+Z’ev

Today’s assigned readings:

AM Sirach 10:1-8, 12-18, James 5:7-10

PM Micah 4:1-5, Revelation 21:1-7

An undisciplined king ruins his people, but a city becomes fit to live in through the understanding of its rulers. The government of the earth is in the hand of the Lord, and over it he will raise up the right leader for the time. Human success is in the hand of the Lord, and it is he who confers honor upon the lawgiver… Sovereignty passes from nation to nation on account of injustice and insolence and wealth.
Sirach 10:3-5, 8

This is an odd day for me. I made a decision when I started this two-year cycle of meditations that when a given Holy Day was designated by AM and PM readings that I would use the readings for the Holy Day instead of the regular readings. So what is the good Christian Anarchist to do when the “holy day” is July 4th?

It’s a doubly odd day for me because one thing that drove me batty when I was Orthodox was the weaving together of various nationalist mythologies and Christianity. A lot of Orthodoxy treats Russia or Greece or Serbia or Ukraine or Ethiopia or Kosovo as if - as far as God was concerned - they were the new chosen nation. The line “because of our sins, God let X happen” comes up a lot. But then we sure spent a lot of blog-ink saying 9/11 wasn’t a curse from God. And, like the Muslims, we say “God willing” a lot: as if God actually cares that I’m going to try to fly to Charlotte on the 23rd, God willing…

Of course the Orthodox are not the only folks to do this. I learned in school about the Divine Judgement in favour of the English Reformation in the defeat of the Spanish Armada. God had further cursed the Catholics in the defeat of King James by King William. Of course, God gave the New World to the Catholics. He put Israel back in place - how are we to read that?

How does a nation get an “undisciplined king” who “ruins his people” when the Lord is supposed to “raise up the right leader for the time”? Unless the undisciplined king is what the people deserve.

And so we get Bush?

Is God so involved in the affairs of the world that even the very kingdoms are under the control of him who said, “my kingdom is not of this world”? Or is there something else here?

I don’t know. I can say that seventeen more times, if you’d like. When St Paul said there’s nothing wrong with obeying the emperor, did he know that a few years later that emperor’s heir would be a lunatic who would commit wholesale slaughter on the Christians? I don’t know. When subsequent generations of Christians have tried to marry Church and State because of what St Paul mistakenly babbled off, should we blame them? I don’t know.

I know: I’m sounding redundant. I even waited until after Mass this morning at St Mary’s in the hopes of getting some insight. No such luck. We’ll just call this a “ramble” like I do on my other blog.

Have a good BBQ, where-ever your politics are. I have to go to work.

Today’s assigned readings:

Sirach 46:11-20, Revelation 15:1-8, Matthew 18:1-14

…[T]he temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from his power, and no one could enter the temple…
Revelation 15:8

In 1983, I was in my first year at NYU. I heard about a huge service at the Episcopal Church of St Mary the Virgin celebrating the sesquicentennial Oxford Movement. The Lord Bishop of London, Graham Leonard, was preaching; Paul Moore, the Bishop of New York, would be there; John Maury Allin, the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA, was, if memory serves, the principal celebrant of the mass. The great liturgist, Canon Edward N. West, was the Master of Ceremony. There were other Bishops present: it was a huge to-do. Everyone in the diocese was there, clergy in procession and clergy in the pews, monks, friars and nuns, and pile of laity filling in the remaining nooks and crannies.

I was newly come to NYC and I journeyed up to W 46th Street from my fraternity house in Greenwich Village with a friend from High School. The crowd was huge and there were no seats available that had not been reserved for some VIP or parish or religious order. We were standing on the steps of St Mary’s Church feeling kinda lost, when a familiar face popped around the corner. My parish priest from upstate, John Osgood, crooked his finger at us and escorted us inside and past the ropes. He brought us up to the front of the church, sitting just under the pulpit. We had a prime - if slightly obstructed (by the pulpit) view of full-on Anglo-Catholic piety. As the saying goes, it was so high you had to look down to see heaven.

