Resurrection at the Gate

Parish of the Good Shepherd, Watertown
Third Sunday After Pentecost
June 9, 2013

O God, you have brought us up from the dead; *
you have restored our life as we go down to the grave

Please turn our wailing into dancing;
put off our sack-cloth and clothe us with joy.  (Ps 30)

Good morning.  It’s good to be with you again here at the beginning of the summer.  The last time I was with you, as I recall, I had just participated with several of you in a Eucharist for economic justice downtown.  We had processed in full ecclesial regalia through Downtown Crossing, incense wafting between the buildings, to the Government Center Plaza, where we celebrated Eucharist and cut up the credit cards of the big banks.  Just a few weeks earlier, many of us had joined a night vigil – a kind of stations of the cross – in the South End after the shooting death of St. Stephens’s Jorge Fuentes.  We brought our grief and our anger to diocesan convention.  We engaged in robust debate, and we committed ourselves to ministries of economic reconciliation and nonviolence.  We had in a sense been launched into that work because we had stood in spaces of intense sorrow and discomfort, determined to face the most difficult of questions.  We did this because there was something about this process that was part of our call to live into the paschal mystery.   That’s what strikes me about this morning’s readings—that they reflect challenging interchanges, threshold encounters, that then become sites of resurrection.

In our section of the letter to the Galatians, Paul tells us of the utterly unexpected turn of a transformation that met him in the crossroads.  We heard this story in the third week of Easter (Acts chapter 9:1-20), how the risen Christ came to (then) Saul on the road to Damascus, announcing himself as “Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”  As Paul describes it, God called him specifically to stay in that threshold space, to travel about from community to community, to risk the judgment of impurity and open this transformative message to the Gentiles.  So powerfully and challengingly did he “proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy” (Gal 1:23) that he would eventually need to hash out the borders of his expanding community with Peter and the other original apostles.  Paul would embrace a call for all to be “clothed with Christ” famously expanding the binary of “Jew or Greek” to include “slave or free, male and female” (3:27-28).  Indeed, he himself would go on to struggle with the radical communal implications of that charge (e.g. see 1 Corinthians 11).  What made him such a catalyst for transformation, what changed him from a persecutor into the ultimate agent of proclamation was his own encounter with the risen Christ that took place in an in-between place, in a threshold.

Our paired readings from 1st Kings and the gospel of Luke also feature resurrections that are launched at crossroads.  In 1 Kings the prophet Elijah has encountered a widow at Zarephath in Sidon as she gathers sticks at the gate of the town.  The area was in a state of drought because Elijah had invited the God of Israel to reveal the impotence of Baal the deity of this territory—Baal was supposedly a god of the storm (Richar Nelson, Harpercollins Commentary, 292).  Consequently, the widow—preparing a last meal for herself and her son before they starve -- does not view Elijah with particular warmth.  Yet she receives this prophetic stranger, responding to his request for food and water.  Our story picks up in the wake of her generosity—her son has fallen ill and stopped breathing.  Elijah scoops him up and calls upon God to restore him to life, lying three times on top of the woman’s son as if the breath of life might flow out from his full human frame.  This entire story of resurrection unfolds through great challenge and uncertainty on the threshold between two worlds.

Our passage from Luke clearly has this story in mind.  Once more the key encounter happens at the gate of the town.  Only this time, Jesus encounters a funeral procession; the only son of a widow is being brought to his grave on a bier.  This makes sense, as the dead would be buried in threshold space, outside the living bounds of the town.  And this in-between space is where Jesus literally steps in.  Reaching out and touching the bier, risking ritual impurity, he commands the young man to rise.  Resurrection bursts forth in the margin, in the places we are not supposed to encounter or touch.  We encounter it on the way to the grave, are changed forever, challenged to turn and walk again, to trust in ways our heart does not imagine it can bear to open itself.  We are called out of ourselves and placed on a new path, told to go and do likewise.  We are called to become bearers of this unfathomable paschal mystery: life emerging in and through death.  Transformation springs upon us in the thresholds of our lives, our communities, our ways of being in the world.  Just when we least expect or perhaps even desire it, we turn a corner and there it is.  So often our first reaction against an opportunity for transformation is akin to the widow’s:  "What have you against me, O person of God?”  And yet, to ask the question is to begin the conversation.  Okay, here I am.  What would you have me do?  Where would you have me go?

