, you may feel uncomfortable with one or more of these options, but the important thing is to get out there and do something.

People speak of the blind leap of faith. The blind leap of faith is not so much the mental effort of believing something you find difficult to accept, as doing something you might not ordinarily do, something that is consistent with the faith you espouse, something done as an act of faith. There is just no substitute for showing up, being there and getting involved. Armchair religion is easy, it is relaxed, undemanding, and safe. First-hand experience is always more dangerous. There is no telling when the fire will start in your belly, when it will begin to transform your life, and through you, transform your world.

Two Kingdoms

2011-09-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

Pentecost14, Proper 20, September 18, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal, Rev. Paul Moore

What if there were here in Killeen a place that, whenever you went there, without fail you got the one thing that is noticeably absent in the rest of your life, the one thing you crave in the midst of the craziness and selfishness, the one thing that settles your soul and gives you perspective: Peace? How often would you go? How often would you take your friends? How popular would it be among the people of this town, of this county, of this state?

Such a place exists. In fact, there are many of them. One such place is in the largest city in the world. The place is so large you can see it on Google Earth from a mile above the city. The largest church on the property can seat 10,000 people. It holds what brings the people there, the tilma or poncho of Juan Diego. People come there from miles away, some of them on their hands and knees. It is the shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Without exception and without equal, what people get when they go to a place of pilgrimage, is by a sense of peace and tranquility. They can get that peace in these places, but not in the rest of their world. These places stand as witnesses to an alternate reality, a different dimension in stark and sudden contrast to the world in which we normally live. And they stand as witnesses to the Church that the Gospel we preach is a Gospel of peace, not as the world knows or gives, but as God alone gives. We call it "The Kingdom of God."

The Kingdom of God is that alternate reality in which what is true and right and good and living holds sway. In the final analysis, it is not just an alternate reality, one among many, but the only real reality. The other world we live in, the world of power-driven self-centeredness, is the alternate reality, the less-than-reality that we project on one another. Whenever these two realities, these two great kingdoms collide there is an upheaval, as the real reality begins to reorder and remake the less-than-reality we still believe in.

Today's readings all deal with that upheaval. In the Old Testament lesson Jonah is sent to Nineveh to preach the judgment of God. Much to his chagrin the people repent and turn to the Lord. In a sense what Jonah preached did come to fall, because in the face of truth the people chose truth over their own previously held world, and the old passed away, a new city was born. But Jonah is not impressed. He is thinking in the ways of the kingdoms of this world, and not the Kingdom of God. He desperately wanted to see God wipe out this ancient enemy of Israel for moral decay. God sets up a parable of a vine and a worm to help Jonah understand his own message. God is truly the God of unexpected and undeserved mercy.

One of the reasons we baptize infants is specifically because they cannot respond for themselves. It makes it abundantly clear that God is the one who grants mercy, for God's own sake, and ultimately it has nothing to do with our worthiness. It has everything to do with who God is. God does not ask, "What if this person goes out to become a axe murderer or a drug pusher?" God has already extended His mercy to that person, and laid it on the table, right there for the taking. We are offered forgiveness even before we have a chance to sin. If God is that reckless in dispensing mercy, should not we be the same? Who is it that has offended you? The sooner you forgive the sooner you see the Kingdom come.

In the Epistle lesson Paul struggles with his desire to be with the Lord and the need of the church. What a quandary, to be caught between the delights of heaven and the joys of earth! He settles on this life, for it is necessary for the good of the church, and offers that struggle to the Philippians to inspire them to sacrificial living in a world that doesn't believe in it. He chooses to stay in order to share the blessings God brings in community, for God is truly the God of unexpected graces.

God is truly the God of unexpected graces in the community of believers. Since the beginning of the fire season more than 1500 people have lost their homes in Texas, 800 of them in the Bastrop area alone. Some lost literally everything but the shirts on their backs. To respond as the world’s kingdom suggests would be to blame the victims for their suffering: “They deserved it. God is punishing them.” “If they hadn’t built where they did this wouldn’t be happening to them,” and “it’s not my problem.” But as a nation we have touched another dimension and responded differently. People from all over are rising to the challenge of their need. They are the hands and heart of God, walking with them through the suffering, into newness of life to come. We know that nothing happens without God knowing and being there with us. We are not alone, there is always hope. If we hang together there is nothing we cannot weather, for God is with us. When two or three are gathered in His name there He is among us. It’s a Kingdom thing to do.

In the Gospel lesson Jesus tells the parable about a landowner and his day-laborers. The scandal of this story is in his remuneration of the people who worked for him. It had nothing to do with the amount of work they had put in, and everything to do with their need. There are two clues in the text that show us this. First, those hired first complain that he has made those hired later “equal to us…” Their mind is on their honor, not the welfare of the others. But the landowner clearly works from a different kind of place, for he promises those he hires at nine o’clock to pay them what is “right.” “Right” to him is a day’s wage, enough for them to satisfy their obligations. The landowner obviously is not worried about his bottom line, he is concerned with his employee’s bottom line—the welfare of others. He operates from a mentality of abundance, not scarcity; an assumption of plenty, not want, for God is the God of unexpected abundance.

The church has already set up pathways by which you can respond to the needs of those in Bastrop. Just like the landowner who valued the people more than their contribution, our brothers and sisters in Bastrop are important to us. There is an abundance in our hands out of which to share, not a scarcity to protect. If we reach into our pockets in love and faith we will find that they are deeper than we thought. We can give out of the abundance the Lord has given us to make sure they are alright. After all, it is a Kingdom thing to do.

In our lives and in our worlds two kingdoms constantly collide. In which one will you live? The real one or the less-than-real one?

9/11

2011-09-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

In Remembrance

9/11 is a time to remember. Cecilio Gonzalez was a Sergeant with the NYC Health Department Police Unit. On that morning he dropped his son off at school and headed to the area he normally patrols. He noted an extraordinary amount of traffic, but when he turned to look at the WTC he saw tower 1 billowing smoke. Unable to use his normal route, he finally got off the freeway to see police and firefighters on their way to the scene. He thought, "There are my brothers and sisters in red and blue, doing what they do best!" When he arrived he and set up a perimeter and an incident command center for the health department. He managed traffic to let first responder vehicles through. He drove his own truck to local pharmacies to pick up medical supplies. He went for water, he went for orange juice (that was donated on the spur of the moment,) he did whatever he could do for 16 hours straight. That night with 20 other officials he secured the perimeters of lower Manhattan. Then Cecilio went home and cried for 3 days. He says, "Till this day I still see the yellow haze and feel the choking dust in my lungs, oh yeah I was given a souvenir "WTC Cough", 1 year later I still have it."

In the book of Genesis 11 of Jacob’s sons sold the 12^th , Joseph, into slavery because of jealousy, but God was with Joseph and he soon became second in command under Pharaoh. When Jacob died the other brothers feared reprisal. Joseph remembered what they had done, but he also remembered what God had done. It is important to remember well and to place one’s memories in the context of faith. What were you doing that day? What was your response? To whom did you say that you loved them? How did you avail yourself of your faith on that day? We must never forget.

9/11 is a time to forgive. Sharon woke up normally on that morning and went to work in New Jersey. At work a co-worker told her of the events. She began to wonder and to fear. What else would happen? Who could have done this? Nobody knew, nobody seemed to have any information. She began to try to pray the Lord's Prayer. She got stuck on "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." She couldn't stop thinking of all the people who got up that morning and slapped their alarm clocks, showered, grabbed coffee and rushed off to work like she did, but never came home. In subsequent days, aware of the ease with which our lives can end she committed herself to approach every other fragile life with love, not hate.

The heinous nature of what we suffered that day cannot be denied or minimized. There is no justifying and there is no forgetting. But there is forgiving. Humanity was forgiven the most heinous act of all—of killing God on the cross. We have been forgiven all the little and big things we've done since. We've even been forgiven what we don't realize yet that we have done, although someday we will. It is only right that we forgive as we have been forgiven. He who does not forgive cuts himself off from the Father, and condemns himself to bear an unbearable load of bitterness and grief, making himself one more casualty of the offense. Jesus teaches us over and over to forgive. For the Christian there must be forgiving.

9/11 is a time to live differently. Pat was an Airforce E-6, Master Staff Sergeant assigned to the Pentagon on September 11th. He is also a master mechanic and maintains all of his own vehicles. On that morning could not get any of his household vehicles to start. When he finally got his wife's car running he left for work. As he approached the Pentagon he watched in horror as American Airlines Flight 77 crashed through is office window. He spent the next two days pulling the wounded and the dead out of the wreckage; when he got home his uniform went into the trash. Pat is now retired. He lives in Florida with his wife. His children are all grown, the house is paid off. He says, "We have enough," and he spends his time doing volunteer work in his community. It is something he never would have done before 9/11 but the experience of it changed his life.

How has it changed yours? You weren’t in the towers. You weren’t in those rooms at the Pentagon. You weren’t on flight 93. You live among a people who are good under pressure. You have a lot to be grateful for. How best will you express it in view of today, the 10^th anniversary of that day?

9/11: A time to remember, a time to forgive, a time to live differently.

Tidal Treacheries

2011-09-02T15:15:00.000-07:00

The Romans invaded the Island of Britain in the first century, and Christian soldiers were among the first English to found churches in Kent, as early as the 2nd century. But as Rome weakened under Vandal invasions its ability maintain control of its far-flung provinces waned. In the 5th century the Romans pulled out leaving behind a few scattered Christians and a bunch of building projects made of stone. In the 5th and 6th centuries on the northeast coast of England, in an area known as Northumbria, Angles and Saxons invaded, driving the Britons back down into southern England on the heals of the retreating Romans. They were of Germanic stock, and, melding with the Celtic Briton's and Picts, came to be what we now know as the English.
In the 7th century the crown prince of Northumbria, Oswald, was spirited away to Iona for safekeeping during internal strife in the kingdom, where he was baptized a Christian. When all was said and done Oswald became king. He sent to Iona for missionaries to convert his pagan people. Earlier attempts by the more Roman church to the south failed, but Aidan's Celtic practice and mild and humble ways commended themselves to the English. In typical Celtic style, instead of setting up a cathedral church in a town, he selected something more monastic and more rustic, the island of Lindisfarne.

Well, it's sometimes and island and sometimes a peninsula. There is a great tidal flat between it and the mainland, cutting it off for several hours out of each 12 at high tide. Best to watch the tides, too. They are high and they are a force to be reckoned with. What is clearly a dry road during low tide is covered by enough water to flood your car and wash it off the pavement. If there is anything worth retrieving afterwards you are just darn lucky. And afoot it is no better. There is a "pilgrim's path" marked with high poles visible even at high tide. Best stick to the markers because changing quicksand lurks beyond. We heard a haunting tale of a mother with children who went out to dig clams. Caught in quicksand, the incoming tide drowned them all before they could be pulled to safety. Drivers are warned over and over again not to attempt to cross except during low tide.

And these were not the only dangers. Kings of Northumbria built castles along the coast, from point to point, creating a visual link all along the coastline to guard against Viking invasions in the 9th and 10th centuries. One such castle inhabits another corner of Lindisfarne Island. They were not entirely successful at their task however. Lindisfarne was sacked by the Vikings more than once. Most of the monks fled to Durham, inland, taking with them the Lindisfarne Gospels, a richly decorated book done in wonderfully ornate Celtic style, reminiscent of the Book of Kells. The Priory Church, however, was reduced to ruin. Rebuilt, it suffered like most monasteries under King Henry the VIII and was suppressed. The only surviving building that is in current use is St. Mary's Church of England Parish, which is built on foundations dating back to the 8th century and has parts of its upper structure from the 12th and 13th. The Priory Church and its compound itself, standing just yards from the parish church, is one magnificent sandstone ruin.

What drew these ancient Celts to such dangerous places? One of Aidan's disciples, Cuthbert, chose another island 10 miles to the south, separated by a mile from the shore, with steep rock sides and nothing but seals and sea-birds to build a hermitage and pray. Perhaps here is the answer. Legends tell of the sea-birds and seals bringing Cuthbert fish to eat. One story tells how he dug a hole in the rock, prayed, and in the morning it was full of fresh water. From then on it was never dry, but always provided the saint with water. Perhaps they sought to live out what St. Paul meant when he wrote, "I will glory in my weakness." When we are weak the opportunity for grace to excel is made more obvious. When these Celts meekly and humbly put themselves in such harsh and inhospitable places they found it easier to see the hand of God providing and protecting them. Cuthbert was supposed to have passed many a night's vigil submerged up to his neck in the cold north Atlantic waters to mortify the flesh and vanquish his fleshly desires. Again, making himself weak, God could be strong in him. Tradition has it that when his body was taken from Lindisfarne to its final resting place in the Cathedral in Durham 150 years after his death monks opened the coffin to find that his body lay just as it was when first buried, "uncorrupt"--a testimony to his great holiness.

Perhaps it was fitting that the day Landon and I spent there it rained all day!

A Thin Place

2011-08-29T09:01:00.000-07:00

The sight of the Abbey's stone walls from a mile away across the sound nearly brought tears to my eyes. Admittedly, Iona was one of the biggies for me on my sabbatical. I was keen on many of the other places on the docket, but Iona was a show-stopper, a deal breaker. I just HAD to go to Iona.

I had heard so much about the place. I know the history, how in 563 St. Columba had come here from Ireland to found a monastery and to begin evangelizing the Pictish Scots that lived in Scotland at the time. I knew that it had been a place of pilgrimage and Christian prayer ever since...1400 years of hallowed ground. I had been told the place was magical, ethereal, a thin place, to use ancient Celtic categories, where the otherworld and this one are not quite so opaque to one another.

I was disappointed, in a natural sort of way, to find out that the stone abbey was not built by Columba himself, but dates to the 12th Century. Viking raids had all but shut down the Christian witness of the place in the 9th, and it took many years to rebuild. By then the preferred building material was stone rather than wood, more durable and capable of greater heights. I was delighted to find St. Martin's Cross standing in the courtyard just as it has since the 9th Century. Apparently the Vikings never got around to tumbling it to the ground like they did so many others.

I was also disappointed to find out that Henry VIII, so key to the emergence of the Anglican tradition, was also responsible for desecrating the place in his suppression of the monasteries. Fearful that they would foment loyalty to Rome, he set about destroying them one by one across the realm. Iona fell into ruins, only to be rebuilt shortly afterwards, and then fall again into disuse, not by political decree, but by the spiritual vacuity of the Enlightenment. The actual building as we see it today is still being renovated, part of a project that put it back in use beginning as late as 1938.

But it is in use. It's not a ghostly relic like St. Aidan's Priory on Lindisfarne. Each night Christians gather in the hoary nave and choir for a variety of worship experiences. The choir is lit by candles hanging on the ancient stone walls and the corners of the pews. The nave is populated by folding chairs, electric lights, and a sound system. Ferns grow from the wall up by the Altar and the carved stone frames for the glass in the rose window twist and turn on one another like a Celtic knot. The place is timeless because it encompasses all times since its inception.

A thin place indeed. My tears anticipated the truth.

However, everyone attests that it is not just the Abbey that is a thin place, but the whole of the island. Landon and I went to find what is known as "St. Columba's Bay" where he is supposed to have made landfall the first time. Some soul of great mystical generosity has formed a simple labyrinth of stone on the grass, an invitation to reflection on the time and place. Suddenly the whispers of ancient chants seem to emanate from the stone cliffs to each side.

Most moving personally, however, was a circle of stones, perhaps 15 feet in diameter, that we discovered on the west side of the island. It sits inside the remains of a stone wall that incorporates in a square corner, another square room. The map labels it as "The Hermit's Cell." Only a quarter of my blood is continental, the rest of me comes solidly from the Celtic parts of the Islands, half of my blood is Scot. From here my people were introduced to the Christian faith. From here the special richness of the Celtic heart blessed the Church. From here comes much of the character of my own being, the shape of my own soul.