After the mass and concluding prayers, there was sung a solemn Te Deum. All the clergy came and stood before the altar. Memory says it was the Langlais Te Deum, although I know that thing is 25 mins long. It was glorious and loud. The opening bars of the Te Deum were simple chant and suddenly the organ stomps in: BLARGH! BLARGH! BLARGH! BLARGH! I started forward in shock at the sound. After those first bars, it was not traditional at all: it was loud and clashing and the organ seemed ready to leap out of the loft and fall down on all of us! There were three thuribles of incense flaming away in great pendulum swings and the incense was a great cloud. Eventually it obscure the altar: the Church of St Mary’s is not known as “Smokey Mary’s” for naught. (Neither is its other appellation, The Temple of Isis, in vain, but that’s for another time.)

Years later I wanted to check my memory: had the altar really been obscured? A book had been published of sermons and papers from the Sesquicentennial. The last page was a photo taken from the loft at St Mary’s during the Te Deum. You can see me and my friend, Cele, standing by the pulpit. A few pews in front of us a fog worthy of Hogwarts begins and only a few mounted peeks of Episcopal mitres break the banks between us and reredos. That is the scene in my head when I hear the today’s reading from the Revelation.

He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.
Matthew 18:3-5

There was a child at St Gregory’s Church… one that drove me up a wall. His mother was a priest. I’ve forgotten her name and his name. I’ve not forgotten two things, however:

1) How distraught I was that every Sunday he was very noisy, beyond what I thought should be normal or acceptable for a child in public (where children should be seen and not heard).

2) How I went to the rector and complained and, in his loving way, he chastised me for not being hospitable to the child.

When I joined the Orthodox Church I discovered that, in those parishes without pews, people would let their children play and crawl around in the huge open spaces. Even in some tiny spaces, I grew very used to praying with children who were reading books, playing with Spiderman dolls, and generally, having fun in God’s house.

And there’s the contrast I want to see - and I’m sure you can see it too:

On the one hand the Temple filled with the smoke of the glory of God. And on the other, a little child held in Jesus hands like the Eucharist, (one tradition says that Child was St Ignatius) and declared to be the way to receive Christ, himself.

I’m tempted to draw them as different images, to show that some how the Temple-Filled-With-Smoke is something about an Angry God while the Child-With-Jesus is about a Loving God.

I want to draw contrasts between the seriously ritualistic structure of Eastern Rite worship or the military corners of Western Rite worship, versus the joy of a danced liturgy at St Gregory of Nyssa or Emergent Church home worship.

But I’ve been in churches too long.

I know that often there is great joy expressed in those military corners. I’ve been awed by the moment of silence in the elevation and breaking of the Consecrated Host as clouds swirl around it and then, suddenly, the state trumpets blow from the back of St John’s Cathedral, and, then is sung in holy awe, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us!”

I’ve been moved to tears by Orthodox poetry, standing in liturgy singing:

We, who mystically represent the Cherubim,
And chant the thrice-holy hymn
to the Life-giving Trinity,
Let us set aside all earthly cares
That we may receive the King of all,
Who among us invisibly
borne by the angelic Hosts.

I’ve laughed for sheer joy in the communion of the Saints going forward to the chalice; or smiled warmly at people leaving confession and, being moved to love by the rite, sweeping each other up into great hugs.

I’ve danced laughing in a crush of people around an altar decked out in Ghanan nwentoma cloth, standing under a canopy of variegated silks. I’ve guffawed in holy hilarity at the beginning of the service, jesting with the Cantor, Sandford, that the hymn, “O Wondrous Type referred to the (Font) Fount of Every Blessing. I’ve been frozen in stunned awe giving communion to a mother, great with child, realising I was communing the child, Sophia, as well as the mother. And I will never forget the moment that past between us as I addressed the mother saying her name and the child’s, “this is the body of Christ.” Then I’ve cried giving First Communion to that same child.

I’ve embraced - and been embraced - as we all sang:

Come sing and dance to Jesus’ lead!
“The Lord provides for every need.
My joy in you will have no end
because I call you each my friend.”

We see your likeness in each face.
You freely give all holy grace.
Your friendship, God, is our desire:
Inflame our hearts with holy fire!

I’ve wrapped myself in the Grief of Holy Friday and been “whallopped” over the head, turning around to see a church filled with light on Easter. I’ve opened the doors to welcome the dancing hoards.

But I’ve also been horrified to see a priest turn around from the altar and give a look to his wife, the Choir director, that moved her to weeping and left his own children terrified of what might happen when they got home. I’ve entered a church where no one dared speak because the priest had a bad day. I’ve struggled as the only cantor and bible reader and prayer leader, while as the priest attempted to put on the right worship (orthodoxy) for Holy Cross Day: my solo chanting of hundreds of “Lord Have Mercy”s as the priest held aloft a gold cross and a congregation of 3 others stood around being bored.

