Eating With Jesus

A Sermon Preached on September 11, 2011

2011-09-13T16:28:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I took our dog to Crissy Field for an earlymorning walk on the beach. It was a windy morning. The bay was covered in whitecaps and the sand blew fast across the whole width of the beach. I guess thatsalt was blowing in the air too, because when we had finished our walk and gotinto the car for the drive home I could taste salt in my throat. And that’swhen it happened, that’s when memory took over from a normal Saturday morningwalk with the dog.

The taste of salt in my throat took me back ten years tothat other September 11. Of course then the taste of salt in my throatwas because I had spent most of the day swallowing my tears. At the time I wasthe rector of a church in Houston. The day before – September the 10,2001 – had been the opening day of our brand new Montessori school. After allof the crashes and collapses and all of the death, I spent that Tuesday morningtalking to parents who came to get their children. One cried in my arms, “Ijust want to go. I just want to go somewhere that’s safe.” My own tears camelater, leaning hard into the chest of my husband Grant, staining his blueBrooks Brothers shirt. “Why are you crying?” he asked. But the hardest thingwas the next Sunday.

I had carefully planned the liturgy, trying to strike thatbalance between sorrow and courage and compassion that I knew my people reallyneeded. I preached about the need to forgive, as well as to grieve. When it wasall over, I took my regular place at the front door of the church, greetingpeople I knew and people I’d never seen before. Most were sweet and crushed andbewildered. But some were angry. Angry at me. One woman demanded, “Where wasour anthem?” At first I assumed she meant some piece of music for the choir,but in the next instant I realized that she expected the National Anthem, apiece of music I had intentionally left out of the liturgy. I told her to waituntil everyone had cleared the line and I’d explain it to her. But she left.There were more such conversations. Some people were angry at mypeace-mongering sermons. And some people left the church as a result. Thehardest thing wasn’t their anger or their absenting themselves or their lashingout at me. The hardest thing was forgiving them.

The hardest thing is always about forgiveness. Forgivenessrequires us to step out of a place that feels safe and go to a place wherenothing is safe at all. Forgiveness, as the preacher Karoline Lewis said lastweek, is giving up on the idea that we can change the past. Something badhappens between two people, and the life that they had shared before is changedforever. They may reconcile, they may forgive each other, but the life betweenthem can never be the same again. And no matter how much we try and pretendthat we can just move along in life as if nothing has happened, we’re reallyonly kidding ourselves.

This rock hard parable from Matthew’s Gospel is addressingjust what it feels like to be in community with someone that you must forgive.It’s important to note that it is very specifically about the community of thechurch; this isn’t a parable about the need to forgive people that you aredistantly related to or generically interested in. It is about the absoluteimperative to forgive those who are closest to you, who share with you thespiritual and ethical call of God in Jesus Christ. The church is the placewhere we come to experience the life of Christ, to learn the life of Christ,and to practice the life of Christ. It is from the community of the church thatwe go into the world as those who re-present Christ for all people. The churchis our laboratory and our gymnasium; it is our testing ground and our studygroup; it is our crucible and our potting shed. And if we cannot learn toforgive each other in this place, then we have very little likelihood offorgiving the people we encounter in the world outside of these walls.

Like terrorist bombers. Or political hacks. Or moralperfectionists. Or your boss. Or your past. Or yourself. We come to church inorder to experience and learn and practice forgiveness. And if we can’t do ithere, then life will be a torture.

Parables are not analogies. It is impossible to read thisparable and assume that from start to finish the king in the story isequivalent to the God of Jesus Christ. That just isn’t possible. The God ofJesus Christ does not hand people over to be tortured; she just doesn’t.Parables are infinitely more complex than analogies, and at the same time theyare more resonate. A parable is like a painting that invites the viewer tolinger over it and to be changed by it. A parable is like an opera where themusic and the movement and the drama all fit together into something greaterthan the sum of the parts. If there's torture in life, it comes from us and notfrom God.

This parable says that there is a basic conflict betweenreceiving mercy and holding onto legal rights. The difference between the worldof mercy, freely given to another, and the world defined by my demand for myrights is a matter of life and death. Forgiveness has nothing to do withclaiming rights. Forgiveness is limitless, freely given, charged with life.Limited forgiveness is just the rule of law repackaged in a slightly fuzzierwrapper. This parable says in the brassiest way possible that if you want theworld of legal rights and rule bound relationships, you’ll soon discover thatit is called “hell”.

There’s a special supplement in today’s New York Timescalled, “The Reckoning”. One section of it is called, “What we Kept”. It’s acollection of relics and stories that people kept after 9-11. One of therelics, one of the stories is mine. The relic is a small desk calendar. DanBarry interviewed me, and from that interview composed these words, my ownstory from that day: “I'm a priest. I was having an early breakfast at a dinerwith a friend when the first plane hit. I went home to put on my clericalcollar and go to the church when the first tower fell. I went to the church,opened the front door and put up a sign that said, 'Pray.' The little calendarwas a gift for my ordination. I used to change the date every month. But afterSept. 11, I left it. I would look at it, sitting on my desk. Sometimes I wouldcry. Later I put it high up on a shelf, the date still set for September 2001.”

Jesus commands us to forgive in the same way that hecommands us to love; if it weren’t for the command, we might draw back. Wemight find it too hard to live with forgiveness as a part of our lives if itwas only a suggestion. Forgiveness takes practice; it takes a long time tosettle into our lives. Sometimes I would look at that little calendar,perpetually stuck on September 2001, and it would remind me of all the peoplethat I needed to forgive: that woman at my church, that terrorist who killed somany innocents, that politician who used the tragedy for advancement, thathurting, weeping self that is me. But eventually I moved it off of my desk, outof sight, because I didn’t need the reminder to forgive anymore. And I don’trecall a moment where I forgave all those people. But I do know that I believeI have forgiven them. Because I don’t want to live in hell. And I don’t needthem to live there either.

Or, as St. Paul says in today’s reading from Romans, “Fornone of us lives for himself and none of us dies for himself; while we arealive, we are living for the Lord, and when we die, we die for the Lord: and so,alive or dead, we belong to the Lord.” I know the one to whom I belong and Iknow that the way of forgiveness he commands me is meant to make me truly,eternally alive. And so I will forgive, because I want to live. I want tounderstand more and more what God’s forgiveness means. I want to live in a waythat I am truly, unconditionally free. I want to love others not because theyare necessarily loveable, but because I am good at loving. I want to experiencethis love, and learn about this love, and practice this love with you in thishousehold of God. And I want to go forth from this place into the worldempowered by God’s Spirit to change the world with the power of forgiveness.

Like the servant in today’s parable, we get to make achoice. We get to turn to God’s mercy and be turned around by it. We get tolose our rights and the privilege of our grievances. And in their place we getnothing but mercy to give to each other and to the world.

Feelings are Stupid

2011-08-31T09:06:00.000-07:00

I had that experience last week where I wrote something to someone that was --- how to say it --- too direct. I was trying to report back on an experience. And I guess I was giving my opinion, something that I really try to avoid. Sometimes.

Anyway. I said things that hurt feelings. I knew that was a potential result of having an opinion. And I can remember that fleeting second before pressing "send" when I wondered if it was going to be worth it. Is it better to be direct or not? Is it better to have opinions or not? Is it better to speak truth or not?

When I spent my life in the closet (yes gentle reader, I have the gay) I was always watching myself to see if I was radiating homosexuality to the world around me. Like anyone who has spent any time in the closet I wondered if I would be found out, and I imagined that would be the worst possible thing. In the closet I learned how to lie about myself and about the world that I most desired. It seemed that the truth, far from setting me free, would kill me.

Living a lie gave me a strange orientation to the truth. Learning how to use many words to not say anything real made me a confusing mess to myself and to others. Coming out of the closet made me tell the truth - all of the time. I can remember feeling as if the new truth of myself and the former lie of myself were in a kind of matter/anit-matter death match. I thought I might explode. And in my early days of being out I did, sometimes.

Now I try and tell the truth all of the time. I try and use the power of my experience to shed as much light as possible. I try and pay attention to my feelings as if they are real and have meaning for me. And I very often make a mess of it. Feelings are stupid. That's what I tell myself. But feelings are all I've got. Feelings lead down paths that are just plain confusing. And feelings are all I've got. Feelings are stupid. And feelings are all I've got.

When I hurt a person by telling my truth, I feel confused. Truth is what I'm devoted to. And truth makes people feel bad. I don't have anything profound to say about this. I just notice it in my life and my relationships - which is just another way of saying "my life". So for today, I'm going to tell the truth and let it be. I'm going to feel my way into my future and know that it will result in pain, at least some of the time. I'm going to trust myself in my truth and pray for the best.

Chasing the Past

2011-08-17T13:06:00.000-07:00

As I write this I’m sitting in the dining room of my parent’s home in Texas. It is a long way from home to come back home. I appreciate the way that distance both warms memory of the past and removes the rough edges of what is real. And I guess many have the experience of nearness scattering the fuzziness of memory and rendering what is as so disturbingly real that it can actually change a man.

I was driving my mother around in the stunningly hot Texas weather, running errands with her. We stopped at the blessedly cool mall to return some items. As we walked the brightly lit, uncannily cool halls of excess she grabbed my arm. “Sometimes these shoes stick to the floor,” she said. I flashed to my grandmother doing the same thing: grabbing my arm for balance.

In that moment the image of my own mother as ageless – more or less the same now as she was when she bore me in her youth – once again disappeared. She is a woman of 79. My own grandmother was something like 89 when she died. My mother is going to die, but first she is going to grow old and feeble. And I, her now middle-aged son, is supporting her on a stroll through an artificially cooled mall in the tormenting Texas heat.

What I recall about a place, or a person, or a thing puts me into a certain sort of relationship not only to that other, but also to myself. I must change my self-knowledge as I come to know what is real. I must change in order to receive what is real.

This is the first rule of the spiritual life: in order to know God we must change. I can’t grow in the life of the Spirit without accepting that the promise of God is real and that it is drawing me into the one place that I cannot control: the future. I only get my self when I am willing to let myself go, when I am willing to let the vast Other take me.

There are things in the spiritual life that I think that I want, but discover that I don’t really want. I love the idea of these things – wisdom, mercy, power – but I love the idea of them on my own terms, according to my own definitions. Each of these spiritual gifts comes to me with a requirement to change. And the change will always bend me to the point that I fear I will simply break in two. But it is what I want, this bending almost to breaking.

I can no more grow in the life of the Spirit based in my own power than I can keep time from moving forward around me. What I get is not what I want, but what I need to move forward in the life of God. It would be so much easier if I were God. But what a limited god I would make.

Getting Closer to Forgiveness - Part 4

2011-08-13T03:59:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons that I love the gospel teaching about love (see above for more on that) is that it removes my affect from the decision to love. Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE my affect. I am a romantic by nature. I love all the lovely lovey feelings that go with love. Except when I don’t. Sometimes I’d just as soon kick somebody down the stairs (gently) as love them --- IF we’re talking about my affect. So the gospel frees me to love by separating love from affect (at least in terms of loving our enemies). I am free to act out of love for people I can’t stand. That’s something like unconditional love.

In the same way, forgiveness is always unconditional. If it isn’t, then it isn’t forgiveness. If forgiveness comes with conditions, then you’re still chained up in a kind of cage match with your enemy. Forgiving enemies can be stone cold and hard edged, but it has to be unconditional. Otherwise, it’s just about fairness. And the life of faith is far from fair.

I pretty sure of this: if you want to understand what God’s forgiveness means, you have to forgive others without condition. (sucks)

But the upside is that forgiveness also releases you --- it frees you to become something new. The simplest definition of forgiveness that I’ve got is this: I refuse to be defined by the violence done to me. When I forgive the one who has violated me, I get to be free. I get to be the recipient of mercy just as surely as I have shown mercy to my violator. I no longer have to suffer the consequences of all my anger. I’m free. I don’t have to be the kind of person who is perpetually defined by being a hard-ass. I’m free.

The only problem is that forgiveness takes practice. It’s hard to forgive. But it’s hard because most people are so well rehearsed at forgiveness’ opposite: vengeance. As a culture we are fed a steady stream of vengeance. And it is a cornerstone of the domination culture. Vengeance is powerful and can push people to amazing acts. But in the end vengeance only has the power to burn you up.

I want something more than vengeance to keep me warm at night. I want something more than judgment to keep me company. I want to forgive others because I want to act like God (who always forgives [cf. the cross of Jesus]). And I know that I will have to make a practice of forgiveness for the rest of my life. Which means that I need to be in the company of other folks like me that still struggle to be real, to forgive, and to love enemies.

Just like the old shampoo commercial says, “I’m worth it”. I’m worthy of forgiving others. I’m worth it.

Getting Closer to Forgiveness - Part 3

2011-08-12T03:09:00.000-07:00

So, how do you get closer to forgiveness?

First off, you don’t curse your enemies, even if they curse you.

And just to be clear, when Jesus said, “bless those who curse you,” he wasn’t talking about somebody calling you a potty-head (still one of my favorite). To curse someone meant to CURSE them: to make the evil eye toward them or to cast an incantation against them. Cursing an enemy was a kind of supernatural hack; it was designed to destabilize or neutralize your opponent. It’s all very True Blood.

Jesus tells his followers to cut it out, because cursing your enemy would break relationship and destabilize you. Cursing your enemy is to curse yourself. And even though I’ve never seen Harry Potter, I know they do stuff with wands in that movie, and I think that the wand thing just keeps ramping up until somebody’s head explodes or something. That’s the kind of prohibition on cursing that Jesus has in mind. Instead of matching curse with curse, Jesus’ followers are to go completely loving: they are to offer blessings and make prayers for their enemies. The type of prayer is not specified, but it’s a good bet that it is a blessing for the enemy’s benefit and increase.

(Say this in a whinny voice) But that’s so hard!! Yes, isn’t it.

Jesus’ commands his followers to work for their enemies’ benefit and pray blessings on them. This is a word that is to shout down another worldview. It’s an ancient story of how things came to be and what sustains everything that is. And it is the worldview that Jesus came to overturn.

Walter Wink reminds us that many first century followers of Jesus --- both Jewish and Gentile followers --- perceived within the Roman Empire a demonic spirituality, which they called Satan. This is the dragon found in the trippiest book of the bible, the Book of Revelation. These people not only feared this spirit, they saw it every day of their lives. They met Satan as it appeared in the crucifixion of their children by bored soldiers and in the casual annihilation of their religious practice by governors and bureaucrats. All of this cruelty wasn’t accidental. It was based on an ancient mythology that informed people about everything they came to accept as real.

The same thing happens today. The spirit of an institution (the military, the playground) is created not by supernatural forces, but by the very ordinary and seemingly rational choices that everyday institutions make and perpetuate. These values may seem totally normal (buy low sell high, focus on the family, lather/rinse/repeat [kidding about that one]) but if they become the all consuming center of a groups reality, to the exclusion of real, live, breathing humans --- including enemies --- then they are idolatrous. And idolatrous values become “spiritualized”. They become more than just a person’s opinion and become something that must be protected at all cost.

Wink names one form of this “institutions creating idolatrous parallel reality” the domination system. It is an institutional spirit characterized by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, patriarchal gender relations, hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence to maintain them all. Regardless of the shape the Domination System takes, it has persisted now for at least five thousand years. Again --- it is the worldview that Jesus came to replace.

Forgiveness is the cornerstone of Jesus’ movement to replace the domination system. And the cornerstone is made up of --- you guessed it: LOVE. Not the feeling heavy kind of thing that most 21^st century North Americans are familiar with; this is love that acts for the sake of the other, because the other is of equal value to your own self. Forgiveness without love is a no-thing. Love without forgiveness is just feelings (sometimes).

More to come…

Getting Closer to Forgiveness - Part 2

2011-08-11T05:30:00.000-07:00

So how do we stitch together love and forgiveness? First, you have to get over your feelings.

Enemies can be defined in all sorts of ways. A reading of Luke 6:27-28 makes it pretty clear that enemies are (at least) those who hate you, curse you, and abuse you. So, how are we supposed to feel loving feelings for people who do this? How are we supposed to open our hearts to those who abuse us and love them?

We aren’t. When Jesus commands his disciples to love their enemies he doesn’t have in mind our modern and post-modern concern for an inner emotional state. Our cultural preoccupation with the psychological state that we call “love” wasn’t very interesting to Jesus’ average Palestinian audience member. In fact, it’s anachronistic to read the idea of “psychological states” into Jesus’ commandment. Or as some men like to say, “feelings are stupid.”