I laid down spread-eagle in the circle. Suddenly I felt as if I was not alone, and would never ever be again! A thin place indeed.

A Way to See

2011-08-25T19:42:00.000-07:00

In 1746 an Indian man was walking between villages outside Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Night caught him before he got to his home village, so he camped beside the trail with his son. In the middle of the night something poked him in the side. Groggily he pushed it away. It poked him again, and he pushed it away again. The third time he grabbed it, stuffed it in his bag, and went back to sleep. In the morning he awoke, stirred his son, and went home.
Curious, he looked in his bag. There he found a small figurine of a Madonna, about 4 inches tall. Word got around and soon curious people filled his house. Miracles began to occur, healings and fortuitous events that were credited to the figurine. Soon a house was built as a shrine, then a church, and she was named after the town in which the man lived, "Suyapa." Devotion to the image increased to where eventually she was named patroness of Honduras. Pilgrimages from all over Central America end at the altar of the small church.

About a dozen years ago the Catholic authorities decided to build a larger church to house the pilgrims. It is a stately thing, done in shades of blue and green rather than pink and red like the small one, but patterned after the original. Green marble accents the appointments within, and beautiful stained-glass windows picture important scenes in the life of Mary from a Catholic Marian perspective. It is all beautiful - and empty.

The people are all down the hill at the original church where the figurine is. The story goes that on two occasions the authorities tried to house the statue in the new church but mysteriously by morning it was back in the old church. After two tries they decided she wanted to be there so they left her there.

I find it interesting because the figurine itself is seen as imbued with power. It "fell from heaven" so to speak, not crafted by human hands. Miraculous powers are attributed to it, and then by inference, the Mother of God.

It's a different way of seeing.

But I saw something else again. The new church, beautiful as it is, is hollow. It is the idol of the church authorities, devoid of life for the people, cold and strangely un-welcoming. The smaller church is crowded and dirty, but homey and warm, full of the hearts and souls of devout believers.

Strange as it may seem, the Spirit of God was almost palpable in the old church, and eerily absent from the new.

An almost invisible faultline

2011-08-25T19:02:00.000-07:00

The drive from County Mayo where Patrick's mountain stands up to the ferry that took us to Scotland took is across the boundary between Ireland and North Ireland, from the Republic to the Kingdom. I had allowed for some time to cross the border. I had heard stories of the Protestant north vs. the Catholic south, and we all know of the atrocities committed on either side. Such a place of tension would certainly be marked by armed guards, razor wire and menacing looking gates.
The only indication I had that we had crossed the border was a simple and small sign that said, "Speed limits marked in miles per hour."

What is the significance? Ireland is part of the European Union. The currency is the Euro and the speeds are marked in kilometers. Signs are all printed in Irish Gaelic as well as English. The UK circulates the pound sterling and marks distances and speeds in miles. Only in Scotland and Wales are there bilingual signs. It came clear to me an hour up the road when we were stopped by a "police" (not a "garda" of Ireland,) because a short parade was moving through the center of the town, flying the Union Jack and featuring kilted pipers. We were definitely no longer in Ireland, we were in the UK. It seemed simple enough, but there is no mistaking the boundary. It marks an almost invisible faultline.

How quickly we bury our deep divisions with commonalities, only to have them emerge once more as hidden and dangerous faultlines. How much better to name them, own them, and learn to value the other precisely for their differences.

Croagh Patrick

2011-08-25T18:51:00.000-07:00

Patrick was all Irish. Well, historically he wasn't, he was Welsh, but he was Celtic to the core and the Patrick of story and legend is all Irish. He is dramatic and powerful, imaginative and full of flair.
The place in Ireland connected with Patrick is a mountain. It stands in stark contrast with green, hospitable, hearth-oriented Brigid. It is high (as high as any of the surrounding mountains,) windy and blowy, and the day we were there we saw the sun actually shine on the summit only for moments at a time. When we first began our ascent it looked as if we may not see the ground below us from the top--it proved true much of the time.

The ascent, or "the Reek" as it is called, starts out challenging enough, but the climb of 2500 feet from sea-level gets real serious for the last third. The path takes you straight up a scree slope along one edge of the mountain. It feels like it's nigh-on vertical when you're going up, and your knees will tell you it IS vertical coming down. People climb it for many reasons: the exercise, the view, to worship in the small chapel on the summit, or barefoot as an act of penance. Some climb to see the traces of pre-Christian circle-huts that populated the summit before Patrick. Those who know say that the mountain was a druidic place of worship. Few know, unless they have visited the museum at the foot of the mountain, that underfoot, protected by a layer of rocks and dirt, lies the square foundation of a Christian oratory or prayer-chapel that dates from the 5th century. In other words, Patrick himself could actually have prayed there. The peak has its draw. On the last Sunday of July, known as "Reek Sunday" 20,000 people climb the mountain and a Catholic priest says Mass in the chapel.

From here Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland. From here Patrick threw the mother of the Devil, a pernicious demoness named Corra down from the heights, where she plummetted to her death in the valley below. The crater her body created filled with water and is known as Lough Nacorra. If Brigid is the welcoming, mothering, nurturing side of the Irish heart, Patrick is the challenging, buffetting and proving side. The Irish in this broad sweep of legend capture the two great movements of the human soul toward God, not in tight theological definitions, but in the infinitely more articulate language of symbol, poetry and song.

Irrrrrlnd

2011-08-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

Irrrrlnd, the land of Guiness and leprechauns and the gift of gab! Ireland, the emerald isle, was enchanting to us. We saw its rolling central hills, the high peaks of the west, and the almost skitzophrenic change as we drove out of Ireland proper into Northern Ireland, part of the UK. One difference you cannot miss is that in Ireland proper all the signs are bilingual, in English and in Irish Gaelic, as soon as you cross into Northern Ireland the Gaelic goes away.

First stop was St. Brigid's Cathedral in the village of Kildare. "Kildare" comes from the Irish "Cill Dara" (pronounce the "c" as a hard "c" like in "cat.") Cill Dara means "Church of the Oak" which is a fitting icon of its meaning. Here a young woman, daughter of a druidic warrior and a Christian mother, accepted the Christian faith under the tutelage of Patrick himself, or so the legend goes. Not wanting to marry as her father wished, she instead began to serve as one of the first Irish nuns. Around her a group of men and women gathered, and in 480 A.D. she formed one of the first double-abbeys in Ireland, of both men and women. An abbey was built under a large oack tree that quickly grew and spawned sister houses all over central Ireland. She became known for her leadership qualities, her works of mercy for the poor and her open arms to all.

Almost nothing is known historically about her outside of the brief sketch above, but just like with Patrick, stories and legends abound. She needed a place for her abbey and approached the local chieftain for a piece of land. \He laughed her off, not wanting to encourage the new Christian religion at all. Finally she convinced him to give her the land her cloak would cover. She then directed four of her sister nuns to take her cloak, each by a corner, and begin walking north, south, east and west. By the time the cloak stopped stretching it covered an area that became known as the Curragh, on which no one is allowed to build even today--it encompasses 800 acres!

\Like the stories with \Patrick, the mix of pre-Christian Celtic thought and images and Christian tenets is a seamlessly woven tapestry of color and surprises. Both are credited, Brigid in her feminine way and Patrick in his masculine way, with Christianizing the island with no bloodshed by using the very fabric of Celtic thought to bring a new way of being to the people.

Oaks were sacred to the druids. Hence Brigid's birthplace and the town that grew up around her abbey are aptly called "The Church of the Oak."

Surprises

2011-08-06T13:26:00.000-07:00

Roatan was wonderful as always, beautiful beaches, beautiful coral reefs, and a wonderful surprise. Actually I had stumbled upon hints of it before I was supposed to, but my beautiful wife joined me there for three days in paradise! It was grand!

But that wasn't the only surprise. We hired a boat that took us out to a reef we had not seen before, and a cut in the reef called the "Spooky Cut." As you approach the bottom is about 30 ft. down, covered in sand, and the coral rises before you like a giant underground beachhead. In the center is this crack that at its narrowest is only about 10 ft. wide, but probably drops 120 feet to a narrow floor covered in chunks of broken-off coral the size of a large pick-up truck. You can only see the ones that got caught above 60 ft or so because the darkness of the cut and the intervening water make the depths a dark, foreboding no-man's-land.

I found myself asking myself why it was so spooky to me personally. I recalled a dream many years ago in which I dove under the floorboards of my house into the ocean below. The floor of the ocean in the front half of the house sloped gently away from the shore to about 50 ft. Pretty shells washed to and fro on the sand. Half-way back from the front of the house the land dropped away vertically...yes, you guessed it, into a spooky black depths in which there were scary things that might embarrass me horribly if they ever came to light. There was more to the dream, but it felt eirily as if I was staring back into my dream as I gazed down into the blackness of the "Spooky Cut."

So what do I do with it? I do not have the technical skill to go down into the cut safely to face my fears, so to speak, and I had the distinct insight that such would not have worked anyway. In the intervening years since that dream in many ways I have plumbed the depths of the darkness. I know what there is there that can embarrass me, but more importantly, I have discovered riches hidden away until their appointed time of discovery, capacities I did not know I had, gifts to give far more significant than the pretty shells of my then-conscious soul.

The "Spooky Cut" was still spooky, but now in a fun sort of way, as it recalled what I have found in my own depths.

Inside Out Blesssings

2011-08-06T13:13:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I blogged, finally got access to a computer! Here goes nothin...

Honduras Medical Mission is always an exciting week. I approached it, however, with a bit of trepidation in my heart. I was on Sabbatical, and this felt like going back to work too early, like the workaholic who can't stay away from the office because he's convinced the place will fall apart without him. I had planned to do my Sabbatical research in Tegucigalpa before the mission began, but due to the events in my last blog such was not possible. We arrived just an hour before the rest of the team and wiped out. Mercy was granted for us to take our truck to the college where we stay and get there early! Ah....sleep!

The next day, however, it did feel like work, so I did something about it. I found the other clergy person on board, the Rev. Pat Richie, deacon from "down east" in the Diocese and began delegating. Between her and a couple of others I had opened up for myself a chance to sit back, watch and relax a bit while carrying my load with the mission. It worked fine until the very last day.

That day I was scheduled to go to Oropoli. Oropoli has a reputation among those of the Mission who have been there. Crowd control is always a problem, you have to watch your haircut lest someone try to lift it, people always want more medicines than we have, and people will do most anything to get them. Such is the reputation that the dean of the convocation who decides where we go and where we don't go, the Rev. Dagoberto Chacon, had not wanted to send us there. The local lay pastor, like in Jesus' parable of the unfruitful fig tree, had begged one more year on a trial basis. He hoped that somehow against hope it might prove able to turn over a new leaf.

It wasn't. The day was exactly as we had expected, in some respects worse. Among misgivings that somehow we were complicit in holding self-fulfilling profecies in our heads, we battled against the aggressive, deceitful crowd as we tried at the same time somehow to share with them the love of Christ in the form of medical attention and medicines. We finally closed up shop early and headed out, as much due to having run out of medicines as patience.#

So how does this contribute to the happy glow we normally associate with those who return from the Honduras\Mission? Well, for some I am sure it tarnished the shine a little, but it need not have. All we have to do is remember that our greatest advances are usually granted (certainly not achieved) in the midst of what often feels like the greatest failures and disappointments. We gave out medicines, but we learned patience. We gave out care and we received an awareness of just how desparate a people can be. We gave out time and received instead time to reflect, time to consider how God loves us sometimes in spite of what we think of ourselves.

Once again we received more than we gave. Hmmm.....

Beats a poke in the eye...

2011-07-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

For the second morning in a row Landon and I got up at 0-dark, 30 and made our way to an international airport. The first time we left our good friends' house in Lima at 3:30, and after checking in the nice lady at the counter gave us passes to LAN Airline's VIP lounge. There we feasted on an extensive continental breakfast buffet and then crashed until the last minute to board. On board LAN again treated us to a very nice breakfast! We arrived in Quito shortly after breakfast, in time for a long nap. Neither of us were hungry.

This morning my brother-in-law German braved the pre-dawn traffic to get us to the airport. By 4:10 the line was already 40 people outside the ribboned walkways to the counters. We filled out immigration forms, we talked to people, we gave a late-comer American girl the sad news that the 20 people behind us formed the end of the line. Landon bought us both humitas, a delicious, steamed Ecuadorian corn bread, and yoghurt for breakfast. We watched a couple of men at the counter argue with the attendant for almost the whole time we stood in line. After an hour we finally got to the desk. No checked luggage, this should be a snap, and we'd just have time to clear security and immigration and get to our gate. But...

The lady said something inane to us about vaccination forms for yellow fever. What vaccination forms? Oh, the little yellow International Vaccination Certificates? Mine is in a file in Harker Heights, last entry was in 1972, for--you guessed it--yellow fever! Landon piped up, "I had mine two and a half years ago to come here to study, but I don't have the form with me either. Does that count?"

"No," the lady replied firmly as she tore up our precious boarding passes. It was all on the website, and she was surprised that the travel agent hadn't told us, but there was absolutely no boarding from Ecuador for Honduras without a yellow fever vaccination dated at least 10 days before travel! She said we could get the vaccinations today and ask that the date be listed 10 days before, and she would put us on tomorrow's flight.

Crestfallen, we walked away from the impatient line. The girl who had been behind us was approaching the hope of a boarding pass after all and her seriously depressed face was beginning to show signs of hope that ours had lost.

I was suddenly ravenously hungry, and it seemed a bit unkind to reappear at my sister's house at 5:15 in the morning ringing the doorbell. As we walked toward the one open restaurant in the airport a very thin young man with a scraggly beard said something to Landon I didn't hear. His response was clear though, "Sure, how about if we buy you breakfast?" So the three of us sat down and had omelets, his first. Turned out he had finished his studies in classical guitar at a local conservatory, but struggles at home had driven him out last night into the street. He had come to the airport looking for a place to be, and Landon's kind heart treated him to breakfast after what was most certainly a sleepless night.

On the phone German gave us instructions to a clinic where we could get our vaccinations, but first we should drop off our bags at the house. With that intro back into the household we caught a few winks and headed out. We found the clinic easily enough, and they were willing and able to give us the shots, but not the international vaccination certificate the airline needed. We would have to go one of the Ministry of Health's clinics.

We arrived at the closest one without too much trouble, and found the room titled "Vaccinations." A number of people were in a waiting room outside, enough that if all of them were waiting for vaccinations we were in for a very long wait. However, they didn't seem to be, and after a young mother left with her children we walked in. In about 90 seconds we had each got a poke in the arm and a certificate to take down to the end of the hall to get transferred to an International Vaccination Certificate. Would she pre-date the paper? Absolutely not, it would mess up her records at the end of the day.

At the end of the hall a dour young lady sat at a desk, about 6-months' pregnant. I explained the situation to her, that we had flown in from Peru the day before and had run into this problem at the airport. Could she please help us out? Absolutely not, the certificates are dated when the shots are given. D.....!

I went back to the vaccinations office, maybe they could do something. But again the lady explained--very patiently, really--how it would mess up her records and she just could not do it. OK, so I figured we've got the shots now, no turning back. If nothing else maybe the airline can help, fly us into Panama on one day and into Honduras the next or something. Back we went with heavy hearts to get our little yellow cards. A line came out the door by now.

We waited patiently. A lady took the place behind us, asked Landon to keep her place, and disappeared for a few minute before coming back. Slowly, one by one, people were seen. Finally it was our turn. I walked in and the lady said, "Well, what have you decided?" I told her we would take the cards and talk with the airline. "Please sit down." We gave her our identifying documents along with the certificates of vaccination from the nurse. She began filling them out, then turned and picked up a desk calendar. "Were you in Ecuador on the 8th?" she asked.

"No, but we were on the 4th."

"That's OK, they won't check. I dated them for the 8th!"