I’ve experienced the horror of a community worship service that seemed to violate the second commandment. I’ve argued with people who have “never done it that way before” as if their own innovative liturgy, its current form less than 2 years old, were some kind of Passion Play of Oberammergau that could never be changed for fear God would curse us. I’ve been angered by a child I couldn’t welcome, and by a priest that was wearing far too many bells - both disrupting “my prayer” by their ability to show how unloving I could be.

In short, I’ve managed to be a human who, in community with other humans, was found by God in his friendship in all these places.

The internet is filled with the “Worship Wars”. Low church Protestants debate praise bands vrs traditional hymns, Romans argue about the Novus Ordo vrs the 1962 Missal, while the traditionalists wait to gloat over the release of a long-rumoured permission to do which ever liturgy they wish including the Tridentine rite. Fleeing the supposed horror of such a banquette-of-choices, many American Protestants enter Orthodoxy and discover a liturgy they imagine to be “Unchanging”… until the first time their parish priest or the choir director (acting well within his or her rights) changes something. Then they flee further into “Holy Unchanging Tradition™” deeper and deeper into the schismatic insanity of “True Orthodoxy” vrs “World Orthodoxy.”.

I’ve been in all of them. I’ve heard justifications for all of them. Aand I’ve been a partisan in all of these arguments. I still have some pretty strong opinions about them, to be honest. We create stumbling blocks, however, when we imagine that God “wants” one and not the other. The dance is disrupted. “Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!”

But I know that somehow, praise bands or Gregorian scholla, dancing around an altar or standing stock still, huge open cathedral or tiny Catholic chapel, kneeling in awe before the elevated host, scrunching down before a gold spoon, or passing baskets of consecrated pitas and clinking glass goblets around the dinner table, somehow we are all one in Christ. John has been granted to see exactly what God sees, and I beg for the grace to see it, too:

And I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mixed with fire, and those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands.

And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb: “Great and amazing are your deeds, Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, King of the nations! Lord, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed.”

Today’s assigned readings:

Sirach 45:6-16, 2 Corinthians 12:11-21, Luke 19:41-48

He made an everlasting covenant with him, and gave him the priesthood of the people.
Sirach 45:7

I continue to struggle with the idea or question of “What is my vocation in the Church?” I wrote to my friend, Donald, that the big question is “what now?” “Now” being that I’m nearly 43 and feeling totally stranded. I’m so very used to the idea that I’m supposed to be doing this - church, Bible, mystery. Every other job - and I’ve had a lot of them - seems like simply paying the bills. This is what I do and this is what feeds me as I do it.

Late Thursday evening as I sat down to write this I picked up a voice mail from my boss asking me to consider a change in my schedule. The change would, basically, take away all the freedom I’ve recently found to continue to explore vocation. I know my vocation is not being on the lowers rung of the drug-rehab industry. But that pays the bills. But if I can’t be doing this - Bible, Church, Mystery - all the rest is rather useless. I’d continue doing this for free. It’s my life.

Who are the ministers of the Church? I wrote yesterday “if we look with unbiased eyes at Church history there was a lot more diversity than we like to admit: congregational, presbyterian and episcopal governance were all present.” This is true of the earliest days of the Church, gathered in Jerusalem and we see it throughout the book of Acts and the Epistles. By some lights we see it in the Gospels, too, although I admit to being confused by that.

No matter how you slice church history, however, there is a sense that something changed. This verse from Sirach - this entire passage, in fact - is no longer true. The covenant with Aaron and his sons was not everlasting. It ended sometime around the appearance of the Archangel to the priest, Zachary, the father of John the Baptist. While it is true that “Before Aaron such beautiful things did not exist.” It is not true, as it says following, “No outsider ever put them on, but only his sons and his descendants in perpetuity.”

My friend, Susan, and I have been having an extended email conversation about, among other things, lay presidency at the Eucharist. This is ironic for those who know me, because I tend to have a very “high” theology of Sacramental things. Baptism really saves one, the Eucharist really is the Body and Blood of Christ (God save me, I had to edit out “Blog of Christ”) and ordination really puts an ontological mark on your soul.

Or does it?