* * * * * *

To say that a lot has happened in our collective diocesan life this year is the proverbial understatement of the century.  In January Bishop Shaw called for the election of his successor.  In April, of course, we experienced the Boston Marathon bombings.  At Boston University we lost a student in the bombing, and then a few days later your neighborhood became the surreal scene of a manhunt.  I want you to know that I was praying for you in the midst of that-- as were people across our dioceses and far beyond.  BU then lost another student in a house fire before the academic year mercifully came to a close.  As a diocese we joined the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace to remember Jorge Fuentes, the Marathon victims, and all touched by violence in our midst-- to mark our commitment to the eradication of violence.  And then shockingly, within a few days of that event, Bishop Tom was diagnosed with brain cancer. I actually saw him for the first time since then yesterday.  He was sitting in the back of a bright red convertible with Bishop Barbara Harris at the Boston Pride parade, wearing a hot pink zucchetto (skull cap).  As far as I could tell, he didn’t wear it to cover up his scar, which matter of factly stitched across his forehead, but to be whimsical, to be who is he, to step again into the glorious crossroad of church and world that wended its way through our streets under an unexpectedly piercing sun.

The Pride parade returned our diocese to Boston’s streets, as did the Eucharist for Economic Justice in October and the Vigl for Jorge Fuentes in September.  And just as these earlier actions had prompted the questions what then shall we do? how then shall we respond?, I find myself wondering in a broader way what our visits into this wider border terrain may be calling us to consider right now.  How now, how in this crossroads in which we stand-- as a diocese, as the wider Episcopal Church, and as smaller units of the larger body of Christ here in the Boston Area -- how are we being invited to transform, to embody resurrection?  The forward strides that the wider US LGBT community has made in recent years, even in recent months, gives us much cause for hope, even as the supreme court rulings are soon to unfold.

Ultimately our readings this morning underscore: the space of the threshold is a place in which resurrection meets us in all its challenge and promise.  The margins of our world call us out of our places and practices of comfort, invite us to receive resurrection, to become agents of God’s transformative power in the world.  And so we are asked, What prompts are confronting us in the margins?  Whom are we meeting at the gate?

Easter People in a Locked-Down World

One of my family’s favorite books, The Napping House begins, “there is a house, a napping house, whereeveryone is sleeping.”  I may bethe only one awake here on this bizarrely quiet late Friday afternoon.  Our three year old son has fallenasleep on the floor of his room with the light on, my spouse and our threemonth old are asleep on the couch, and our guest is napping at least in name—that was the condition under which our son released him from drawing endless pictures

of our family as a collection of pterodactyls. 

This is our Boston lockdown.  A little levity is going a long way around here.

Monday, of course, we had the Marathon bombings.  I was in a meeting at Tealuxe inCambridge when I simultaneously noticed somber tones emanating from the radio andmy phone vibrating off the hook in my pocket. I immediately got on Facebook to check in on my students.  Harvard was open Monday, but BU was closed since the marathon essentially runsstraight through the campus.  Attendingit is a BU tradition, so much so that the Dean of Marsh Chapel hosts an annualmarathon brunch at his home.  Icouldn’t get across the river, so I checked in again later from home.  And when I did, I couldn’t believe thescope of what had happened. Despite its smaller scale, it was impossible not to be reminded of9-11.  And for me, having grown upin the Bay Area, the experience of the Loma Prieta earthquake came back aswell.

As the days went on, we learned that a BU graduate student, LingziLu, was one of the three who was killed.  Another was in the hospital.  That yet another BU student has died isbeyond what my mind can grasp. Over the last two years the university has lost several students incontexts ranging from bicycle accidents, to a car accident in New Zealand, to amurder in Allston.  This is by nomeans the norm.  There was apalpable sense of disbelief at the vigil Eucharist Wednesday evening, as Dean Robert Hill described the celebratory, carefree spirit that pervadedMarathon Day before the carnage.

Meanwhile, the suspects were still at large.  On the way home from EpiscopalBU's Wednesdaynight dinner, a member of the community commented, “I’ve realized that nobodywants to admit it because no one wants to seem needy, but we’re all prettyfreaked out.  Because, let’s faceit, these people are still out there, and nobody knows what they’re going todo.”  We had talked about thebombings and our reaction to them during community dinner, but there was asense of reserve about it—people seemed to need space from it, not to lingertoo much in its enormity.

Then yesterday I attended the Interfaith Service at theCathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston’s South End.  I was pulled across police lines by a Moses-like Rev. LauraEverett, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, whosomehow managed to get me in.  TheGovernor’s office planned the service from start to finish, but Laura was ahuge to support to many of us along the way.  As I stood through the service with my back against a pillarat the back of the cathedral, I took in the mixture of grief, anger, resilience,and resolve.  I arrived home in theafternoon, totally exhausted.  