I could have kissed her, except that I figured pushing my luck at this point might not be advisable. We smiled broadly instead, paid our money, thanked her profusely, and headed back to the nurse's office. Her assistant took the cards upstairs to be signed, and then we had to sign one more book for her. As she filled out the preliminary stuff on the page she noticed the date on the cards, looked up and smiled. "Ah, she did it for you, eh?" I smiled and nodded back. We were at my sister's house by 10:30.

The internal records of the Ministry of Health reflect our date of vaccination as July 20th, but our cards, which are the only document the airline cares about, inexplicably one might say, bear the hand-written date of the 8th, complete with validating stamps and signatures. We will be on the plane tomorrow barring any other unforeseen adventures.

Ah, bureaucracy can be managed after all!

A Balanced Diet

2011-07-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

In Argentina Landon noticed a sign in the local hospital that urged its readers to maintain a balanced diet. It went on to explain that a balanced diet included a variety of meats like liver, kidney and heart and not just steak.

Landon's observation: "Aha, in Argentina liver is a vegetable!" Yes!!!! I could so live here!

Unexpected Joy

2011-07-17T21:47:00.000-07:00

I did my study in Peru in downtown Lima at the Church of the Lord of Miracles. It is a beautiful colonial church just blocks off the central square. The story goes that the statue of the Virgin and Child in the church was saved miraculously from a devastating earthquake in the 19th century, and therefore the fame of the church. People filed in and out of the Nave, crossing a small stone-paved courtyard as Mass was said. To the side of the main Nave a small chapel housed a large crucifix. People kneeled and prayed in that side chapel at their own discretion.

It was harder to get people to speak to us here, big city, more reservations among the people, and finally one young couple gave voice to what was for sure a common fear: people thought we were selling something. In contrast, a group of catechists were very open and eager to participate. We finished our interviews in about 2 hours, and then I spent some time in the side chapel in prayer.

And there was where I discovered unexpected joy. The same sense of God's presence on the páramo in Ecuador flooded my being, a powerful, tangible awareness of the presence of God, spiritual tingling of the soul, silly-yeet-not-shallow joy that comes from incredibly deep gratitude, I find it hard to craft words to fit the experience, but I would recognize it anywhere and any time.

It was a totally unexpected surprisie to find in the center of a bustling city what I thought was only to be found in the wilds. I found out later that the location had been a place of spiritual pilgrimage for pre-Incan peoples more than 400 years before the Spanish. Perhaps...

Nice!

2011-07-17T21:33:00.000-07:00

I went to church tonight. With our host family we attended Our Lady of Charity Catholic Church in Lima. It was an amazing experience.

First, I got there ahead enough of the service to ask the priest if I could take communion. By technical canonical law I can't, not being Catholic, but often the local priest has some discretionary authority in how the law is applied. As an Episcopal priest I had often gotten permission before in other Catholic churches, but one never knows. The priest was almost surprised that I asked, and (in good Anglican fashion) left the decision up to me. I had already decided, and I told him.

Second, I was surprised to see that every one of the readers was female. I knew that Vatican II had opened the way for women to participate more fully in the services of the church, but this seemed almost overkill.

Third, the choir's average age was probably 30 at best. Young people with guitars and drums led lively worship music, and the congregation sang enthusiastically.

Fourth, when it came time for communion there were three communion stations; the priest in the center aisle, a layman to the right, and a lay woman to the left. I tell you, this parish has taken inclusion of women in the Catholic worship to new heights!

Fifth, about half the congregation took communion. I had been accustomed to very low rates of communion in the Catholic church, a hang-over from Vatican I strictures. Here, on the other hand, one would almost have thought oneself to be in a traditional Episcopal service!

And finally, at the door of the church an elderly priest in a long black cassock handed out candy and cookies from a large grocery bag to all the kids, the great dispenser of happiness among the children. He did so with an open and happy face, obviously enjoying his job. I had told him who I was ahead of time, and he repeatedly gave me a side-to-side hug of welcome.

One theme stood out unmistakenly: they throw the door open to anyone and everyone. Men, women, children, old, young, locals and strangers--even Episcopalians, all were welcome, and as many as possible were offered a share in active, public participation in the worship experience. Talk about spiritual hospitality, they do it in spades!

Just the theme of my Sabbatical study, and in a totally unexpected place!

To Run or Not to Run

2011-07-17T18:46:00.000-07:00

In Peru there is a falconer that lives about 3 hours' busride south of Lima. If you dare ride with him you will pull into his 650-acre farm in about 2. He will show you his and his fathers' collection of Peruvian Paso horses that he sells around the world. You will see acres and acres of tangelos and asparagas bound for markets in Europe and North America. And he will show you his falcons. He has Peregrines and Aplomado falcons, as well as Harris' Hawks, Bat Falcons, Bicolored Hawks (like Cooper's Hawks in the US) and Merlin falcons. He flies them, he breeds them and he loves them.

And he is given to extremes. One of his extreme habits is to fly his Aplomado Falcons after Ornate Tinamous at 13,500 feet of elevation. These birds are about the size of chukars, they range individually and in pairs throughout the high and dry Puna of central and southern Peruvian Andes. We told him we wanted him to take us up there. He agreed, because he is a gracious host, but I could see some misgiving in his eyes.

Jose Luis told us about a couple of Brazilians who came and could hardly get out of the car at that altitude. He told us of some Colombians who barely managed 100 yards from the car without throwing up. He suggested lower elevations where "there were hundreds of tinamou to chase," but we tenaciously clung to the highest prize. The day came, we loaded up the birds and the dogs, and headed out.

He drove up the mountains like he drove from Lima, at breakneck speed, congratulating himself for making very good time. On the way we saw Andean Geese and wild Vicuñas. We arrived at the hunting area at about noon, and broke out the best of his Aplomado falcons and dogs. We charged into the hills with Landon coerced into filming the action on his brand-new professional-grade video camera.

Bird after bird flew, and was duly chased in amazingly fast and agile flight by the falcon. Bird after bird escaped, and the falcon began to get fatigued. Soon she decided she had had enough and took to soaring up along the slopes, totally ignoring Jose's frantic efforts to recall her. She finally settled down on the brow of the hill, 500 feet above us.

A pair of wild Aplomados appeared soaring above her, and then the focus of the falconer's concern: A Variable Hawk, a bird of prey about the size and power of our Red-Tailed Hawk, appeared. These birds are entirely capable of killing and carrying off an unwary Aplomado Falcon. We decided we had to climb after the bird, and we all charged up the hill, ignoring the searing lactic acid build-upn in our legs and burning oxygen-starved lungs. Soon I was ahead of the pack, and a pair of Black-Chested Buzzard Eagles appeared. They are half the size of a Golden Eagle and are the dominant avian predator of the Puna. Jose calls them pirates. He has lost four falcons to them over the years.

At first the eagles didn't have their eagle-eyes on the falcon, they chased the hawk around the sky with murderous intent until the trio disappeared in the distance. Distance is deceiving, however, because they can easily cruise at 60 miles an hour, which means an eagle that is a mile away and out of sight can be onsight in 60 seconds. I broke into a run up the ridge.

We got to the falcon OK, and began to hunt down the hill. Finally, on the 10th try, the little falcon was successful. We cheered her, we saluted one another, and we took lots of pictures. Landon, in the mean time, had taken some truly excellent footage of flushes and chases, things that Jose will use in his upcoming video, with acknowledgment to the budding videographic skills of Landon.

We ran a pair of pointers and flew another falcon briefly, but by 5 p.m. Jose's knees were giving out, so we piled into the car for the ride home. I noticed a new kind of openness in Jose's eyes. He no longer warned us of the difficulties of high-altitude falconry. He finally believed that the time we had spent in Ecuador on the páramo had prepared us well for his high-altitude adventure.

But that is not the point of this story. At one point he asked if I was suffering because I was tired. I pointed to the beautiful falcon on his glove, and then to the spectacular vistas surrounding us and said, "Look at this, look at all this! I am not suffering in the least!" Physical capacity not withstanding, if one were not open to the beauty around one would fail to enjoy it nonetheless. Beauty has the capacity to energize the heart, and therefore energize the muscles. There is truly a power in the eyes that gives life to the body, it's part of our ability to see God in the world around us.

No Trees

2011-07-17T18:19:00.000-07:00

There's a great joke about a logging competition in the northwest that involved a tree-felling contest. 10 large logs were set up as trees, and 9 competitors with more hair growing out of their ears than most of us have on our heads signed up. Each one felled a trunk in increasingly short times as the crowd yelled and screamed encouragement. One trunk was left standing, and a wizzened old man stood forth from the crowd and claimed it. The judges were understandably concerned, and before they allowed him to proceed had him sign wavers of liability and warned him about possible complications, but he was resolute. The whistle blew, and the old man's axe hit the log. Chips flew and in record time the log fell to the ground. He had halved the time of his fastest competitor. The crowd went wild, and as he came forward to claim his trophy the judges asked him, "That was amazing, old man. Where did you learn to chop down trees?"

"Patagonia," the old man replied.

"There are no trees in Patagonia!" answered the judges.

"Not any more!" the old man replied calmy.

Well, I an attest that there are trees in Patagonia, along the rich river bottoms of the Rio Negro. Some of South America's best apples, pears and cherries are grown there, along with grapes for fine Argentinian wine. Up on the open steppes, however, it looks a lot like Laredo Texas, where the highest shrub is hardly higher than your head. World-famous Argentine beef is raised there, and any restaurant in the area will serve you up a delicious"asado," that will melt in your mouth but not on your fork.

But there are taller things in Patagonia. One of them is the figure of Ceferino Namuncurá, young Mapuche Indian chief apparent, who became a devout Catholic. The church shipped him off to Rome to study for the priesthood. His wish was to return as a missionary to his own people, but illness cut him short in Rome and he returned in the form of ashes that are buried in the town of San Martin de los Andes. Near his place of rearing, however, in the village of Chimpay, there is a shrine dedicated to his memory. Like many shrines in Latin America, expressions of gratitude for miracles by his hand range from large, expensive plaques to grafitti scribbled on his statue's base. People who live there come daily, others who drive through on the highway stop a moment to find peace and offer thanksgiving.

This is not an apparition of the Virgin Mother of God, interceding before the throne of her Son for her people. Here is a man of unusual spiritual depth whose example inspires, and who, in good Latin American style, offers his standing before the throne of grace as an intermediary before God, much like a senator or congressman might achieve favors from Congress on behalf of their constituency, or even an appointment to West Point for an individual.

In his own way, and in the ways of this people, here is a man whose roots go deep and whose branches reach tall and wide for the people of God, a true tree of Patagonia that no one will ever chop down.

Holy Wind

2011-07-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

The word for Spirit, especially the Spirit of God in both Greek and Hebrew is also the word for wind. The ancient writers could have taken their inspiration from the high "páramo" of Ecuador.

The páramo east of Quito is an area I frequented as a teen. It begins at 12,000 feet and goes up to 14,500. (You don't count 14'ers in Ecuador, there are too many to matter.) Further to the east the Amazon jungle generates copious quantitites of humidity, that is summarily wrung from the air as it cools on its way over the high passes. 400 inches of rain a year is standard, which means it normally rains multiple times a day, and the rain may very well come at you sideways as downwards. The temperatures average in the high 40's, on a clear night it will freeze hard any night of the year. It is high, cold, wet and windy.

And it is also one of the most bio-diverse places on the planet. The highest hummingbirds live there, going into a dormant torpor overnight to survive the cold. It is home to a small race of White-tailed deer, the Spectacled Bear (every bit as big and ornery as the North American Black Bear,) and the elusive Mountain Tapir. If one is especially lucky one can see the magnificent Andean Condor soar by on wings as big as the mountains themselves. Flowers peek up through the thick coarse grass, club-mosses 10 inches high paint the marshes in orange, dwarf forests of Polylepsis trees, draped in moss and epiphytes, choke the steeper gullies. It is truly a magical place.

I found it magical in another very un-magical way when I was a kid and just the other day when I was there. It is often in the margins of life that we most potently encounter the Holy. The páramo drives one to the margins very quickly. God was there, powerfully, unequivocally, driving through me like the rain in my face, filling my soul with such incredible gratitude and happiness such that tears are hardly avoidable--perhaps my small oblation to the God of Wind!

Considerate Drivers

2011-07-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

We've been in Ecuador now for three weeks. We've been to Our Lady of the Sacred Waters in Baños, to the high wet and windswept "páramo" east of Quito, the thermal hot springs of Papallacta, and to the idyllic beaches of northwest Ecuador. We have lived and loved and laughed as family. Throughout it all we have relied on either hired drivers or public transportation.

On first appearance the local traffic customs remind one eerily of Hatrry Potter's Night Bus. Vehicles seem to go where they couldn't possibly fit, and people and objects magically get out of the way at the last minute. Our son Leni made an interesting comment the other day. He said drivers here are more considerate than in the US. I think he's right.

Oh, there is certainly a lot of cutting people off, disregard for lanes and general mayhem out there, but in it all people generally give other drivers at least 12 inches of leeway, and if you really have to get in you roll your window down and wave your hand frantically--other drivers will let you in. I never once heard a driver yell at another driver or even make a comment to me. Everyone knows that everyone else is also trying to get somewhere, and if everyone gives a little bit everyone will get through. Last minute decisions are part of life, and you just live with it. What goes around comes around.

Hmmmm....now if such an attitude could somehow seep through the doorframes and windows of the United Nations...

Hmmm....

2011-06-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

In the 1690's the parish priest from the village of Patate, Ecuador used to ride a mule to the smaller village of Baños every Sunday evening to say Mass and teach catechism. The two villages are divided by the raging Paztasa river canyon which is 70 meters deep at that point, and whose waters churn through a chasm only 10 meters wide. The bridge had been destroyed and the workers had laid a single wooden log over the gap. The priest was deep in prayer as his mule approached the log. He wondered why the mule hesitated, and without thinking spurred him on. The mule crossed the torrent on that one log and carried his charge into town. The people had figured that without the bridge they would have to forego the minstrations of the church, so when the holy man rode into town they were all filled with surprise and astonishment! In the morning they returned to the crossing and found the mule's shoe-prints clearly marked on the log.

The painting of the episode is one of many hanging in the Cathedral of our Lady of the Holy Waters in Baños. It records one of the earliest miracles attributed to Our Lady, and her residence here is one reason Patate continues to be a small town and Baños is now a thriving place of pilgrimage, as well as a mecca for outdoor sports. (You can even bungie-swing into that same canyon!) The active volcano of Tunguragua sits just barely out of sight to the south, and many of the miracles have to do with rescues from lava and boiling waters during eruptions--about 5 major ones in 300 years including one in 2006. Hundreds of plaques of gratitude, "milagros" and offerings of everything from wedding dresses to projection TVs, fill several rooms of a museum on the third floor of the monastery cloister next door to the church. Thermal springs blessed by the Virgin bring healing when medical assistance fails. A graceful and almost lacy waterfall right where town meets mountain cliff is dedicated especially to her, with a shrine and all, and outside the shrine there is a long line of gravity-fed hoses where at least 24 people can all do their lawndry in her water.

Fascinating place, this is!

Pearls of Wisdom

2011-06-13T18:29:00.000-07:00

Rough translation of some words of wisdom from a hanging in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Holy Waters in Baños, Ecuador:

It is not the candle you light as much as the light you shine in your world.

It is not the holy water you take home in a jug as much as the holiness of your life.

It is not the blessing you receive as much as the blessing you are.

It is not the car you have blessed as much as your responsible driving.

And I would add: It is not so much the holy places you have been to as much as the holy places you take away within you.

They'll Suck us Dry!