I don’t know my answer to that any more. During my time as a non-Christian I learned a lot of things. Among them was that anyone can lead a service if they have the right skills. Later I had time to learn this very same thing at St Gregory of Nyssa Church, functioning as a liturgical deacon even though I was not ordained. But was I? This is really the source of the question. Is a Christian priest (or pastor) ordained to speak before God instead of the people, or is the pastor (or priest) ordained to speak for the sake of order: because having 50 or 100 voices all babbling together might be unseemly and chaotic?

Is a priest or deacon (or bishop or verger or any other Church Title you might pick) simply a function of the congregation, something that is done to make things happen “decently and in order”, or are Holy Orders part of the magic of the Church? I’m mindful of two phases of Methodism (in which tradition I was raised). On the one hand, at its very beginning, the Methodist societies had no ordination. When they wanted sacraments (as for once a month communion) they visited the local Anglican church). Later, John Wesley began ordaining presbyters himself because of necessity, feeling that the Methodists needed someone empowered to administer the sacraments. He did this after he had rejected any idea of Apostolic Succession… so he was simply empowering laymen to do the function within the community. There was no “magic” involved.

Also feeding into the conversation is my contact with modern Judaism: among its many streams, traditions and denominations, one increasingly finds egalitarian structures where services are conducted not by the Ordained but by the community and those the community names as having the right skills for the job. The same is true in parts of what is called the Emergent Church movement.

While I do not doubt that an ordained clergy has been a part of Christian tradition for nearly all of the last 2000 years, it was not always so in all parts of Christendom. Nor, I think, need it always be going forward. So who are the ministers of the Church?

In her book Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor realises that her ordination keeps her apart from the very people with whom she worships God. She speaks of being at a pool party with her parishioners. Various persons are getting dunked in the pool fully clothed but no one is coming near her - The Priest™. Finally someone takes pity on her and throws her in as well and from within the pool, people laughing, she looks around in love:

If being ordained meant being set apart from them, then I did not want to be ordained anymore. I wanted to be human. I wanted to spit food and let snot run down my chin. I wanted to confess being as lost and found as anyone else without caring that my underwear showed through my wet clothes. Bobbing in that healing pool with all those other flawed beings of light, I looked around and saw them as I had never seen them before, while some of them looked at me the same way. The long wait had come to an end. I was in the water at last.

In his review of the book, Adam says the following (after hearing the author speak on the same topic):

At the lunch, she always shared what her ideal church would be. She said it would consist of 52 people, and it would be a community of pastors, in that all of the leadership would be shared. Hopefully they would be a community of social activists, a community of leaders, and they would never own a building - because she said as soon as you have a building, then the problems begin.

Adam says these are, “Some interesting thoughts for would-be emerging church planters.” I think they are interesting thoughts for all of us who are Christians living today. How do we do Church? Why do we do it the way we do? Is it simply because “that’s the way it was being done with I got here”? Is it possible that’s not the best way to look at things? Or, more to the point, is it possible that what’s “always” been done isn’t “always” the right answer?

Aaron’s sacrifices shall be wholly burned twice every day continually. Moses ordained him, and anointed him with holy oil; it was an everlasting covenant for him and for his descendants as long as the heavens endure, to minister to the Lord and serve as priest and bless his people in his name.

Continually until things change.

The Community always assumes continuity. Of course Israel’s sacrifices will continue forever (even speaking - as the writer is - after a time when they had been interrupted).

The Community always assumes changelessness. History will show the evolution of the Eastern Rite liturgy - but people still say “it never changes.” the same is true of the “traditional Latin Mass” which grew and evolved right up until it was discontinued in 1967. It will return to it’s evolutionary track after B16 takes it out of storage and releases it to the wider Church later this year. History will show the evolution of even the most modern things: the 3 or 4 very different liturgies that developed over the last 25 or 30 years at St Gregory of Nyssa, for example. But some folks, even when I was there, wanted to lock them away in a kind of liturgical Tupperware. Nothing stays fresh for long without the Holy Spirit’s winds of change blowing through. Nothing keeps out freshness like Tupperware.

We see Jesus driving out the moneychangers in today’s Gospels. The money changers and animal sellers were all there doing the work of the Mosaic law. You could not sacrifice animals that had not been approved by the priest - better to get them pre-approved in lots than risk having some turned away at the altar. But you couldn’t bring images of pagan gods into the temple - such as were on the Roman coins. So, change your Roman coins for kosher gelt, then buy a sacrifice. Jesus’ action overthrows not just any injustice that might be present, but the entire sacrificial and sacerdotal system by disrupting its purpose and function.