By 11pm last night, I was collapsing into bed, but a quicklook at my Twitter feed revealed police activity at MIT. Shots fired, officer down.  I fell asleep thinking, how long wasBoston going to be in this twilight zone? I awoke at 6:30am to my spouse tellingme much of metro Boston was basically shut down.  The MIT shooting had actually been related to the marathonbombers manhunt.  One of the suspectswas dead, the other on the run somewhere in Watertown, Cambridge, Belmont, orthe Allston/Brighton area of Boston. Already many from the area colleges and universities had sustainedinjuries of one sort or another. With the impact of the marathon bombings having stretched so palpably tothe MIT campus, all of us in campus ministry here are bound that much more inextricablyin this wider web.

Even as I write, the search continues.  Members of both of my university communitieswho live in Watertown are being visited by SWAT teams.  They are, as one of them put it in ourfacebook group, “freaked out but okay. We just want this to be over as peacefully as possible.”

Meanwhile, in my Harvard Divinity Schoolministry (I am a Lecturer and Denominational Counselor for Episcopal/Anglicanstudents at HDS), we are in the home stretch of our long-planned AnglicanStudies Conference, “Contemplation in Action”. Much of todayhas been spent online, in conference calls, and in shuttling arrivingguests.  This morning I scooped upone presenter who flew in from out of state.  Little did he know he would spend significant time todaydrawing dinosaurs for a three year old.

Bottom line: Harvard University may or may not be closedtomorrow, but we are determined to go forward.  We are still on tomorrow, in a changed venue:  at Christ Episcopal Church inCambridge.  Former Presiding BishopFrank Griswold is unable to get to us from Philadelphia, but Bishop Tom Shaw is committed tobeing with us, preaching and celebrating at our Eucharist which has been movedto 3pm.  All are welcome and invited to come to the conference as a wholeand to the Eucharist in particular, to receive the gifts of bread and wine whenwe need them most.  More than ever, as we make our way through this great ordeal, we want to be together, to be (to adapt a favorite phrase of Bishop Barbara Harris) an Easter People in a locked-down world. More than ever, we want to call ourselves afresh into practices ofjustice and peace, prayerfully fueled by the good news of reconciliation. Thelove of Christ urges us on.

Stigma Transformed

Yesterday was the joint Feast day of Damien and Marianne of Molokai. In the Episcopal/Anglican Fellowship of Harvard Divinity School, we heard a wonderful homily by Marisa Egerstrom.  As it also turned out, of course, yesterday afternoon the finish line of the Boston Marathon turned into a massive crime scene, a kind of war zone, in the wake of two bombings. We are still very much reeling here.

In this reflection I gave on this feast day last year, the context was still Lenten-- two days prior to Palm Sunday.  As I continue to wrestle with and reflect on yesterday's tragedy, I find myself drawn to the idea of God in Christ in radical solidarity with us, forever scarred by sojourn among us.  That spirit was at the heart of the ministries of Damien and Marianne.  

Feast of Damien and Marianne of Molokai

Isaiah 57: 14-19, Psalm 103:13-22,

1 Cor. 4:9-13, Matt 11:1-6
April 15, 2012

When I was in fifth grade, easily the most harrowing of all my school years (middle school included), I happened upon a story that stopped me in my tracks.  Amid my uninspired book reports on the likes of the hammerhead shark, in waltzed Anne Neimark’s biography Damien the Leper Priest (William Morrow, 1980), which had somehow made its way into the library of my uber-secular, San Francisco Bay Area school in 1983.  As part of that report, I vividly remember drawing (from my imagination) a picture of the young Damien—when he was a boy named Joseph — kneeling before a church altar that uncannily resembled the one in my own parish. 

But it wasn’t simply his early vocational discernment that caught my attention.  It was the peculiar shape of his life’s work.  I was captivated by his ministry in the “leper colony” on the Hawaiian Island of Molokai, a small community surrounded by ocean and jagged cliffs to which those suffering from what is now called Hansen’s Disease were shunned.  Over his sixteen years there, as he pastored, celebrated communion, built homes, and buried the dead, Damien contracted the disease himself and died April 15, 1889, one hundred twenty two days ago today.  His ministry and eventually his own body had taken on the shape of terrible stigma, causing others—including other Christians—to shun him.  Unbeknownst to me, ministering to him in his illness, and carrying on his work for the next thirty years after his death was Sister Marriane Cope, a woman who managed not to contract the disease despite her close contact with numerous patients.  On Damien’s deathbed, a famous series of  photographs were

taken, showing his scarred hands and face, marked by years of perseverance and solidarity.  To my awkward ten-year old imagination, grieving my parents’ divorce and soon bewildered by growing news of the AIDS crisis in my broader Bay Area context, Damien’s life opened a new window onto what it could mean to live one’s faith.  That what we might term “holiness of life” or “sanctity” need not shun stigma but might actually problematize it, cross its borders, embrace it and seek its transformation.  At ten this story spoke to me as an inchoate revelation and source of profound hope.