It’s not that Jesus audience was primitive or stupid. They were just different from us. They understood their relationships not as a stew pot of psychological experience. Their relationships were set in a collectivist world-view. Individuals were known as they were in social relationship with those closest to them: the kin group, the village group, the neighborhood, and their various social groups. People’s awareness was formed by their relationships. The only way that a first century peasant living in Galilee was self-aware was as others knew them.

Love was not so much a psychological state for Jesus’ audience as it was something that you did in relation to another. You knew you were in love if you did something for another person. You might not have any affection for the other person, and still love the person. Love was manifest in what you did, not what you felt; in how you were attached to someone, not feeling all cuddly.

Jesus’ command of love broke down social barriers. When he commanded his followers to “love your neighbor as yourself,” he meant being attached to the people in your neighborhood, the same way you would to your primary social unity: your family. Which would have been just plain socially aberrant. “Family First” was the rule of the first century way more than it is for any 21^st century moralizing demagogue. To put neighbor before family was breaking up with normal.

So the bombshell “love your enemies,” was a hot moral mess. It meant, “Behave toward those who abuse you as if they were members of your primary social group, as if their benefit was your own, as if their identity was your own.” Jesus is seriously messing with family-normative culture. And he's getting us closer to why/how to forgive others.

More to come...

Getting Closer to Forgiveness - Part 1

2011-08-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

Like any self respecting liberal couple, my husband and I enjoy watching the Rachel Maddow Show while we eat dinner. Although not so good for our digestion, it is a chance to get riled up by the shenanigans of the political class. And since it is the Divine Miss M. who's giving the commentary, the shenanigans are usually those of our political enemies. I'll let you figure out which party I mean.

Now, I know this isn't the most edifying thing for a Christian Minister to do. ginning up the machine of my malice wasn't on the checklist of my ordination exam. But ignoring the fact that I have enemies seems self-delusory at the least, and downright dangerous in most cases. But then Jesus gets all up in my business.

The summary of Jesus’ moral teaching --- and he didn’t spend a whole lot of time teaching morality, BTW --- begins with a command: “Love your enemies”. And the only normal human reaction to that kind of teaching has to be “Damn!” I’d much rather hate my enemies. It’s a more rational way. It’s economically clear. And it just feels better than loving your enemies. But Jesus said it, damn it.

Like a lot of his moral teaching, it isn’t an original saying. You can find similar teaching in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek philosophical world in which Jesus’ message hit. But it is a commandment of Jesus to his disciples, not a suggestion and not an invitation. Despite the plain counter intuitiveness of the commandment, followers of Jesus have to. As any political season will show you, loving your enemies isn’t what works. It differs considerably from the typical cultural expectation of revenge, harm and hatred.

But wait, there’s more. Not content to leave well enough alone, Jesus follows up with three elaborations on the commandment to love. Like a crème brulee that would be enough on its own, Jesus tops the commandment with whipped cream, AND chocolate sauce, AND a raspberry coulis: he says, “Do good to those who hate you…bless those who curse you… pray for those who abuse you.” In the words of the immortal Anna Russell, "I'm not making this up you know."

Freaking Luke 6:27. If you’ve ever wondered what the Gospel’s definition of “love” is you’ll get as close as you can in that passage. And, if you want to know WHY it’s so hard to love, you will run into the answer here. It’s not the ones that you’d naturally love that Jesus commands his people to love. Just to repeat --- the crown of Jesus’ moral teaching tells his followers to love enemies. And to eliminate any chance of blurring this into a meaningless fluffy thing, he insists that love is to do good, to bless, and to pray for --- wait for it --- your enemies.

This blows my mind. The fact that Jesus isn’t teaching us how to have better relationships with our partners or spouses or children, the fact that he isn’t teaching about healthy family relationships or ethical business relationships, the fact that he only talks about love of enemies is breathtaking. There’s not another chapter in Luke where Jesus instructs his disciples to love. It’s only here. And it’s only about loving enemies.

Damn.

The Shame of it All - Part 2

2011-08-05T12:49:00.000-07:00

So the day after my jalapeño adventure I got another free gift of food. My friend Angela's husband brought home a wild boar from a hunting trip and she shared a shoulder of it with me. It was poorly butchered. And it hadn't been hung long enough, so it was pretty bloody (all apologies to my non-meat eating friends). So I had to treat it with a super-special care. First I had to kosher the pork (I know - pervy) to get the blood out of the meat, then I had to soak it in water over night to get the salt out, then I made a rub for it out of dried ancho and chipotle chilies. You can see where this is going, can't you.

The burn returned. As soon as I had wrapped the chili-rubbed meat and put it in the fridge I could feel the tingle begin again. "I've just been through this!" I thought. "When will I learn?" To make matters work, I responded to a call of nature and spread the burn to other regions of my own self. Sorry if that sounded like an over share, but the truth is that the burn was relocated. It moved from one part of me to another. It could have been any other place. Shame (like chilies) spreads wherever we go, goes to whomever we touch. We can't stop it, we can't contain it. We are made victims by it. And my position is that there's no cure for shame. It is just a part of being human.

So, if there's no cure for shame, are we just screwed? I don't think so. But we can't resign from life. We can't ignore shame or forget about it, because it has that astonishing ability to spread wherever we go, to whomever we touch. We have to name it, be honest about it, and live with it. We have to admit that we are victims of shame, then move beyond our victim status. We have to live as if our being victims is not the most interesting thing about us. We have to live as if there is something more important than our shame.

The problem with staying a victim of shame is that we just stay stuck in that shadowed place. And as far as I can tell, the only way to live with shame and not stay victims of shame is to lean deeply into God's love. It isn't always easy. Sometimes it feels more like I'm pretending that God's love can take me than it feels like an emotionally satisfying experience of God. And sometimes that's all that I get. Sometimes I get to act like God's love will take care of me.

The funny thing is, I do believe it. I do believe that God is love and that those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them. And I believe that God's love has the power to - not remove shame - but to name me as one who is conceived, formed, enabled, and propelled by love, by God, by God who is love. In the end, I guess that my living with shame is just another thing about me, like my receding hairline or my fabulous blue eyes. It is a part of me, but it isn't all of me. All of me is one who is formed in God and made new by God every day. And there is no shame in that. None.

The Shame of it All

2011-08-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

Last month I joined a seafood CSA (which I guess would be Community Supported Aquaculture). So I’m getting lots of seafood every Saturday. I don’t have a long history with fish, at least not in the kitchen. So I find new recipes and new ways of fixing fish every week.

Last night I slow roasted halibut and topped it with a salsa of avocados, tomatoes and jalapeños. They were some freaking hot jalapeños. I stemmed and seeded them under running water after charring them lightly, and as soon as I wash finished I could feel the skin on my hands begin to tingle. I washed them four or five times, rubbed baking soda on them, put on lotion – and they still burned like crazy. Even now, 14 hours later, they still burn. I look at my hands and they don’t look like they’re burned (the lotion actually has restored their boyish luster). But they burn. It’s annoying more than debilitating.

Shame is the same way. I do some stupid thing like snark off to a friend and I feel ashamed of myself. Or I revert to bad habits like replaying the tapes of former failures in my life and the feeling of shame returns. Or I feel ashamed that I can’t get over the shame of past moments in my life. And I look fine. I walk through life and do my job and find new ways to cook fish. I communicate clearly and go to the gym. I do all the things that I’m supposed to do. And I feel shame the same way my hands burn a day after seeding jalapeños.

So is there a cure for shame? I don’t think so. There are techniques for relieving the sting of it, but shame is a core part of being human. And it hurts.

The best I know right now is to find a way to live with shame that places it in its proper place in my soul and my life. I may not be able to get rid of the shame that haunts me, but I can sure as hell find a way to place it in my life where it belongs.

More to come…

The Good Samaritan and Racism in San Francisco - Part 4

2011-07-30T05:06:00.000-07:00

My problem is with morality. I’ve had morality drummed into my head for as long as I can remember. My problem is creativity; moving from normal to fabulous. When I get in the existential rut and can only see the other as a problem to be fixed and not a neighbor who’s just so fabulous, I am diminished. People’s problems and challenges are more than a hassle; they are an invitation to act like God acts in Jesus Christ. I get to reflect the mercy that I’ve received in the ways that I choose to act in relationship to a person that troubles me. What I DON’T need is a little inner life-coach who tells me what I ought to believe. What I need is the vision of the world that God gives to the whole creation. I get to see people the way that God sees them: as beloved children. I get to love other people as God loves me.

The gift of God in Jesus Christ is enemy-love. I read the Gospels and I see story after story of Jesus sharing his life with folks I try to avoid. Again and again Jesus pours love and life out for people that I prefer to call my enemies. Jesus takes “normal” and messes it all up with Samaritans and bandits and priests and whores and tax collectors. The lawyer in the parable really asks the wrong question. It isn’t just “Who is my neighbor?” The real question is “How far will I go to see that my neighbor is my sister? How much danger will I take on to see that my neighbor is my brother?”

There is spiritual sickness that I suffer from called tolerance. As my old friend Bette first told me, “Tolerance is just hatred mastered.” I want something more than that. I want to act like Jesus who throws his love at his enemies like a drunk sailor throws $20 bills at strippers. I want love that is abnormal and unboundaried. I can’t wait to be healed from my addiction to tolerance, because I want to go as far as I can in the love of Jesus Christ. I want to be limitlessly in love.

None of the categories that we find so adorable make a damned bit of difference to Jesus. The meaning of “neighbor” cannot be restricted. Jesus isn’t original in summarizing the law of God; that he gets from other rabbis. It is the radical redefinition of “neighbor” that makes his teach original. The law commands compassion, but it also limits compassion. The law wants to impose a double bind on people. Only someone who is outside the law – an infidel – can fulfill the law of love that is the original law.

The bottom line is that religion can be bad for your soul. If your beliefs wall out some people, then the fullness of God’s love cannot be experienced. If your system of beliefs says that you have to wall out ______ __________ (please insert the name of your most despised enemy), then you can’t experience the fullness of God’s love.

When God choose the perfect revelation of himself to the world he picked being human. God could have chosen anything else (maybe) but God choose tacky human beings. That means that the image of God is human, and in all humans. So if you want a life that is built on God’s image, then you will have to find it in all humans, not just some humans. Which I guess means that the cure for racism and classism (and all the other isms) is found in really looking at people and knowing them to be revelators of God.

The Samaritan in this story has nothing left to lose. That makes him the perfect follower of Jesus. He has nothing to lose, so he is free to love and to find God in the bodies of people that he is raised to hate, but chooses to love. He is the model of a disciple of Jesus because he cares more for the heart of God than the heart of religion. Jesus says that this is the way to live, not by being normal, but by seeing all people in alive in God’s heart. Then people might just see that same image in you: grace made visible.

The Good Samaritan and Racism in San Francisco - Part 3

2011-07-29T05:45:00.000-07:00

But a Samaritan traveler who came on him was moved with compassion when he saw him. He went up to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them. He then lifted him onto his own mount and took him to an inn and looked after him. Next day, he took out two denarii and handed them to the innkeeper and said, ‘Look after him, and on my way back I will make good any extra expense you have.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved himself a neighbor to the man who fell into the bandits’ hands?” He replied, “The one who showed pity towards him.” Jesus said to him, “Go, and do the same yourself.”

I get the desire to be normal. It makes me feel invisible and safe. Normal feels like the way that things are supposed to be. Normal in Jesus’ parable would be despising the victim (stupid, naked, beaten man), the Samaritan (crazed, spiritual terrorist, tradesman), and to heap admiration on the bandits (poor guys that just can’t get a break) and the religious leaders (as long as they’re not bothering me and keeping the sacrifices on the grill, I’m down). Normal in my neighborhood is to buy charming Victorian houses, rehab them, rename the neighborhood “Lower Pacific Heights”, resell the house for a profit, and think (but NEVER say) that the African American folks are probably happier in Oakland anyway. I get the desire to be normal, but it makes me want to vomit.

Jesus is telling a story about the dangers of “normal” and the imperative to have no enemies. That’s the point at the end of the story. When an enemy saves your life, the word enemy loses all its meaning. Instead of “enemy” the only word that you can use to describe unclean people, and terrorists, and bandits, and priests, and lawyers is “human”. Drop the word enemy and everyone (including your own self) becomes fully human. Then everyone gets to experience the full humanity that Jesus is so anxious to bring to birth.

And it’s not by ignoring differences between people. That’s what counts for normal. There are huge differences between Samaritans and bandits and beaten-up men and priests and lawyers and me and the folks at Westside Courts. We are not all basically alike. We are all magnificently odd and other. You can’t ignore differences and be fully human; you just have to act as if our differences don’t mean a damned thing. When it comes to being a neighbor, or being healed of racism or classism, what matters is faith.

If we only hear the story of the Good Samaritan as a morality tale (it’s nice to be nice to the nice), your take away will be limited. Morality is just another part of being normal. At the heart of this story there is something much more destabilizing and different: God tells us to love our enemies. Not tolerate them. Not get along with them. God tells us to love people that hate us. You can’t stoop down from a position of privilege and take care of the down and out and call it a day. You have to love the life of the other as much as you love your own. You have to get deeply engaged in the life of your victims. And the prize for this is seeing that your salvation is tied up with our enemy’s salvation.

More to come…

The Good Samaritan and Racism in San Francisco - Part 2

2011-07-28T05:16:00.000-07:00

“And who is my neighbor?” In answer Jesus said, “A man was once on his way down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of bandits; they stripped him, beat him and then made off, leaving him half dead. Now a priest happened to be traveling down the same road, but when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite who came to the place saw him, and passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan traveler who came on him was moved with compassion when he saw him.

For Jesus’ first audience, both the victim and the Samaritan were despised persons. Nobody in the peasant audience would have had the slightest sympathy for either. The victim would be despised because he was outside the realm of the one thing that guaranteed everyone’s safety: the religious purity structure. Every right thinking person in Jesus’ audience would have known that you have to keep religiously pure and if somebody doesn’t, then they are a threat to the whole community. Lepers are the obvious example of this, but anyone or anything that was unclean – menstruating women, lame men, weeds growing with wheat – were just as bad as a leper. Unclean things screw up everything.

So the victim in this story is unclean – just by being there he is able to screw up everything. His first problem is that he’s naked. The issue isn’t nudity. That’s pretty shameful, but that isn’t the worst part. Because he has no clothes, you can’t tell what sort of person he is. You can’t tell if he’s a foreigner or a friend. You can’t tell if he’s religious or filthy. There are no social clues to let you know how to relate to him. The second problem is that a naked man lying by the side of the road would presumably be dead, if not dead, then as good as dead. Dead bodies are super-filthy. Coming into contact with them will totally screw your purity.

The Samaritan is also super-unclean. He’s a stock character for Galilean street preachers. Samaritans are not only religiously impure (they pray to God in the wrong way in the wrong place) his kind are also known to be the sort who go out of their way to mess with nice people’s religious purity. They are the kind of folks that would drop a corpse in the Jerusalem temple, just to make it unusable for sacrifice. In other words, Samaritans are spiritual terrorists.

In addition to being a foreigner, he was probably a tradesman, a despised occupation. He was despised because he walked the roads selling his goods instead of staying at home and taking care of the women-folk. And he has goods with him – wine and oil – and a considerable amount of money (later in the story he leaves two days wages at the inn and promises to pay whatever it costs to house the victim). He’s a sketch character.

If there’s anybody in the story that the audience would have liked it would have to be the bandits. They were frequently peasants who had lost their land to the elite lenders whom all peasants feared. Their sympathy would have gone to the bandits, and in fact some of them hearing Jesus’ story might have taken up that profession. The surprising twist in the story is the compassionate action of the one stereotyped as a spiritual terrorist. The religious characters, the ones who pass the naked man, are only doing what any sensible person would do: avoiding impurity, staying out of harms way, looking out for themselves. So how do we hear this story?

More to come…

The Good Samaritan and Racism in San Francisco

2011-07-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

“Who is my neighbor?” That's the question the Jesus is asked that kicks off the parable of the Good Samaritan. Although the context of the parable is different from the context of my life in San Francisco, I'm pretty sure that both Jesus' parable and mine are the same. I'm pretty sure the shared context is about hatred of differences or to say it nicely, a love of norms. In this morning's New York Times, Andy Martin called this kind of love hypernomia, a pathological preoccupation with norms.