And Christians set up a new one a couple of centuries later. Who are the ministers of the Church? (As the Episcopal Catechism asks):

A friend wrote a little thing and shared with me. (He said then that he’d deny he wrote it 15+ years ago when he hired me at the Episcopal Church Centre. I wonder how he feels now?) Of course, I don’t have the full text memorised, I only saw it the one time, but here is the gist of it:

Who are the ministers of the Church?

We are all called to be evangelists. We have this sacred meal we are all called to shared with everyone. We have the Risen Lord who gave us this meal - that we are called to share and somehow, by sharing this meal we share Him.

We are all called to be evangelists - but some of us fail at this.

God is merciful however, and has appointed a place for those of us who fail at being evangelists. He allows them to be waiters at his Holy Table. And so they are - they carry the napkins and lead us to our seats, they direct us in our actions and our words and they bring us the food that we eat at God’s dinner party. The Christian community functions better thus with dinner guests/evangelists and waiters.

Some of us fail at these jobs, however, but God is still merciful. He allows those who fail at being waiters to be Maitre D’s. They get to be the sort of dinner directors. They speak in the assembly. They hold forth. But their only purpose is to help feed the evangelists - which they do with the aid of the waiters. The community functions really well, thus - with Dinner Guests/Evangelists, Waiters and Maitre D’s.

Some of us, however, continue to fail - even with a job spectrum so wide. God is merciful, however, and has a job even for these triple failures.

From the earliest days of the Church those who went to this dinner party were persecuted for various reasons: the Waiters were stoned, the Maitre D’s were crucified. The Evangelists were driven out of town on the rails. The idea of a dinner party wherein everyone was welcomed and no one - male female, slave free, Jew or Gentile - was turned away usually managed to offend someone: at first, the Free Male Jews (even the ones who claimed to follow Jesus) - later we found cognates for them in every society.

So God in his wisdom found a way to help protect the dinner party: he created the office of Decoy. He dressed the decoy up with a lot of finery and put a big hat on his head. He sat the decoy up in the middle of any room where the dinner party was happening and, sure enough, they began to attract attention. It keeps the heat off the people doing the real work of Evangelism.

And the community works very well with its sacred ministers:
Evangelists
Waiters
Maitre D’s
and
Decoys.

One last thought. Before entering the sanctuary to serve liturgy with the people, the “vested party” at St Greogry’s Church reads the following. Based on Aaron, it was written as a meditation for an Anglican Priest to read before service (by George Herbert, an Anglican Priest). But read by everyone about to lead a liturgy - choir director, cantor, lay readers, etc - it becomes a profound statement of the priesthood of all of us. Who are the ministers of the Church? Us.

Aaron

Holinesse on the head,
Light and perfections on the breast,
Harmonious bells below, raising the dead
To leade them unto life and rest.
Thus are true Aarons drest.

Profanenesse in my head,
Defects and darknesse in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest.
Poore priest thus am I drest.

Onely another head
I have, another heart and breast,
Another musick, making live not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest:
In him I am well drest.

Christ is my onely head,
My alone onely heart and breast,
My onely musick, striking me ev’n dead;
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in him new drest.

So holy in my head,
Perfect and light in my deare breast,
My doctrine tun’d by Christ, (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest)
Come people Aaron’s drest.

Today’s assigned readings:
Sirach 44:19-45:5, 2 Corinthians 12:1-10, Luke 19:28-40

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven - whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person - whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows - was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.
2 Corinthians 12:2-5

John Chrysostom says, all of Paul’s clear statements to the contrary notwithstanding, that Paul is talking about himself here, getting caught up into heaven. He says Paul is just being really humble. Really humble. John has to wrap the text around a few trees to make that seem plausible, but every Orthodox preacher I’ve ever heard comment on this text says the same thing: why? Because no one wants to disagree with John Chrysostom.

Even when the text clearly says John is wrong - everyone just goes along, cuz, hey, it’s John Chrysostom. This drives me up a wall and I could go off on a huge rant right now… but I’ll not.