2011-06-09T18:35:00.000-07:00

While on Puerto Rico Landon my son and I decided to visit a State Park in a dry forest area. Dry forests are unique in a lot of ways, and being on the leeward side of an incredibly lush island they seemed somehow oddly out-of-place. We got there with an hour to closing time, and the kind man in the shack showed us an hour's worth of trails to walk. Landon was eager to see whatever he could see, I was eager to add some birds to my life list. So off we went--

Right into the teeth of the biggest, baddest swarm of mosquitoes you could ever imagine. They hounded us. No piece of exposed skin was safe from their onslought. At first Landon was rather pleased to see me battling more of them than he. Yes, perhaps I've gotten a bit more sugar in my blood over the years, but I was also showing a lot more skin with my short sleeves compared to his wisely-chosen long ones. It was almost impossible to stop to watch birds!

Stop and they swarm, clouding your vision and darkening the sky above you,
You can feel the moisure being drawn from your body,
Blood stains seem to appear through your shirt and even pants,
Are they lifting you off the ground now, to carry you away to the great Mosquito Queen?

A bird? What bird? Did you see a bird?

(I did add 4 new species in spite of the black horde!)

Dreams Fulfilled

2011-06-09T18:28:00.000-07:00

Last nigh I dreamt I saw two large airliners line up on parallel landing strips, only to have one crowd the other, clip its tail with its wing, and rip open the fuselage, sending both onto the ground as they landed. I ran to tell authorities, and saw a large military missle come over the hill in slow motion, and pop like a giant balloon against a building, causing no damage. I woke wondering what sort of omen it carried.

At the first toll booth outside of Ponce on the way back to San Juan on the Island of Puerto Rico I found out. The lanes were being worked on, funneling three lanes into one. In typical Latin American style the car to my right and I played a game of chicken until his mirror hit mine--on my rental! Seeing minimal damage and not exactly wanting to confront that kind of reckless driver, I paid my toll and drove on up the highway. Soon the other car passed me and began to try to force me off the road. He did that a couple of times until I finally had my son call the police, and, relieved to see one quickly appear, pulled over with the other car right behind me. The officer heard our stories, scolded me for not stopping even though the damage seemed slight, and then mercifully wrote up a mere "accident incident" report and did not issue me a citation. So now I've called insurances, and done all of that other stuff. In the end the missle popped with no real damage to anything or anyone.

So I began reflecting on why I had joined in the game of chicken. Part of my Latin American spirit c an get just as machista as the next guy, and having the right-of-way, didn't want to get shown up, even with a rental car. Yes, I confess.

To chide myself into more careful choices is to mold my behavior with fear, something that I strongly disagree with. What other options are there?

Community. So here is how it goes. Yes, I'm in the middle lane with the right-of-way, and yes, the cars beside me are being royal pains in the heine, but somehow, in the larger picture of things, everybody has to get funnelled through that one lane, pay their tolls and be on their way. Why not help the general peace of the land and give my place to another? Does that not take even more "c....es" in the long run?

Lessons are usually learned the hard way, though....

Why do they come?

2011-06-09T18:18:00.000-07:00

The Virgin appeared to a young boy and two young girls going to the spring for water for the school, so the story goes. It was 1953 in rural southwestern Puerto Rico, and the three still live in the village of Sabana Grande. You can go visit them if you want.

Unlike Guadalupe in Mexico, the Virgin of the Well does not enshrine national or ethnic identity, that honor goes to a pre-Christian goddess named Boricua. Here, however, those who come in faith (from any tradition, it seems) are welcomed with calm, gracious openness. You are invited to drink from the well that she blessed. The water is sweet, surprisingly so. But the sweetness that lingers is not in the mouth but the place and the people in it. Those people come in twos and threes and small family groups, sometimes alone. They range from young children to the elderly--I was surprised at the number of teens and young adults who seemed to be there of their own accord. They come almost always for one thing. They come for peace: in their bodies, for healing; in their souls, for tranquility; in their spirits, for inspiration.

One older Episcopalian said he had been coming here since the aparition and he just can't stay away. A 20's Something described the place as existing in another dimension. His friend added that the troubles of the world just stay at the gate, and are often not there when you return. Another was convinced that if everyone would follow this path the world would be at peace. It's hard to argue with that.

Except some do. One of the particular trials of this sort of place the world over is the Church. The sanctuary has had its ups-and-downs with the local Roman Catholic hierarchy. Currently the local parish priest allows rosaries to be said there on weekends but does not have permission from his bishop to celebrate mass there.

Just as indominable is the Puerto Rican spirit, so is indominable the spirit of this place. Church or no church, it will always draw its faithful and win new ones. How embarrassing to have the church be outperformed by the Spirit!

A Land Between the Lands

2011-06-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

Puerto Rico is an interesting place. Christopher Columbus claimed it for Spain on his second trip to the New World, and it was a Spanish colony for 400 years. It became a part of the United States over 100 years ago, and for more than 40 years English was taught in its schools. Now it is in what is called a free association, which means that it is a posession of the United States, with voice and no vote in Washington.

Culturally it stands in-between as well. The official language of the island is now Spanish, but English is a required course in every grade. The language of the street is Spanglish. Signs are in both languages, or either, doesn't really seem to matter. The US mail service is the mail service of the island, and my cell phone is on the American grid. Driving is much more like Mexico City than Killeen, Texas. Grit, guts and certain abundance of hormones makes life full of color and drama. And so on this island freeways with clear signage criscross banana plantations and lush, green tropical forests.

I found myself feeling strangely en casa

Faith and Culture

2011-06-05T17:28:00.000-07:00

Why do thousands of people flock to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City? They were there in typical numbers today. We saw couples flirting in the corners, we saw men and women of all ages walking across the stone courtyard (big enough to hold several football fields) and into the new Basilica on their knees. From the painfully slow progress some of them were making it would seem they had come some distance, they are reported to come this way for miles.

Why do they walk up the beautiful stone stairway to the top of Tepeyac hill, overlooking the city from a 500 ft. vantage point, and crowd into the small chapel there to say a rosary or see the life-sized pictures behind glass on the wall? The pictures all over the campus tell the same story, the story of a poor and insignificant Indian man, Juan Diego 10 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico (1531), and how to him the Virgin Mary appeared on this spot and sent him on an impossible errand. She sent him to ask the Bishop for a church on that location. But what 16th century Spanish bishop was going to listen to a recently-conquered Indian's request? The Catholic church of the time was hand-in-glove with the sword that had conquered these people. They were one more way that the pagans were being subjugated and brought under the rule of Spain and the Catholic faith. What did they know?

To cut a beatiful story short, she appears to him four times and the last time she gives him an armload of cut roses to give to the Bishop. He wraps them in his "tilma" or shawl, and when he pours them out at the bishop's feet the image we know is emblazoned on his shawl. The sight triggers a reversal in the bishop and the rest is history. Well, almost.

The tilma ended up enshrined in the Basilica. We were able to get a picture of it from 50 yards away, not nearly close enough to satisfy a cynical heart or even a critical eye. Masses are said there on the hour every hour every Sunday. There are a hundred ways you can give your time, talent or treasure. (For the first time I saw a girl serving as an acolyte in a Catholic church in the old Basilica next door!) The church is packed every time. But people hardly hear the sermon. They mumble the responses like automatons. That is not why the people come.

The machinery that the Church has built up around this place sometimes helps and sometimes steps in the way of what people are really after. They are after the Mother of God with brown skin. They seek the divine in accessible clothing. When she calls Juan Diego "my little one," and says she is his mother every Mexican with Indian blood hears her words as spoken to them. By extension everyone with a mix of Spanish and Indian blood across the width and breadth of Latin America hears her words. This is their mother's home, and Juan Diego, the poor and insignificant Indian man, conquered and pushed brutally to the bottom of the heap like so many of them, he is their brother and their inspiration. For anyone who does not see the world from the top of the mountain, for anyone whose history is not pure, whose tradition is a mixture of heroism and failure, that is, "mestizo," this story speaks of hope, the great hope of the reversals of which Jesus spoke when He said, "The last shall be first and the first shall be last."

For me Juan Diego is the real hero of this story.

Why the Catholic church took until 1990 to beatify him baffles me, and why our own Episcopal church has not scooped up this voice from underfoot and raised him up with the great saints of the ages, I do not know.

Honors

2011-05-24T15:29:00.001-07:00

Easter 6, May 29, 2001, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

This is Memorial Day Weekend. Killeen and the Fort Hood community always celebrates it in spades. There will be flags flown, graves of our war-dead will be decorated, and a moment of silence will be observed at 3:00 p.m. Rightly do we celebrate this day well. Not only are many of us military-connected, but the largest US military installation in the world has borne the brunt of the war effort in the Middle East. Probabilities prove out in statistics, that we have also suffered the most in terms of fatal casualties.

Why do we celebrate thus? Honoring our dead is something profoundly human. There is anthropological evidence that the very earliest humans honored their dead. There is not a culture in the world that does not mark the passing of one of its own, giving significance of the moment. And when the loved ones we remember died to protect our way of life we mix our grief with gratitude. They were our exoskeleton, our auto-immune system, and they lost their lives for a cause larger than themselves.

But at the root of it all, we honor our dead because it helps us get a focus on the living. If these died for a reason, what does it mean for those who are left behind? The past lays the foundation of the future, and those who paid the most dearly in the past speak most eloquently about our future. And so we have our Gold Star Families. The Tragedy Assistance Programs for Survivors (TAPS) is a national organization that provides care for Gold Star families and has supported more than 30,000 since 1994. TAPS' motto is “Remember the love, celebrate the life and share the journey.”

If on this day we remember the past and the prices that have been paid, it is only right that we also consider the future for which that price was given. We have this morning three ways we are going to consider our future. They do not overtly speak of our military efforts, and though we live and move and have our being in the matrix of what is the American culture, what we do this morning has to do with something larger than merely American culture. It has to do with people and the sacred relationships they hold dear:

with spouses, with the Love-Dare program, with oneself in the Fireproof your Life program and our graduating Seniors, and with our God in our everyday living, and personally, in my Sabbatical which begins on Saturday. If an American soldier could say, "In America we live and move and have our being, and for America I am willing to lay down my life,” how much more the believer says, “In God we live and move and have our being, and for Him I will live my life.”

One day when Landon our son was in 2nd grade we were driving to school, we stopped at a stop sign and he asked me, "Dad, why are we here?"

I replied, "Because there's a stop sign and we have to stop."

“No, dad, why are we HERE?”

Confused, I asked for clarification. “You mean, why we live in Weslaco?”

“No, why are we HERE?”

I reached for the impossible. “You mean, why are we here, rather than not here? Why do we exist?”

“Yeah, that's what I mean!”

He wasn't the first to ask the question. In today's first lesson Paul is preaching in Athens. He has raised some curiosity with his preaching of Jesus, and confused, people ask him for more. Noticing an altar to "An Unknown God," Paul takes up the theme of the One Creator God, who is largely unknown to his hearers. Don Richardson in his book Eternity in their Hearts tells a delightful back-story to this. I don't know where it comes from, but the thrust of the story is that the god who must be appeased in order to stop a plague is invoked precisely on the basis of their ignorance. Paul jumps on the opportunity. The real Unknown God is the one who is not a god but the God, the one and only uncaused cause, the Pre-existent One, who is ultimately lost in unknowable divine mystery. That God has made Himself known to us in Jesus Christ, and that God now has created a way to be in relationship with Him through Jesus Christ. And so Paul preaches Christ as the One in whom we live and move and have our being.

If indeed in God we live and move and have our being, then God is the context of our living and our dying, in God we recognize and honor those who have fallen in defense of our country, and in God we value and commit ourselves to our relationships with spouses, with God and with one another. God's heart is the larger context in which all that we know is located, of our marriages, and our graduations and our efforts to fireproof our lives, and our sabbaticals. To be a believer is to acknowledge this, to live as a believer is to live from this. To be a Christian is to believe that we best understand this in the person of Jesus Christ, that in Christ we meet the unknown God, face to face.

As we honor our war-dead tomorrow let us honor the greatest casualty and victory in the war the world has ever witnessed, when the very Son of God died to win the battle against evil and death, and rose again to unprecedented victory. Let us also honor the living relationships in which we find ourselves, and accept them from the hand of God as gifts for our good and theirs, ways in which God Himself honors His relationship with us.

Sabbatical--Hidden Treasures

2011-05-23T18:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a Youtube about my upcoming Sabbatical. I'm traveling with my son, Landon. We leave June 4 and return August 17.
http://www.youtube.com/user/StChrisKilleen#p/u

To Change the World

2011-05-17T16:10:00.001-07:00

Easter 5, May 22, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

It's been a long time since anyone tried to stone me for a vision of heaven. I figure it's an indication of a lack of faith or zeal, but I count it a good thing. I'm not sure I would really relish that kind of martyrdom. "Martyr" means "witness," however, and there are lots of different ways to give witness. Happily for me, and for you, the most effective "martyrdom" is the most natural and the most genuine thing in the world. It consists of nothing more or less than the effect the Kingdom has on your world.

The effect the Kingdom had on Stephen's world ended rather badly, I should say—not for Stephen, mind you, he made out rather well. He got heaven right off the bat, he got a name and a reputation, and he got the great satisfaction of finally being proven right. Those who stoned him, however, did not fare so well. We know of two groups of them. One was a group of one - one Saul of Tarsus. It wasn't long before Stephen's martyrdom fired this young man up into a missionary zealot, but before he could really get things rolling he had an encounter with the same Jesus near Damascus and ended up preaching the very thing he set out to destroy. We know him as St. Paul, the Apostle. Humble pie always starts out bitter (though it always ends up sweet.)

The other is the unnamed group of hoodlums who actually pitched the rocks. All we know about them is that their lives went on apace. If the Gospel lesson today means anything at all, they, too, will one day stand before the God of Stephen and give account, for when Jesus declares, "I am the truth," he lays claim to all truth for all time, and in all places wherever it is found, even the truth that Stephen was an innocent man.

The effect the Kingdom had on the community of believers to which the epistle of I Peter was written no less significant. The Kingdom makes us something special in the world, it says, and that something special has an effect on the wider community. To those who are being called into the life of God it is good news, Gospel, but to those who refuse it, it becomes a stumbling block, for when Jesus declares, "I am the life" He lays claim to everything that shares the life of God with us, and in our communities, no matter where, when or how we stumble across it.

The Kingdom stretched Thomas's geography almost to the breaking point. Thomas and the rest were stunned at Jesus' declaration that He would be leaving. It cast before them a web of confusing possibilities. Do they fight? Do they run? Do they hide? Do they pretend it all didn't happen? Do they pretend they didn't know Jesus in the first place? Knowing Jesus precludes all of those things and places before them a different sort of map. I remember many years ago walking with my father on visits among the Tsachi people in western Ecuador. The Tsachis do not live in villages, but rather on their individual farm plots, like so many Texas ranchers. He knew the paths, but to me they all looked alike. I learned that the best map I had was my father's back. As long as it was in front of me we would get to where we were supposed to go. Otherwise, I was in trouble.

The key to getting to the Kingdom is not a map but a person. Wherever we see the traces of His passing, there is the door to the Kingdom, for when Jesus declares, "I am the Way," He lays claim to every signpost that points to God, wherever or whenever it may appear, and however we might notice it, for it not only points to God, but to Himself.

Visions of heaven no longer get one stoned to death these days, but the effects of the Kingdom still rock the world. When you forgive your enemies as they are doing you harm you change the world for good. In 1955 five young missionaries attempted to reach the violent and warlike Waorani Indians in eastern Ecuador. The Indians attacked the defenseless men and left their spear-ridden bodies on the jungle beach. The widow of one missionary and the sister of another, because they were defenseless women, managed to contact them peacefully. They offered the killers forgiveness, a concept the Waorani did not understand. But in time their violent ways were set aside in favor of the Gospel of peace. In the 1980's a young Waorani man, product of the Waorani church, made a trip down river to another village still caught in the cycle of violent revenge killings. He became martyr number 6, even as he forgave his own kinsmen who killed him. The Gospel now urges people in that village as well to set aside their spears.