My home is in a liminal space between the multi-million dollar homes of Pacific Heights and the historically African American neighborhood called the Western Addition. Although we’re technically in the Western Addition, realtors call our neighborhood “Lower Pacific Heights”. It’s a classic example of racist labeling that afflicts our city. When we moved into the neighborhood back in 2004 an acquaintance told us, “That’s a good block – it’s changing.” In other words, wealthy people are buying into the neighborhood and poor people are moving out; white people are buying the charming Victorians and black people are moving to Oakland.

Westside Courts is a housing project a block from my house. It was built in 1943 and was the first public housing project in San Francisco to allow African American residents. It isn’t in a part of town that’s changing. Even though there are three-million dollar houses three blocks away, Westside Courts is cordoned off from change, at least as far as I can tell. I respect this cordon. I drive by Westside, or walk by it almost every day. And yet, I’ve never entered it. I’ve never walked through the courtyard or gone into the community room. I nod to people that live there. I say hello to people at the corner market across the street. But I never do anything beyond that. I adhere to the racist and classist rules that define my life. I abide by the rules, because the rules benefit me. That makes me a racist and a classist. I reinforce the rules by my bad beliefs and practices.

But God keeps trying to change my mind – metanoia me – away from racism toward something else. God keeps breaking through barriers and turning the world upside down. About a year ago, God gave me a tiny opportunity to cross the line of my own racism.

Grant and I were returning home after dinner on a Saturday night. It was late. I had to get up early and preach the next morning. As we drove up to the intersection of the corner market and Westside Courts I saw a car with its hazard lights flashing. A young woman was standing by it. I imagined that she lived in the housing project. Grant rolled down his window and asked her if everything was all right. “I ran out of gas,” she said. “We can give you a ride to the gas station,” Grant replied. She went and got a gas can. “I’m Grant, this is Paul.” “I’m Desire,” she said.

Desire needed our help. Desire was our neighbor. But Desire lived beyond the barrier that I had bought into. And I was tired, ready for bed. I had to preach the next day. Desire needed help. We drove her to the gas station. We chatted as we drove along. I don’t remember what we said, probably about our dogs, that’s the kind of casual chat that you have with an unknown neighbor. Was Desire my neighbor? Who is my neighbor? Does it matter? Is there a cure for racism and classism?

More to come...

The Dazzling Oddness of God - Part 3

2011-07-21T05:31:00.000-07:00

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”

God doesn’t believe in scarcity. God doesn’t believe in limits or propriety or rules. God takes what is and uses it for his purpose. The primary purpose of God is mercy. God forgives, loves, and welcomes home everyone. And when we say “No thanks” to the purpose of God, he just keeps at us, showering us with mercy, forgiveness and love. God will always choose mercy over efficiency, or fairness, or domination.

Jesus tells us what this is like. “Listen! A sower went out to sow.” No plow. No ox. No hired hand to help out. Just a crazy farmer flinging seeds around everywhere in a field. Not efficient. In Jesus' day, there were things that the farmer did to prepare the field. But Jesus makes it clear that the field hasn't been prepared. There are well-trod paths, there are rocks, there are thorny weeds. If the sower would just deal with those problems, just make the slightest effort, then there’s a chance the seeds will find good soil and bear fruit. But this sower doesn’t care about the soil. He simply goes out and starts tossing the seeds everywhere.

If I had a field that was completely grown over and rocky, I might abandon it, or get a tractor and plow it all under, in order to find some good soil. But not God. God doesn’t plow us all under and start over. God sows the seed of his mercy everywhere. And if it doesn’t take hold at first, God just keeps throwing the seed of mercy. This prodigal Sower is God. If you believe in limited good, this is the shocker – designed precisely to get you to look at God in a new way. If God is willing to throw blessing over everyone, even those that a reasonable person might conclude are a lost cause, then we have a new way of knowing God.

I have a lot to unlearn about God. I need to get over my addiction to fairness and my fear of scarcity. Maybe you do too. I have to unlearn things about God that I’ve picked up along the way, because I want to know God more and more; so that I can begin again to know God as she really is, not just as I fear she is. I just have to stop and enjoy the experience of God.

The most peculiar thing is that we get to act like God. We get to be like a sower throwing everything he has at creation. We get to unlearn all the bad habits of believing in scarcity. We get to make mistakes, to waste our time and our energy, because God uses all that we offer to make the world anew. We get to give away what we have, what is most precious to us, not because we have to, but because we get to see it increase in the lives of others. God the Prodigal Sower has sown that abounding love into every part of our lives. And that abounding love has begun to bear the fruit of new life in our lives.

What kind of God is this? A sower went out to sow. And in one place he used a sissy-boy to make a covenant, and in another he used a homeless girl to bear him for the world, and in another he took us and gave us his image so that the whole world might know God’s love.

The Dazzling Oddness of God - Part 2

2011-07-20T05:24:00.000-07:00

With sincere thanks to Peterson Toscano for his inspiring take on the story of Jacob... (www.petersontoscano.com)

Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren; and the Lord granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived. The children struggled together within her; and she said, “If it is to be this way, why do I live?” So she went to inquire of the Lord. And the Lord said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.” When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red, all his body like a hairy mantle; so they named him Esau. Afterward his brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.

Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob, “Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!” (Therefore he was called Edom.) Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.” Esau said, “I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?” Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.

When I hear this story from the scripture, something about God creeps back into my consciousness - something that has come to me again and again over the years. And if I had to distil this act of consciousness to a simple phrase it has to be, “God is peculiar and seems drawn to peculiar people.”

Esau is anything but a peculiar person in the Hebrew Scriptures. He is (as the old English translations put it) “an hairy man”. He is the sort of son any Hebrew patriarch would hope for. He is a hunter. He is unfamiliar with the way a household is run – that is strictly women’s work. He is at home in the fields, not in the camp. He’s sort of like the guy on that reality TV show that survives in the wilderness with a knife and his animal wits.

On the other hand, Jacob is the sort of son a Hebrew patriarch might just roll his eyes over. He is not “an hairy man” but is at home in the tents of the camp. And everyone raised in the culture from which this story evolves would know, “living in tents” was a polite way of saying that he was a momma’s boy – a sissy. Tents were for women. Fields were for men. And Jacob picked up all sorts of sissy boy habits in the tents; like cooking a tasty lentil stew.

But above all, Jacob is a negotiator. He knows how to get what he wants without sinking to the level of manly, physical violence. And he know what men like – food – especially if they’ve been out in the fields all day hunting. So Jacob negotiates with his brother to get the family fortune. And all that it costs him is a bowl of his famous lentil stew. Which would be just another episode from that hit series “The Abrahamic Family Feud” except that Jacob seems to negotiate his way into the family fortune on the basis of God’s call – a call based in his mother’s prophetic insight.

Which is a really interesting thing for God to say to a woman about the children growing in her womb. One of these sons of yours will be strong, and it won’t be the hairy one. Instead, the strong one is going to be the momma’s boy, the sissy. The great nation that was promised to old Abraham isn’t going to come from the patriarchally designated he-man. If there is any hope for the human family, any blessing that will come from heaven to earth, it will be through the one whose behavior and actions is a scandal to patriarchy. A momma’s boy will be the blessing.

What kind of God is this? Not the kind that I hear about from Focus on the Family or read about rooting for all kinds of people in the coming presidential election. This isn’t a God who is bound to a culture’s ideal of propriety and gender roles and order and power. This isn’t a God who plays by the rules that run any common sense schoolyard, or corporation, or prison, or political party. This is a God who does peculiar things – at least peculiar to those who prefer the status quo.

This is the kind of God that I’m really interested in, because he takes what is unlikely and unlikeable and turns it to his purpose. God takes us, and in our lives, she works out her purpose. Which at least means that God is not stopped by the kinds of things that stop me. I fall into that trap of believing in scarcity – that there isn’t enough to go around – and so limit myself to what is right in front of my eyes.

More to come...

The Dazzling Oddness of God - Part 1

2011-07-19T05:22:00.000-07:00

I’m at a place in my life where I’ve become more and more interested in God. Who is God? How do we know God? Questions like that. I’ve had some awareness of God in my life for as long as I can remember being aware. And like some people, maybe not that many, I’ve never seriously questioned whether or not God is real or whether or not God exists. In college, when I came out as a religious studies and psychology major, some friends would roll their eyes at my persistent belief in God. “What about the holocaust? What about the crusades? What about suffering children?” You know the questions. Maybe you ask the questions. And I just have to confess that they never moved me off the place where I put my trust in God. I’m not bragging. I worry that my trust in God makes me a simpleton or a rube. There is nothing less sophisticated in San Francisco in 2011 than having an abiding faith in God. I just have this disease called faith.

But my faith doesn’t make me take God for granted. In the same way that my faith has been a constant companion in my life, I’ve been skeptical about who people tell me God is. And as a result I have paid attention to the God-place in my life for as long as I can remember. I have believed in many different versions of God. I have viewed God through many different optics and considered God from many different perspectives. And now I am becoming more and more interested in God and where God is in our common life, right now.

More to come...

Deadbeats and the Kingdom of God - Part 3

2011-07-16T05:31:00.000-07:00

One thing that the Way of Jesus Christ has taught me is that we are accepted by God not because of what we do, or fail to do, but because of who God is. And what God gives to us, from God’s very being is not a static thing. It is the transformation of our whole selves.

We are transformed by God’s grace for God’s purpose, not just to make our lives happier, more successful, or more enjoyable. We are transformed by grace so that we can join God’s ongoing work of creation; to struggle for the sake of the poor, the sick, the rejected, the marginalized. That we might live no longer for ourselves, but for him who died and rose for us.

We are transformed by God’s grace for a purpose, not just to strive for what is fair. I believe that we are to work for the sake of the poor, even if it costs us. Even if it is unfair. Not to work for justice only. To work for a grace-filled, godly response to the poor and hungry. On the Last Day, Christ will not ask us if we balanced the Federal budget. Christ will ask if we fed the hungry, and clothed the naked, and cared for the weak.

Moving from fairness to grace is not easy. It means that we must change. God gives himself to us, so we can know and love God. This relationship changes us. We are no longer simply related to God as creatures to our creator. We are more than that. We are forgiven, therefore accepted. And if accepted by God, then we become joined to God. And if joined to God, then called to do the works of God. Not in order to earn God’s favor, which is ours already, but because we have been transformed by God’s grace. To love things heavenly, to hold fast to those things that shall endure. So that we may see heaven all around us.

Deadbeats and the Kingdom of God - Part 2

2011-07-15T05:29:00.000-07:00

According to the rules of the game called grace, we get what we don’t deserve. This is the part of grace that we like. Most people like the idea of receiving from God all the good things that life has in store - even if we don’t deserve them. But what about those other people - the sinners, the deadbeats, the late comers, not to mention the con artists, the welfare mothers, the street-side beggars - what about them? The problem with grace is that it is so indiscriminate. It isn’t just me, and the people like me, who get the good stuff. Everyone gets what they don’t deserve according to the rules of the game called grace. Everybody wins. Everybody that is, accept God. In the game of grace God is the only loser. In the game called grace, there is absolutely nothing fair.

The cross is the sign of everything unfair. On the cross the child of glory died. Not fair. Even though he of all people should NOT have been on the cross, there he hung. To any intelligent creature, that meant that he was a loser. The losers are the ones that end up dying on the crosses of life. Unless something happens that has the power to turn loss into victory. Unless the God who started the game of grace going also has the power to raise his child up in glory. And, just as the cross contains nothing fair, neither does the resurrection. It is just a gift of God’s power-filled grace.

Grace is greater than fairness. The slackers who work an hour at the end of the day and receive a full day’s wage and receive a full day’s wage? That’s us. We are the ones who receive grace upon grace upon grace. Not because we deserve it. Not because there is something within us that has a right to it. Only because God looks at us and sees not what we see - not slackers and deadbeats. God looks at us, and we all look the same - hurt, lost, sick children all in need of mercy. All children of grace.

More to come...

Deadbeats and the Kingdom of God - Part 1

2011-07-14T05:19:00.000-07:00

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”

I will always remember that Fourth of July. I was 12 years old. In those days when it was legal to shoot off fireworks in the suburban streets and yards of Houston we played the dangerous and wonderful games of Independence Day. All the kids in the neighborhood would light bottle rockets from our hands and toss firecrackers at each other’s feet. We were, all of us, daredevils in training, especially my older brother. Always rambunctious, my tormentor in childhood, my brother would tempt fate. And as happens when she is tempted, fate got usually had the last word.

I had just lit a firecracker to throw at a tow-headed friend of mine when my brother called out a distracting shout to me. As I looked at him I heard a loud POP and looking quickly to the noisy blast saw my still raised hand smoking in the air. I opened my fist and saw my palm all gray and scorched from powder burns. The explosion set off fiery pains in my hand and in my heart. I ran into the house, to the kitchen sink to let the cold tap water wash away the burn. Tears stung in my eyes. Then my brother, my prankster brother, was standing behind me whispering in my ear, “Don’t tell mom what I did.” There was panic in his voice. The kind of panic that comes when you know a mistake has been made that will result in punishment. Despite my anger and pain I knew what I would do. Even though it was his fault, even though he had meant the distraction that caused the accident, I would not tell my mother what he had done. Sometimes the bonds of brotherhood run deeper than rage.

My second thought was the natural one, “This isn’t fair!” It isn’t fair that my brother shouldn’t get in trouble for this. It isn’t fair that I should take responsibility for my burned hand. It isn’t fair that I should protect my brother from whatever punishment comes his way. It isn’t fair.

Nobody likes unfairness. Whether boys playing with fire, or prophets ready to damn a city with the judgment of God, or work weary folk watching latecomers receive a full day’s wage, nobody likes unfairness. Perhaps it’s just in our nature to want things fairly distributed, to want our fair share. Some inner accountant keeps a careful tally of what another gets compared to me. The thinking goes, “If I don’t watch out for my own interests, who will?” Nobody likes unfairness.

Who deserves the greatest share of the wage? Those who’ve worked all day, or the deadbeats who show up at the end of the shift? It doesn’t take an economist to figure out that the longer you work, the more money you should make. Right? Wrong.

This isn’t a parable about fairness or the principles of the free market. It is a parable about what happens when God enters into human lives. And, what happens is inherently unfair. When God enters the picture something called “grace” happens. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, there is something inherently unfair about grace.

More to come...

For the love of God!

2011-07-12T05:01:00.000-07:00

Come away to the skies, my beloved arise

and rejoice in the day thou wast born,

on this festival day come exulting away,

and with singing to Zion return.

I'm in love with the image of God as our lover. Who is this God? Who is this God who comes wooing us to heaven like some absolutely hot seducer? The words above are by the prolific writer of hymns Charles Wesley. He takes his text from the Song of Solomon.

The words describe a lover’s searching out of the beloved, and the bliss that comes when the beloved is finally found. So great is the love that no obstacle is too great to block the progress of the beloved and the lover. As it says in another place, “Love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.” When everything else is exhausted, there is only love. When everything else has passed away, love continues. At least it is with God.

Nothing is ever lost to God our lover. Nothing can ever separate us from God. Not sin. Not impurity. Not even our own attempts at being good. Even when we go down to death, God remains our lover. So what are we supposed to do about living with this God? If God’s love is so free, what are supposed to do?

I think the answer is nothing. We don’t do things in response to God’s love, we become something – someone – new. We are transformed by God’s love, not on our own effort, but in the love of God. We are transformed by love into love.

One of the hardest things for me about God’s love is that it doesn’t let me stay in one place, one emotional space, for very long. God’s love doesn’t give much opportunity for looking back over past failings and regrets. God’s love frees us from regret. There’s no looking back in God’s love, no time to get hung up on our losses. We may love the feeling of mulling over the past, filled with all of its broken pieces, but the exercise has nothing whatsoever to do with God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “God is closer to us than the past.” The love of God is always given to us to draw us into the future, to make us lovers not only of God, but of all whom God gives us in the path of life. The rapture of this love is not fixed high in heaven, but breaks forth in the whole world, in every place where God desires to be. We are God’s desire, God’s love made flesh.

Resting in God's arms

2011-07-11T05:46:00.000-07:00

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want! He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters, he restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name‚s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil for thou art with me, they rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me the presence of my enemies, thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows! Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life! And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord!

The Psalmist speaks of God with such nerve! To describe the author of the cosmos as a simple shepherd catches my attention as much as it confuses me about this God. Who is this? Who is this God who bothers to lead the sheep through wet meadows to life giving springs of water? How is it that the God of eternity is the One who leads us through the darkest of death’s shadowed valleys?