And once I sat with a priest who was reading some stuff that I wrote and he was not happy: seemed I was pulling something called “eisogesis” - which means reading meaning into the text - instead of exegesis, reading meaning from within the text. Orthodox never do eisogesis… unless you’re John Chrysostom: then you can turn the clear meaning of the text around 180 degrees and no one will bat an eye. Or if you’ve ever read Gregory of Nyssa torture meaning out of the superscriptions on the psalter, you’ve seen eisogetics in action.

In common usage, eisogesis is one of those irregular nouns. It’s only used in the second person negative:

My book is exegesis.
Your sermon is eisogesis.
Their blog is filled with bloody heresies.

But the point of this is that we’re all eisogetes: we may read in our own meaning, or may chose to read in the meaning written by a long-dead Bishops to the exclusion of all others, or may chose to read in the meanings of the Jesus seminar or the current pope… it matters not. We’re adding to the text. The same is true of those folks who claim “sola scriptura” - or ask them to explain something difficult like who was Jesus talking to when he says, in Mark 13:14, “Let the reader understand”? Any answer will be clear eisogesis: Any answer whatsoever.

Again, the point is that we are all eisogetes and I hear that to be a good thing.

Yesterday I read two essays by two rabbis and I think we can read them also into our topic today.

First, Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s post of yesterday on how Bible Scholarship impacts faith, brings us to a place that sounds like a lot of modern Christian scholarship.

First, the Bible is a human document, reflecting both timeless wisdom and time-bound bias. Second, the Bible speaks in metaphor and should be looked to for wisdom not scientific fact or unchanging sexual mores. Third, the Bible can be read to condone the greatest evil even as it can be read to uphold the greatest good. Hence the Bible is not to be separated from those who read and interpret it; it is a moving target, reflecting what the reader desires rather than what God commands.

And then we move to the “Radical Torah” blog (which I *highly* recommend for all readers!) In the lectionary used by most synagogues, this week’s Torah reading is Numbers 16:1 - 18:32, the portion called “Korah”.

Now Korah, son of Izhar son of Kohath son of Levi, betook himself, along with Dathan and Abiram sons of Eliab, and On son of Peleth — descendants of Reuben — to rise up against Moses, together with two hundred and fifty Israelites, chieftains of the community, chosen in the assembly, men of repute. They combined against Moses and Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above the Lord’s congregation?”

Over at Radical Torah, Rachel makes some good points that are, for our Gentile conversation, a bit far afield, but I’d always heard this text as telling the story of the evil men who wanted to overthrow Moses. Through Rachel’s post I finally saw another side to this story: It is a celebration of what Christians might refer to as “the priesthood of all believers” and the tension between that truth and other (equally true) models of community.

These models might come into direct conflict if we see Church as another one of those irregular nouns:

We have church.
You have something, but we’re not sure what.
They have nothing at all.

The traditional view of Church is one of, if not uniformity then, at least, conformity. We craft this looking backwards with eyes occluded by our current struggles, I think. In the traditional view differences are seen as weaknesses. The motto “Diversity is our Strength” would not have applied. I speak from experience here - diversity scared me as recently as 5 years ago (it was five years ago this past Sunday that I entered the Orthodox church). But, if we look with unbiased eyes at Church history there was a lot more diversity than we like to admit: congregational, presbyterian and episcopal governance were all present. There were competing theologies. Uniformity happens as we draw nearer to Constantine, but it is artificial and enforced from without.

But if we see, instead, the community of people seeking to live God-ward or Love-ward (they are the same thing) in the way of Jesus, all living in eisogetic conversation with each other - and our spiritual ancestors - we get to a very new, very different, and I think very exciting place.

I repeatedly wonder if the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation are not the works of the Holy Spirit restoring to the Church her glorious and diverse plurality.

And for those who see such pluriform quality as a weakness, St Paul says, Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.

Deuteronomy 5:22-33; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:10; Luke 16:19-31

PM: Eve of Trinity Sunday: Sirach 42:15-25; Ephesians 3:14-21

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:18-19

The Gospel today recounts the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. It is sometimes used to justify ideas that might be called “redistribution of wealth” and “social justice”. I’m putting them in quotes for a reason. Hold on: we’ll get to that.

