When people are at their least attractive
is when we are to get as close as we can to them. "While we were yet
sinners, God loved us" has to do with the present as well as the past.
As leaders, bishops are called to be misunderstood and projected
upon. There isn't a moment when they have the freedom to sacrifice
the core of their religion to win a battle. I'm with Gandhi on this
one. Suffering comes with the territory.
We don't maintain the unity of Christ's Church by "being right."
The late Rabbi Edwin Friedman said in his lectures on family systems
that no aquarium survives unless some fish is willing to eat the garbage.
I have found eating the garbage to be profoundly instructive.
We talk about thinking outside of the box, but we don't do
it because we don't recognize we are in one.
The Gay issue, the Women's issue, the Race issue, and the Class
issue aren't going to be settled in my lifetime, except for people
in competing camps whose thinking is blissfully without nuance, whose
appreciation of complexity never transcends the possibility of putting
both ketchup and mustard on a hot dog.
If Jesus were to walk among us today, I suspect we'd ridicule
him on a talk show. That's one of the ways we publicly execute people.
Jesus most dismayed, perplexed, and outraged the good people
of his day by meeting on friendly terms with, and actually sharing
meals with, the agents of foreign oppression, tax collectors like
Matthew and Zacchaeus. Jesus outraged decency more in that he also
met with people otherwise identified as sinners by even the enlightened
and progressive minds of his day.
The only necessities for a gathered Episcopal church are people,
a priest, a Bible, a prayer book, some bread and some wine. Everything
else is a cultural decision.
On the stone that blocked Jesus' tomb were inscribed
the words: "We've never done it that way before." We all know that
stone. It keeps us fearful of what might be the Holy Spirit's promptings.
Can we get through the day without having to have power over
others - letting our loved ones be themselves? People who are embarrassed
by their parents have not yet become their own person.
Biting the tongue as soon as you feel the urge to complain
about the turkeys who plague your life may turn out to be a moment
of liberation: they aren't running your life.
Christian morality, New Testament morality, is considerably
more than the Ten Commandments, but it is not less. We walk before
we run. The function of moral teaching and self-examination is not
to make us feel better than others or give us a reason to condemn.
Its purpose is to check our self-honesty, our faithfulness in response
to God's love.
"The cross of Jesus Christ, the one, great mediator, becomes
for me a window into the heart of God: God's love and mercy and forgiveness,
God's loving embrace, God reaching out through the outstretched arms
of Jesus Christ. This God is far beyond the best god my limited imagination
might invoke. A God who loves sinners. Too good and loving, so as
to be -- ironically --incredible."
It is only when we take our fallibility, fragility, and occasional
imbecility for what they are that we realize that in the long run
this whole enterprise called life depends not on our talents or good
looks, but on the grace of God. St. Paul isn't urging any of us to
be poster child for National Low Self-Esteem Week. What he's trying
to show is that for each of us, life and God's love and power are
gifts, not attainments, so we can relax a bit "so that the life of
Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies."
"When Jesus said, 'I am the the way, the truth and the life,'
he taught us that truth is not just an idea that can be freeze-dried
and meditated on: in the long run, truth is a person, Jesus, living
the wisdom of God, with and for all humanity. Knowing him, knowing
him as the truth, is what sets us free."
Built on the rock. There is no other foundation that
lasts than our common faith in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, our common
commitment to the Risen Christ as our master, our joy, our teacher,
savior and friend.
Is it possible - and I'm just asking - that if being
a Christian has not really affected your standard of living, you may
well be a believer, but perhaps you are not yet a disciple of Jesus?
I know nobody whose opinion changed because of how thoroughly
someone else insulted, belittled or defamed them. Do you?
It is when one is sitting on top of the world that one
is most precariously balanced.
A person who knows how to be properly curious, never
reads minds -- something that cannot be done in the first place. A
person who has healthy curiosity does something else when they hear
something that is different from what they believe or is totally out
of their world of thought or experience. Instead of attacking or defending...
they ask a question.
There is an enormous difference between being a witness
and being an ideologue.
Christians are invited to expect to meet their shortcomings
and misdeeds as an inescapable part of their Christian growth....
Show me a Christian who hasn't repented of anything lately and I'll
show you someone who isn't paying attention to God or their neighbor.
To ask God what we are called to do with our resources,
our power, is to begin to see our lives in a new way, full of new
meaning, purpose and joy.
Meals have meaning. Sometimes that meaning has to be
repaired.
Like nostalgic meals, sharing the Bread of Life recalls
the past: our personal experiences of religion, and even more, the
story of our salvation by Jesus the Messiah. But unlike nostalgic
meals, sharing the Bread of Life is not focused on the past alone,
because salvation is at work in the present. We share Jesus in song
and story, in word and sacrament, because the future is Christ's.
So I asked the psychiatrist if he had any advice to
give a new bishop. "Almost nothing people will say will really be
about you: don't take anything personally... Just stay free to follow
your own vision."