I do not know much of sheep and shepherds. I am an urban dweller. The valley of the shadow of death is a concrete canyon of skyscrapers - at least as far as I have known it. The sheep I have known are usually confined to the zoo, which is where I learned something about God as our shepherd.

It was years ago. I had gone to the zoo with two of my sisters and their children. It was a perfect Spring day. My two-year-old niece was having a perfect child’s day in the children’s zoo, playing with the goats and sheep. And then it was time to go home. She erupted in tired frustration. She didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to be carried from the zoo. I held her, and tried to interest her in anything else besides staying at the zoo with the sheep and goats. But she wouldn’t have it. She kept crying to be let down. And so I finally let her down. She tired to run back to the children’s zoo, but couldn’t find her way. She became more and more frustrated at her inability to find her way. I followed her as best I could, wanting more than anything for her to let me carry her home. But she ran in frustration and rage until she could run no more. Then she simply lay down, crying on the pavement. I picked her up and held her close to me comforting her as best I could. She cried, and then stopped, and then fell asleep. She was, at last, at peace.

I sat with her asleep in my arms while my two nephews and my sisters went to look at the snakes. In the silence and sunshine of that all too human afternoon I looked into my niece's face and saw the face of each one of us. So wanting to have things a certain way, so frustrated at our inability to make things stay the same. So exhausted. So ready simply to rest. The peace of my sleeping niece must have been something like the peace the Psalmist felt under the careful eye of the God who is our shepherd. Why is it that God cares so much for us? Is it not that we are God’s children, God’s possession, the sheep that he pastures?

The easiest of burdens

2011-07-08T05:30:00.000-07:00

A sermon preached on July 3, 2011 at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco.

Tomorrow we make a holiday to remember the founding of this nation; a founding that was predicated on a particular belief about what it means to be fully human. The founding document states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And today we hear the gospel telling us something quite contrary. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

So which one is it going to be –divinely ordered liberty or a yoke that is light, but still a burden?

No matter which way you dissect it, a yoke sounds like the antithesis of liberty. A yoke is a bar placed over some beast of burden, by which the beast is bound to the command of its master. Liberty is our freedom from such external coercion. A yoke takes you places you may not want to go and take up work imposed by some external force. Liberty lets you exercise your own agency. A yoke takes your energy and directs it toward something that is quite beyond your control. Liberty puts you in the driver’s seat. A yoke is what Jesus offers his followers. The yoke is the Good News of Jesus Christ.

So, which one is it going to be? Liberty or the yoke of Jesus? The context of the story may help us to make a choice.

Before the story you’ve just heard, Matthew’s Gospel tells us about John the Baptist, imprisoned, destined for execution, who asks THE question about Jesus – the question that continues to reverberate through my imagination, maybe yours too: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Are you the one, is your yoke the answer to the question that digs into my imagination in the night watches, or is there some other way, some other method, something more familiar and more like the rule of the culture that enfolds me? If it’s at all possible, could I just please have my own way, my own free choice, my own idea of justice, my own personal liberty? It turns out that John – the ascetic, irascible, irritated forerunner of God’s anointed – has questions about Jesus just like I do.

And you can understand why, especially if you read the Gospels and all the scandalous things they tell us about Jesus. He presents himself as anything but a proper religious figure. His unnamed critics summarize for us: “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” A man who eats and drinks with just everyone. The sort of person who doesn’t wash his hands before supper and who insists that the oddly disturbing other join in the feasting as well. Is this the yoke that we want or is there another?

Jesus eating and drinking is tied up with how God is choosing to be revealed: God is doing something new, right now. So, there’s no time to prepare, no time to bury the dead, no time to tend the fields or attend to the law. God has come and changed everything. God has taken our best efforts at creating culture by excluding some and exalting others and placed them under judgment. God sends the beloved to us, and the beloved – Jesus – will go with just anyone, no discrimination, no sense of religious propriety. For Jesus, there’s no time for fasting. It’s so long gone that we’ll have to figure out another way to define “long gone”. All of the rules and regulations, all the opinions and pre-judgments have been swept away – and right now, in this moment, God is making creation new.

John takes a good hard look at Jesus and wonders what sensible people have always wondered: is this yoke the way, or do we have another option?

And of course we have. We don’t have to take the yoke of Jesus. In this regard we are perfectly free. We can easily say “no thanks” to being yoked to this peculiar way. There are plenty of other yokes that will fit us. The culture will always offer another master over our lives – even if it’s our very own selves. We can easily fit into the yoke of our own unregulated ego, our own magnificent opinions, our own carefully tailored beliefs. But the culture, that thing the Gospel calls “the world” or more elegantly “cosmos” will lead us in a direction that will not serve the God of Jesus Christ.

Ever since Cain poured out the blood of his brother Abel, human culture has objected to the yoke. In Cosmos the desire of God seems too easy, the love of God seems too free, the mercy of God seems too simple. Cosmos understands that getting things done has nothing to do with the character of God and everything to do with the simple application of force, violence, blame and scapegoating. Cosmos believes that it is the justice of God that must be stopped at all costs, because if it is revealed to people they will see that Cosmos has no real power. Then Cosmos will be dispatched and the justice of God will be seen as the blueprint of the universe. Then the yoke that Jesus offers will really make sense.

So cosmos will offer another yoke, another ideology to stop this revelation. Cosmos will use its greatest weapon, telling the lie, the majority of the time. You know what the lie is. It is all around the culture and is manifest in a thousand different ways every moment of every day. The lie says that you are not good enough to be used by God. The lie says that you are too damaged to be loved by God. The lie says that our disease and our appetites limit God. The lie says that our bodies are filth, that our relationships are a sham, that our longing is a pipe dream, and that our hope is false. The lie says that our longing for freedom is ridiculous unless it is based national strength and self-protection. The lie says that it is only in killing the evildoer that we will be saved. The lie takes our fear and spins it into a tissue of oppression, a prison for our best selves. The lie says that there is no yoke but violence. The lie says that liberty, only makes any sense if it is my freedom first, and forget the rest.

Jesus offers an alternate reading of history – of my history, of yours. Jesus says that everyone who is burdened and beaten down by the experiment of living may lay down that burden, lay down the lie of this cosmos, and take up the yoke which leads to the fullness of life and real freedom; freedom which the Prayer Book reminds us is only found in perfect service.

Maybe you’re not clear on what a yoke is. Jesus’ first audience certainly was. It was a regular feature of every day. It was a wooden bar to bind a pair of oxen who would prepare the fields for planting. A pair. Two. Jesus says, “take my yoke.” And if we lay down our burden and take his yoke he will walk the way with us, bearing that burden. He will join us in the struggle, in the loss, in the ecstasy and joy.

Jesus uses a funny word to describe his yoke. The Greek word is “chrestos” – one letter off from “Christos”. Our English translation says “easy” – but easy in a particular sense. The word differentiates one thing from another. Jesus’ yoke is easy as opposed to heavy. It is cheerful, light-hearted, even whimsical. There are other yokes. And they will break your heart with all their rules and regulations, all their exclusions and hatreds – but not the yoke the Jesus offers.

God’s culture of peace and love is here, now. And if you’re willing to throw off that other yoke – the yoke of rules and heartache and trying to be good enough to be loved by God – you may find that life is just like he promises us it will be: a feast open to all people without exception. And all those other things that seemed so likely to protect and fortify you, those burdens that just end up breaking your back and your heart, you can let those go. And your yoke-mate Jesus will take you places that you could not imagine with a grace and loveliness that seem to good to be true. Except that it is true.

This is the truth: God comes to us as one who is gentle and humble in heart, and promises every suffering creature rest. And it is in that image that we shall be remade: Gentle. Humble. At rest in the perfect peace of God who draws all beings to his feast of love.

More than playing house

2011-07-07T17:39:00.000-07:00

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” John 15:9-11

The word that catches me is the word “abide”. It implies making a home with someone; coming to a place that is your own. And it is always about relationship with the other person. There is a difference between just sleeping with someone and sleeping with someone at home. There’s a difference between hooking up with someone and making a home with someone. And it isn’t some rule about morality; it’s not about separating nice from nasty people. It is about giving yourself to another in a way that costs you; that costs you a lot. Abiding with someone is living in relationship without domination or violence or manipulation or control. Abiding with someone means living freely, openly, lovingly, and generously. And it is hard to do.

More than anything I wanted to make a home with my beloved. That’s why we moved to San Francisco. I wanted, more than anything, to abide with him – at least that’s what I told myself. It took a lot of practice. At first, it felt like “playing house”. At first it was pretty much sweetness and light. And we kept at it, even when there was less sweetness and less light. We no longer had separate houses. We had one house. We had to abide with each other. There was no space other than OUR space. And every so often I would roll over in the middle of the night and think, “Why is he still in my bed?” And instead of running away, or burying my head in the pillow and ignoring him, I would abide with him. And it is hard to do.

But there comes a place in relationship where the hard thing to do becomes the thing that we must do, if we are becoming more real in our own lives. It’s a kind of healing. It’s that place where we step out from what we have known in the past to a new kind of life in a world that we do not know. It’s a healing of our desire for the other which looks like responding out of love instead of fear. So the question becomes NOT, “Am I good enough to love you?” The question becomes “How is my relationship with God bound up in my love for you?” Jesus doesn’t love me because I’m loveable. Jesus loves on the basis of his desire for the Father. It’s as if Jesus looks at me and says, “I want more God, and so I must love Paul more.”

Jesus doesn’t think it’s just a neat idea for us to abide in his love; he knows that it is the only way that we can be saved from a culture that believes more in control than blessing. He knows that it’s the only way our desire can be healed – turned from self-serving to other-serving. It’s the only way that we can move from “playing house” with God to admitting our soul’s dependence on God. And it’s the only way that we can actually do that thing that the Gospel tells us about – and that Gregory of Nyssa called true perfection – becoming God’s friend.

That is the point of abiding in God: to live in friendship with God. This friendship is completely determined by God. And Jesus defines how it is determined when he lays down his life for his friends and commands us to do the same.

That would be an easy thing, and distant from us, if it only meant physical death. It’s like the parent who tells his son, “I love you so much that if you were lying on a train track and a locomotive was coming toward you, I’d sweep you off the track and take your place.” That’s an easy enough pledge to make, because (really) how often is that likely to happen? Let’s make the scene really hard. What about placing your beloved before your career? What about losing face with your family for the sake of your beloved? What about naming your beloved’s addiction to his face? What about changing your carefully planned life to make room for your beloved if she becomes disabled?

The list could go on. But my point is that laying down one’s life only matters if it takes place in real situations in real life – not unimaginable places in an ideal life. And I truly believe that the only way to get to the point where you can love so really is by practicing love in real relationships.

One of the recurring themes you’ll find in John’s Gospel is Jesus interpreting God for his followers through his own experience. And then he goes one step further and tells us that we are to do the same thing. That’s why he says, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” Jesus calls us to live in imitation of the relationship that he shares with God.

And that kind of imitation is just impossible if we try and do it out of our own disordered desire. The only way to redeem our desire is to pay attention to what God is doing in our actions and experiences. In these moments the gift of God becomes clearer. When we can see and name God’s action in our lives, then we are having our desire healed. Then we have the hope of God present with us in every moment, every challenge, every blessing.

That’s when playing house changes to abiding. When we recognize that the love we have for another is the same love that God freely gives us as a gift, and when we freely abide in that love, then we begin to live in a new way. It’s the way that sees every love as a part of God’s love. It is abiding in the love, not in the person. Love is the point. I may get exasperated with you, I may get angry with you, but if I’m abiding in the love that God gives, then that doesn’t matter so much. The exasperation, the anger, all the hard parts of relationship don’t matter, because God is between us, in the love. That’s what being God’s friend looks like to me: seeing the love of God between us.

And we have to practice at this kind of loving. It’s natural enough to ask, “What am I going to get from you?” That doesn’t take practice. It takes practice to see the other as a friend not because of what they bring to the relationship, but because God’s love is in that person. Friendship isn’t just about feelings. Friendship is the meeting of our feelings and our faithfulness. Friendship is trusting that you can give as much to the relationship as you can get. Friendship looks beyond the ideal image of the other to know and love the other as she truly is. The only rule of friendship is to walk together in the love that is God’s love, God’s very self.

My vocation is to practice this kind of friendship. I have to practice generosity and forgiveness and mercy and love - because I haven't mastered these gentle arts. I practice these gifts so that I can take this love – this love that is God’s love – into the world outside of my skin. This is true perfection: to live with each other in the love of God, even when we find it hard to be friends. This is true perfection: being friends with each other from the basis of God’s self-giving love and no other place. This is true perfection: to lay down our lives for each other in real ways. This is true perfection: to abide in the love of God that is healing our desire.

Sexuality and Spirituality - Part 3

2011-07-05T05:20:00.000-07:00

...I could only say stupid things to myself, which I continued to repeat for years and years. But the deeper truth, the truth that came to me as a gift from God, was that my queer desire was given to me so that (as my friend Sara likes to say) the works of God might be revealed in me. And even though I tried that other great antidote to newness --- shame --- to squelch the natural and God blessed desire that stirred in my body, the newness was permanent.

I am impressed that sex is very much like drinking or eating another person. The tangibility of mouth-flesh on mouth-flesh is so like that of food or drink around tongue, on palate, between teeth. But the hunger, the thirst that is satisfied by sex is different. It’s like the Jesus saying, “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The desire becomes something that lives inside of you. It wells up in you. It is not diminished. It remains delicious, even when it is past.

The first time I kissed a man this door opened for me. Even after life separated us, his taste on my lips remained. In those long years of self-imposed sexual denial I could remember the taste of him in my mouth and it remained a spring of water in my soul. Even when I turned away from the gift of God – the gift of being queer – and walked in wilderness, the refreshment of that first kiss watered my soul. The water that flowed by us that night in all of its raw, dark power welled up in me to eternal life.

poetry (instead of july 4 hoopla)

2011-07-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in  

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere  

i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done  

by only me is your doing, my darling)  

i fear  no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want  

no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)  

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant  

and whatever a sun will always sing is you   

here is the deepest secret nobody knows  

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud  

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows  

higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)  

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart   

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings

Sexuality and Spirituality - Part 2

2011-07-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I still fear that freedom, this intoxicating newness, will be my unmaking. And that fear is essentially the fear of the truth. And truth will always be just another way of talking about the Living Word of God, Jesus Christ. The truth is that I am a man who loves men. I love men erotically. I love men as sexual beings. I love the way men look – their hairiness and their hardness and their broadness of shoulder. I love the way men smell and the way men taste.

All I have ever truly wanted is to open myself completely to this truth. I want it in my eyes. I want it in my mouth. I want it in my arms. I want it in my soul. I want that truth to become all moments, all times. And, my refusal of God’s gift was my desire to be invisible, to be a non-being, to be straight.

That is the other part of my fear. Not only have I feared the truth of my love of men, I have feared myself as a man. If this queer desire could originate in me, if this particular and perverse erotic heat could pour out of me, then I was someone other than the one that I was taught by the church and my society to be.

It was only when I began to take myself seriously as a gay man that I could face the fear of truth, the fear of self, and the fear of knowing. Only then did I understand that fear was not my own, but a trait that I was asked to take up by the larger world. It was only then that I could begin to face the fear and say “no thank you” and live my life with a little bit of courage and a lot of hope.

The most absurd thing that I have ever said to myself was, “you do not like this.” There was that time in my life where the convergence of my desire and my fear resulted in fear winning out every time. “You do not like this, because this is not what boys like.” My fear of being rejected cut off my physical desiring from my own self-conception. “Men do not like looking at men’s bodies.” I could not like this because it was a lie.

More to come...

Sexuality and Spirituality - Part 1

2011-06-30T17:04:00.000-07:00

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”

Flannery O’Connor

The question that burns in me now is the question of how queerness – all of our queerness – redemptive? How do queer folk exist for others in a way that manifests the real presence of God to human life?

First things: God is making everything new. This includes the troubling intersection of sex and spirit. It is the newness of myself as a sexual being that continues to be the part that lives in me. I am sexual – homo-sexual – and I am new. The newness that I experience I recognize as being from God. That is, my awareness of being queer, of being sexual, of being beautiful, is a gift from God. And as any gift from God it is an occasion of thanksgiving.