Today, thanks to the calendar in Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Lives of the Saints, passed for trial use by the General Convention of 2009, we celebrate the lives of Damien and Marianne of Molokai.  That we do so this year in close proximity to Palm Sunday strikes me as particularly fitting.  For Palm Sunday gives us an overview of the events of Good Friday in a way that foregrounds the peculiar bend of the paschal mystery.  Jesus rides into Jerusalem in absurd triumph on a donkey, hailed and then betrayed, hung out to dry by his own community.  The long passion narrative into which we are invited to participate on Palm Sunday foregrounds our own multiple connections to the stigma at the heart of this story.  We watch and speak, wincing as soldiers mock the notion of Jesus’ kingship, stripping him of his ordinary robes, clothing him in purple raiment and a crown of thorns.  We both listen and speak as people of various stations mock the absurdity of a Messiah hanging on a tree—come down from the cross if you can!  Who failed not simply to take offense at but even to intensify this spectacle? 

But even as we are presented with our own contribution to this horror, we are also invited to stand in solidarity with the crucified one at its heart, knowing that his very presence there is his participation with us in all our abjection.  To be a people of the cross is, as Paul puts it in his first letter to the Corinthians, to be “fools for the sake of Christ,” to acknowledge and not shun our weakness, our weariness, and yes, our stigma.  As Paul, in typically provocative language puts it, “We have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things, to this very day.”  And yet the heart of this identification into which we are engrafted at our baptism, sealed and marked as Christ’s own forever, we are invited to be agents of transformation.  Stigma is not a stasis of identity, but an injustice to transform.  Indeed, at the heart of the paschal mystery lies the truth that it is, even now, already, being transformed. By recognizing our connections to that process, we are being invited, like Damien and Marriane, to participate in what I suspect may be the very hardest and most compelling part of our vocation.  May we be strengthened to do so.  Amen. 

Familial Exchange: a Good Friday Meditation

Meditations on the Seven Last Words of Jesus

Marsh Chapel, Boston University

Good Friday, March 29, 2013

1) Father forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34)

2) Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43)

3) Woman, behold your son: behold your mother (John 19:26-27)

4) My God, My God, why have you forsaken me, (Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34)

5) I thirst (John 19:28)

6) It is finished (John 19:30)

7) Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Luke 23:46)

John 19: 23-27

23When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top. 24So they said to one another, ‘Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see who will get it.’ This was to fulfill what the scripture says,

‘They divided my clothes among themselves,

   and for my clothing they cast lots.’

25And that is what the soldiers did.

Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ 27Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

In the midst of community we are estranged. In the midst of alienation, community is formed afresh.

The scene before us is unimaginably bleak.  An innocent man hangs before us, being stripped of life.  His loved ones look on from near and afar, nearly crushed by pain.  Yet in the midst of utter desolation, Jesus inaugurates a new creation.  A new community, a transformed family.  To his mother he says, “Woman, here is your son.”  To the beloved disciple, “here is your mother.”  “From that hour,” the gospel reports, “the disciple took her into his own home.” 

Strange as it may seem, this passage echoes the first miracle story in the Gospel of John.  Seeing a connection between this story and our passage, the sixth century Byzantine Hymnist Romanos imagined a grieving Mary querying her son, “Is there once again another wedding at Cana?”[1]   In the second chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus had declared to his mother, who was concerned about the depleted wine supply, “Woman… my hour has not yet come” (John 2:3-4).  He had gone on to transform the contents of six water jars into the finest of wines.  Now, standing in “the hour” of his death, the formation of family has become once more an occasion of transformation.  To and for his beloveds, Jesus performs a relational exchange: I now pronounce you mother and son.

In this week in which the Supreme Court oral arguments on Proposition Eight and DOMA have saturated the airwaves, the transformation of community, of family, of marriage, are much on our minds and hearts.  In a poignant columnthis week, a fellow Episcopal priest, the Reverend Canon Susan Russell, evoked how painful – and for LGBT people and our families, how triggering – it can be to hear these arguments.

If you find yourself hurting, angry, anxious, scared or snarky reach out and let someone you love remind you that you're loved… And if you know someone who may not reach out, find them where they are and remind them that they're loved.[2]

In this week of “heightened scrutiny,” Jesus’ words reach across the chasms of fear.  For we are family, all of us.  We are made for one another.  However fraught our communion, however intense our disagreement, however frayed our fabric, we are constantly being knit afresh. 

