What I Know About Gardening

We enjoy gardening, but are not obsessive about it.  With little direct sunlight, ours is mainly a yard of green, many shades of green.  We tried to grow a traditional English garden for a few years, but without enough sunlight, it was a dud.  Then we went into vegetable gardening.  Another bust.  I couldn’t even grow a radish or carrot.  So we are green, many shades of green.

As for the lawn, my theory is that if it is green and not prickly, it’s probably not a weed.  In any case, it’s lush, and without the benefit of Chemlawn or the like.  The neighbors are baffled by that.

The garden part of the yard, which is extensive, is rich with trees, bushes and plants, some flowering, the names of which I remember vaguely if at all, but then the birds and squirrels don’t know them either, so I’m in good company.  Anyway, my weed theory about the garden is that a weed is a perfectly fine plant growing where I don’t want it to grow.  So we do a little weeding now and then to keep things from getting out of hand, and the result is that visitors ooh and ah over it as long as they don’t get down on their hands and knees to look too closely.  The preventative is gin and tonics served on the patio.  Beer drinkers don’t care much one way or the other.

And that’s what I know about gardening.

What Legacy Shall We Leave?

The small rural congregation that I now serve a few times a month is aging. The youngest of us is in her fifties, and the majority are in their seventies or eighties.  In recent sermons, I’ve been asking the question of legacy.  What legacy does this congregation desire to pass on to the future generations?  Will there even be a future generation?

Previous generations found ways of transferring a sense of purpose and mission from one to another.  Never a large gathering, the congregation has served it’s members and the community faithfully and well for over a hundred years.  Will there be another hundred years to come?  It’s a good question.  The town isn’t growing, but it isn’t declining either.  Local conservative Evangelicalism has given a generally bad name to church life, so the number of “none” in this church filled town continues to grow.  It isn’t simply that the “none” have failed to choose a denomination; most of them have only the vaguest idea of what Christianity is even about, however much they might claim a belief in something akin to God as we understand God to be.  We cannot assume that there is a pool of easily catchable fish out there ready to swim into our denominational nets.

I think there is another, more important, stumbling block than a growing number of “nones”, aging members, or the demographics of the community, and that is the century long tradition of serving members and the community.  What about a tradition of serving God?  The long standing mission statement of the congregation is to know God and make him know, but when serving members and community becomes the measuring stick, the God part becomes invisible. 

To confess and follow God as made known in Christ Jesus must come first, and then the serving of members and community will take on the powerful, Spirit driven energy of doing God’s work through the church, rather than the church doing its own good work with an occasional reference to Jesus.  And that brings me to the question of legacy.

Many families are passionate about wanting to honor the good name that their parents and grandparents had bequeathed to them, and even more passionate about wanting sons and daughters to do the same. “Remember who you are.”  “Be proud to bear our name.”  “You have an obligation to uphold the traditions of our family.”  Whether for weal or woe, it’s a common theme.  So what about our congregations?

Shouldn’t the legacy we have received, and the one we want to pass on, be to remember who we are as followers of Jesus Christ, stand proud to bear the name of Christ, and take seriously our obligation to uphold and pass on the best of two thousand years of tradition?  Do we want to become a small handful of old people worshiping behind locked doors until the last one dies?  Or do we want to proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ no matter how old or few we become?

Our little church building and the congregation that worships in it will be remembered, but for what?  That is the question.

Accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior or Surrendering to God's will. Which?

I had an interesting conversation the other day with someone who wondered if we Episcopalians could learn and thing or two from certain Evangelicals who are more than comfortable in asking (demanding?) whether one has accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.  Are we Episcopalians too reluctant to claim and use the name of Jesus?  We also recognized that the Evangelical approach has become an enormous stumbling block to many who are put off by it and by other assumptions about what Christianity is about.

What, we wondered, if we took another tact, one that asked of ourselves and others whether we are willing to surrender to God’s will as made known in Jesus Christ?  There is a significance difference.  For one thing, I have no idea what accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior means.  It has become so much of a bumper sticker phrase that, for me, it has lost all meaning.   It has a ring of certainty to it that implies that whatever it means, it answers all questions and is itself the destination for all who will be saved, but from what and for what? It also seems to imply a sense of ownership.  Having accepted Jesus as MY Lord and Savior, I now own him in some way.  I doubt that’s what they mean, but that’s what it sounds like.