Gregory of Nyssa said that human beings are most like God in our ability to desire. That God desire’s us with a lover’s passion is clear both in experience and in Holy Scripture. The longing that I feel for God the Son – whom I’ve taken to calling the Boyfriend – is like the longing that I feel for my husband; like the longing I felt for my other lovers. It is something that takes my whole self and makes it new, based in my desire. Gregory’s description of the human vocation could equally be claimed for our sexual relationships: “This is true perfection: not to shun wickedness for fear of punishment, like slaves, nor to do good because we hope for rewards, as if cashing in on a deal. On the contrary, setting aside all the prizes we hope for – and have been promised – we regard falling from God’s friendship as the only thing dreadful, and we consider becoming God’s friend the only thing truly worthwhile.”

The problem is in our shrinking from the goodness of God’s gift. God gives us good things. Sex is one of them. God gives us good things and we humans sometimes fuck them up. There is something about living that leads to train wrecks. I have betrayed others because of my evolving relationship to my desire and my queerness.

But betrayal isn’t the worst of it. The biggest problem is that we don’t allow betrayal to take its part in God’s work of making us new. The betrayer turns to regret or denial, and nothing changes. The betrayed stays a victim, and nothing changes. Maybe that’s why Jesus commands his disciples to love each other. If it wasn’t for the commandment maybe we’d all just stay in our betrayed and broken lives, and nothing would ever be made new. But if we follow Christ’s commandment and choose to love another person, we can learn to live not based on past regret or violence, but on the completely effervescent and new life of God given to us in Jesus Christ. That is how we become free from the past, free from betrayal.

More to come...

Celebrating Interdependence Day

2011-06-29T16:50:00.000-07:00

I’ve just returned from the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina. Over one thousand people gathered to experience music, justice, art and spirituality. North Carolina is different from Northern California. Where we are a polyglot culture of religious skepticism, there it is a religious monoculture. Except when it isn’t.

Although you could probably find plenty of folks in North Carolina who still trust that America is a Christian Nation, the gathering of Wild Goose placed a giant question mark over that assumption. Although many of the Wild Goose folks would call themselves Evangelical Christians, just as many are post-Evangelical or never-Evangelical. Perhaps the thing that held us in community was a rejection of Imperial, Post-Constantinian Christianity.

In the year 313, Constantine set up the Church as the center of the Empire. The social movement started by a Galilean reformer named Jesus became the state religion of the empire that had worked to obliterate the Way of Jesus. Empire co-opted the Way. And as happens in all imperial co-options, the Way had to be sanitized. No longer could the Church be a community of exiles and equals under the leadership of Jesus. It had to become the community of the state power structure. The roots of the empire grew deeply in the church. They grew all the way into our own national experience.

Our memory was co-opted by our national mythology. According to this cooption, whatever was good for the nation was good for the church, and vice versa. If the nation wanted slavery, then the church would legitimize it. If the nation wanted to disenfranchise women from the political system, then the church could give a theological reason for so doing. But then something happened. Although imperial cooption had contained the church for 1600 years, it all began to come crashing down. The church ceased to hold the central position in our nation. The church might just as well be the nation’s critic as its creation. No longer just another aspect of civic life, the church became something more like an embassy in the midst of an alien country.

The prophet Isaiah wrote these words 2500 years ago, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” They are words written when empire had taken God’s people captive, had destroyed their culture, and sought to obliterate their identity.

They are the words that made the exile bearable. The exile is always called into covenant with God. We too are called into covenant with God – and are called to live as exiles; to look to God for our needs and depend on the promise of God that we will not be left desolate.

Empire cannot make this promise. It cannot promise us anything that isn’t tied up with conditions. Empire says that if we work hard enough, we may be lucky enough to earn its graces. But, please don’t expect something for nothing. Even in your soul’s life, empire tells us that we will have to work harder and harder to fill the huge void in your soul. And if you don’t - well, it's your own fault. You just didn’t try hard enough.

“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” Why break yourself every day on the altar of empire’s expectations only to receive a broken heart? The promise of God is that there is more. “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

God’s gift is for every broken hearted victim who tries to make meaning from a world that doesn’t care. God’s gift is his love made flesh in Jesus. The promise says that our identity isn’t dependent on our own power or prestige, our possessions or property, but on God’s unconditional love and mercy. We can join God where she is to be found: the place of exiles. We will receive what we need to live our lives with integrity and grace. It is the place where the hungry are filled, the broken are healed, and everyone hears good news.

2010-11-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

Adult Forum October 24, 2010 The Rev. Paul Fromberg St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

(N.B. I cannot recommend more highly Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence by Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law and professor of law, published in 1999. It is an intelligent, compassionate and levelheaded piece of scholarship regarding the tension between vengeance and forgiveness, and serves as the basis of these notes.)

Large-scale violence is used in order to destroy the remembrance of individuals as well as of their lives and dignity. Yet history is teaching us, as in the case of the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa, that mass violence can be linked to complex, painful, transformative acts of forgiveness. What can we learn from this? In this process of violence and forgiveness, the culture has had to struggle over:

How much to acknowledge
Whether to punish and
How to recover

Finally, this process of forgiveness has had to deal with the question:

How do you treat the presence of the perpetrators of violence?

Two dangers are:

Staying stuck in the past and the violence of the past
Forgetting the past and the violence done

Too much memory or not enough; too much enshrinement of the sacred victim or insufficient memorializing of victims and survivors: these joined dangers accompany societies emerging from violence and also individuals recovering from trauma. But regardless of the dangers inherent in recovery from violent action, the greatest danger of all is doing nothing.

Although no response can ever be adequate when police ordered to shoot at a crowd of children has killed your son, something must be done. Although “closure” is never really possible, regardless of how much victims and survivors might want it, there is a way of moving from the past into the future.

Vengeance

The concept of vengeance embodies the idea of pursuing punishment of wrongdoers because they should get what is coming to them. It is the impulse to retaliate when wrongs are done. Through vengeance we express our basic self-respect. And through vengeance we express what seems to be a basic human impulse: to receive recompense.

The problem is that vengeance has the ability to lead one to exact more revenge than is necessary. Then one becomes hateful. Vengeance can set in motion a downward spiral of violence. And this downward spiral does not have the power to restore what has been destroyed by the violence done.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is about:

Ending the cycle of offense
Recognizing the common humanity of the other

The act of forgiveness can create something new between the offended and the offender, and it can create a new state of soul for the injured party.

Where vengeance can be excessive and lead to preoccupation with harms done in the past – the memory of which can be debilitating for the victim or survivor – forgiveness permits victims to reassert their own power and reestablish their own dignity.

Forgiveness may also teach the wrongdoer the effects of their harmful actions. And forgiveness always has at its heart the reincorporation of the wrongdoer into the society from which their violence has excluded them.

Justice

Justice and forgiveness stand in a tense relationship. Forgiveness can’t take the place of justice. And justice doesn’t assure forgiveness. Justice and forgiveness want different things.

Justice wants there to be a way for the imbalances in life to be set right. If someone has been injured, justice wants the injury to be balanced with some kind of punishment for the offender.

Forgiveness wants something else.

Forgiveness is an energy that has the power to change the offended person, the injured person. It marks a change in how the offended feels about the person who committed the injury. So forgiveness is about the affective self – it is about the way that I feel toward the other. Of course there are things that have been done to me that do not easily make me want to feel positively toward the one who has done the injury to me. There are times where I simply cannot “feel” anything but hatred for another. But at the same time, there comes a point at which I cannot “feel” the hatred any longer. It simply takes too much energy for me to extend the emotional response of “hate” to one who has injured me.

At some point my feelings, my affect, have to take a secondary position in terms of how I will be in relationship to the one who has injured me. Then forgiveness becomes an act of will more than an affective response.

Forgiveness does not have to be a substitute for justice. There is a classical Christian position that says that vengeance is not for humans, it is for God. I don’t know if I believe that about God or not, but I do believe it about humans.

I think that we have a limited ability to work for real justice when it comes to injury that has been done to oneself. There is a sense in which my desire for vengeance, or justice for that matter, is beyond my competence. If I am so deeply wounded by my own injury that I cannot see straight, cannot see the humanity of the one who has injured me, then I am not competent to administer justice for that person. I am too bound to the injury – which in itself does claim a certain kind of intelligence. But it is an intelligence that is limited to my own experience.

And my own intelligence about justice is a part of my basic dignity. I have the mind of justice as a part of my being human. I know right from wrong. It is this part of me that is injured when violence is done against me. (BTW – as I was writing my husband walked by and asked what I was doing. I said, “reading the dean of Harvard Law on vengeance, forgiveness and justice for my class.” He said, “I especially like that first one”.)

But forgiveness requires one thing that justice also requires: forgiveness must tell the truth. People say, “forgive and forget” but that is not the right thing to say. In order to retain some sense of our own power we must always “forgive and remember”. Not to remember in the sense of keeping score. Not remembering so that we can later find a way to undercut our forgiveness. Instead, remembering is about telling the truth of the injury done to the injured. Remembering that there was a time when this terrible thing happened to me – and that I survived that terrible thing.

Forgiveness does not mean “moving on” or “closure”. It means being released from the injury so that life can go on in a way that is more than just survival. It means living with the full consciousness of the injury that has been received, even retelling the injury (if it is for the sake of another’s benefit), and claiming the power of release from the injury.

Observers of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation commission note that although many who were victimized are prepared to forgive or reconcile with police officers and government officials from the apartheid regime, the survivors recoil when perpetrators greet victims with open arms and handshakes. In these cases, forgiveness is assumed, rather than granted. A survivor may think, “should you not wait for me to stretch out my hand to you, when I’m ready, when I’ve established what is right?”

Forgiveness is a power held by the victimized, not a right to be claimed by the wrongdoer. The ability to dispense, but also withhold, forgiveness is an ennobling capacity and part of the dignity to be reclaimed by those who survive the wrongdoing.

2010-11-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

Adult Forum
October 17, 2010
The Rev. Paul Fromberg
St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

One of the things that I love about worship at St. Gregory’s is that we touch each other. There was a time where this could not have been the case. There was a time where this kind of touch seemed sort of icky. One of my favorite satirists of religion Betty Butterfield describes the Episcopal church’s sharing of the peace by saying, “I don’t care for all them people touching me saying ‘the peace be with you,’ I don’t know them people. They could have chicken pox or monkey pox!” I haven’t seen her at St. Gregory’s. We touch each other in liturgy, not just because we’re touchy-feely Californians, but also because touch is a natural human action that indicates affection.

Affection means that attitude toward the other that is nurturing, loving and careful. This attitude is the aperture through which we hope to realize transcendence in our liturgy. You can create a sense of transcendence in all sorts of ways. One way is through fear, and sadly this has been a way that churches have tried to mediate transcendence. We choose to attend to affection as the entry to transcendence, in other words the experience of God. We claim that God desires us with a lover’s passion; that God desires intimacy with us.

I have an idea that there are many church folks who are afraid of intimacy with God. I suspect that there are some who don’t want to talk about desire in church. And, I can pretty much bet that talking about God as erotic is not something that happens on most Sunday mornings in the church house. But, that is basically what we are talking about today - the desire of God, the erotic in human life, and the place where these to join.

For most of the years of Christian history God was conceived of as unmoving, immutable, dispassionate. The thinking was that passion involved bodily alternation, and God was way above such things. And my experience certainly is that passion changes me, it changes my body in pretty extraordinary ways. It changes my heart, my mind, my imagination and my volition in ways that may not seem to fit comfortably with an image of God that is essentially static.

For a lot of western history people have not thought of God as changeable, therefore people have not thought of God as passionate - or as erotic, nor having desire. However, I think there are very many good reasons to believe that God is changeable in some way. At least God is changeable in relationship to we who are constantly changing. I believe that God is willing to become alongside us who are more human becomings than human beings.

I experience myself being in relationship to God. As a part of my human becoming I experience God in the process of change. I also love God. And I wonder what difference that love makes to God, if we concede that there is a God who is in some way conscious. If my love of God doesn’t make any difference to God - if God is unmoved by my love - then it seems possible I’m chasing after the wrong image of God.

The Hebrew Scripture includes this really wild story about God and one of St. Gregory’s favorite biblical characters, Moses. In the thirty-second chapter of Exodus, Moses pleads with God to change his mind. And God’s mind is changed. This is what it says, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people…? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people.” Moses (the faithful friend of God) argues with God and changes God’s mind. In the scripture, God changes his mind.

Only beings that are able to change are capable of passion. Only beings that can be moved are competent to be erotic. God is one of these beings. God is able to change, and is passionate. God can be moved, and is erotic. God has intense desire, and that desire is for each one of us.

I do take as an a priori that God is love and that God loves us. This is a foundational assumption that I want to make about God. But what is the character of that love? How does God love us? What is the love that is God?

As you undoubtedly know there are different words for love in biblical Greek than in modern English. Four kinds of love mentioned. Storge is affection felt for ones family. It is the love of mother and children. Philea is the love of friendship. It is the brotherly love that gives its name to the city of Philadelphia. Then comes Agape. This is self-giving love. Love that does not seek its own benefit, but only that of the beloved. Finally there is Eros. This is love that seeks possession. Eros is the love that desires more than anything the complete having of the other.

Christians have traditionally been about agape in our understanding of the love of God. This is the love that Jesus has for the disciples. It is the love that is demonstrated to us in the self-giving of Christ on the cross. But eros, the love that is possession, is seldom mentioned as a part of Christian love. Neither is friendship, or philea, by the way. I wonder at this. In the English translation of the Greek text of the New Testament we say “God is love.” In Greek the word love is agape. This is what love God is like, at least as this statement comes to us in the First Epistle of John.

However, this idea of God as agape continues to develop in the early centuries of Christian history. Augustine and later Christian theologians in a particular kind of way conceived God as agape. It was the love of the unmoved mover. It was love as disembodied. As such it began to lose an important aspect of its meaning. For people like Augustine, so deeply rooted in a classical worldview that essentially mistrusted the particular passion of love known through the body, love was a purely rational thing. Love was not the deeply felt passion of one who would give his life for you. Instead it became impersonal and abstract.

My position is that God is neither impersonal nor abstract. God is always passionately interested in relating to us. God, depicted in the Hebrew Scriptures, is always chasing after us like a jealous lover. God is depicted in these scriptures like a jilted lover and an erotically charged bridegroom, and a tender seducer. Based on these images of God, and on a desire to get to different understandings of love, I wonder about a new way of coming to know God’s love. I wonder about God being the love that is eros. I wonder about re-visioning God as erotic power.

Sallie McFague speaks of the erotic involvement of God as lover. She says, “We speak of God as love but are afraid to call God lover. But a God who relates to all that is, not distantly and bloodlessly, but intimately and passionately, is appropriately called lover.” In other words, the church likes to keep God safely at a distance, not to think of God as a lover in the heat of passion.

Maybe this is because the church has historically had such a conflicted relationship to erotic love. We don’t quite know how to bring the topic up in a theological or spiritual conversation. We affirm the erotic. We remind ourselves that God’s very first commandment to the newly created human creatures is to have sex. We charge those being married in our church to procreate, to support, to have and hold. But we don’t quite know how to continue the conversation about our desire, at lest in church.

I like the image of God as lover. It speaks to me of the intensity of God’s love for us. It speaks also of the action of God in relation to us. God chooses us. This is the chief characteristic of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. God chooses to be in relationship with Abraham and Sarah. God even gets involved in their lovemaking. God creates life in the womb of the old woman Sarah. God chooses precisely because God loves. And whom does God love?

God’s choice in the Hebrew Scriptures is always very particular. It is love for the outcast. Both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures are clear that God chooses those who have been made to feel powerless or like outcasts. God is passionately involved. God is socially in the midst of human practices for liberation and conflict. God rescues the Hebrew people from slavery. God forms them into a community that is marked chiefly by justice and compassion. This theme carries into the Christian Testament. Jesus’ teaching the reign of God says that God is present with the people in order that justice and righteousness might be established. For Jesus God is not neutral to the oppressed. In fact, God is passionately partial, choosing the oppressed, the weak, and the powerless. God is actively working within their struggle for liberation.

This struggle of God for justice and liberation is found in each of our own stories. We may not automatically identify ourselves with the outcast. But if we are living faithfully as Christians, that is who we will become. When we begin to identify ourselves with those whom the larger society calls unclean - particularly in the context of our discussion today - those whom the society calls erotically unclean, we will join in their outcast status.