When you become known as a caring, loving community it changes the world for good. Last year I sat with two men in their 70's on the porch of the school in Pedregales, Honduras. I love visiting with the older men that come to the clinics. They speak with measured tones and carefully chosen words, everything they say is worth hearing. They told me in heart-felt words how appreciative they were that we had gone to the work and expense of getting to their village with doctors and medicines. "It is clear how much you love God," they said. This is the one thing the world has in very short supply and the one thing the Church has to offer.

When your geography stretches arms of love around the whole world it changes the world for good. We come from all walks of life. We are all different from one another. Some of us are younger, some of us are older, some are single, some are married. Some are politically liberal, others are more conservative. Some have special needs, some seem blessed beyond measure. Some are better at one thing and others at something else. Yet here we are, all gathered together in God's house, under one roof, worshipping the same God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, seeing the truth and the life and the way differently at times, yet always somehow a reflection of Jesus Christ. Here we stand together, shoulder to shoulder, and the grace of the Kingdom stretches a common mantle over all of our shoulders, to serve the world in His name. Our uniqueness’s are evidence of grace. Christ wears a myriad of faces, seen in one another and the people who populate our worlds. As we see the face of Christ in those around us we most powerfully serve the world in His name!

The Kingdom will change your world, but that’s OK. God’s changes are always for the good. Jim Elliott, one of the five young missionary men martyred by the Waorani in 1955 said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose!”

Landon Moore and the U of I

2011-05-07T19:33:00.001-07:00

For a very nice piece done by the University of Idaho featuring our son Landon follow this link:

http://www.uidaho.edu/cnr/peopleofcnr/currentstudents/featuredundergraduatestudents/meetlandonmoore

He Will Not Be Denied; Mother's Day

2011-05-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

Easter 3, May 8, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

The parents of this morning's baptismal candidates are special to me. The situation has happened to me plenty of times in my 20 years of ordained ministry, and every time it is special. I married the parents, now I'm baptizing their children. In today's move-every-3-years society that doesn't happen often. It's special because in our transient society follow-through with the same people is often just not an option. They PCS somewhere, their job moves them, or their parents need them in a distant city, and off they go. Oh, we get around it like today, by the parents bringing the children back to the same place to be baptized, and whereas they will be raised in another context, the sense of continuity is important, the sense that we have a hand in continuing what we start.

This is the lesson in today's Gospel reading. We don't really know much about Cleopas and his friend, Cleopas sounds like "Clopas," whose wife, Mary, was at the foot of the cross at the crucifixion. But there is no evidence that these are referring to the same person. Either way, there is no other Scripture reference to either of them. So we know these two disciples only as the two men who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus. We can say this about them, however. They knew Jesus before the Crucifixion, and they were sad and disappointed at His death. They took it to be the final chapter in Jesus' story, and they wished there had been more. A nascent faith was dying in infancy in their hearts.

It is puzzling, of course, why the disciples were kept from recognizing Jesus. The text seems to indicate that something did it to them, the voice is passive. Was it God? If so, why? Was it the devil? So what is the moral of the story? Or was it something in themselves that just couldn't get past Jesus' death? We're not told. I believe that whatever the immediate cause, their blindness is instructive to us. In Jesus teaching them from the Old Testament they would see that what had happened was part of a larger plan. In appearing to them in the breaking of the bread He showed them that the story keeps going, and that they are part of it. His presence is no longer restricted to one time and place, and therefore one appearance. Now He will be with them wherever and whenever they break the bread.

So, whoever they were, these two disciples are one with us in the community of Jesus, for Jesus is also with us and recognized in the breaking of the bread. We, too, are warmed in heart, and hurry out to share the news, and Jesus' actions that night become His actions with us tonight, we have a hand in the message of Emmaus.

And herein lies the greater lesson. Baptism gives us a hand in continuing in the lives of these two boys, yes, and it is a grand thing to do so, and a great privilege and responsibility. Yet that is not the end of the story. Baptism is bigger than any one baptism per se. I was baptized at age 11 in an outside baptismal font in Quito Ecuador on the campus of missionary radio station HCJB. My wife was baptized by her father in a river in Africa. All of our baptisms take on a different color and texture and appearance, yet they all are one, for we are all baptized into Christ, who is one.

Therefore we reaffirm our own baptismal covenants. Just as the experience with Jesus in Emmaus sent Cleopas and his friend hurrying back seven miles in the night to Jerusalem to share the good news of the risen Christ, so we join Christians of all places everywhere in committing ourselves to proclaiming in our own way and our own day the power and grace of His resurrection. Cleopas and his friend hold our hands and the hands of these two baby boys.

Today is also Mother's Day. I think of my own mother, 81 years old, living with my father in Dallas in the sunset years of their lives. The other day we were up there visiting with them and she said what every mother feels. We were talking about a move to a retirement center in their native Indiana, close to my older brother. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea. At one point almost rebelliously she said, "I don’t care how old you are, you know you’re all still my kids." Though my siblings and I now carry the load of the family, and it is now our turn to care for them, we are still her kids. She still has a hand in our lives, and she will not be denied!

There are many images in Scriptures of God treating us as a mother treats her children. God Himself, as the best of mothers, will have a hand in our lives, our continuing, changing and evolving lives. From creation to birth to baptism through this life to death, our Lord Jesus Christ continues with us. Often incognito and unrecognized, always recognizable in the breaking of the bread and the life of the Church that breaks it, but always there, whether known or not, always present, always with a firm, wth a steady and supporting hold on the upper hand in all that our lives are and will be. In His unobtrusive way He will not be denied.

Truth and Reconciliation

2011-04-22T12:29:00.001-07:00

Easter Day, April 24, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

The nation of South Africa changed the face of human history in the decade of the 1990's. South Africa held its first free election in April of 1994. The world had watched with bated breath as the edifices of apartheid were systematically dismantled and another way of life was build on its ruins. The crumbling of the old system had begun 5 years before when President, F. W. De Klerk surprised the parliament and the nation by removing the bans on liberation movements, and releasing Nelson Mandela.

The Anglican Archbishop of South Africa, Desmond Tutu, records the cataclysmic inner struggles of that April day. On the one hand South African blacks were being allowed to vote for the first time in the life of the nation. They were overjoyed to the point of delirium. On the other hand, they had lived with reprisals for so long that some feared that the whole day was a set-up for an even more crushing blow. South African whites voted because they always had. Many supported the change and voted for a new South Africa, even amidst the growing sense of betrayal of the system that had so benefitted them, and many of them feared the reprisals awaited them from newly empowered blacks. In the World Community optimists heralded the day as the end of yet another oppressive regime in the world. Pessimists and realists who had seen what had happened in other similar situations were far less hopeful. They predicted a bloodbath as the newly enfranchised blacks pushed their hated oppressors into the south sea.

But it just didn't happen. Oh, yes, there were the excesses of the day, but nothing of the bloody aftermath everyone feared. Far better than the pessimists, even more than what even the optimists hoped, something happened that was totally new in human history.

It was clear that all were victims of a system gone wrong, the great question was how to set it right. Tutu and Mandela saw two impossible extremes. On the one hand cruel justice had been dished out on Nazi war criminals in the Nuremburg Trials, and the result was only more fear and less reconciliation. On the other hand, calls for blanket amnesty were hardly honest with the horrendous pain the country had experienced, both the pain of the oppressed, and the damage to the conscience of the oppressors. They chose instead the knife-edge of the middle ground. They created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, tasked with the profound work of reconciling a people alienated from itself. It functioned on two principles. First, amnesty may be granted only to those who in good faith came completely clean with their deeds, and restitution was something negotiated between the perpetrator and the victim. There just would be no reprisal.

It was astoundingly successful. More often than not the experience of victims being able to tell their story in a context of support and truth, combined with hearing the perpetrators tell the full story of their deeds and ask for forgiveness was enough to have both leave the room arm in arm, both delighting in their newfound freedom and friendship! The nation of South Africa realized that the way forward had to be the way of forgiveness.

Well, maybe it wasn't the first time in human history. The very first time took place a couple of millennia earlier. This time it was not a nation that was alienated from itself, it was a whole creation. It was not just political and economic, it was cosmic. Jesus also faced the possibilities. When Jesus rose from the dead He could have marched into Jerusalem at the head of his disciples' army, stormed the Temple and seized the High Priest. Pilate's palace would have been next, followed by Herod's stronghold of Caesarea, and then, with the Armies of Heaven behind Him, He could have marched on Rome itself. What could have stopped the King of Kings from asserting His place? Or He could have stood in the middle of the air and pronounced forgiveness for all of creation, for we knew not what we did in killing the King of Glory, He could have whisked us all into heaven, and lived happily ever after.

But these were also impossible options. The first would have been to reduce His kingdom to a kingdom of the earth, built on the same systems of power that have produced such mixed results for us, and the second would have been to obliterate our part of the deal, short-circuiting our engagement in the process. Instead He chose something radically different, something in-between—in good Anglican style! To the fearful men who ran to his grave He sent an angel to send them into Galilee instead. Galilee, where it all started, and from where it would all now once more begin, Galilee of the Gentiles, shadow of the world-encompassing mission to come. To the faithful woman who wanted to find his broken body he called her by name; personal, warm and present! “Mary!” In the grand scheme of things Peter, James and the other disciple, Mary and the women, were no less guilty than the Pharisees and the Soldiers. But in the resurrection God walked the knife-edge of forgiveness with us. Cruel and harsh justice was set aside, with its inevitable end of winners and losers where in the end all lose, as was mere unthinking amnesty with it's Pollyanna forgetfulness. Instead God opted for reconciliation, whose end is relationship, purpose and fulfillment!

You would almost think that Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu had heard of that story before! In fact, there were others, like the young Welshman named Patrick, caught by Irish slave raiders in the 6th century who escaped and then return to Ireland at the risk of capital punishment to win the land for Christ; and J. Hudson Taylor who gave his life to share Christ with the Chinese and is remembered there to this day; or 5 young men who landed on a gravel bar along the Curaray River in eastern Ecuador half a century ago, and gave their lives to reach the warlike and violent Waorani who now follow Christ; and Bruce Oleson who contracted malaria to reach the unreachable Motilone of Venezuela. The list literally goes on and on and on.

Yes, Tutu and Mandela's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is unique in the way it reconciled a nation to itself, built as it was on Christian forgiveness, but the reconciliation of the world through forgiveness has been happening countless times and in countless ways throughout the world. You’ve lived it, and if you believe in the resurrection you’re called to live it in ever greater circles around you. Every instance is unique, yet every instance is built ultimately on one great moment between God and His creation, the resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ.

90 Degrees and Other Expressions of Hope

2011-04-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

The Great Vigil of Easter, April 23, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

90 degree angles can get you in trouble, especially when they're not 90 degrees. But we're all 10 feet tall and bulletproof when we're in our mid 20's, and I knew better. We had gone upriver to go hunting, some friends and I.

The river ran perpendicular to the airstrip—at least at that point in the river. And the airstrip was always directly lined up in front of the mission's DC-3 when it flew in from the mountains to the west, which means it had to be oriented east-west. So the river ran north, right? We rode up the river all day in a motor canoe and stopped where the oil companies had blazed a perfectly straight seismic testing trail through the tangle of the jungle. It hit the river at a right angle which means it must be—are you still with me? East-west.

One of my friends, Carl, went with me hunting one morning. We heard game off the side of the trail and followed--making sure to cut directly away from the path at a 90 degree angle, so now we were headed south. We lost the game and headed back—we turned directly around and promptly got totally lost! (Later when I got to a map I discovered that none of the angles I figured were 90 degrees in actuality were!)

I tell you, the feeling of being lost in the Amazon jungle with nothing but miles and miles of trackless jungle around you is perhaps just a bit like Good Friday.

By happenstance, in our wanderings, we approached obliquely to a strange opening in the jungle. Simply because we thought we could get our bearings better we decided to step into the cleared area. Lo and behold, we stood once again on the seismic trail, not 50 yards from where we had left it. Relief is hardly the word. In a word, we understood Easter Sunday!

Tonight we celebrate the same sense of hope in the darkness, but on a cosmic scale. The little ones we baptize this night pass not just from the vastness of the Amazon onto a known trail, but out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. And we, in reaffirming our baptismal covenant, remind ourselves and them of just what we are doing.

Therefore the Covenant begins with the Apostle's Creed:

I believe in God, is the first light in the darkness.

I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, is the rays of sunshine bursting through the gloom.

I believe in the Holy Spirit embraces the coming light with joy and gladness!

And then we promise to live in a way that gives expression to that hope in the form of 5 promises:

To live in the faith community of the Church, (To stick together, even when we feel we're lost)

To mould our lives after the pattern of Jesus Christ, (To follow the compass, even when it seems wrong)

To share the knowledge of Christ with the world, (getting others to look at the map, too)

Share the love of Christ with the world in acts of service, (sharing our compass)

Struggle for justice and peace--the values of the Kingdom of God, (urge one another to follow the map)

I thank God that we found our way out of the jungle that day, but I thank God more for bringing us out of the jungle of darkness, into the glorious Kingdom of God's Son, who is our light, and our path!

One in Life, One in Death

2011-04-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

Good Friday, April 22, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

Earthquake and darkness, the very cosmos looks on as its Creator is murdered by His creation. It is the world's most cataclysmic self-contradiction, and creation itself cannot but shudder. Whatever got into God that He might allow such a thing? What great divine hick-up allowed such freedom to humanity, such audacity, such moral expanse, to be able to spit in the face of the fountain of one's being? How can it be that the creature could threaten his own livelihood thus? And yet, somehow, our faith bids us call this Friday "good." Was it good that we nailed the King of Righteousness to the Cross? Absolutely not! It was humanity's greatest evil, our deepest depths of depravity. Was it good that we stood there and taunted our salvation even as he died? Absolutely not! So few, so few had even an inkling of what was going on and beat their breasts in holy fear.

We call this day "good" because ultimately the joke is on us, not God. Our greatest efforts to hold God at bay only resulted in Him being closer than ever. Such is the great surprise of sin.

This day is good because in this moment God cannot be closer. It was humanity that killed the Christ, we imagine that we can take control over our Creator, the ultimate treason, the final betrayal. As if pitting petty god against petty god, we imagine we fought him and won the day, and all the while we wonder at how he does not return our hostility, proving thereby, that He is not over against, but one with our spirits.

It was humanity that killed the Christ. We, today's humanity, continue to kill the Christ in every act of rebellion against Him, in every act of hatred toward His creatures, no matter who or what they are, in every act of selfishness or thoughtlessness, we return to nail Him there. We nail Him down where he can't get away, right in the midst of our immorality. We prove Him to be one with our souls.

It was humanity that killed the Christ. We submit the immortal to mortality. After all, as mortals we could only perpetrate on Him what we had to give. He willingly joins us in our dying. We prove Him to be one with our created bodies. What a serendipity that today is also Earth Day. The earth that was entrusted to humanity as stewards, testifies to the job we've done by its response on that first dark Friday, and reminding us that the way we treat our God is reflected in how we treat His creation. The two are intertwined and cannot be separated.

On this day Jesus died for our sins, and for the broken creation itself, that as Paul says in Romans 8, it might with us taste of resurrection. On this Day, behind and beyond and through our evil deeds, God has acted. As God joined us in our depths, so and only so can He take us to the heights, and therefore we call this Friday good.

Eating and Drinking

2011-04-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

Maundy Thursday of Holy Week, April 21, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

I have a watch that is both digital and analog. It has an electronic chip in it that keeps track of all kinds of things with great accuracy: It tells the time, it tells the phase of the moon, it tells the temperature, it tells you the time in selected cities of your choice, it has a timer and a stopwatch and all those bells and whistles. It does it with millions of 0's and 1's that all answer one very logical question: Is it on or is it off? Yes, or no?

It also has a face with real hands that go around and around. My ancient brain registers quickly what time it is in relation to where the hands on the clock are. It has a digital read-out, but I never look at it. The symbolic value of the hands quickly wires around the numbers and gives me a relative time--good enough for me.