Surrendering to God’s will as made known through Jesus Christ is another thing altogether.  It’s a little scary.  It requires us to inquire what we can know about God’s will through what Jesus said and did.  Even a cursory reading of the gospels leads in many directions that drive us back into Hebrew scripture, forward into other texts of the New Testament, and deep into our own hearts and minds, and the contexts of our lives.  All those directions cross over and under each other in confusing patterns.  To make a comparison, they can take on the appearance of an impenetrable maze when, in fact, they are a labyrinth (three dimensional) that, if followed, leads unerringly to God’s presence, but not by any straight path.

Surrendering to God’s will requires knowing Jesus, not accepting him.  If requires walking with him, talking with him, eating with him, and trusting that he is God incarnate who loves us.  He is a most confusing Savior who desires both to be worshipped as God incarnate and take up residence in our hearts as our most intimate companion.  Surrendering embarks us on an adventure in life and living where our plans and intentions engage in unpredicted and unpredictable events and outcomes.  Like the most romantic of adventures, danger lurks, and injury and death are real possibilities.  But so also is a fullness of life beyond measure, and the assurance of our safe arrival home. 

I’m not sure how well that will sell out in the religious market place, but perhaps it can inspire us to be more bold about claiming and using the name of Jesus.  Who knows?  Maybe there will be others who will want to enter into such a life with us.  We don’t go on our adventures alone.  We go in the presence of one another.  In our best moments we lift each other up, help each other with our burdens, and learn to live in respectful tolerance of our many differences.  We celebrate our victories and mourn our losses.  Sometimes we lose heart or become bored.  We abandon our adventures and sit on the wayside watching life pass us by.  By and by Jesus always comes along to sit with us for a spell, and then together we begin again.

That’s a little of what a life of surrender looks like.  Wonder if can sell?

The Legacy of Old, White Males

I am at the CREDO conference for retired clergy of which I wrote in an earlier post.  I cannot say that I am having a terrific time.  Eight days of meetings meant to help me reenter daily life with renewed vigor and vision is about four days too long, as far as I’m concerned.  Besides, I’m not unhappy with the state of my vigor and vision.  But it has been worthwhile in its own way.

At one of our evening gatherings someone noted that we are a very white, male gathering.  Of the 39 of us, only a handful are women, and none are of any color other than pasty white.  Partly it’s a generational thing.  Clergy of our age come from a time when there were few ordained women, and fewer clergy of some ethnicity other than Northern European.  Most of us, it seems, were raised in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, thus narrowing the scope of our backgrounds even further.  So it should not come as a surprise that we are old, white and male.

However, we are also the generation whose legacy to the Church has been the ordination of women, the slow transformation toward a more inclusive Church, and a recommitment to economic and social justice here and abroad.  Stumbling but persevering efforts to include anti-racism and anti-sexism training for all ordained and lay church leaders, implementation of programs to protect our children from sexual abuse, and a decades old screening process to weed out potential abusers from the ranks of clergy wannabes, are also legacies bequeathed to the Church from this generation of old, white males.  

It’s not that we did all these things willingly or in unison.  We have also been a cantankerous, stubborn, and skeptical generation that often had to be pushed, pulled and kicked into the future.  Some small portion of us couldn't take it and bolted for the presumed safety of newly formed ersatz “Anglican” denominations, or the golf course, whichever came first.  But the fact remains that it is a generation that held the reins of power in the Church, and guided it in new directions, as it was led to do through prayerful discernment of God's will.  

That’s not a bad legacy.  Now the questions is, how does one leave all that behind and get on with life in a new way?

Four Faces of God

The readings for Morning Prayer on the Feast of the Ascension included the passage from Ezekiel where he was confronted by heavenly creatures bearing the image of God, and whose heads had four faces: human, ox, lion, and eagle.  It’s an image similar to one found in Revelation, and it reminded me of how often it has been used to symbolize the four gospels.  I never can remember which gospel goes to which face, and this morning I began to wonder about other symbols.  For instance, whether the four faces more fully represent our humanity, or what it means to be made in the image of God, and to bear that image into the world?  I have no doubt that others have covered the same ground, but, since I am unfamiliar with whatever they had to say, here goes my own take.

We’ve become accustomed to the language of Freud and Jung, who parsed our personalities into their component parts, and farmed them out to psych labs and instrument designers who have given us all kinds of fun ways to pigeonhole ourselves with interesting names and acronyms.  I am, myself, an INTJ, if anyone cares.  Perhaps God gave Ezekiel another way to look at what it means to be fully human.