What I am advocating is a spirituality that seeks liberation for all people. From passion we receive the power to act. From desire we receive the energy to continue in the struggle. The erotic impulse in our lives, both our private and public lives, gives force to our spirituality. In other words, the insight of human sexuality is part of the human experience of God.

The denial of erotic passion removes Christians from the essential spiritual power of these forces as God reveals them to us. The denial of erotic passion removes us from doing justice. To hate our physical selves, to denigrate our sexuality is to cut ourselves off, somehow, from God. There is a strong correlation between despising the body and apathy.

God is passionately in love with us. This passion invades our own understanding of ourselves and of our relationships. The meeting place of human and divine passion is the place where we learn to value all of creation in a new way - in a way that shows the essential goodness of every created being. The meeting place of human and divine passion is also known by a name - Jesus.

Jesus is the erotic power of God completely incarnate. The Christ bursts from the tomb on Easter Day and proclaims that the passion of God cannot be contained by death. The risen Christ vanquishes the place of our greatest fear: that we are eternally dead. No longer do we have to live our lives hopelessly, apathetically, knowing that only death awaits us. We can live with a new kind of passion that embraces life and creation completely. The gift the Christ brings to us from the empty tomb is life, generativity, and liberation.

As we take on our true identity as erotic and powerful beings, then we become a declaration that nothing can stop the process of God’s life in us. The destiny of creation is life.

My hope is that each one of us will dare to love God passionately, and that we will continue to honor the erotic power of God given to us in creation. That we will draw strength from our passion and our desire. In so doing we are working alongside God to declare that life is the final triumph in the universe.

Gregory last book, the Life of Moses, ends with these words: “This is true perfection: not to avoid a wicked life because we fear punishment, like slaves; not to do good because we expect repayment, as if cashing in on the virtuous life by enforcing some business deal. On the contrary, disregarding all those good things which we do hope for and which God has promised us, we regard falling from God’s friendship as the only thing dreadful, and we consider becoming God’s friend the only thing truly worthwhile. The one thing truly worthwhile is becoming God’s friend.”

It is of course based in the teachings of Jesus. In the fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel Jesus says, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” Jesus calls us friends.

Doubt in the Middle of Faith

2010-10-06T13:10:00.000-07:00

Adult Forum
October 3, 2010
The Rev. Paul Fromberg
St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

I want to begin this morning with a confession and a promise. The confession centers on my role in the church as a mid-level cultic functionary. That’s right, I need to confess to you all that as a priest in the church, as a paid representative of the institutional side of Christianity, I stand in a tradition that has not told you the truth about faith and doubt. The institution of the church has done a poor job of unfolding the meaning of faith, and we have (as Friedrich Nietzsche says it) done our utmost to close the circle and declared doubt to be sin. My promise is that I will tell you that you’re doubt is just as holy as your faith, just as much a gift from God, and just as meaningful in coming closer to God in your life.

I don’t believe that the church has done a poor job around faith and doubt to purposefully mislead you. I just think that the church has been lazy, preferring to let the jargon of Christianity sit in the middle of the room like a strange relation that nobody quite knows what to do with. I remember when I first became aware of myself as a person who believed he believed in God. I remember having no idea what the word faith meant – apart from formulaic definitions that people would parrot. I didn’t know what faith meant for the longest time, not really.

But I think the time has come for the church to come clean and say the thing that you probably already know: that doubt is always at the center of faith, and that is the way it was always supposed to be. As I’ve said before, doubt is not the opposite of faith; certitude is the opposite of faith. Not that internal knowing that you feel you can rest in, that is not what I mean by certitude. Rather, I mean to point toward a state of being where one is in absolute control of one’s ideas and images of unimaginable stuff. I mean that position in life that wants to believe that the self has everything figured out – case closed, no further debate. That, I believe, is the opposite of faith. So what is faith?

We get the language of faith, not surprisingly, from the scriptures. But what the scriptures have to say about faith may come as a surprise to you. In particular, what the gospels have to say may sound unlike what you’d thought before.

The way that the English language speaks of faith or belief almost always implies a psychological, internal, cognitive, and affective assent of mind to something that is true. We tend to look at faith and belief empirically. If something makes sense in itself, if A=C and B=C then A=B, we believe in it. Or if a person speaks with credible authority, we believe what that person says. We don’t have to prove to ourselves by our own research that E=MC2. We believe it because Einstein said it. Or if “everyone” believes that things are a certain way, then we tend to believe them. If everyone believes that slavery is a bad thing, we put our faith in that belief.

Considering faith in this way is really not very common in the scriptures. The bible doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about faith as assent to something or what somebody says. You can find it in a few places like Mark 13:21 which says, “And if anyone says to you at that time, ‘Look! Here is the Messiah!’ Or ‘Look! There he is!’— do not believe it.” But that kind of instruction to rational assent just isn’t a big deal in the scriptures.

It’s also rare in the scriptures to use the word faith to mean the collected tradition of the religious culture. In other words, the bible doesn’t use the word “faith” to mean “religion”. Several years ago the Prince of Wales was being interviewed about his future role as the sovereign of England, which of course includes the title “Defender of the Faith”. His response was typically modern, “Why not just be Defender of Faith?” he asked. The reason he can’t properly call himself that is because “The Faith” refers to Christianity. “Faith” is not something that needs defending by the king of England – it will get along just fine. But my point is that the substitution of the word “faith” for “religion” is also not a big deal in the scriptures.

What the scriptures do with the word “faith” is really quite different from any of these. To find out why, we have to take a short spin through the sociology of the New Testament world.

The New Testament was written in a world in which internal, psychological states were not very important to people. What really mattered were relationships. More specifically, what mattered were the relationships that bound you to others in terms of honor and shame. Who you were, your own identity as a person, was based primarily on who you were bound to by blood and honor.

Individualism, perhaps the social trait that our culture puts its greatest trust in, is almost completely absent from the New Testament. That isn’t to say that either individualism is bad or the New Testament is primitive; it is simply the case that the world in which Jesus taught and our world are dramatically different. In the ancient world of Jesus the very concept of the individual did not exist, at least not in the terms that we think of it. In the world of Jesus every person was understood to be embedded in the people she or he shared society with. A person’s identity was not what that person wanted it to be; identity was found only in relation to those who formed his or her fundamental social group, typically their family. What one member of the family was, every member of the family was.

Introspection and reflection, the psychological state that we so cherish, was equally unknown in the ancient world. Rather than sitting and thinking about one’s identity, people in Jesus’ world relied on those around them to provide them with a sense of who they were. Deciding what you wanted to be when you grew up was not a pastime for children in the ancient world; generations and generations who came before you decided everything. The very idea of the inner life – again, something that we cherish – was just not an issue that people worried about. The collective culture was the only thing that mattered.

Because of this, people in the ancient world did not know each other in the terms that we take as absolutely essential. They did not know each other psychologically. They didn’t know what we understand as psychology. They had no “mother issues”. So if you read the bible and try to read emotion or psychology into the characters, it is always an anachronistic projection of our social norms onto a world that won’t bear them.

If you want to know the most important thing that occupied people’s thoughts it would have to be what other people thought of them – of how other people considered them in relation to the surrounding culture. The question for a first century Palestinian was not, “Who am I?” it was always, “Who do other people say I am?”

I was talking about this with my friend Robin on Friday night. I explained this idea of first century culture and the lack of psychological thinking in the first century. She said, “Yeah, but they must have had an inner life…” Maybe. But to assume that first century people are just like 21st century people is to assume that culture is one shape. And, when it comes to a discussion of “faith” and what scripture says about faith we have to back away from our assumptions a bit and hear what this ancient world, in which Christianity was born, heard in the word “faith”.

In the New Testament, the word “faith” usually refers to the bond that finds one person to another. Faith has to do with the things that one person does in relation to others. So loyalty in relationship is analogous to faith. Commitment to the plans that are made in a relationship is analogous to faith. And perhaps most importantly, solidarity with another person – particularly a person that is a teacher or guide – is analogous to faith.

Jesus called people to follow him who were in some way becoming dislocated from their social systems. For example, Matthew was a toll collector – a generally despised profession. Others were more closely related to their social systems. Peter and Andrew were brothers and worked alongside their father (at least according to Mark’s Gospel). But fishermen generally worked through the night, leaving their women and children alone and unprotected, which resulted in a lower than usual place in their village’s rank of honor. Regardless of their social location when they were called, the disciples of Jesus soon became outcasts. The fact that they left their villages behind, that they left their womenfolk unprotected, that they ceased to care what others thought of them all meant that they were social outcasts and socially disconnected from what everyone experienced as normal life.

Jesus provided for his disciples an alternative social structure – what sociologists would call a fictive kinship network. Within this new “family” the disciples learned to live together according to a new rule of life. And in their rule of life the most important thing was loyalty and commitment to their leader – Jesus. Again, the social norms and rules of that day held that the most important question was not “who am I?” but “who do people say that I am?” Having left behind the known world of the village to follow Jesus wherever he led them meant living to answer the “who do people say that I am?” question by saying, “I am a loyal follower of Jesus. I am committed to his message.” This is how the writers of the New Testament defined faith.

But Jesus does something remarkable in his call. He is not interested in claiming loyalty and commitment for himself. He wants his followers to place their faith – their loyalty and their commitment in the God of Israel that he calls Abba. So in Mark 11:22-26 Jesus says, “‘Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, “Be taken up and thrown into the sea”, and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. ‘Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.’”. Jesus isn’t interested in people putting their ultimate faith in him, but in the God whom he comes to reveal. Thus, loyalty to God and commitment to the culture of God, are the ways that the New Testament wants to define faith.

For me this shifts the understanding of faith away from intellectual ascent to hope in relationship. Solidarity with God’s culture – a culture of forgiveness, mercy and peace – is the life of faith. Even when it seems that living for vengeance, retribution and violence is the sensible thing to do, the response of faith is to claim something else. It is to claim that a culture has been called into being by God that is built on a promise; a promise that there is a new way of being in relationship with God and with one another.

So we have received a tradition of faith that is primarily defined in terms of personal loyalty, personal commitment, fidelity, and the solidarity in relationship that comes from such a relationship. That is where I would suggest we begin to understand faith. Not as a set of unbelievable facts that we have to somehow muster an intellectual ascent, but rather in a confidence that the way revealed in Jesus Christ is one that leads to abundant life.

And then there is doubt. The philosopher Martin Buber uses the analogue of a solar eclipse to explain doubt: for the believer, God the “sun” must radiate his light if the earth is to continue to exist, but something has intervened to block that light and make the darkness of unbelief plausible. For Buber, the eclipsing “moon” was the atheism implicit in German National Socialism in the 19030’s. An idea is introduced into human culture that blocks our ability to faith. So perhaps vast realignments in human culture can cause such a disruption that faith is less plausible and doubt more reasonable.

But it strikes me that such doubt is potent only when the influence of culture is given primacy over the experience of God. I think that it is in terms of our lived experience that both faith and doubt have a lively relationship. Or as Frederick Buechner expresses it, “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” There is something about doubt in relation to faith that keeps it moving forward, that keeps the soul active in its pursuit of union with God.

A Zen proverb says that a student must have great faith, great doubt, and great determination. The life of conscious appreciation of life is obviously complex – as complex as any human system. So if we have no faith, we have no doubt. We are less than human, relational beings. The thing that binds faith and doubt is our willingness to be changed by our experience in life. I think that is because faith and doubt are both about openness. Faith and doubt are about living with your heart open to the presence of the mystery of God in all the little things of life, and the struggle to see God in life. Faith and doubt are about living honestly and courageously, not being closed off from your experience. Faith and doubt are about welcoming experience as a teacher: learning to overcome fear, grief, disappointment and remaining open to the possibility of new insight and growth. Faith and doubt are being open to what scares us, and seeing what happens as a result of being in that scary place.

I don’t believe that doubt is having trouble with intellectual assent to doctrines or disagreement with ethical positions. I think doubt is an energy that drives us forward in our lives, just as living in real, honest relationship drives us forward. One of the truly amazing things I’ve experienced in life is that you cannot have real love without real pain. Wherever there is love, there is pain. Doubt is like this. And when doubt and faith, like love and pain, are a part of your experience, then there is a kind of restless action – a yearning that pulls us forward in life.

I love these words from Andrew Sullivan, “Complete calm comes from complete certainty.” That is to say, when we feel that drawing out, that pulling toward the future, we are feeling the stimulation of honest faith and real doubt. Our yearning, our desire, our restlessness can be tools for living deeper and more authentic lives. But doubt, I believe, cannot be an end in itself – I mean it can, but it is a meager meal. Instead I experience doubt as a way of moving off of my certainty and moving more deeply into the real presence of God in my life.

At the core of our life at St. Gregory’s there is this tension. We realize faith through risk instead of approval. We live not to appear to be good people, we live to risk the realness of God’s presence in our lives. We risk stepping out of what is known for what is unknown, expecting, yearning to find our heart’s desire in that risky movement.

Richard Dawkins wrote, “Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” Which I believe is untrue. I agree with my brother that people tend to operate from a position that they call “faith” but I do not think that it is really the idea that the scriptures offer us. Instead, I would call Dawkins’ definition certainty. The evidence is our experience in our lives, living in community, living with our hearts and minds and bodies open to what is coming.

Finding a Pathway through the Unknown

2010-09-30T12:36:00.000-07:00

Adult Forum Sept. 26, 2010

The Rev. Paul Fromberg

St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

San Francisco

The topic of today’s discussion is about spiritual pathways: finding your way through what is a changing world with a changing set of assumptions about everything from the economy to the spiritual life. My belief is that for all of us there is a spiritual pathway that can help to make sense out of what seems random and disconnected in life.

The very first thing I want to say is that each one of us is on some sort of pathway that – to use the language of John’s Gospel – leads us to the Father. Each one of us already has some sense of what the pathway is, the direction that we are heading and what we find along the way that helps us to achieve the goal of spiritual maturity. Each one of us is making progress on the spiritual pathway in the spirit of freedom that God offers us.

So I’m definitely NOT saying that you need to pick one of the pathways that I’ll offer this morning or else. I’m not saying that you have to choose a brand and stick with it. I’m not saying that the pathways of Christianity are the only way to gain spiritual maturity.

However, I do want to insist that realizing progress in your spiritual life emerges best in a spirit of freedom, and is inhibited if you assume there is something disordered about your spiritual life. In other words, I believe that God desires to be known and that God plants in you all of the seeds that you need to grow in spiritual maturity. I take as an a priori that you are ready to hear God and free to choose the pathway that leads you to God.

Different people find themselves on pathways that make sense to them. For some the spiritual pathway is going to be grounded in relationships; they may find that the path is clearest when they are close to other travelers – friends, families, gurus, etc. Others will find that their pathway is more about the life of the mind then it is about living in relationship with others. They prefer intellectual discipline, study and reading. Others will be moved along the path by contemplative practice, or in common prayer, or in serving others, or by the presence of God discovered in the natural world. Each one of us will resonate to a pathway that matches the character that defines our selves. And of course these may shift from time to time, depending on one’s setting in life or one’s age, or any number of factors. And you may find that a variety of influences and energies on your pathway.

I want to suggest, though, that for each one of our spiritual pathways there is a common thread. Each pathway leads us to God. Each pathway reveals us and reveals God. And each pathway – if it is leading to God – will affirm that the universe of God’s creation is a place that is fundamentally good. That the blessing of God’s presence introduces the opportunity for seeing holiness in almost everything. That peace and mercy and love and forgiveness are the hallmarks of the spiritual pathway. And finally, that the reality that surrounds and penetrates us is one that is first and foremost marked by God’s presence, so that in any promise or challenge in life we have the opportunity of seeing God alive and real.

What does it take to know that you are on a pathway to God, instead of some other?

So here is a metaphor to consider when you consider your spiritual pathway. When I was young and my family would vacation in Colorado, we would spend a great deal of time hiking in the Rockies. Although we didn’t always do this, on occasion we would let the littlest person in the group lead us. This meant that the entire progress of our hike was paced according to the needs of the weakest, slowest, neediest hiker. In the same way I invite you to look at spiritual pathway and consider that the thing that leads us all is this little, weak, slow and needy reality of God’s leadership. This may be the part of you that you think is weak, embarrassing, helpless or even foolish.

Although for some the leadership of God is like a tidal wave, for me it is easy to miss. I get so wrapped up in my plans and my needs that I forget to look out, just ahead, to where the gentle presence of God is leading. And I believe that this gentle presence is marked in at least four distinct ways. This list, by the way, is a work in progress.