Like Jesus’ garment for which the soldiers cast lots, we are called to be one, mysteriously,seamlessly woven from above.  In this light, the fourth century theologian Ephrem the Syrian challenges us, “Share then, for love of [Christ], the body of him who, for the love of you, shared his garment between those who were crucifying him.”[3] This body of which we all are members: share it.  This is the message we receive at the foot of the cross, that ultimate symbol of stigma and alienation that turns death and division on its head.  This is my body.  This is your family.  Take, absorb, share it in its entirety.  Fling wide the doors of your heart.  Be transformed.

photo from
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/27/175463886/photos-supreme-court-hears-arguments-on-doma

---

[1] Romanos the Melodist, “On the Lament of the Mother of God,” stanza 1. 

[2] Susan Russell, “The Marriage Equality Debates: The Pastoral in the Political” 

[3] Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on the Diatessaron 20.27

Mary and Martha: Contemplation in Action

This piece was originally written for and posted in the Lenten Meditations for Young Adults series at Episcopal Commons.

At first glance, the story about Mary and Martha of Bethany (Luke 10:38-42), unique to the Gospel of Luke, can be confusing, even irritating.  Martha and Mary are hosting Jesus, and while Martha attends to the details of hospitality, Mary simply sits at Jesus’ feet, listening.  Eventually Martha complains, can’t Jesus encourage Mary to join her?  But no:  “Mary has chosen the better part which will not be taken away from her.”  It’s a strange, potentially irritating reply.  After all, Martha is perfectly within her rights to challenge her sister’s seeming complacency, and Jesus’ reply is mysterious at best.  Is Martha’s more practical work meaningless while Mary’s contemplation is ultimately what counts?  That conclusion could – and does -- cause a conflagration in many a household.

But just reading the passage in context makes it clear that critiquing Martha’s praxis orientation or ranking Mary’s listening more highly cannot be Luke’s point.   After all, the parable that just precedes this one – the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) – ends with the enjoinment: go and do likewise.  As in, do justice to your neighbor, particularly the most marginalized.  

In two homilies on our text (103 and 104), Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) read Martha’s activity through just that kind of lens.  She was operating in the spirit of the ministry starkly detailed in Matthew 25, doing unto Jesus her guest what all should do unto the least of these.  Meanwhile by sitting at Jesus’ feet, Mary was modeling the contemplative life on earth as it is in heaven.  Although theologians over the centuries have typically valued Mary’s practice over Martha’s, they have also been clear that each approach is intimately connected with the other, and that Christian life ultimately requires both.  

Last fall an intergenerational, strongly young adult group from the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts participated in a street liturgy for economic justice.  Organized by Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation, the heart of the event used the lens of our interconnection to call us to think, pray and act differently about how we use, and where we invest, our money.  We walked the threshold of the world and the church, intentionally making that borderland visible in the streets of Boston by processing and singing hymns behind a vested crucifer and thurifer.  We broke bread and drank wine beside a subway stop.  The following weekend we brought our message, our questions, to diocesan convention, where our resolution passed after one of the more spirited diocesan convention debates I’ve seen in years.  I was proud to watch young adults who had previously scoffed at my energy for this aspect of our polity stand up and be counted.   Some are now involved in planning a conference at Harvard Divinity School for this April 20th,  called “Contemplation in Action”. 

Now, not everyone at Convention was comfortable about our message.  Talking about money, and about economic class more broadly, can be disquieting and sometimes downright excruciating.  But our strong sense of interconnection and collective accountability urged us on.  That awareness ultimately stemmed from our prayer, our common worship, our understanding of our care for and connection with one another.  It was and is an outgrowth of our understanding of the gravity of the gospel and the boundless love of God.

Reflecting symbolically on Mary and Martha, the fourteenth century author of the Cloud of Unknowing explains that the practice we sometimes call “charity” is “nothing else than loving God for [Godself], above all created things, and loving people in God just as we love ourselves.”  We are embodying the true spirit of caritas when we are filled with love, when our actions emerge from its wellspring: love of God, love of our neighbors as ourselves. The love that infuses our prayer causes us to love the world, stranger and relative, foe and friend -- “Yes, and sometimes more to foes than to friends!” (Chs. 24-25)

At the end of the day, our most authentic prayer and action stem from the same source: unbounded love of the God who made us, reconciled us and calls us to be agents of that reconciliation in ourselves and in the world.  Mary and Martha may not quite be two sides of the same coin, but they are as inextricably bound to one another as they are distinct.  We need them both. 

Gracious and loving God, whose Son Jesus Christ enjoyed the friendship and hospitality of Mary, Martha and Lazarus of Bethany: Open our hearts to love you, our ears to hear you, and our hands to welcome and serve you in others, through Jesus Christ our Lord; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

Wisdom of the Wreck

Shipwreck from the bronze age excavation at
Akrotiri on the island of Santorini, Greece.