These two ways of calculating, analog and digital, parallel two ways of approaching religious rites. We approach them analytically, we tease out the theology of them, we line up ideas one after another in cause and effect relationships and we group ideas together because they are similar in important ways. We also approach them analogically. We sense the mystery, we are taken by the multi-valenced power of the symbol, we sense connections that are neither logical nor illogical, but just are.

Tonight we celebrate, more than anything else, Jesus' institution of the Lord's Supper. When He did it He recast part of the Seder or Passover meal, but shortly after His death and resurrection, when the numbers of Gentiles increased, the church's understanding of it deepened and broadened to lay the foundation of what we have today. Let's take a look at the celebration of the Eucharist through these two lenses, the analytical and the analogical.

The analytical understanding of the Eucharist fills libraries full of textbooks on the theology of the Eucharist, but it can mostly be boiled down to some basic concepts. The Eucharist is a participation in the ministry of Jesus Christ. It is a way of touching once again that eternal reality of Christ's death and resurrection, and allowing it to form our Christian living. Why it is done as a meal harks back to Jesus' use of a meal and eating images, but if you think that we are what we eat it makes more sense. We nourish our souls on these realities, and let the power of the Spirit so conferred empower our living.

There are basically three approaches to understanding what Jesus' death and resurrection do for us. One is juridical, and it goes like this:

God is holy, God cannot abide anything that is unholy. We sinned, rendering us unholy. But God wants to be in relationship with us anyway. But we can't do anything about our un-holiness, so God did instead. Jesus takes our un-holiness on Himself on the cross and pays the price we could not pay so that we could be reconciled to God.

This one saw its heyday in the Middle Ages and up through contemporary evangelical theology.

The next is pedagogical and it goes like this:

God is holy, but we sinned, rendering us unholy. Jesus came to teach us what holy living is all about, and gave Himself in self-sacrifice as an example of what the love of God is really like. We are called to die to sin and be raised to new life, just as Jesus was, albeit in a smaller way.

This one got its start in the early Church and found a stronghold in the Eastern Church.

The last is relational and it goes like this:

God is holy and cannot abide anything unholy. When we sinned and were rendered unholy the relationship between God and humanity was damaged. Jesus came as the required sacrifice to reconcile us back to God. When we are baptized and when we partake of the Eucharist we are accepting what God has offered, a renewed relationship.

This one is Jewish through and through, informing the earliest Church's Eucharistic theology, and is experiencing a resurgence in the last 30 years or so.

The analogical understanding of the Eucharist is more of an approach than an understanding. We see bread and we see wine, we taste bread and we taste wine.

We do so shoulder to shoulder with our fellow-Christians. We experience that fundamental life-giving experience of eating and know that the experience is more than just eating material food. Eating is nurturing, Jesus nurtures us with His own self, His own body and blood, Jesus calls us to be His body in the world, which means that it is ourselves that we see on the altar, offered to God as a sacrifice of praise, and it is us in union with Jesus that we experience when we partake of the Holy Meal. We find that afterwards we are linked to one another in a fundamental way, we find that we know the same reality together, that of the renewed life of Christ within us, and we face the same challenge together, that of carrying this presence that we have come to know out into the world in the power we have received.

What does it all mean, then? Either way, analytically or analogically, we finally arrive at the same point. In this meal Jesus does something deep within us that unites us to Himself, empowers us to be His presence in a broken world, and sends us out to reconcile the world to Himself. And this is exactly what He did when He offered Himself on the cross, and then rose again 3 days later. So it is fitting to celebrate this meal this night, for tomorrow we celebrate His death so that on Easter we might celebrate His triumphant resurrection!

Connect the Dots, a Palm Sunday Story

2011-04-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

Palm Sunday, April 17, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

Hello, my name is Judah and I am a temple Scribe. My job is to copy down meticulously the texts on the sacred scrolls, and to teach what they say to the people in the Temple. I apprenticed this job from my father Jehoachim when I was 13. Now I am old and grey, I have been copying down the sacred words for the last 55 years. Yes, it grows tedious sometimes, and I am tempted to think I know it all by now, but I love my work, and something happened just the other day here in Jerusalem that set me thinking. It leaves me wondering if perhaps after 55 years I have not really truly read the Holy Scriptures.

You see, Jerusalem seems to be a magnet for every fool who thinks he knows something about the law. The people are eager to learn, they flock to whatever teacher stands on their corner to preach. So it was with one Jesus, of Galilee. They say he was born in Bethlehem, that He is descended from the great King David, but he was raised in Galilee, and there is where he had his biggest following. Here in Jerusalem he drew the attention of the Temple officials; seems he stepped on their toes over something. The guy was really pretty gutsy. Just over a week ago he entered the city on a donkey. A bunch of people got real excited and started to proclaim him King, like David, sent by God. We'd like a king, really, someone who could liberate us from Rome, and some people thought he might do that, but it didn't end that way.

The temple officials got really upset over him, really bent out of shape. Turns out one of his disciples wasn't too cozy with him either, and turned him over to the authorities. And the authorities got Pilate to put him to death. Awful shame, I sort of liked the guy. But the thing that has me thinking, that has me really rather tied up in knots are the words. I've been a man of words all my life. And when I see a parallel between our words and the Words of Holy Scripture I know something important is about to happen.

Well, when you look carefully you can see some rather amazing ways that this guy's life parallels the Words of God. Rumor has it that the disgruntled member of his band, one Judas, was given 30 pieces of silver for turning Jesus over. And then afterwards in remorse he threw the money back into the temple. The prophet Zechariah took 30 pieces of silver from the sheep merchants for having badly shepherded the sheep. He took it and put it back in the temple treasury. It's almost as if this disciple was the bad shepherd and the one sold is the good guy...makes a man think.

What's more, it is rumored that this Jesus knew about Judas' plot ahead of time, but walked right into the trap anyway. Now anyone who could heal the lame and blind and even return people from the dead would have known what he was doing. Isaiah the prophet talks about the leader of Israel "going as a sheep to the slaughter," and giving his back to those who strike and his cheek to those who pull out the beard…maybe...makes a man think.

And it is said that he told his followers ahead of time that they would desert him (which they did,) quoting this scripture: “I will strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock will be scattered." Now this comes again from Zechariah in which God Himself strikes the shepherd of Israel for being a bad shepherd. But this man wasn't the bad guy. Or was he putting himself forward as some sort of sacrificial lamb or something? It makes me think of Isaiah again. And then, he goes right to where he always goes, like he doesn't even care he is walking into Judas' trap, when Judas comes with the temple guards and a mob of thugs one of Jesus' followers fights back—and Jesus stops him. Sounds dumb, but the idea of not returning violence for violence is clear in the prophets, I can't cite you passages off the top of my head, but I assure you it’s there.

And then you know what Judas did? Seems almost poetic justice, but there is more. They say he went out and hanged himself. King David had a friend who betrayed him and then hanged himself over it. Makes you wonder about just who this man Jesus really was! And the temple authorities (I saw this with my own eyes) bought the field of a potter as a cemetery for foreigners. Blood money it was, and now it is even more so. What is it about this guy that the story just won't quit?

Now this, however, is the really spooky part. Jesus reportedly told one of his other followers, one Peter, that he would betray him three times before the rooster crowed. I was in the courtyard, I saw it happen. The maid questioned him, and then another guy, and then the maid again. Each time Peter said he didn't know Jesus (the one he said he wouldn't desert!) And then, as if on cue, the rooster crowed.

And then, the temple authorities got the clearance to have him crucified. And Pilate put that mocking title on the cross, "This is the King of the Jews," as if the Romans weren't cruel enough, but had to rub it in, as if to say, "This is what we will do to anyone who claims to be King of the Jews." So much for liberation from Rome—but then why all these signs?

And then Jesus died really suddenly, and the temple, the curtain that separates the Holy of Holies ripped from top to bottom. You know what that means? The holy place is essentially desecrated. Anyone can just look in there on the most holy things. It wasn't any trick of human action. That veil is really thick, it's 10 meters high, and it ripped from top to bottom, as if God Himself was ripping it. This man predicted that the temple would be destroyed, maybe it has already started.

Then it was dark in the middle of the day for three hours. The last time something like that happened the Israelites were at war in the desert, and as long as Moses held his hands in the air the sun did not set, so that two men had to hold his hands up so that we could win. Makes you wonder just who won the final play now, Jesus or Pilate.

And then the ground shook and the graves of holy men of old have been opened and there are no bones inside. It's as if they have been raised to life by this man's death. You know, the guy is supposed to have predicted that he would die and rise again in 3 days, so the temple authorities have asked for a guard to seal and guard the tomb until the day after tomorrow. But in view of it all, you just wonder how much power a Roman guard and seal can have with such a man. If the man said he was coming back and all this has happened, who’s to stop him?

You line the pieces up and connect the dots...and it just leaves you wondering.

Rod and Staff

2011-04-06T15:38:00.000-07:00

Lent 4, April 3, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

Psalm 23 is one of the most well-known passage of Scripture. It is used almost universally at funerals! Appropriate as it may be for funerals, it has something to say to us today as well, on this 4^th Sunday of Lent. In contrast to today, originally it is believed that it was probably used as a psalm of thanksgiving. It was probably used at a feast or dinner party thrown by a worshipper who has made a thanksgiving offering to the Lord in the temple, and has gathered later together with family and friends to share in the meal provided by the sacrificial animal.

What does Psalm 23 have to say to us on this day, the 4^th Sunday of Lent? Let’s look at the images and the flow of this beloved psalm.

There are two primary images in this psalm. Throughout the Old Testament a shepherd is an image for a king. A good king was supposed to provide for and protect his people, as a shepherd is supposed to provide for and protect his flock. David, a good king, is called the Shepherd of Israel, and in Ezekiel the prophet rails against the shepherds of the people that instead of protecting and feeding, consume and scatter the flock. Bad times come on the life of the flock when the shepherd is hardly distinguishable from the wolf!

Verses 2 and 3 tell us how the Lord is shepherd. The phrase, "He revives my soul," can be perhaps better translated, "He keeps me alive." He provides those things which a sheep needs to stay healthy and thrive: He provides pasture in which the sheep can feed,

He provides water that they can drink, and he provides a safe place for them to rest. He does so "for His name sake," that is, because it is of His nature to do so. It comes naturally. For us Christians, Jesus tells us in John 10 that He is the fulfillment of what even David pre-figured. It reminds us that in His death and resurrection He cares for us in ways no earthly king or shepherd ever could, and that in the life of the Church we have all that we need to be part of Jesus' flock.

The scene shifts in the last part of the psalm to the scene of host. The language shifts from third person to second. Now, as the worshipper is host to his family and friends, he reminds himself and all present that really God is the host, and he is the guest, provided for in the presence of threat (enemies) who, because of God's presence, are rendered harmless. The word, "follow" in vs. 6 is better translated, "pursue." God's goodness and mercy shall pursue the worshipper, as he dwells in the presence of God forever. God the heavenly host actively engages us, tries hard to get our attention, seeks to impinge upon our lives. God wants us!

It seems that in all the psalms of Lent there is a hinge, a turning point at which we turn from adoration to a more Lenten theme. In this psalm such a point also exists. You may have wondered why the psalmist talks about the shepherd's rod and staff. We normally think about the shepherd's crook by which he can pull wayward sheep back into the flock.

But that dates from the Middle Ages. This is a more ancient, and perhaps less accessible image. Arnobius the Younger, a bishop of the 5th century in Gaul, is known mainly for his commentary on the Psalms. He writes, “He has a rod by which he warns the delinquent ones. He has a staff by which he succors the penitent.” I remember hearing a meditation on this psalm that keyed off that little image of the rod and staff. The author drew out that little distinction and then said, "Lord, please, a little less rod and a little more staff!" And that is the significance of this Psalm on this Sunday.

4th Sunday of Lent traditionally called "Mothering Sunday." It comes from the traditional Roman Catholic lectionary that assigned to this day the Gospel lesson about the true mother, sisters and brothers of Christ to be the ones that keeps His word. We are brothers and sisters of Christ, and the church is the mother of the Christian, that nurtures him or her in the life of grace. The lectionary has changed and we did not read that Gospel lesson, but this Psalm is very fitting. Again, Arnobius the Younger writes, “We have in the previous psalm the tribulation of the passion. In this one let us receive the joy of the resurrection.” There is a shift today. The focus is not so much on the disciplines of Lent but on their end, the light of Easter is just beginning to dawn on the liturgical horizon.

Today we shift from rod to staff. Lord, a little less rod and a little more staff! I am hoping that for you who are participating in our Lenten program this year. You will find that it offers some of each. If you are doing the Love Dare there is some rod. It is not always easy to do what will enhance your marriage. It will challenge your ways of being and doing. But there is also some staff. There is the response of your spouse, the enhanced love and respect you have for one another, and the beauty of renewal. The same applies if you are doing the Fireproof Your Life program. There will be the disciplines of a more orderly lifestyle patterned on your faith, and there will also be the joys of a clearer mind, conscience and perhaps even calendar!

For those of you who are not, the same principle applies. The disciplines of Lent are not meant to beat you down. You are not merely scum on which the Prince of Heaven deigns to honor you by placing his divine foot on your neck. They are meant to make you a better person and a better Christian, better able to live the meaning of your faith in this world, better able to share in the redemption of your world.

The substance of the Christian hope is this: As surely as Easter follows Good Friday, rod will always be followed by staff.

A Promise Sure

2011-04-06T15:37:00.001-07:00

Lent 5, April 10, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

Psalm 130 is a Psalm of ascent. It was used procession up to the Temple. It may sound a little strange for that use, exclaiming as it does one's dereliction before the Lord, but though the psalm starts in the depths, the end of where it is going is reflected in the first word: Out. It is out of the depths that the psalmist has come. It makes it especially appropriate this 5th Sunday of Lent. Next week begins Holy Week. It is the celebration of Jesus' descent to the depths, and His victorious rise to the very heights of heaven.

The Psalm again has two great themes. The first one draws its power from the experience of the Exodus. In the exodus when the Hebrews stood with the Red Sea blocking their escape from Egypt, and Pharaoh’s army bearing down behind them, they were in the depths of despair. They were too weak to stand up to Pharaoh,

So the only way forward was into the waters, the waters that to them symbolized death, destruction and chaos. It seemed surely a lose-lose situation. It was out of that place that God brought them into a new day.

As expressed by this psalm, then, it describes by extension the experience of the guilty soul. Our guilt puts us in the depths, for if the Lord were to note what we have done, what hope would there be? It is only because we know the Lord heard the cries of the Hebrews in the depths and delivered them that we can conceive of crying out to Him in our distress.

The second one is in the last verse. It is a hope claimed even though it is not yet fully realized. It is in that sense what theologians call an eschatological hope, for it hopes for a new day, a new dawn, the fullness of redemption.

The Lenten hinge-point in this psalm is in vs. 4. Waiting is what one does when one is in one place and needs to be in another, be it between Pharaoh and the other side of the Red Sea, or between one's guilt and one's forgiveness, or between the limitedness of this world and the limitlessness of the next.

It is in one sense the place of the Christian. Jesus said we are in the world but not of it. The Gospel Lesson gives us multiple images of it. We are like the on-looking Jews, blind to the reality of God's resurrection power, yet about to be confronted by it. We are like Mary and Martha, mourning the death of their brother and protector, yet soon to be restored to joy. We are like Lazarus, dead to this world, but soon to be alive in Christ. We are, in short, in the depths, yet we have hope not to remain there, we wait with yearning, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.

The hidden treasure for us here is in the tense of the verb in vs. 7. The psalmist does not say, "With him there will be plenteous redemption,” but "With him there is plenteous redemption." It is as if the promise of redemption is not entirely in the future, though it is not entirely realized yet either. As in so many other places in the Psalms the author claims the reality of the promise as a present reality even in the midst of the darkness.

