I COULD HAVE HAD MILLIONS!

Like a lot of others I receive a lot of SPAM each day. I decided that a SPAM filter wasn't always a good thing when e-mails from our daughter and from a staff person at the Episcopal Church Center got caught in a filter. I ignore most of the SPAM, but I find that I can't ignore those that are fraud attempts. For a while I reponded to some of them, urging the senders to stop what is not a fitting pursuit for one who bears God's image. Recently, however, I started forwarding them on to the various internet service providers that the criminals use. A number of those ISPs are very good about closing down the e-mail accounts that are being used for fraud attempts (msn.com, yahoo.com, gmail.com, and hotmail.com are good at closing accounts that violate their terms of use agreements.) Unfortunately a few ISPs don't have a way to report this abuse and now some ISPs are refusing any e-mail from me. The internet is a useful tool, but I think stopping crimianls from using it ought to be a goal of all ISPs. Sadly it isn't.

JUST AS HE WAS

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. (Mark 4:35-36)

Just as he was.

Even though I had read or heard this passage many times, I had never noticed that phrase until a colleague pointed it out to me. Reading back to beginning of Mark 4, I saw that Jesus had begun his teaching sitting in the boat near the shore and so this little phrase that I had overlooked for so long simply meant that he had remained in the boat until he was finished teaching and the disciples set out for the other side with Jesus sitting just where he had been all day.

But I don’t want to leave it at that, nor do I think Mark wanted to. At the nursing home where we celebrate the Eucharist each week, we sometimes sing “Just as I am…” and I rejoice that Jesus invites us just as we are. But isn’t it also true that Jesus invites us to a relationship with him just as he is?

The problem, of course, is that we don’t want him just as he is. We want a different kind of savior. One of my friends has said that we want an ATM savior. We ask and out pops the answer that we want. Or we want a Rambo savior who will mow down any obstacle or enemy in our path. Whatever kind of savior we want, we hardly ever want Jesus just as he is.

As the story in Mark 4 continues, we hear that a storm blew up and the disciples feared for their lives and chided Jesus for sleeping. After he had rebuked the wind and the waves, he chided the disciples, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Faith, not belief in a set of propositions, but trust in Jesus. Perhaps what the disciples had not yet grasped was that Jesus wasn’t what we might call a meteorologist savior, one who would show us where the storms of life were so that we could avoid them. I don’t think Jesus wants us to avoid all of life’s storms, but he promises us that he will be with us always, even when the winds and waves threaten to capsize our boats.

Someone has observed that we really don’t want a savior who was crucified, dead and buried, and then was raised to life again. We want a savior who avoided death altogether. We want our lives storm-free. We like smooth sailing. But that isn’t the kind of life to which Jesus has called us. We are called to bear witness to God’s love in the world, and that means that our lives will be stormy at times. The world doesn’t really want to hear that God’s love is freely given to rich and poor alike, and that wealth and prestige and power are not what matters. And when we challenge the world’s values, when we proclaim that what matters is sacrificial love, the world may decide that we are crazy and, perhaps, dangerous.

One of my favorite hymns, a hymn about those fishermen who became Jesus’ disciples, ends with these unsettling words, The peace of God it is no peace but strife closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for but one thing - the marvelous peace of God.

Schadenfreude

I follow several blogs written by folks who are very critical of the Episcopal Church. While I don't find Schadenfreude (pleasure at the troubles of others) in the bloggers' posts, I do detect it in the almost gleeful comments of visitors to these blogs. Every piece of negative news about the Episcopal Church is recounted with what I see as smugness.

I do not count myself as a paragon of virtue, but during the past five years I have been thankful for the successes of the Anglican Chapel that was organized by some of our parishioners who had left us after the 2003 General Convention. The Chapel's Rector is a friend and I was glad when one of the Chapel's members was ordained to the diaconate - a better candidate would be hard to find.

Why shouldn't I rejoice when another congregation grows? Why should anyone rejoice when any Church, not just the Episcopal Church, loses members? Our parish planted some seeds in the lives of those who left us; the Anglican Chapel watered those seeds; but it was God who gave the growth. For that we should all rejoice and be thankful.