This reflection was originally written for the Lenten Meditation series at Episcopal Commons.  Its prompting biblical passage was Psalm 69:8-18 and the theme of that week, from among Paul's gifts of the Spirit, was wisdom. 

Wisdom of the Wreck

I came to explore the wreck.The words are purposes.
The words are maps.I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
-Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck” in Fact of a Doorframe, (Norton, 1984), 162-164

In “Diving into the Wreck”, one of my favorite poems by the late Adrienne Rich, a diver undertakes an inner inventory.  The object of the search is a sunken ship, an epic disaster long settled on the ocean floor.  On the lip of catastrophe, its crew might well have shouted the words of today’s Psalm: “do not let the flood sweep over me, or the deep swallow me up, or the pit close its mouth over me” (Ps 69:15).  But because Rich’s poem surveys the scene from the other side, it can offer a strangely serene perspective, a certain wrecked wisdom.

This is a time of transition, struggle and risk in the lives of many I know, both in and out of the church, and indeed, in the life of the church itself. Many strain towards life goals of one sort or another-- the finishing of a degree, the assurance of a job after the degree, the securing of a job or of affordable housing so that one can finish the degree.  Many are terrified of falling short, of feeling stranded or estranged, of being in one way or another, as the Psalm puts it, “a stranger to my kindred, an alien to my mother’s children” (Ps 69:8).  Again and again I encounter a longing for security of place, clarity of purpose, recognition of our distinctive humanity, connection in community.  The psalmist gives voice to a deep-seated fear and desperation, and its prayer is one of holding on, of survival.

Nothing could be more natural than to want to avoid a wreck, imminent or ancient. How could we not beg the God of Moses to deliver us from impending flood?  Did not Jesus himself rage in terror and abjection from the brink of death’s chasm (Mk 15:34 & Mt 27:46)? 

But here’s the thing:  we are, all of us, always already swallowed, just as surely as we are always already redeemed.  Even if we weather the most immediate crisis, even if we manage to make every last family member proud beyond belief, the waves will drench us at some point.  Yet just as surely as that will happen, we are also surrounded by the God who made us, has reconciled us, and calls us into a life that utterly transforms the wisdom of our world (including that of maintaining all one’s ducks in a row).  Indeed, a life that changes the world itself, turns it upside down.  And inevitably, this turning entails a certain upheaval on our part.  There’s really no way around that. 

But none of this means we must stay silent, must somehow welcome the waves as friendly companions. Indeed, strange as this may sound, there is a ragged wisdom to the psalmist’s cry, a kind of self-offering to the One who took on our estrangement, entered our ocean and came out the other side, knows our very hearts, honors the truths we shout from its depths. 

I wonder if perhaps, as we stand in our thresholds of fear and uncertainty– whatever our particular circumstance or location– we might be strengthened by knowledge of this vast connection, this intimate solidarity.  Whether we stand on the verge of disaster or explore it in hindsight, perhaps we might be buoyed to know that there is no estrangement that can, finally, separate us from divine love, a love that sustains and transforms us and, with that transformation, re-forges the very world in which we dwell.

Let us pray:

O God of mystery, who refracts the world’s wisdom through the lens of divine foolishness and has charted our course through the belly of the deep: grant us the courage to be swallowed up by life and the perspective to discern in our depths those truths that draw us into your freedom; through Jesus Christ, the firstborn of the dead.  Amen.

ashes to ashes-- a peculiar honor

in the GSU at BU (photo by Becky Garrison)

Wednesday was quite a day of ecclesial/academic border crossing in the life of this College Chaplain/Episcopal Denominational Counselor/Lecturer.  A veritable landslide of “peculiar honors,” the strange/wondrous connections, participations in larger life that inspire this blog. 

It started early in the morning as I headed out with four members of the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Boston University to do “Ashes to Go.”  ATG has become something of a movement across The Episcopal Church, started (or at least brought into wider church consciousness) by the Reverend Emily Mellott of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago.  (Another peculiar honor: Emily and I were Bryn Mawr classmates deeply impacted by the Feminist Christian Theologies course we took from David Dawson  our senior year.  Oddly, we barely knew each other at the time.)

The idea behind Ashes to Go, as its website explains, is to “take worship to the streets.”  It is to do the imposition of the ashes in a public location, a place outside the walls of the church, to take church to where people live and work.  It is an act of solidarity, a practice of outreach and of visibility.  But more mysteriously, it seems to me, it is caught up in Incarnation.  By crossing the border of church and world, we call to mind the God who crossed the border between Creator and creation, who came among us, who became one of us, to take on the burdens we carry and to reconcile us-- to God and to one another. 