The Artist’s Way

The first way is what I’ll call the artist’s way. This is the way of affirming that what God has made is good. This way invites us to be filled with the goodness of the universe. That is the whole content of this pathway. The universe is to fill us with love our life in the cosmos.

As you may know the word “cosmos” in Greek has many translations. Not only is it translated as “universe” but it is translated as “beautiful” - hence our word “cosmetic”. The universe is beautiful. Our task as people of faith is to affirm its beauty. To love its beauty. To be drunk with its beauty. The14th century mystic Meister Eckhart said, “is-ness is God.” In other words, the divine is everywhere. God is present in all that is. Our job is to make the presence of God fully comprehensible in life.

A good metaphor of this is the life of the artist. One of the functions of the artist is to tell us where the sacred “is-ness” can be found. The artist tells us not to miss it when it comes. Don’t take it for granted. The artist tells us that the presence of the divine in creation can be about color or shape or movement or sound or silence or story. But always it is relational. The sacred mystery in creation is always something that exists between the viewer and the viewed.

The sixteenth century poet-priest George Herbert writes these lines: Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave bids the rash gazer wipe his eye. The beauty of something so simple in the universe as a rose stops the rash gazer, the one whose view is always hurried and distracted. She stops and she stands, teary eyed to see something so beautiful and so easy to pass by. The metaphor of artist says that each one of us must stop and in wet-eyed love look at the divine mystery as it comes to us.

But more than this, the artist’s way says that we have a role in showing forth the divine mystery in creation. In our expression and our action, we reveal the meaning of the cosmos. We are called to show forth the wonder of God’s glory in creation. And before we can do this, of course, we must be ready to stop and look and see the mystery all around us.

This is the work of the mystic. The mystic is one who does not take for granted, who has paused to see the shape of things, and the relationship of things. The mystic may also be the one who finds a language to speak of the presence of the mystery of God’s glory in our midst.

When the mystery is spoken, then we feel grateful, thankful. Both the one who speaks and the one who listens is stirred. There's a fullness in our soul that fills up and rushes over with a passion for living. And this may feel like the erotic power of passion. The metaphor of the artist teaches us that this is what art is about at its first dimension - to fill us with passion for living, to discover the Eros of the cosmos. We both seize Eros and are seized by it, and in both we are invited to see the cosmos as the place wherein both are manifest.

This is the wisdom of the Song of Solomon (which is an extended erotic poem, and featured above our preaching place). It tells us that Eros, this love of life, is another word for wisdom. We cannot live wisely without an erotic attachment to life. We can know everything that there is to know about the cosmos, but knowledge does not equal wisdom. Experience makes wisdom.

Wisdom is about making the connections and announcing the connections, holding them up and beholding them. Wisdom is realizing the connection between the cosmos and us and of all that is within the cosmos, and knowing that it all flows from the creative work of God.

Years ago I showed one of the flowers from my passionflower vine to my neighbor. She was a devout Christian lady of 72 years. All she said was, “It was made by the hand of an artist.” All that is praises God. All that exists shows forth the glory of God.

The Witness’ Way

The next way to consider the spiritual pathway I will call the witness’ way. This is the way that flows from the experience of feeling the pain of the world. Witnessing the pain of the world can call forth the experience of compassion or it can simply shut us down. This is because seeing the pain of the world is painful, and telling the truth that one sees in the world can be painful. This path tells the truth about our experience of pain in life: telling the truth about the abuse, the shadow, the grief and the moral outrage of life. This pathway reminds us that we cannot live the life of eternity as long as we are in denial. And it says that God is with us to strengthen our witness, so we are not left alone in despair.

Again, the metaphor of the artist is helpful. Not only does art awaken us to beauty, grace, joy, awe, wonder and intoxication, it bears witness to all of life’s raw ugliness. The artist helps us to name grief and its progeny, and thereby to cease denial, to cease running from pain, and cease forgetfulness.

I think of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. You may remember that the first response to the winning design was outrage. Veterans groups called her design a “black gash of shame.” But, when the design was realized, the impact was both unexpected and breathtakingly holy. In the reflection of the polished black granite, each rash viewer could see their own face and the names of the lost. The memorial spoke the truth elegantly and painfully. Since it’s completion this memorial has become a place where grief is purged. It is a walk into the valley of the shadow of death and out to the light of a new day.

This pathway follow St. John of the Cross into the dark night of the soul: going into the shadow lands and remaining there in order to name the suffering of life to emerge into newness. If our heart and mind is at all open to the truth of the times in which we live, we will find ourselves living with both the shadow and the mystery of God present and real.

Naming the shadow enables us to stay in the world and be faithful. Telling the truth about the shadow is a kind of act of sedition. Speaking in witness to the suffering in our culture is a way in which we begin to emerge from the dark night of the soul. Telling the truth is seditious in that it seduces us to act for the truth. And, of course, in doing this we are only following in the way of Jesus Christ, who was condemned - at lest in part - for telling the truth. We are likewise called to undermine the shadow by speaking the name of all the unspeakable realities of life.

But the witness’ way is not just about suffering. It is also about standing strongly in the truth of God’s love and God’s insistent presence to forgive and show mercy. It is about speaking truth in the silence of apathy and ignorance. It is about acting for the sake of the world out of God’s spirit of compassion. It is about renouncing our own passivity and desire to stay victimized for the sake of those around us. This is the way that finds the space for the silence that dares to name the sacred.

The Worker’s Way

The third path I want to suggest is the worker’s way. We bear God’s image in many ways. But we bear it particularly, I think, in our desire to work. God is a worker. One of the most endearing things you can read about God in Genesis comes just after the second creation myth. After they have learned to linked their nakedness with shame, Adam and Eve throw together some fig leaves to cover themselves. But when God finds them, sees their degraded state, lets the consequences of their actions bear fruit, he sews them their first set of real clothes. (Genesis 3:21 - The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.)

Ever since we are called by God to be co-creators in the cosmos and of the cosmos. When we take up work that is set on revealing more of God to the world we may come to recognize the Spirit of God flowing in our lives. We are all competent to walk this pathway. I hear some people say, “I can’t do that. I’m not smart enough or brave enough or visionary enough,” or some such. But, that is strikes me as a rejection of God’s invitation. Each person is gifted, on the basis of his or her own human creatureliness, to work just as God works. When we take up our work we are living in the image of God.

Each one of us takes up work for many reasons. We have within us this energy to work. And I believe that if we do not exercise it, we become sullen or violent. We forget that all work is essentially soul work. We become confused about the work that God gives us to do and the job that we are compelled by another to do. The question is not what work am I supposed to do, but what work must I do if I am living my own life.

The Prophet’s Way

The final pathway I want to offer is the prophet’s way. This is where we take our love of creation, our courage in the face of the shadow lands, and our own energy and we focus each for the sake of transformation. This is the path of the prophet.

One of our dancing saints, Abraham Heschel, said that there lies in the recesses of every human existence a prophet. This is the place where we take our own inner conviction and experience and put them into action. Our experience - our sense of joy, our experience of pain, and our creative activity - is meant to be used in relation to others, for the ongoing work of creation in the cosmos.

And what does a prophet do? Heschel said, “The primary work of the prophet is to interfere.” To interfere with whatever blocks the life that God is, at this very moment, giving to each of us. Our spiritual lives are likewise a process of interference. We are to be working in opposition to that which enslaves and diminishes the human person. And like the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures we see the unexpected and take the risk of being ridiculous.

At this point I feel tempted to do a “how-to” on this process. But, I think I will resist the temptation. I cannot tell you how to live with the four paths. I cannot tell you how to work prophetically in the transformation of the cosmos. What I can do is to encourage you to keep your eyes and hearts open. To watch for the ways in which God is at work in your life. To charge you to hope for a kind of living that sees the presence of God not as a nice little extra, but as the very center of your life. To see your own spiritual pathway not as something to bear competitively with others, but as a way of celebration of each one’s progress toward God. And as we learn in our icon workshops on Sunday afternoons, to take each other icon painters’ success as a new expression of that holy image that God longs to reveal.

So now it’s your turn to identify your pathway. And since the list I’ve presented is in no way complete, my invitation is to examine your own experience and learn from the wisdom that God is planting in your soul.

This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.

2010-09-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

The tax collectors and sinners, however, were all crowding round to listen to Jesus, and the Pharisees and scribes complained saying, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” So he told them this parable. “Which one of you with a hundred sheep, if he lost one, would fail to leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the missing one till he found it? And when he found it, would he not joyfully take it on his shoulders and then, when he got home, call together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, I have found my sheep that was lost.’ In the same way, I tell you, there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repenting than over ninety-nine upright people who have no need of repentance.

“Or again, what woman with ten drachmas would not, if she lost one, light a lamp and sweep out the house and search thoroughly till she found it? And then, when she had found it, call together her friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, I have found the drachma I lost.’ In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing among the angels of God over one repentant sinner.”

This is a story that’s all about how God reworks one of the basic rules of human culture: we can afford to lose some people. And you may have had the experience of being lost yourself, but that isn’t the place I’m going today. So for today let me be clear that you are not the lost sheep, you are not the lost coin. For today you are the 99 sheep that are left alone in the wilderness and you are the ten other coins in this wild housewife’s purse. So if you want to find a hook to identify with this story, ask yourself not, “How am ‘I’ lost or how am ‘I’ found?” Instead ask, “How are WE found and how are WE lost?” In other words, read this story as one about all people everywhere and what lengths God is willing to go to bring all people everywhere to feast.

What ridiculous lengths will God go to in order to make sure there’s a place at the table for everyone? That’s the core question in today’s Gospel. And it’s a theme that comes up again and again in the Gospel of Luke. There is no end of the trouble that God will take to see that every seat is taken at the banquet she is preparing – and not taken by the people that you’d expect. God goes to ridiculous lengths to bring everyone back to the table, because everyone is precious – even those, especially those – whom we’d just as soon never eat a meal with again.

Maybe one of the reasons that Jesus was executed on a cross was because he kept saying ridiculous things about God. Ever since we had a way of defining some people as insiders and others as outsiders, ever since human culture began, sensible people have known that God only operates in one direction: God wants to keep misfits and nice people apart. That’s the mythology of religion. Jesus was killed because he not only spoke foolish things, he enacted foolishness – and worse than foolishness – and said that it was the very nature of God and of God’s people to so behave.

So ask the question, “What is God like?” and the answer you’ll get from this gospel story is that God is like a shepherd who is so concerned by the loss of a single sheep that he leaves 99 ranging free in the wilderness. The shepherd trusts that the 99 sheep he leaves will be able to stay in one place long enough for him to go out and find the lost sheep. God, in other words, will risk the safety of the 99 for the sake of the one. And in case you were wondering, we are the 99 sheep. We are the ones that God is trusting so that he can go and fetch the single sheep that’s gotten itself lost.

“What is God like?” God is like a frantic housewife who has lost a day’s wage somewhere in her house. The housewife tears the house apart looking for the coin, even though she has ten days wages with which she can provide for her family. So if the furniture gets tossed into the front yard and kosher dishes get mixed up with the everyday stuff, the neighbors start shaking their heads and saying, “Look at her! Doesn’t she care what people think? I knew one day she’d lose her mind, poor thing.” And when she finally comes out holding the lost coin above her head like it was the lost Ark of the Covenant, her neighbors must wonder why such a big deal for a single coin when she has ten more jangling in her purse. “It’s just a coin…”

It’s just a junkie angling for a fix. It’s just a Florida pastor huffing and puffing on TV. It’s just my brother who’s always been a thorn in my side. It’s just an ex-governor who likes the sound of her own voice. It’s just a (fill in the blank, please). God has this annoying habit, Jesus says, of going after the losers and villains and fixers and haters. God has this propensity for seeking out the one person on this planet – the one person – that I pretty sure we’d all be better off getting rid of. And God calls that one person to sit next to me at the meal that makes us closer than family.

“What is God like?” His answer to that question is what landed Jesus on the cross. Norman Perrin, one of our dancing saints, said this about Jesus’ outrageous parables, “The tragedy was that the new situation demanded a willingness to sacrifice principles and attitudes previously regarded as essential to the life of the community and its relationship with God, and for this many were unprepared.”

How are we prepared to hear this news about God? Your answer matters intensely, because it will indicate a way forward in your life. The initial complaint in this story is carved and gilded on our holy table, “The tax collectors and sinners, however, were all crowding round to listen to Jesus, and the Pharisees and scribes complained saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” It is the meal that sets the stakes so high. In our world eating can be something as mindless as shoveling down left over take-out, standing over the kitchen sink. Or eating can approximate what it meant when Jesus was first criticized: eating together makes the eaters more than family. Eating together makes the tablemates joyful concelebrants of God’s unbounded love for each one.

A new community is being created in Jesus’ actions. It consists in both the persecuted and the persecutors, the A-list and the D-list, the acceptable people and the unacceptable. Everyone is welcome to come and eat with Jesus, but not everyone will come to the table. And the thing that catches me up short is that I wonder if I am the one who will not come. I look at my life and the ways in which I steer clear of those people who trouble me, and I wonder if there isn’t some other table that Jesus is setting for people like me. So the first thing lost that must be found in me is compassion. God is seeking out to find that thing that is beyond value in our souls, so that we can begin to act as God is acting right now.

What ridiculous measures will we take as a community in order to act like this ridiculous God? First we have to see that the table isn’t just the little one with the gilded lettering in the rotunda. We have to see that the table of Jesus stretches beyond these walls into the places where we live our lives. It stretches beyond these walls and beyond those places where we gather with people just like us. It stretches to the place in our hearts where we imagine ourselves and plan for our futures. And that table is a place where everyone is welcome to come and be fed. In our lives God is preparing a place where everyone is welcome. In our lives God is bringing in the lost and moving everything else aside to make one more place.

Freaking out with the Spirit

2010-05-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

Change is coming. That is a major theme in the Christian life. We heard about it last Sunday in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles - the reading assigned for Pentecost. Men and women who had followed the Jesus-Way gathered together for prayer, just like they'd always done. It was a typical day, a day just like yours today. Then everything was changed. Whether or not the people were prepared, this is what happened. The Holy Spirit came into their lives like a wind. The Spirit blew through them and among them, and changed their lives and the life of the world forever. Nothing that had come before had really prepared them for this event. Everything about them changed.

This story kind of freaks me out. I mean, it's just so over the top. It's so beyond my control. It's just so charismatic! But just like those first followers, trapped in fear then freed by hope in Jesus' new life, there is something more; there is the coming of the Spirit. Even though the invitation to anxiety is all around us, there is something more at work in our lives. The Holy Spirit will come into our midst and blow through us and among us, and we just have to be in that sacred space. Then we have to choose how we will say, "yes" to the power of the Spirit.

I'm freaking out again. I have no control over the Spirit. The Spirit has complete control over my life. The Spirit has control over all our lives, our world, everything. Which means that the Spirit is not easily managed. Sure, I can close my eyes and ears, pull a blanket over my head, through my focus on anything else --- but finally the Spirit is right here, in my life and yours. I can't control the Spirit, anymore than I can control the wind blowing over me as I walk the streets of San Francisco. But, I can respond to that presence. I can look up and see what is happening around me and in me and I can follow my longing to be a part of the Spirit's life.

But I can't do it alone. One of the things about the Spirit is that She comes to just everyone. The most interesting thing is not that the Holy Spirit of God blows into my life. The most interesting thing is that the Spirit comes to all of us and makes us into a new creation that we call the Body of Christ.

It takes all of us to be the Body of Christ. This is why the gift of the Spirit is to all of us, not just some of us. And for the work of Jesus to continue in our world we have to be present and ready to go. It's not just to support each other, not just to be a therapeutic community; we need each other to fulfill that final promise of Jesus to his anxious followers: "You will do greater works than these that you've seen me do." So, who is going to do these greater works?

That's you. Not just you alone --- but all of us working as the one Body of the one Christ. And just as a reminder of how much we need each other as fellow workers, think of a time when you had to do a project or piece of work all on your own. Others who might have been helpful were unavailable or not interested. Perhaps they sat and watched, or even made critical comments instead of pitching in. Maybe you heard things like, "Oh, but you do that so well," when you wanted to hear, "What can I do to help?" Get it? Being the Body of Christ means all of us doing the work of ministry. And maybe you can remember that experience --- when everyone was working together to make some greater work happen. That's just what it feels like to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

God is ready, here and now to be known by everyone. The Spirit gives us all the tools we need. The work of Jesus continues. Don't be afraid!