Pentecost: In Praise of Diveristy

When I bought a copy of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's The Dignity of Difference, I asked the friend who had recommended it if he thought the cover illustration of the Tower of Babel was appropriate. His response was that it was, so long as we understood the story in Genesis the way Prof. Christopher Duraisingh interpreted it. Christopher is on the faculty of Episcopal Divinity School and I was on sabbatical there when I bought Sacks's book, so it did not take long for me to learn about Christopher's understanding of the Tower of Babel story.

As that story is often linked with the story of Pentecost in Acts, it has been in my thoughts as I have prepared to celebrate Pentecost. Far from being a story about division and disunity, the Tower of Babel story is, I think, a story about God's love for unity with diversity. In this fascinating story, God responds to the human desire for uniformity by affirming diversity. The desire for uniformity, while a good thing in many circumstances, can lead to a totalitarian suppression of all differences. Even in its more benign forms, this desire can lead us to overlook or dismiss the wonderful diversity that exists in creation. For me, as a white male, to assume that we are all alike would be a failure to honor the distinctive cultures, experiences, and perspectives of those who are not white males.

The story of Pentecost is not, I think, a story of the reversal of what happened in the Tower of Babel Story. Yes, there is unity in the story, but not uniformity. Those who hear the disciples "speaking about God’s deeds of power" do not hear some sort of universal language, but just the opposite. They hear them speaking in their native languages, in the languages of their childhood, their mother tongues. There was an almost universal language available, Greek, but they each heard the Good News in their own languages. Unity, yes, but not without diversity.

Pentecost is not only about the Good News of what God has done in Jesus the Christ, it is also about the Church's participation in the missio Dei, in God's ongoing work of reconciliation and renewal in the world. Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall has asserted that our work in mission needs to be marked by faith, hope, and love. Far too often in the past these three virtues have been in short supply as we engage in mission. We too often have acted as if we had all the answers and that we didn't need to walk by faith because we had absolute certainty about our own understanding of the Truth. We too often have acted as if we had already arrived, had reached the goal, and no longer needed to travel in hope. And we have far too often been so dismissive of the cultures and experiences of those we meet in mission that it would be nearly impossible to say that we loved them.

I recently read a story about different approaches to language training for missionaries and about how those approaches effect their mission work. When missionaries attend language school before they are sent to the communities in which they will serve, there is a tendency for them to long for the camaraderie of those with whom they attended the language school and to welcome the chance to meet with them again. However, when the missionaries attend language school after some months in the communities in which they are serving, the pull of those reunions is much less, and when they attend meetings with other missionaries, they are anxious for the meetings to be over so they can get back to their work.

When we engage in mission, whether in our own communities or in other countries, honoring and even celebrating diversity is a Gospel imperative. It is often fear that keeps us from admitting that we don't have all the answers and might have something to learn from people of other cultures, other faiths. It is often fear that keeps us from admitting that we haven't arrived and don't even have a perfect road map for the journey. It is often fear that keeps us from becoming vulnerable by loving others. But perfect love casts out fear and we are loved perfectly by God, so let's get on with the mission of reconciliation and renewal in faith and hope and love.

The Lie of Context-less Judgment

The nomination of the Hon. Sonia Sotomayor to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court has raised again the question of how context influences our judgments. To listen to some who oppose her nomination you would conclude that it is possible to make decisions that are not at all influenced by our own contexts. Judge Sotomayor understands and acknowledges that her experiences will influence her decisions, but why is that a problem for some people?

Those of us who belong to the dominant group in our country - or in any profession - can be tempted to believe that our belonging to that group does not influence our decisions. It is probably harder for someone from a minority group to be tempted in that way. But no matter our own context, our own life story, our own ethnicity, the challenge is to recognize how context influences our judgment. Denying that it does can blind us to our responsibility to make sure that context does not have an undue influence on our decisions.

If Judge Sotomayor becomes Justice Sotomayor - and I hope she does - I suspect that there will be plenty of people warning her against the danger of letting context become too great an influence. But who will be reminding the white male Justices of the same danger?