There is an invisible famine in our country, even in
its best-fed neighborhoods. Our friends, our neighbors, even some
of our relatives, are living random, unfulfilled, and even destructive
lives - and they do not always even know that there is a problem.
[We Don't Create Visions... +Paul, DioLife, April'98]
(From a recently discovered Satanic Field Manual) Human
beings are at their most dangerous when they believe they are right
and are taking action to protect what is true, orthodox, or patriotic.
So by hook or by crook, step one must be to get temptees to believe
that they are right. Persons can be made to believe that they are
in the right most easily by leading them to substitute feeling for
fact. Reinforce in every way possible the delusion that "feelings"
do not require thought; if possible, get them to act on their feelings
without any thought at all. Never let them know that the only real
"feelings" are hunger, fear, aggression, sexual desire, and anger
-- anything else called a "feeling" is simply automated sloppy thinking.
Guard that secret well. Everything depends on it in Hell, and almost
that much on Madison Avenue.
Every parish knows who it does and doesn't want as members.
Become a "Peace watcher" and a "coffee hour watcher" and you will
see what I mean. God had to remind Jonah (Jonah 3:10 - 4:11) that
God's love is for everyone - a problem the first Christians had as
they struggled with the idea of mission to the Gentiles.
In an age that gets most of its information electronically,
are we settling for small service listings in the local paper, hoping
occasionally to get an item printed among those fillers on the religion
page which I'm not sure everyone reads?
If we are serious about wanting to reach a generation
quite at home in cyberspace, will we go there?
To a generation that values a church primarily in terms
of the services it provides, will we resist becoming another service
agency competing for customers, and find instead a way to speak a
convincing word about emptying ourselves while following a servant
Messiah?
God uses symbols of brokenness to impart life - that
is a promise impossible to misunderstand.
No matter what thousands of preachers say, I can indeed
worship God while playing golf.
The first Christians knew what they were doing when
they told those who had heard the gospel and knew the love of God
in Christ to work only at jobs that did not contradict their faith.
Christianity is not a religion of "anything goes." It
is a religion for those who realize that business as usual is not
good enough.
Martin Luther, in the very first of the Ninety-five
Theses, wrote that Jesus intends the entire life of the Christian
to be one of repentance.
What would the butterfly say to her earthbound cousins
who were so used to creeping around that they sort of liked it?
"Are you in love?" "No, we're just having
sex." ... The phrase focuses on the act rather than the persons, on
having rather than giving and receiving, and sounds mechanical, value-free,
and a bit boring. Where is passion, where is commitment, where is
ecstasy in those two drab words?
With my body I thee worship.... The expression
making love takes on new possibilities when we see ourselves giving
pleasure as an act of worship -- affirming the worth -- of the other,
doing what we have learned to do to move as one flesh to a repeated
experience of ecstasy.
Puccini never finished Turandot. When he died
in 1924, the opera was reverently finished by friends from his notes.
At the premiere at La Scala in 1926, Turandot was conducted
by Arturo Toscannini, who, when he came to the last passage Puccini
had written, actually stopped an entire Italian opera, put his baton
down, and turned to the audience. Through tears, he said: "This is
where the master ends." Then he raised the baton, and said: "This
is where the friends continue." He went on to what has to have been
one of the greatest premieres in musical history.
There is a reason that leaders of worship in the Episcopal
Church just stop at the end of their prayers, and that there is sometimes
a nanosecond of silence before Amen swells from the congregation.
It goes back a very long way.
Our spiritual biographies can be written by looking
in our checkbooks.
What are your idols? Mine include financial security,
my children, my notion of myself as productive.
The normal reaction to getting a raise is to consider
what one can now buy, what one can now enjoy having. The discipled
reaction to getting a raise is to consider how much more good one
can do.
Our society is structured in such a way that
the rewards of doing well include living and working in places where
the poor are not to be seen. The all-too-real "red-lining" in the
mortgage and insurance industries makes sure that the have's and have-not's
are kept at arm's length from each other. The church will have to
go to the poor.
People are at their most dangerous when
they believe they are right... The question is how to be right and
not be dangerous.
God meets us on the dance floors of our parishes. We
gather weekly and practice both old and new dance patterns with our
Lord. All of us --
children and adults -- join together and celebrate God "in whom we
live and move and have our being." The role of the parish to teach
and carry on the dance of our Lord cannot be underestimated. In a
culture that offers dance patterns of self-centeredness, greed, addiction
and abuse, it is imperative that we know and offer something radically
different to people: the dance pattern of shalom.
There is a God-given corrective to being too at
ease in Zion. St. Paul reminds us that "our knowledge is imperfect"
and that we "see through a glass darkly," now usually translated with
"see in a clouded mirror."
"Fella, I wouldn't have missed the Episcopal Church
for anything."
Diocesan Life index