This is the beauty and power of an eschatological hope. It transcends time and space, because the hope is ultimately located in God, who transcends time and space. So as the writer of the Hebrews tells us, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is the willingness to live now as if the promise is as good as delivered, a little bit of heaven lived while yet on earth, an in-breaking of celestial life and health into the brokenness of our world. Our waiting is not just for something that is entirely yet to come, it is a waiting for the full revelation of what we already have received.

So now as we approach the whole drama of Holy Week, how, then, shall we live? We know from Palm Sunday what the secret ending will be. We can freely mourn on Good Friday because we know Easter Sunday cannot be prevented. We can do so with renewed hope. It is tempting to think that the assurance of forgiveness cheapens our confession, but that is to miss the point entirely. The person who knows he can swim need not fear the deep water. The sinner who knows he is forgiven need not fear the depths of the whole raw truth of his guilt. Precisely because we are assured of forgiveness can we be fully honest with our sinfulness.

So I challenge you to be fearless. In your marriage, in your friendships, in your work and in your play, fear not the depths. Be honest and present, be clear and engaged, be thoughtful, intentional even at the risk of being wrong, for you know from the beginning that you have a friendship with God.

In your politics and in your economics, fear not the depths. Read the opposition with an open mind. Talk openly with someone with whom you disagree. Consider the ethics of your dollars and your votes, for you know from the beginning what is the end of all earthly kingdoms.

In this last week of Lent, fear not the depths. Confess your sins bravely and completely, plunge to the depths of the ways you are breaking your world rather than fixing it, dive to the bottom of the murk of your noisy, addicted patterns, wade through the muck and the mire, for you know from the beginning what is the end.

We cry out from the depths because we know we are already heard.

Ode to Nimrod, a Ballad

2011-04-06T14:38:00.001-07:00

An owl’s quick wing-beat silent as light

Sent two fledgling hawks out into the night

Orphaned and destitute, baby-fat carried

Them out into nothing but hunger’s hard bite.

They wandered far past the nest’s comforting view

Searched for anything edible, searched for the clue

That their parents’ short lives had endeavored to show,

How their powerful feet held the promise of food.

And nothing but thorns and mesquite and hot sand,

‘Til a kind-hearted human reached out his skilled hand,

And carried the two to his home’s bounty high,

Unrecognized hope buoyed their thin bellies’ band.

A phone call conveyed the news far, far away,

And another skilled human was soon on his way.

One’s world changed forever, in lands to the north,

But his brother soon languished and in the dust lay.

Nimrod was eager to do what induced

The man to produce a rich morsel of food.

He learned to come quickly to glove, lure and perch,

And to tolerate dogs, cars, TV and the hood.

Soon free again, flying along with his team

Of human and dogs and a beating stick lean,

He played at the game of hunting his prey,

And practiced his wing-beats from glove and high beam.

One day when the wind was especially strong,

A burst of it drove him all tumbling along,

Into a fence where starvation-weak bones,

Broke quickly and crippled his powerful toes.

The man’s friendly cohort and hunting companion

Was also skill-handed as veterinarian.

Soon the snapped bone was trussed up in a brace,

With two months of tedious recuperation.

Then six months of fat and full lazy days

Saw baby-hawk feathers soon all replaced

With noble clean feathers of nature’s full force

Of just what a Harris’ hawk’s world has to face.

New on his wings, and quick with his feet,

September’s winds saw him launching so fleet,

To learn the full force of a hawk’s fierce-some flight,

And to catch and to kill, to tear and to eat.

The chill of fall promises cold winter rains,

The speed of his wings and his quick-footed gains

A promise of greatness, deep from within,

To high-flying glory sometime to attain.

He learned to catch grasshoppers quick in the air,

He learned to catch rabbits and mice with great flare.

Ducks would dive back to the safety of ponds,

He even once chased a fleet-running deer.

He also re-challenged the owl’s darkest hours,

And pulled noisy grackles from roosts in great hordes,

A spot-light on pigeons ensconced under bridges

Directed his flight to their grey cement towers.

One day when the human, the dogs and our star

Had not managed to roust any prey near or far,

To satisfy urges to kill and to eat

Took our hero again to the pigeons’ high lair.

The first one would surely have flown free and clear

But the hawk turned and snagged it aloft in mid-air.

The second one also soon tumbled to ground,

In ten minutes’ time twice victorious he fared.

One last pigeon remained, and instead of retreat,

The human’s desire for an e’en greater feat

Pitched the hawk against darkness and cold springtime wind.

The pigeon dodged quickly and sealed the defeat.

Battle-trance thoughtlessness quickened the hawk’s gait,

Like the owl of his youth he drove hard in pursuit.

And the air turned him upward and into the way

Of an oncoming motorist servant of fate.

The man hoped against hope that the hawk had gone high

And managed to top the oncoming car’s flight.

But no quick show of wings, no motion at all,

So he climbed up the bank to find tragedy nigh.

The broken and twisted remains of his friend

Lay hard on the pavement too still and too bent.

He picked up the remains of a promise cut short

And quickly drove home before tears stained his hand.

In good time the brave hunter was laid to his rest

On the ranch where he reclaimed his raptor’s bequest.

On twice-borrowed time, he had thrice challenged fate,

And to the risk taken had given his best.

His grave received softly his human’s hard grief

Shared on the shoulders of two friends’ belief

That all things that are done in this world below

Will in God’s endless tapestry come to relief.

pm, 4-5-2011

Being Sheep

2011-03-28T14:19:00.000-07:00

Lent 3, March 27, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, the Rev. Paul Moore

Our Lenten Psalm for this 3rd Sunday of Lent is Psalm 95. It was probably used liturgically like the Psalms of Ascent, as music for a procession to the Temple, recognizing God for who God is, and warning against rebellion against the heavenly King. But more specifically it is classed as what is called a psalm of enthronement. It has two parts: It speaks of God as King. He is King of all the gods of the Canaanites. He is King of creation, holding it in His hands. He is the God of the Exodus who saved His people through the "sea" on "dry land." Now His worshippers are like sheep with their shepherd—a common image for a good king. But that required a response from them. They are warned not be stiff-necked or hard-hearted, nor to turn to the gods of the nations, for there are consequences for rebellion, and those consequences are always enslaving. To this day, to be a Jew means to live one’s life as a faithful response to the Exodus.

The hinge between the two parts is the second half of Vs. 7. The key word is "today." Today is not yesterday, when the people rebelled at Meribah and Massah. Massah and Meribah both refer to a place in the Exodus wilderness wanderings where the people had no water. God provided water from a rock that satisfied their thirst and that of their livestock. But the place was called "Meribah.” Meribah means "quarrelling.” Here the people quarreled with the Lord. Every quarrel is at its root a challenge to authority.

Today, while it is the present and has not yet slipped into the immutable past presents the chance to choose once more. One can choose death in the wilderness again, in which case “today” becomes indistinguishable from “yesterday.” It may sound like a rather harsh judgment, but the issue is not God's arbitrary wrath. If I walk out into the West Texas sun and don't take any water I will dehydrate, and I could die. My choice to be foolish is my own choice, my death the reward of my foolishness. In the same way we are made for community with one another under the lordship of God. To choose to be one's own lord is to walk out into the wilderness, and to separate oneself from the source of life and rest.

But “today” can also be different from “yesterday.” Now is the only real time: The past is a memory, the future is yet to be determined. Now is the moment in history when you are radically free. Just as freely as we chose death we can choose a new day, in which life and rest come to us by choosing submission to God in Christ rather than the quarrel of self-determination.

Here, of course, is the Lenten message for us.

Lent always starts with the sovereignty of God. We must, in the final analysis, admit that we did not create ourselves. There is a God whose purposes will prevail either because of us or in spite of us. That God has revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Whereas we influence our destiny, ultimately it comes from beyond us, granted through that same Jesus Christ.

Lent must move us to respond to that truth. The thought that we owe allegiance to a higher power at first feels foreign to us Americans dedicated to liberty, but it is a true thought, and ultimately is not foreign to personal freedom at all. We have freedom to choose to quarrel, and we have freedom to choose to submit. Therein lies our freedom. The God of Jesus Christ is the master we must choose if we are to choose our own truest selves. To be Christian is to live one’s life as a response to the Incarnation.

I spoke in a previous sermon about a Christian teacher who claims that American Christians are essentially practicing agnostics. These are harsh words, to be sure, but perhaps truer than we would like to admit. There is one aspect about this psalm that you may not have noticed, yet it challenges the very fiber of our individualistic American psyches. In no verse of this psalm are we addressed as individuals, everywhere we respond to God as a group, and God works with us as a group.

Perhaps we show our agnosticism most clearly in our attitudes towards the family of God. I often hear, “I don't need to attend Church, I can worship God anywhere.” The truth is that we actually can, but it's like trying to stay healthy by not eating any vegetables. Some claim no affiliation, but worship equally at all churches, and it sounds magnanimous, but it's really more culturally American than it is Biblically Christian. A constant diet of "any church" is like trying to build a marriage by dancing with everyone at the party.

There are currently more than 3000 recognized Christian denominations in this land. We split over theology faster than ranches near the suburbs and atoms in a reactor. But choosing a church based on one's own individual ideas of what constitutes good theology rather misses the point. It is undeniably important to every church to be built on a solid theological foundation, but churches are groups of people in relationship with one another and with God in Jesus Christ with the mission to bring the world into that relationship. They are not propositional platforms for one's own imperfect formulations of ontological truth.

God calls us into relationship as a group, and it is in the context of the relationships we have with one another that we live out our relationship with God. The word "Sheep" is both plural and singular. What a happy theological coincidence!

I submit to you that this Psalm is a radical Lenten call to community. To be the community that worships the King of creation, the King of our redemption, and the King of our salvation, not only by gathering in worship every Sunday morning, but by living in harmony and unity with one another and vital engagement with the world around us all week long.

The Tyranny of Second Best

2011-03-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

Lent 2, March 20, 2011St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, the Rev. Paul Moore

Psalm 121 is the second of a series of psalms called the Psalms of Ascent. They are usually thought to be used in procession as worshippers approached the Holy Mount on which the Temple stood. They tend to be upbeat and hopeful, it seems almost strange to be reciting a Psalm of Ascent during Lent. But on closer inspection it fits rather nicely.

In this psalm there are two predominant images, that of the hills, and that of the Lord. The Hills represent everything that is penultimate in life. One interpretation of "the hills" in vs. 1 is in reference to the "high places" of the Old Testament. These were shrines located at the tops of strategic hills, dedicated to the “baals,” the gods of water and fertility of the Canaanites. Against these the prophets railed incessantly. Why? Because Israel's God is different. Israel's God is not merely the god of recurrent seasons, of the necessities of agricultural life, or of locations precious to the worshippers. The gods of these things are not ultimate. They are the gods of the created order, and of recurrent events, and of local places. But Israel's God revealed Himself in the Exodus, a breaking into human history and altering the direction of things, a once-for-all revelation. Therefore Israel's God, while concerned with agriculture, is just as concerned with politics, that is, with issues of justice and peace and social relations. The psalmist might be saying, then, Do I look to the local gods for my help? No, my help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.

Another interpretation applies "the hills" to the very hills upon which Jerusalem sits, and therefore to the Holy Mount itself. Interesting, then, that the psalmist denies even this hill as the source of his help. His help is still from the Lord, the one worshipped on the Holy Mount. The result is the same. Even the Holy Mount itself is penultimate, it points to something greater than itself, it points to the true source of help, the Lord Himself.

The Lord is described in the bulk of the text of the psalm. The Lord is the maker of heaven and earth. He is not merely the controller of local seasonal shifts and changes, He is not the just one whose hand is on the floodgates of the rain. He is the maker of both of those things! As sure as the Lord is master of heaven and earth, so sure is His care for His worshippers. Slumber, that element of created life that steals from us our awareness for a requisite time, is not something to which He is subject, for He is subject to no one and no thing.

The movements of the procession up to the Holy Mount are no different from the movements of the soul toward heaven. Over all the Lord is the guardian, the providential presence guiding and sustaining and keeping. The Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun, with its Middle-Eastern or Texan heat will not overcome you, neither need you fear the sun-gods of the Egyptians, nor the moon-god with links to orchards and fruit in Canaan, nor even Shachar and Shalim, twin gods of dawn and dusk, the morning and evening stars. We might say in today's world, the gas prices, or the stock market, or the cost of health care, or votes in Congress about funding. It is the Lord who will keep you safe from all evil. The Lord shall watch over your going out from the Temple into the business of daily living, and your return to the temple for worship, renewal and strengthening. God, the creator of heaven and earth, is Lord of not just part of life, but all of it.

We find our Lenten theme in the transition from vs. 1 to vs. 2. The spiritual masters called it an apophatic move, away from that which is unessential, stripping away of secondary things, to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. The Lenten message then, on this second Sunday of Lent, is to fearlessly forge beyond all that is penultimate. There is no hill or high place, there is no god of sun, moon, or economy of this world, there is no deity of fame or fortune whose allegiance is equal to the allegiance due to the God of Heaven and Earth. It is not that these penultimate things are bad, only that when our hope is in them we lose sight of the true source of help, and end up like Nicodemus, in the night, asking questions to which we cannot understand the answers. It is only when the God of Heaven and Earth is our help that all the rest takes its proper place.

Do not look to the hills. Sacrifice their magnificence, their splendor and their seductive attractiveness. Settle for nothing less than the Maker of Heaven and Earth.

The Ecstasy of Forgiveness

2011-03-28T14:17:00.000-07:00

Lent 1, March 13, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, the Rev. Paul Moore

Psalm 32, is a psalm of thanksgiving for the joy of forgiveness. It is very fitting for Lent, very fitting for the first Sunday of Lent. Let us consider for a moment 4 themes reflected in the Psalm, ideas that contrast or complement one another.

Water: In this Psalm water is both good and bad. The psalmist speaks of his unrepentant state as being dried up as in the heat of summer. The heat of the Middle-Eastern sun is like the heat of west Texas in summer. Ugly as it might seem, think of a desiccated animal on the side of the road in west Texas. It lasts forever because not even the buzzards and the raccoons will eat it, but it doesn't do anything any good, either. It just lays there as a constant reminder of death. This is the effect of unconfessed sin. It dries up the soul, it cuts one off from happiness and freedom. It alienates and desiccates and leaves one feeling empty and useless. And the pain of it all is intended to drive one to confession.

Because of God's mercy and forgiveness, then the psalmist claims God as his hiding place, because of the flood of relief and joy known in forgiveness, therefore, the psalmist says, the faithful (those who know what forgiveness is and means) will make their prayer to God. When the great waters overflow they shall not reach them. We have seen images all week of the flooding along the east coast and mid-west; people whose lives and homes have been devastated not by too little water, but by too much. Where cars should be driving boats float, where kids should be playing people are being rescued. Too much water in the Bible is a symbol of chaos, death and destruction, all the opposites of the joy, life and reconciliation of forgiveness. Those who seek forgiveness come into a quality of life that puts the problems of life in their proper perspective. Those who know the forgiveness of the Lord will not be swept away by the issues of daily living.

Forgiveness: Guilt is one reality, forgiveness is quite another. Guilt alienates. The psalmist writes, “When I held my tongue my bones withered away.” The implications later in the psalm are that the relationships of the unforgiven guilty person are forced, like a horse that but for a bridle would not stay near its owner. It is a fitting image. Who wants to be with one who groans all day long?

Notice, however, that God has not left the sinner, for His hand is heavy upon him. What God wants more than anything else is reconciliation, as Michael Card sings, "Love will fight us to be found." If guilt alienates, happiness belongs to the forgiven. It does not belong to the one who has the trophy wife, or the Lexus or high-ranking husband, or the 6-digit income, or all the toys of life, but to the forgiven. Why? Because we were made for community, and none of the above will bring one into community by itself. Offense alienates and brings sorrow, but forgiveness reconciles us into joy.