Other times the Gospel passage is seen to disparage wealth and uplift poverty. And I’ve even heard it used to justify the idea of eternal hell - as if that was the point Jesus was making in the story. But I’d rather look at the reality of wealth and poverty as this is also the Eve of Trinity Sunday…

In my own life - and in yours, I’m certain - I can point at points of poverty and wealth. Mine was a single-parent household until I was in fifth grade (minus a year or two). Mom raised three kids in the rural South through the late 60s and early 70s at a time when to be a single mother was not terribly accepted in polite circles. I’ve asked mom for her salary back then - and converted it to “real” money, corrected for inflation. Imagine raising three kids (and yourself, of course) on about 10,000 a year. Even in the rural south, that’s not going to happen - adding even the $21 a month of food stamps. (My Mom, by the way, constantly amazes and humbles me.) And then when I was living in San Francisco, in my 30s I was earning a salary equal to my current age. It was a lot of money: would have been a killer wage in the rural south! But it was barely enough to make ends meet in SF at the turn of the century. When I moved back to the rural south, a cost of living convert told me I’d need to earn $17,000 a year to have the same purchasing power my $42k had in SF. Suddenly I was not lower class or even lower middle. I was on the solid median.

I feel blessed, looking back: not because there were never hard places, but rather because I know at each stage of the game, I was nowhere near “worst”. At least in terms of money: it’s the least important thing possible.

At every turn things change. Money, emotional support, spirit, health. At all stages of the game these things have been way up or way down: most often by my own doings, I confess.

I’ve been both, the Rich Man and Lazarus.

If you read this Gospel for social justice you miss a point: it’s entirely possible for both of them to be saved. Lazarus is there, working out his savation… the Rich Man, traditionally named Divies or Davies, is not working very hard at all. He’s taken a wee bit of a rest.

That’s what most of us do, I think. My maternal Grandfather used to say, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” It’s when the going gets tough that most of us hunker down and start to pray, or bother to think about “things eternal”. What happens if things never get rough?

One of the on-going discussions within the Orthodox Blogosphere (”Orthoblogoslavia” as I call it) is around the question, Can Americans be Orthodox? While most of the discussion gets phrased in a way that might imply something superior about Greek or Slavic cultures, at heart is an important question: can people who have so much leisure time, so much money and so much cultural distraction arrive at a point where they “take up their cross daily and follow Jesus.”

The question misses a point - as do all of us who want to read social justice - or such social issues - into this Gospel: our cross is not “bad”. St Paul tells the folks in Corinth (2 Cor 4:15) “[E]verything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.” OUr Cross is not the troubles in our lives: making it hard for happy people, for successful people, for winners in any way to get saved. Our cross is knowing what to do with what we have.

Divis’ problem is not that he was rich, per se: it’s that he didn’t take care of the poor with his wealth. The Church Fathers write that the extra bread in my kitchen is not mine: it belongs to the poor. So also the extra clothes and wealth in my life. It’s not that I’m rich that will be my curse. I’m selfish holding on to that what God has given me exactly ” that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God”.

The book of Sirach tells us: All things come in pairs, one opposite the other, and he has made nothing incomplete. Each supplements the virtues of the other. Who could ever tire of seeing his glory? (42:24-25) And this takes us to the Eve of Trinity Sunday…

The Trinity is too great a Mystery to resolve in the course of this meditation: even if I had focused all the text on it (I have, but we’ll get to that). What the ancient saints taught us is that (no matter how it is possible) God is love and in that love there is, of course, community. God’s love is so great that in God’s being there is community.

But more than that: in the Incarnation humanity has become part of that community. Jesus as God-Man unites us in our nature with the nature of God, the community of love. It is our salvation to live out that community. It would not do for us to imagine any member of the Trinity to have “needs” that can be filled by the other two. But it is for us to see love flowing from one to the other, from two to the third, from each to each in a fullness beyond our imagining.

Even though it may never be possible for me, alone, to, as St Paul says, “have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge…” God calls all of humanity in Christ, to “be filled with the fullness of God.” Let us, mirroring God’s fullness, “Each supplements the virtues of the other.” Let Divis give to Lazarus to the glory of God until each are filled to overflowing with thanksgiving and love.

Say yes we live uncertainty
And disappointments have to be
And everyday we might be facing more
And yes we live in desperate times
But fading words and shaking rhymes
There’s only one thing here worth hoping for
With Lucifer beneath you and God above
If either one of them asks you what your living of
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love
Say love, say for me love

(The Avett Brothers, Living in Love

This is what the Church - all of Creation - is called to do that we might unite (be reconciled, be made whole, be saved) into an image of the Trinity.