Looking back (and forward) to Easter

2010-05-11T17:42:00.000-07:00

This season of Easter is almost over. It seems like we were just walking in the dark and dancing in the light at the Easter Vigil, but it’s been six weeks. And so it seems like a good idea to ask what Easter has made in us, in our community this year. How have we come to know more about life as a consequence of hearing again the stories of Jesus death-trampling resurrection?

For me it’s been all about normal, every day experience. It’s been about my body and my mind combined into the self that I know myself to be, then paying attention to the world around me. I think the resurrection says that if we want to know God, if we want to find fellowship with God, then we must settle deeply into our lives. We find the Divine in the midst of the mundane, everyday reality of life. That’s why the gospels report all those stories of Jesus coming to his disciples and asking them to meet his most basic needs. Jesus comes into the scene and says, “Hey, that fish looks good – give me a piece.” In other words, Jesus is always there in the midst of everyday lives.

Many years ago I went to the zoo with two of my sisters and their children. It was a perfect spring day. My then two-year-old niece was having a perfect child's day in the children's zoo, until it was time to go home. Then she erupted in tired frustration. She didn't want to go home. She didn't want to be carried from the zoo. I held her, and tried to interest her in anything else besides staying at the zoo. But she wouldn't have it. She kept crying to be let down. And so I finally let her down. She tired to run back to the children's zoo, but couldn't find her way. She became more and more frustrated at her inability to find her way. I followed her as best I could, wanting more than anything for her to let me carry her home. But she ran in frustration and rage until she could run no more. Then she simply lay down, crying on the pavement. I picked her up and held her close to me comforting her as best I could. She cried, and then stopped, and then fell asleep. She was, at last, at peace.

I sat with her asleep in my arms while my two nephews and my two sisters went to look at the snakes. In the silence and sunshine of that all too human afternoon I looked into my niece's face and saw the face of each one of us. So wanting to have things a certain way, so frustrated at our inability to make things stay the same. So exhausted. So ready simply to rest. The peace of my sleeping niece must have been something like the peace Jesus bid to his friends. Each one of them so frightened by the way things had changed. Each one of them so wanting things to be right. So much wanting nothing but to rest in God's arms.

Jesus waits with arms open for all who are too tired with trying to believe. The risen Lord waits to carry us in peace against his living flesh. When we dare to be carried in his arms, he promises us peace. That promise can be known in one way only: by placing our hearts in that resting place. It may look like giving up or giving in. It may seem like a childish solution to a complicated problem. But if it is your heart’s desire, then the resting may bring with it the hope of renewal and real life. And then the resurrection will happen all over again.

Mary Sings Like a Crazy Woman

2010-02-06T16:09:00.000-08:00

The beginning of Luke's Gospel is full of singing. IWhen people come to the limits of their lives, they sing. People sing in these liminal spaces because songs are powerful.

Mary’s song is called Magnificat.

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;
my spirit rejoices in God my savior.

It is particularly powerful. She sings it as if its powerful good news is already accomplished. She recognizes something about God that people still have trouble getting: God is siding with all of the beaten and kicked-out people that have dared to sing in the face of suffering and subjugation. Every since there have been men and women and children who weren’t allowed the dignity of heaven’s children, God has been right there, right next to them, preparing a way out of all that darkness. God has always been like this, and the ones like Mary, the ones who see that truth plainly, finally have all of the world’s power. Mary’s song is powerful. Which may be why it is so hard for us to hear and sing and believe.

He has shown strength with his arm
and has scattered the proud in their conceit,
Casting down the mighty from their thrones
and lifting up the lowly.

We may listen to another song, a kind of light rock of this present age that demands nothing from us but sentimental attachment and projected rage. Or we may listen to that song which comes in so many different versions, but is always designed to sell us some product we don’t really want or need. Or we may listen to those nihilistic ballads that my friend Amy used to describe as “music to open a vein to”. There is some sense in which we have to claim the responsibility that God gives us to pay attention to the Good News, and laugh a little at the bad news. And that is the time that we, like Mary, may find the courage to actually sing out our lives not for what they are just now, but for what God promises us our lives will be. Full of courage and freedom and love that imitates the same stick-by-you-ness that is the very definition of God’s love.

He has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty.

The God whom Mary sings is the God who delights in what is small and insignificant in the estimation of all the big deals and power brokers. It is God’s delight to take the smallest and give them the power to do extraordinary and unimagined things. That is God’s promise. Our few voices gathered to sing may seem like a small thing in the face of the wars and worries of this present darkness. But it has always been from such small things that greater light may spread across the world.

He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
to remember his promise of mercy,
The promise made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and his children for ever.

The power that Mary sings isn’t the kind of power that you hear about on the news. It isn’t the kind of power that reorders the world by making the high low, and the low high; that’s just the oppressed becoming the oppressors. It is the power of humility and vulnerable love; of being made real in relationship to other people. Mary sings of a world that is reborn in a new way of knowing itself and knowing God. And this begins with the birth of a peasant child to an unwed mother in an obscure side street in the middle of nowhere. In this one God is coming to disrupt the world of oppression and competition and winners and losers. Mary’s song is about this entry point of God’s vulnerable love in the midst of our lives. This is the way out of the darkness.

From this day all generations will call me blessed;
the Almighty has done great things for me and holy is his name.

Christmas Sermon

2009-12-27T07:32:00.000-08:00

The season leading up to Christmas has been filled with pain for many in this community. Maybe that’s why this year I’ve been attending so closely to the sad sounds of Christmas music as it floats into my consciousness. I’ve been listening to the melancholy strains of music and wondering why there is this thread of sadness woven through the season. Just when the surrounding culture is doing its level best to hype me up on holiday cheer, I catch a chorus of “In the bleak midwinter” and I’m back to wondering at the pain circling the celebrations.

I suspect that the message of Christmas – at least for me this year – isn’t so much about superficial warmth and good feelings as it is about that most complex expression of the Gospel: love. Maybe what the Gospel is trying to get through my tinsel dazzled head is the truth that this celebration is about love, and frankly – love hurts. Of course, love is good, the best thing that there is. Love is the power of God at work in the world. And love is strong – stronger than death. Love is so strong that it can break our hearts, sometime. If love is true, if it is real, if it is grounded in the reality of life, it opens us up to that which we do not know.

You know the story: on a dark night a mother gives birth to a boy. Fifteen years later she is roused from her bed at three in the morning. Her boy is at the police station. Her child was caught stealing a car. Her son has changed over the years. But now her little child is a stranger to her. Does she stop loving him? No. Does her love hurt her? Yes – it breaks her heart.

Tonight we gather to tell ourselves the story of God’s coming to us in human flesh, and not just any human being, but the most vulnerable, the most loveable, the most delightful kind of human being – a baby. In other words, God comes to us in vulnerability and messiness and confusion.

You know the story: on a dark night, surrounded by animal smells and sounds, an unwed, homeless girl gave birth to her firstborn son. To any observant witness this was the beginning of a life of definite hardship and probable shame. Yet for her it is about a love that binds her to the little child. And when he has grown to manhood, she is still bound to him in this love, though now he hangs dying from a cross, and the love is like a sword piercing her soul.

All of the great loves come mixed with pain. That is something about God that Jesus makes clear to us. God is willing to love us completely, even those unlovely places in ourselves that we would rather ignore. And just like a mother whose child ends up in jail or on the street or on a cross, God loves in the midst of the pain.

We come together on this holy night to celebrate the life of the one born to give life to all creation; to claim that despite the pain, love is the power that will create the world anew. That's why Jesus was born. The Word who was with God at the beginning of Creation, became flesh and dwelt among us because our human lives matter. They matter because in the midst of the vulnerability and messiness and confusion that make our lives we can provide the love of God for all creation.

Tonight we tell this story of love all mixed up with pain: God came down in our fragile flesh, and walked and talked and turned things upside down, and finally the people he offended tortured him to death while most of his friends hid for fear. And by breathing love with his last breath, he accomplished reconciliation for us with God by forgiving those who tried to do the worst thing they could. Even though we believed that there was no space to hold the pain and love together, God makes a way because he is love.

Where do we find Jesus tonight? The answer is as disturbing as it is simple. We will find Jesus everywhere we go, everywhere that pain and love are all mixed together. We will find Jesus in the midst of our violent culture and in the faces of our own children. We will find Jesus in the raving homeless woman and in the innocent baby. We will find Jesus at the office and at the altar. And wherever we find Jesus he will be like a rock in the road, jarring us just enough to look up and see that God is reconciling what we imagined couldn’t be brought together. That God is calling on His creation to be reborn in love. That God is coming alive in an unexpected way that will require us to hold all sorts of tensions together. And if Jesus is to be born tonight, it will only be in people like you. May the love of this night, despite the pain, fill you with peace and stir you to welcome the Word made flesh wherever he will be born.

Christmas is real

2009-12-25T22:16:00.001-08:00

Advent Expectation

2009-12-09T17:37:00.001-08:00

As I sit in my office this darkening afternoon, I’m thinking about the experience of expectation. I say experience because it is too easy for expectation to remain simply an idea for us. Expectation is something that one does in a direction. It takes me from where I sit just now to where I may be in an hour or a year or a lifetime. Expectation is powerful.

How do we live in expectation? The darkening days provide a clue. Although the darkness presses hard, I know that the season will turn and soon the light will grow. I have past experience to lead me to this hope, this truth. Year on year of light growing out of darkness has taught me that sooner or later the warmth of the sun will return. So I live in expectation of the day when I won’t look outside at 4:45 and see only darkness and cold. I live in expectation that something is coming.

Expectation is the cardinal virtue of Advent – the short season of waiting before Christmas – because the day to which we look expects that something is happening in us right now that makes God’s coming to us possible. Paying attention to this growth will open a way for the reality of Christmas to be born in us. Which speaks of hope and faith and directing ourselves to the future where what will be is still unseen, but real.

How do you experience expectation? Where in your body does it lodge? How does it give shape to your life? The one Advent suggestion I make is to keep in balance your certitude of what is coming (because it’s all happened before) and a sense that things are out of your control (because something new is happening). That is the sweet spot where I can lean into past experience for comfort in sameness and look hard into the future that holds surprise that changes me. I believe it is in that sweet spot where expectation has the greatest power to hold us in light, even in the midst of so much darkness.

New Thanksgiving Prayer

2009-03-07T15:32:00.000-08:00

Here is a brand new Eucharistic Prayer / Anaphora for St. Gregory's Day, tomorrow, at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.
Icon by the fabulous Betsy Porter (http://www.betsyporter.com/)

Anaphora of
Gregory of Nyssa
Paul Fromberg © 2009

Presider It is right to give you thanks, God of infinite love.

In the darkness that was before all things, you spoke and light sprang into being, filling the whole creation with your goodness. Forming us from the dust of the earth and breathing your spirit into us we became living creatures, made to love and serve you and one another.

But we would not follow your call to walk in love, and so wandered in the wilderness of our broken desires. And then your light broke upon us to guide us to the truth. You sent Moses, your friend, to bear your law from the mountaintop and promised to write it upon our hearts.

You came to us through prophets and strangers, through women of courage and men of compassion, through children and outcasts. And even then we turned from your light and wandered in darkness.

So you came to us once more in your beloved son. He was one with you in glory, yet choose to abide with us in flesh. As once you spoke to us in the burning bush, now you spoke in this child of Mary.
He drew us near to him and to you, showing us the fullness of your love. He bore our humanity to the fullest, even tasting death for our sake. But your light could not be dimmed. He broke free of the tomb, and trampling death beneath his feet carried our human flesh to your presence, making us one with you as we were in creation.

And even now our Bridegroom has not been taken from us. He stands in our midst, though we see him not. Gathered with him at our wedding banquet, we bring these gifts. Make them holy by  your Spirit to be for all people the Body and Blood  of Jesus Christ our Lord.

On the dark night of his betrayal Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to his friends saying, "Take, eat: This is my Body, which is given for you.  Do this for the remembrance of me."

After supper, he took the cup of wine, gave thanks and  said, "Drink this, all of you: This is my Blood of the new  Covenant, which is poured out for you and for all for the  forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink it, do this for the  remembrance of me."

Remembering Christ’s death and resurrection we offer this bread and cup to you. We celebrate his risen life bounding up in us. And with our hearts and minds enlightened by your presence, we praise you and we bless you.

People We praise you, we bless you, we give thanks to you,
and we pray to you, Lord our God.

Presider Remember your people, scattered to the corners of the earth. As grain was scattered on the earth and made one in this bread, so may we be brought together at last in the kingdom of your love, where with your beloved Gregory, with Mary Christ’s mother, with saints above and saints below we may join in the triumphal song.

People Holy, holy, holy…

Cooking at Mission Street Food

2009-03-06T16:58:00.001-08:00

Wow. I'm tired. Sara and I spent last night cooking 200 covers at a hip little Mission restaurant as the guest chefs. It was an ass load of work for the three days leading up to Thursday - and last night was sort of hero's labor. But it was great. Good people. Very well received. I had to agree with Tony (the head chef of the place) that the beans were under-seasoned, but we fixed them just fine.

And of course the best part was when the Boyfriend (i.e. Jesus) showed up around 11:20 PM. That's right - we made Eucharist in the middle of the restaurant at closing time. Mostly it was the staff with a few customers who stayed behind. Very good to share the bread and wine with absolute strangers and cut-ups. This one guy (Adam) made me clarify what I said about the need for the completely unacceptable to be at the table for it to be Communion. He gave an Amen to that.

Now, I'm still tired. But a good time was had by all. Oh, that's me with the doo-rag in the cloud. I'm frying up some might fine mustard greens in the big industrial wok. Fun!

(that's my adoring public stretched down the block)

St. Gregory of Nyssa has a new rector

2008-12-08T11:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the vestry of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church asked me to serve as the second rector of the parish. With great joy I accepted their invitation.

What is a rector? Most people define the word as "ruler". I don't like that. I like trail guide. That analogy goes back to my childhood experiences of hiking in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. We would always follow trails up the mountains that had been prepared for us by the park service, and on our best hikes we would rely on the experience of a trail guide to take us along the pathways that would give us the greatest experience. I went on an overnight hike when I was about eleven years old. I had just broken my arm. I had to carry my pack just like everyone else. I was tired and cranky - and it was beginning to snow. All I wanted to do was sit down and rest, but the trail guide wouldn't let me. "Paul - get up!" he would say when I sat down on a cold, wet rock. "Don't sit down - keep moving!" I thought he was being a real hole. But he was right - moving along was the only way to make it to our campsite, set camp and start a fire before the weather got really bad.

That's what a rector does. The job means knowing the trail ahead, and leading other's along on the hike. The rector doesn't blaze the trail; that job belongs to Jesus. The rector is the one who has the experience to know which paths will lead the people along their way. The rector avoids the paths that are washed out, overly steep, dead-ends or dangerous. The rector doesn't just led people along the easiest pathway; he leads the hikers in the pathway that provides them the best opportunities.

That's what I intend to do as rector of St. Gregory's - lead the people along the pathway that God gives to us.

General Convention 2009 Logo

2008-09-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

I designed the logo for the Episcopal Church's General Convention (coming up in Anaheim in 2009) as a visual depiction of the concept of ubuntu (not he operating platform - the Bantu word indicating interdividuality). As often happens, the selection committee decided to redesign my design to include additional ideas, concepts, whatevers. So, here are the two logos - first the original design and then the general convention design:

I am the Good Shepherd

2008-02-18T17:06:00.000-08:00

This is a large-scale work for the Church of the Good Shepherd, Austin, Texas. When it is installed it will be 24 feet by 9 feet.

They approached me about designing a worship space for a new service they will hold in their parish hall. They are an older, affluent Episcopal church in a wealthy section of Austin. The service is for people that don't want to be as tied to traditional, low-church worship. I'm pitching a space that will be "ancient-modern" and allow for different kinds of liturgical uses. Planned installation is the week after Easter, 2008.

Stations of the Cross

2007-07-16T17:23:00.000-07:00

The Stations of the Cross are a traditional Christian devotional tool used by individuals and groups to gain emotional and spiritual wisdom from the way of suffering that led Jesus to his execution on the cross.

I designed and created this series of stations in 2005 as a way to deepen my own sense of Jesus' suffering as I see it in the world around me today.

I've sampled images from the media and western art as well as words from the Jewish and Christian scriptures. The images are for you to use as you want. If you show them to someone else, tell them that I made them.