Speech: Silence may be golden, but sometimes speech is divine. Atahualpa Yupanqui, one of my favorite Argentine singers, has a song whose title translates, "I Rage at Silence." In it he describes in beautiful, haunting lyrics just what keeping silence has cost him. It cost him his rights, it cost him opportunities and beautiful chances, it cost him love. It cost him, in the end, the richness of life itself.

Truly, for every time I wished I had held my tongue I have two in which I wished I had spoken up, or said more than I did, or remembered to let someone know some piece of important information, some element of a situation they needed to know, but more importantly, what the other person meant to me. My late brother-in-law gave one of my sister's sons one of the greatest gifts a man can give. He died very unexpectedly one morning after sending the boy on an errand. The last thing he said to him, as he always did was, "I love you." Moments later, with the boy out of the house, he collapsed and died...and these are my nephew's final memories of the man he most admired in life. How much more, then, shall we speak up to God, tell God just what has not been said, tell God about the ugly truth, the buried garbage, and the rotten core. How can one know forgiveness if one has not first owned the truth of one's sin?

Community: Alienation is our unforgiven state, community is our reconciled home. There is a recurrent theme throughout these meditations. God wants to be in relationship with us. Why? Because God is the God of community. God is perfect community within the godhead, God created the world and us to be in community with Him, and the issue with the world is precisely the alienation that occurs when we violate our relationships, first with God, then with one another, and also with the rest of creation.

When there is alienation the only remedy, the only medicine for the sickness of our radical, existential loneliness, the only cure is forgiveness. Therefore Jesus came, therefore we are enjoined to seek forgiveness, therefore we are commanded to forgive others who have wronged us and work to rebuild the community lost with God, with each other and with the earth itself.

Kids Must Be Kids

2011-03-28T14:11:00.002-07:00

Abercrombie & Fitche is selling padded bikinis for pre-teen girls! No Way! What are they thinking? Is everything about nubility and those hormone-infused frenzies of the second and third decades of life? Let little girls be little girls. God knows they'll be big girls for a whole lot longer, let them cherish it while they can. Madeleine L'Engle, child author and one time head librarian at the Episcopal Library said very wisely once, "The church's best theologians are 8 years old." Let's not silence the precious voices of the wee wise ones by hurring them into psycological puberty before their time! I'm downright offended--if you feel like me stop buying anything from Abercrombie & Fitche for the next 6 months. They're doing it for the dollars, so let's make it not worth it.

Eyes Wide Open

2011-03-28T14:11:00.001-07:00

I think I finally got the last oak leaf out of the rectory pool, just in time for the catkins to begin falling. This is the double-ritual of central Texas when you have Live Oaks. You rake leaves in March and sweep up catkins in April. I’m always glad to get the last of the double-whammy picked up and composted. The water in the pool is not warm enough before they are gone. This chore tends to go hand-in-hand with the chores of Spring that announce that Summer is not far away.

If I’m not careful, however, these events go by without noticing them, I mean, really noticing them. When I stop and think about it, the Oak leaves all fell in the space of a week when normally it takes most of a month. The big Live Oaks at the seminary in Austin are about a week ahead of mine, due to reasons beyond my knowledge. The catkins seem furrier and more abundant this year than last. Are we in for another bumper crop of acorns this year? Are all these changes due to the two really cold spells we had this year, or some other reason? I do not know. But I bet my son Landon either knows or knows where to go to find out. He knows how to think about things like this.

It makes me think about taking a closer look at other things in my life, things like my marriage and the amount of time I spend doing what I do and my friendships and what I think of what is going on in the world. Our Lenten Program this year helps us to do that. Fireproof your Marriage takes that most important relationship in your whole life outside of your faith and strengthens it with the help of your faith. Fireproof Your Life focuses the truths of your faith on the different aspects of your life with the same intent. What is going on? Why? Is there something that you can expect from what is going on? Is there something that you wish to change?

Living with your eyes open like this is work. It asks questions you haven’t considered and requires thinking about things you’d rather treat on auto-pilot. Hopefully it is digging into areas that perhaps need attention and hasn’t had it lately. Hopefully these programs will help you know how to think about things like this.

Missing the Point

2011-03-08T11:58:00.000-08:00

Ash Wednesday, March 9, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

I recently heard a Christian teacher say that the majority of Christians today are really functional agnostics; he did not mean in the traditional sense of a belief that God is disconnected from human affairs, and that therefore humanity must get along with the light it has from the various wisdom sources. What he meant was more sinister, really.

We don’t think about God not really being engaged in human day-to-day living, that’s too big of an idea. What he meant was that we keep the influence of our faith out of our day-to-day living. When we are called upon to make decisions we do not orient those decisions by the dictates of our faith, but rather on cultural assumptions about the way things work. This person went on to say that we typically draw life lessons more readily from sports than from the Gospels, to the extent that Sunday Morning sports events draw a greater following than Sunday Morning worship. And we do not hear the voice of the churches protesting in any way what schools and sports clubs are doing to our primary worship time.

He attributes it to a breakdown in Christian formation; I see his point, but I see it as a lack of conversion. The mainline American Church still thinks that the Christian faith is one of those pillars of a good society. The faith exists to make sure we live well; it is one of the several pillars that support, explain and justify our way of life.

If that is the case then we've totally lost sight of Jesus Christ. Jesus was really strange for His day. On the one hand He wholeheartedly embraced the liberal Hellenistic influence on Judaism repudiated by the rich ruling (and traditionalist) class of Sadducees, and on the other he expounded a rigorist, over-the-top interpretation of the ancient teachings on morality. He was, in short, a radical, iconoclastic rabble-rouser! And He had nothing to say whatsoever about the American way of life.

Today's Gospel lesson is one of those rigorist interpretations of the ancient teaching. Isaiah taught us tonight that the fasts to which you call the people are not what God wants. God wants a fast of doing justice and loving mercy and living humbly. Jesus amplifies and expands this. He says, and I paraphrase, "Do your good works in such a way that God will reward you rather than the people." Another way of saying the same thing is, “The works of mercy and justice that God requires will not necessarily be the kind that this world's economy rewards, but your Father in Heaven will.”

Any time that works of justice and mercy are met with the approval of this world's economy there is room for suspicion. That suspicion lies precisely in the consequent inability to distinguish between the good of the Kingdom and one's self-directed ends. Let me illustrate: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently made a donation of $10M to the Liquidia Pharmaceutical Corporation for development of a malaria vaccine. On the surface this seems a very well-intentioned work of justice and mercy. Anyone who has had malaria will vouch for the need for a vaccine, and anyone who has taken the regular Quinine-based treatment will back it up—you wonder if the cure will kill you faster than the disease. But vaccines in developing countries are often out of reach of the people in the rural areas who most need it, they often come under the control of local government officials who use the leverage to garner favors unrelated to health issues, and you can be sure that for-profit corporations like Liquidia are not going to do this on the kind of scale needed to make a serious difference in malaria around the world. It’s a little like the fox in the hen-house. They make money off the cures as well! In the final analysis the only guaranteed good is the PR the pharmaceutical company and the donor receive.

Jesus had no interest in building a pillar of society. He had every interest in redeeming creation by bringing people into right relationship with God, with humanity and with creation, and especially at the expense of any sense of the absolute reign of the local economy. His is not one voice among many, but the ONE voice to which a real Christian first listens.

What acts, then, comprise God's chosen fast for you this Lent? Go ahead and give up your chocolate or beer, take up an exercise program or call your mother more often. These are good things, but unless cast in the right light they unwittingly miss the point. The point of Lent is not just to make you a better person but to make the world a better place, and "a better place" is defined in terms of the kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is where the values God stands for rule in hearts and minds and decisions about expenses and votes, and actions that benefit others for the sake of the creation they are.

The late Dr. Edmund Friedman, rabbi, Ph. D in psychology and noted family therapist, worked with dysfunctional family systems. He would take the healthiest person of the family and work with that person, thereby de-facto putting the whole family in therapy. St. Irenaeus said in the 3rd century that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Lent is therapy for incomplete living. By putting us in therapy to make us fully alive God de-facto puts the whole world in therapy.

So, this Lent we have two programs running side by side. One is called The Love Dare, and it's for couples. The other is called "Fireproof Your Life" and it’s designed for singles. Details are available in the Church office, the programs kick off the evening of March 23rd at 6:00 p.m. and run every Wednesday for 40 days. Sign up, show up, and do the work, and may God grant you a truly blessed Lent.

What does it really mean?

2011-02-16T16:42:00.001-08:00

This morning on Good Morning America they rolled a story about a teacher who blogged in very uncomplimentary ways about her students. She said she had intended the blog to be read only by her friends, but now she is suspended with pay while the school district for which she works investigates. Wow!

A: On one hand, anything you put on the internet is public property. Be it facebook, twitter, blogs or even e-mail. What you say is what gets read by who-knows-who. If you air your dirty laundry on the internet everyone is going to see it. If you air someone else's dirty laundry they're probably going to see it, too, and that, in my opinion, is a violation of trust.

B: On the other hand, perhaps she wasn't airing others' dirty laundry, but rather her own. One can argue that good teachers tend to command respect from their students, and uppity students (especially a relatively green one like her--she's been teaching only about 4 years) tend to get the best of one whose capacity to control the classroom isn't stellar. Skillful teachers don't lose control of their classrooms like this woman obviously does.

C: On another hand yet, perhaps she really has bad kids this year. The green teachers tend to get assigned the bad kids because administrators tend to reward good teachers and teachers with seniority with teaching conditions they do well in...ask a teacher, it's the "I'm too new to have anything but the s***y kids." If so, a place to let off steam might even help...she just chose a s***y place to do it.

D: Or again, perhaps the reason she can't control the kids in her room is because her hands are tied by anxious legislation that is administered by an anxious administration afraid of law-suits, so that her real beef is with the people who got upset with her about it--maybe she has picked the real fight after all!

My wife is a teacher of 20 years. She's really good at what she does. I would vote for some of B, which results in C, but mostly D. I think the response of the administration is evidence of where the problem really lies.

Solution: Get teachers to write the education policy for the state, not legislators bent on policies that will get them re-elected!

Tiger Mom to Hippy Mom

2011-02-16T16:35:00.000-08:00

On Good Morning America yesterday they interviewed several very successful youngsters about the ways their mothers had raised them. This was all part of the spin-off from the book Tiger Mom that sparked such interest and discussions.

One young Korean girl thanked her mom for being the typical Tiger Mom. Another was grateful for the hands-off, love-you-for-whoever-you-are approach of what was called the Hippy Mom. The third found comfort in the hovering care of his Helicopter Mom. I found several things very interesting.

First, they made no mention of the different personalities of the kids. Obviously if these kids were successful there was a good match between the needs of the kids and the parenting they received. This says nothing of the train-wrecks that were not mentioned.

Secondly, it shows the diversity in parenting styles in this country.

But thirdly and I think most poignantly, for once we're talking on a national level about something moral. We're talking about the "right" way to raise the next generation of humanity. We've studiously avoided moral issues since the 70's and the breakdown of a common moral consensus in our society, and now, at this particularly strategic point of enculturation of our children, all of a sudden we're deciding we need to talk again.

I profoundly applaud the effort. I don't know where it will take us, but some consensus is better than none at all, for none at all leaves us at the mercy of the most anxious people among us. With a consensus we've got a yardstick by which to measure leadership, and therefore, greatness.

Talk away! (By the way, my Mom was a Mother Hen Mom....)

Another Kind of Holy

2011-02-16T16:34:00.000-08:00

Epiphany 7, February 20, 2011, St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Rev. Paul Moore

This is reportedly a true story: It had snowed several inches. The family had two sons of middle-school age, just the right age to shovel snow. Dad, holding their allowance money hostage, assigned them to shovel the walk and the sidewalk—and threw in the driveway as a hopeful addition, one he didn't count on. He settled down to his paper. After an hour he decided to check on his boys. The walk was shoveled, and the sidewalk. The driveway was also crisscrossed with characteristic marks of their shovels. The boys were nowhere in sight. But he noticed that the sidewalk was shoveled down to the end of the block. Along the way he noticed the characteristic boot-print of one of the boys. They had apparently, shoveled the whole sidewalk, not just in front of their own house. As he went down the street, however, he noticed other peoples' walks and driveways were shoveled with the same characteristic crisscross marks of the shovels. At first he thought the boys were shoveling other peoples' walks to make a little extra spending money for the arcade at the mall, but then he noticed just whose drives were shoveled.

There was the elderly widow who had no kids of her own, but cared for her invalid nephew. There was the elderly couple who rarely got out. There were the neighbors on each side. At each house the work was done for someone special, or someone who could not do it themselves. At each house it was clear that the walk was shoveled right up to the door, but there was no indication that the boys had actually approached anyone in the house.

And so he waited, and soon they came home, bringing with them six of their friends. He made no indication that he had followed them or knew what they were doing, but he served them all hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls and gave his own boys their allowance money. As he did so one of the other boys gave him the card that they had left at each home: "Your walk has been shoveled by the Christmas Elves. There is no need to thank us. Just do something nice for someone else this week. Signed—The Elves”

From a human standpoint it is encouraging to see examples of altruism in such young men, we would hope for more of it in our world; in that hope is another hope hidden. We hope for another way of going about life itself, one in which kindness is the coin of the kingdom, rather than the selfishness that is so endemic to our economy. The early Christians were known in the pagan world for one thing above all others. They were known for their care for their own poor, and the poor in their communities. The Roman Emperor Julian in the 4^th century noted that the success of the Christian movement (which he called "atheism" because it denied the Roman gods,) was its practical philanthropy. He writes in a letter,

“It is disgraceful that when no Jew ever has to beg, and when the impious Galileans (Christians) support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us!”

When we read about these kinds of things we hope for the coming of the Kingdom of God.

The Bible calls this kind of living "holy." In today's Old Testament lesson Isaiah challenges the people and us. “Be holy for your God is holy,” and then he goes on to describe ways of being good to those around us, as if to say in no uncertain terms, that kindness is the way to be holy like God. In today's Epistle lesson Paul talks about keeping the temple holy, which is ourselves, not individually so much as collectively. It is in the different quality of the relationships between Christians that the world's "wisdom" is confounded by our holiness. Holiness is not a personal, but an interpersonal thing. Finally, in the Gospel lesson Jesus seems like he is really upping the ante on the Law. You have heard it said, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." This was part of Hammurabi’s code, and also in the Old Testament law. Jesus says that's not good enough. That's not holiness. Treating people as you would be treated is holiness, loving your enemy is holiness. Doing good to those who persecute you is holiness. It is a holy thing to let the economy of heaven, the coin of the kingdom, invade that of the earth and turn it all upside down, for otherwise, what do you offer the world that it doesn't already have? And to back it up he quotes from today's lesson from Isaiah.

The church in the world is where two economies clash. This coming March 5th the Mexican Consular offices in Austin will be here. They will provide consular services for Mexican nationals in this area who need them—passports, birth certificates, etc. The people who need these services are invisible people, hiding because their paperwork is not complete. They are a needy people. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) will be providing Porta-Potties and portable copiers for the needs of the day. We will be providing a hospitable place where these people who live in fear can get help, and we will provide some shelter from the sun as they wait outside to be seen.

And we will feed them. Some of our people are going to local restaurants asking for donations of food. Olive Garden is donating two big pots of spaghetti. Another place is donating large pizzas. Others will provide paper plates and glasses.

The economy of the world is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It seems to be the only way the world can keep the strong from oppressing the weak, the rich from stealing from the poor. It is a zero-balance justice in which everyone loses something so that everyone can have something. God's economy, on the other hand, is that of generous self-giving. It invites us to a transformed and transforming way of living that only the Holy Spirit can empower, in which we live out our relationship with the Father by living that same generous giving heart out with one another and the world. Be holy, then, as your Father in heaven is holy.