We have the human face we present to the world, the one that enables others to recognize us, that enables us to express ourselves, and that both entices and offers judgments of everything and everyone within our sphere of awareness. It is an enigmatic face that both reveals and hides, and it can never permit full knowledge of self and others.  Yet, perhaps it reveals enough and hides enough to make do. 

There are also parts of us that behave in more primitive, instinctive ways.  Like an ox, we can be plodding, not too bright, a carrier of burdens, and hauler of whatever we have been hitched to, passively munching and working our way through life, sometimes wondering if there might be more to it.  Lions and eagles are different.  Like a lion we can prowl for prey, not suffer fools gladly, impose our wills on everything including other lions, if we can.  Some part of us is able to gracefully soar like an eagle grace into the unlimited vault of sky, seeing all with perfect clarity and focus, swooping to capture what we want before it knows that it’s been taken.  But we will eat road kill if necessary.  We can be all of these, and we are to one degree or another.

Oxen, lions and eagles are generously endowed to do well what they are able to do.  They have nothing to hide and no shame to feel.  There is no duplicity in them.  Yet they constrained to their assigned places in the order of creation, fated to live it out within the most limited of choices to be made.  They are moderated, perhaps integrated, behind our human face, our complicated, many layered, duplicitous human face, not as demons to be purged nor as Jungian shadows to be brought to the surface, though they might be both.  In a more healthy sense, they are important parts of who we are.  We need them to be complete.  God knows that.  Our inmost parts are not hidden from him, however well we might hide them from ourselves, and he showed them to Ezekiel, not to frighten but to demonstrate that they are essential to who we are as bearers of the image of God.

Perhaps there is more to be said at another time.  We shall see.

Christian Obligation, The Poor, The Government

Not too long ago one of my conservative Christian friends brought up the subject of who is responsible for attending to the needs of the poor.  His take, widely shared by many in our area, is that it is not the responsibility of government but of the Church (and other NGOs?).  After all, he asserted, the bible says nothing about what government should do, and what it does say about our responsibility to the poor is laid at the doorstep of the Church.

He was not impressed with my opening rebuttal about the many things that scripture has to say about government.  I think it was because I didn’t make a connection between his idea of government and what is written about the obligations and sins of society in general and kings in particular.  I thought the connection was obvious, but it wasn’t to him.  After all, what do David or Nebuchadnezzar have to do with democratically elected American presidents, governors and mayors?  What do councils of elders, the Sanhedrin, or Roman authorities have to do with today’s legislatures and courts? 

Perhaps we will have a chance to go over that again, but in the meantime I was puzzled by his laying the obligation to the poor at the doorstep of the Church.  From what I can tell about Jesus’ teaching, that obligation is laid at the foot of every follower of Christ, not at the doorstep of an institution.  Saying that the Church is responsible is just a way to avoid one’s particular obligation as a professed Christian.  That came to mind in an especially powerful way in a recent morning’s prayer and meditation remembering the work of Fr. Damien among the lepers on Molokai.  It was not the Church that took responsibility for that work, but Damien the priest who acted against the better judgment of his superiors. 

To be sure, the Church is a vessel from which followers of Christ emerge into the world to take up their work, but the Church itself, as an institution, has limited abilities to be an agency of support and relief to the poor, sick, and oppressed.  The Church may nurture, train, and send out persons to continue the healing and reconciling work of Christ, but that is not the same thing as being an operating agency engaged in that work.

The romantic ideal of individual Christians lovingly giving of themselves and their treasures to meet the needs of those who are desperately poor, oppressed, systemically disadvantaged by society, and so on is not a myth, it is a corrupting deception that effectively shields selfishness and prejudice.  There are very few Damiens among us.  Disciples continuing Christ’s healing and reconciling work are called upon to do what they can, and what they can do best is organize local resources for action while influencing the public policies of the societies in which they live to turn toward justice.   

As an example, about fifteen years ago a new organization was created in our community to address the needs of the desperately poor.  Called Helpline, it was given birth by committed persons from a number of congregations.  Without those individuals taking up the obligation of doing Christ’s work in the world, it would not have happened.  They had the (sometimes shaky) support of their congregations, but it was their individual effort brought together in collective action that made Helpline a success as an agency that helps the desperate poor successfully access social services that will help them avoid homelessness, recover wholeness of life, and become more productive members of society than they had been.  The social services themselves are, for the most part, functions of or largely supported by government, which is not an alien agency forced upon the people, but the agency of the people.