Now, this movement—and ATG has now become one – has its detractors, and I think their pushback has some real merit.  A tweet I saw yesterday sums up one critique of the practice quite succinctly:  “I prefer to get my coffee rather than my ashes to go.”  Basically, this argument goes, it’s “cheap grace”. Excerpting the imposition of the ashes from the service that frames their meaning could arguably empty the practice of its theological significance—especially the need for repentance, and the trajectory of Easter toward which the ashes point. Some of these folks don’t have an issue with doing liturgy, even liturgical excerpts, outside, but would prefer other actions, like praying with holy oil or foot-washing.  Others might argue more broadly that the movement of liturgical action outside church walls erodes the distinction of the church and the world.  And still others might push back against that retort that the borders of church and world should be eroded. 

Economic Reconciliation Procession & Eucharist I participated in last fall 

I myself tend to worry in general about the watering down of our basic reason for existence (aka our mission), in the name of “relevancy.” I’m not interested in eroding the distinction between church and world, but the last thing I think the church needs to do is to keep the world at bay.  More to the point, the church has a public vocation, a call to be church in the world, to be an agent of reconciliation, of justice, of peace. My hunch is that there is something about the intersection, the crossing of the borders between church and world, that helps us understand more clearly what these distinct aspects of creation are, and who we are as people who dwell in the midst of them, who have a place in each.  In the world and yet not of it. 

on Comm Ave

So what happened at BU yesterday? After an awkward few minutes standing out on Comm Ave as people walked by and stared (yep, “fools for Christ,” Scott Gunn), we migrated to a spot in the George Sherman Union building, near the entrance to the food court.  For about an hour and a half, we stood side by side, three of us dispensing ashes, one of us holding a sign that read “Ashes to Go.”  Once in place in the GSU, I was amazed at how many people came over.  We probably distributed ashes to fifty people in about an hour, and it could have been much more.  We also shared information about the Ash Wednesday services scheduled throughout the day at Marsh Chapel, and plenty of people made their way to those services as well.  As students and I distributed ashes together, what truly moved me was the way this liturgical action crossed lines of race and class, staff and student, lay and ordained.  We all were caught up in the ministry of reconciliation to which the 2 Corinthians reading  from yesterday speaks.  It felt like, in a tiny way, we were participating in the larger ministry that Isaiah names as “repairer of the breach”.

This was an act of strategic crossing.  By being visibly ecclesial – with the presence of vestments, ashes, and the ancient words “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return”—in a secularly identified space, a certain kind of energy was somehow released.  All of us were exhilarated.

From there, I headed across the river to Harvard Divinity School, where the Episcopal/Anglican Fellowship (for which I am the denominational counselor) lead the Wednesday community worship in a BCP service of Ash Wednesday.  We gleefully vested, ramped up the incense, and somehow were able to do both the imposition of ashes and communion in fifty minutes (our allotted time).  The service even included a brief contemplative homily by fellowship president, Dave Woessner.  The most moving moment for me in this service was our procession.  Seeing our group gathered in the hall outside Andover Chapel, and then processing in to “The Glory of These Forty Days” was powerful indeed. 

This was less of a “crossing” experience than the EpiscopalBU experience in the GSU, but it was one nonetheless. It was a huge privilege to lead the HDS community into the season of Lent, to do it as Anglicans, yes, but to do it simply as Christians.

 

It is truly a peculiar honor to continue living into this threshold vocation.

Into the Cloud: Transfiguration Liberation

Episcopal/Anglican Fellowship, Harvard Divinity School 

Readings for Transfiguration Sunday, Year C

Monday, February 11, 2013

Transfiguration greetings from inside the cloud. I say this not simply because of the fog that envelopes us here in Cambridge as rain melts our record snowfall, not only because of the in-between place this diocese has entered in the wake of our bishop’s retirement announcement, or even in honor of the strange possibility that, as this article explains, "a new Archbishop of Canterbury and a new Pope may be enthroned in the same month."  I say this inspired by Luke’s unique observation that all of those present on the transfiguration mount were not only “overshadowed” by a cloud but actually, terrifyingly, “entered into it” (Lk 9:34).  In some way, Luke seems to do more with the Transfiguration, to link the very paschal mystery to it, and to make that mystery accessible to his readers—to all of us.  In the hands of Luke, all of us are delivered into the mysterious liberation that is transfiguration.

This cloud-envelopment is not the only unique gift brought to us by the Year C in our liturgical/lectionary rotation.  Only Luke, among the synoptic witnesses, gives us a window onto the summit conversation between Jesus, Moses and Elijah.  All three accounts tell us that Peter, John and James see these towering figures of the Law and the Prophets.  But Luke alone explains that “they appeared in glory” and, most importantly, that “they were speaking of [Jesus’] departure which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”  The term for departure is ἔξοδον, a word that evokes the Exodus of the Israelites from their Egyptian captivity.  Already the gospel story draws upon Moses’ shining encounter, as our first reading reminds us.  But Luke’s window onto Jesus’ mountaintop discourse gives us more on which to chew.  Jesus was about to embody Exodus.  Think about what that might mean.  Think of what we know about the journey that lay before him:  the downward slope into Jerusalem, the crucifixion, the resurrection and ascension.  The shorthand Luke uses for this, the frame through which he wants us to read it is ἔξοδον.  It is liberation from oppression. It is the transformation of an individual body—suffering and death followed by resurrection life—as the transformation of a collective body.   Does this relationship of collective to individual embodiment not shift how you might read Jesus’ words of agency? Do you not hear the notion of “accomplishing” this paschal mystery in a different way?  It is not simply a matter of deciding to suffer and to die (which, of course, is not simple in and of itself).  This “accomplishment” is about the exodus of a people, or as Paul puts it in our reading from 2 Corinthians, freedom, which flows out from “the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor 3:18).

Both in written reflection and in iconic depiction, the Christian East has long honored the Metamorphosis (as it is often called, after the term with which Matthew and Mark describe Jesus’ transformation), and has seen in it a deep connection to the mystery of Easter itself. Transfiguration is not only something that happened to Jesus on Mount Tabor, as our unnamed peak is often called.  It is also the effect of resurrection power in our lives here and now, as well as at the end of all things, when that power will lift us up from the grave.  Transfiguration is the transformation “from glory into glory” to which Paul speaks in this breathtaking vision: “all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor 3:18).  This is not an effect reserved for the end.  It is with us now.  It is why, “we do not lose heart” as we carry forward in our ministries (2 Cor 4:1).  The present, pervasive reality of transfiguration allows us to discern the holy in this cloud in which we stand.

The idea that to be transfigured is to be changed, to be transformed, to be metamorphosed first drew me to the theology of transfiguration-- as someone who has transitioned, this spoke powerfully to me.  The complexity of my gender identity also gave me a particular appreciation for its liminal placement in the liturgical year.  But surely I am not alone in my love of the uniquely clear way in which the transfiguration (and more specifically Transfiguration Sunday, placed here, at the threshold of Epiphany and Lent) makes the heart of the gospel-- the good news of God’s transforming, healing, reconciling work -- available to us, a prism through which to see our own lives as in some way part of this larger collection, these stories of salvation history.  This combination of liminality and transformation should prompt us to see not only the obviously-set-apart places, the mountaintop locales, but also the more mundane interstices, the in-between spaces of our lives, as places of transfiguration. 

These thresholds can be temporal, spatial or both.  Perhaps we might look afresh at the context of divinity school and of the university more broadly.  This context is a crucible—as you surely don’t need me to tell you—a space of intensive formation, and which carries to some degree the anxiety of next-steps, both for students and for faculty and staff.   And so I want to invite us all to consider here and now, in this peculiar perch:  What is the ἔξοδον you are about to accomplish, or rather, that God is about to accomplish in you?  How are you being called to embody the paschal mystery in all its incorporation of death and new life?  Stand on this verge today and know that by virtue of your membership in the body of Christ, you too are being transfigured.  You, dear friends, are caught up in the mystery of metamorphosis, you are poised to leap up from the sacramental waters of your baptism. In the least likely spaces of your life, you are being “changed from glory into glory,” invited to grow like the engrafted olive shoot you are into the very heart of the living God.  The death Christ died and the resurrection life through which creation itself was recast—these fundamental tenets of our faith our not mental exercises, but spiritual realities with deeply concrete implications.  As we move toward the dust-filled return of Ash Wednesday and the wilderness territory of Lent, think on this mystery.

Luke’s vision of the Transfiguration frames our entry into Lent and Easter like no other gospel.  To be sure, the placement of this day at the end of the season of Epiphany, as the bookend to Jesus’ baptism (another iconic favorite in Eastern Christianity) works similarly in all three years of our lectionary.  Transfiguration stands as the mandorla, the holy hinge on which the cycles of Incarnation and Pascha swing into one another. But Luke’s version alone gives us a prism through which to read the paschal mystery itself.  Luke alone truly uses Transfiguration as the key for interpreting the cross and the empty tomb.  Luke alone refracts our very body/ies through the lens of Exodus (for an Easter preview, see Luke 24:1-12).  And so again I ask you, what is the ἔξοδον that God is seeking to accomplish in you?  How are you being called to embody the liberation that is the Paschal Mystery?  Amen.