It is that idea of individual efforts brought together in collective action that brings me to my next point.  The cult of extreme individualism fails to recognize that the communities we live in are a function of individuals gathered for collective action for the good of society, or community if you prefer.  Government is not an foreign overlord imposed on us from above, but our own invention of how best to create and sustain community.  It is individual effort brought together in collective action for the good of society.  One form of that action is to require, if nothing else, that individuals pay their fair share of creating and sustaining community, which we accomplish through taxation.  We make collective decisions about what those taxes should be used for, and, at least for the last seventy years, we have decided that a significant portion of them should be used to mediate problems of poverty, hunger and health.

It’s an imperfect system of elements cobbled together by elected representatives who find it difficult to cooperate with each other and are often unduly influenced by narrowly focussed “special” interests.  It may be ugly, but it’s not the enemy.  We Christians are called to help make it better, not destroy it.

Moral Evil

The tragic events in Boston and West, Texas, with Newtown so recent in our lives force us to confront the question of evil, to which there is no easy answer.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a useful conversation about it.  Let me suggest that in general terms we can talk about two types of evil: natural and moral, and maybe that’s the place to start so that we can have a place to begin our conversation.

Natural evils are the destructive events that come upon us through the force of nature.  Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and the like are examples of natural evil, and they are evil in the sense that they cause destruction of property, and death and injury to people.  They are not moral evils because no human agency called them into being, they are the ordinary and necessary products of a living earth hurtling through a living universe.  We have the misfortune of getting in their way and suffering because of it.  We made decisions to live and build in places where natural events like these are common, and we take our chances because of it.  At the same time, natural events that are destructive of our lives and property can occur in any place and at any time, so no matter where we are, we are always going to be confronted by nature’s power, and we need to be respectful of it.  

Moral evils, on the other hand, are the destructive events that come upon us through human agency, and it gets complicated.  We usually think of a moral decision as one that is good and proper by the standards of the society in which we live, but in this sense, a moral decision means any decision that intends to do good or bad, regardless of the reason.  The slaughter of children at Newtown was the insane act of a troubled man who intended to kill and cause grief that cannot be healed.  It was a moral evil brought upon us by the intentional act of a person, whatever the condition of his mind.  We do not know the motives of the Boston bomber(s).  Whatever they were, they were intentional.  He, she or they intended to cause destruction, injury, death and panic.  It was a moral decision, and that makes it a moral evil.  

Both are outrageous examples of moral evil, and we are united in finding them repulsive beyond words that can describe our feelings.  Sadly, we are not ourselves totally innocent when it comes to moral evil.  Our grudges, anger, fear, impatience, selfishness, and prejudices often seduce us into acts of moral evil.  They are the ordinary sins of daily life, if you will, that lead us to confess that we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves, and often we have not loved ourselves very much either.  Sometimes we cause real physical injury to others, but more often we cause emotional and spiritual injury, small or great, by our hurtful words and deeds.  

That brings us to the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas.  It’s a real event of great human carnage and property damage that is also symbolic of other disasters like it that occur far too often.  What happened?  It was not a natural evil, but would it be fair to call it a moral evil?  Maybe it was just an accident.  We build things, and everything we build is imperfect.  We run imperfect things with imperfect knowledge, skills and abilities.  Our goal is to do the best we can with what we have.  That doesn’t always work.

I recall a recent local factory fire caused by a worker who skipped a few safety checks when mixing chemicals.  He didn’t intend to cause a fire.  He may not have known about the importance of the safety checks, or what would happen if he skipped them.  Yet property damage occurred.  A few years ago I threw up a ladder to scramble into a garage attic.  I didn’t bother to check if it was well anchored, and the trip down was unpleasant.  It wasn’t just the excruciating pain.  It also costs thousands in ambulance, hospital and doctor bills while disrupting my ability to do the work of pastor and rector.  I didn’t intend all of that to happen, but it did anyway caused by my impatience and tendency to do things in the order of ready, fire, aim.

Neither of these incidences can be labeled a moral evil, but moral decisions were a part of them, and real destruction and injury were the result.  Moreover, they are the kinds of decisions we all make every day.

At the same time, as in recent incidents involving coal mines and cruise ships for example, there are events that are the result of decisions motivated by selfishness, greed, and egotistical pride showing callous disregard for the well being of others, particularly others with little ability to protect themselves.  One might claim that there was no intent to cause harm, but the lack of intent in the face utter disregard for the lives and property of others adds up to moral evil.     

The question of evil is not an easy one.  It gets tangled up and very messy.  But perhaps this can be a framework for a conversation to begin.

I hope so.