The language of “spiritual journey” is commonplace in describing the season of Lent–the 40-day pilgrimage Christians undertake as they trek with Jesus from the wilderness to the garden to the garbage heap of Golgotha and beyond. “Spiritual” in this context, as in almost every other, is so vague as to be not merely unhelpful but an actual obstacle to understanding what it is that Lent through the centuries has called Christians to.

Generally, “spiritual” is meant to signal a concern with matters of the heart or the soul or the deepest self. More pointedly, it almost always springs from–even as it continues to endorse–the tired dualisms of modernity that have divided body from soul, matter from spirit, earth from heaven. This false divide, as Wendell Berry has observed, is “a fracture that runs through the mentality of institutional religion like a geologic fault.”

Interestingly, it is geology (sort of) that can help get us back on track or–forgive the pun–onto solid ground. When we receive the ashes on our foreheads we are marked with a visible sign of our mortality, yes, but we are also reminded of our link to all of creation past, present, and future–to elements both earthly and celestial, to the soil and to the stars. (We could even say: “remember you are stardust, and to stardust you shall return!”).

To read the rest click here.

Though we live (or have lived) in the age of the Emerging/Emergent Church, I have a different proposal for a new vision of church. I call it the Submerging Church! Am I serious, you ask? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe both. Read on and see what you think.

The Submerging Church, as I see it, is radically subversive, relentlessly incarnational, and ruthlessly hospitable. It dives deeply into everyday life, sharing it with others, while at the same time questioning and critiquing the conditions of that life we share. Since this community lives from its center, the risen Jesus Christ, its boundaries are porous and permeable with arms outstretched to everyone who encounters it.

Read more…

Last Sunday After Epiphany (Year B) RCL

2 Kings 2:1-12
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9

Not long ago my nephew was forcing me to find Waldo in page after page of busy scenes where somewhere there was a goofy guy in red and white stripes.  “Where’s Waldo”, “Magic Eye”–we love seeing games where we must pick out an image from visual confusion.  Perhaps this love comes from our history as hunters and gathers, when we had to unmask the camouflage of animals in order to gain our daily food.  Whatever it is, we love seeing what was invisible made suddenly apparent.

The ability to see beyond the obvious is a skill and we have to develop it.  I know people who have never been able to make a “magic eye” picture work for them, but most of us, after we see one “magic eye” image can see any “magic eye” image.  Once we learn how to see, we are able to see everything and anything anew.

Seeing is the common thread of The Revised Common Lectionary readings for this last Sunday of Epiphany.  Elisha must see Elijah taken up into heaven in order to have his double spirit, in 2 Corinthians Paul speaks of “the god of this world”  blinding “the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God,” and finally in the Gospel reading we have the recounting of the transfiguration where Peter, James and John see Christ glorified in an apocalyptic meeting with Moses and Elijah.

As we know from Church history, seeing has been a tricky business for Christians.  Early on there were many debates about whether or not we should have images that allow us to “see” Christ.  Many felt that Christianity must hold to the Jewish prohibition on images of God because of the risk of idolatry, but the position that mostly won out was one that argued that we could picture God because God was made incarnate–once God could actually be seen in and through a person, then God could be pictured as such.  Christ himself, as we read in 2 Corinthians, was an “image of God.”

As this idea and discussion developed there came to be a division between two kinds of images and it is here that I think the critical point lies for us in the readings for this Sunday.  The form of images the church came to accept came to be called icons rather than idols.  The difference between an idol and an icon is that with an idol we take an experience of the divine and try to freeze it into a particular image whereas an icon is a means by which our vision is opened up to the divine beyond the image.

To utilize an icon, to have our vision opened up, we must be formed in such a way so that we can see.  This was the last test for Elisha as his master was taken into heaven–”if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not”, Elijah tells Elisha.  Elijah knew that if Elisha was not trained yet to see the reality of what was going to happen then he would not be able to handle the “double portion” of his spirit that Elisha had asked for as a final blessing.

In the same way Paul knows that in order to actually see the truth of the gospel one must be formed in such a way that we can see it–”even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.”

In the gospel reading we find Peter moving dangerously close to idolatry as he tries to preserve the experience of the divine, the experience of seeing Christ glorified into a permanent fixture–”Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  God saves Peter, John and James from this by blocking out their vision–”Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’”  With vision taken away, the disciples are called to listen–to be taught, and in that teaching their ability to see will be reoriented so that they will be able to properly engage with icons–to see the divine beyond the image.

In philosopher Paul Churchland’s fascinating book Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind he argues that we should work to change our common sense perceptions of the world to better match our best theories of how the world really is in itself.  For instance, most of us perceive the sun going around the earth, even though our best theories tell us the opposite is true.  Churchland argues that the mind is actually very plastic and we can perform exercises that will help make our perceptions conform to what we believe is true about the world.  For instance, if we wake up early and watch the sun rise while imagining we are on a down escalator, we will develop a proper perception of what is actually going on as the sun moves across the sky.  It is in this way that we can begin to live into the truth, rather than the lies that helped us make sense of the world before we really understood it.

What if our churches were places where we learn to see rightly? Where our plastic minds were formed so that we can begin to see reality?  This is what we must seek.  But in doing so we must be careful not to make tents on mountaintops, static preservations of divine moments.  Instead we must be formed so that we see the kingdom as it is–real and always around us.  This formation for seeing comes by listening, by becoming disciples and immersing ourselves in the stories and teachings of Jesus.  Let us listen so we can see, let our eyes be opened, let us see the incredible reality of the kingdom of God where we no longer have to live according to the lies we used to tell ourselves.  This is the work we must turn ourselves to in the Lenten season.

6th week of Epiphany

Feb. 12, 2012

2 Kings 5:1-14

Psalm 30

1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Mark 1:40-45

 Eighteen years ago, the Mississippi Annual Conference planted the next “mega church” in a small but rapidly growing community just outside of the state capital of Jackson.  The congregation started with an average worship attendance of around 90, a number that has dropped slowly but consistently over the years.  When I was appointed there 4 years ago we averaged about 35 on a Sunday morning.  This past Sunday we had eight.  As a worshiping community, it is getting harder and harder for us to have hope for our future, not to mention paying our utility bills. 

In an effort to encourage our struggling church our District Superintendent assured us that if there was even one family who could say that they were genuinely called by God to continue to worship and witness as New Covenant UMC then he would do everything he could to help us stay open and pursue that calling.  So it is that in the last few weeks, we have begun to ask each other very seriously and very concretely “What is God calling you to do?  What is God calling us to do as a Church body? Who is God calling us to be?” 

“Now Naaman was a commander…”  The text of 2 Kings goes to great lengths to help us see Naaman as a man of power and prestige.  The text stacks markers of his identity as a powerful man one on top of the other.  He was a commander, a great man, highly regarded, victorious, a valiant solider, he traveled in horses and chariots, and he had no problem getting a letter of recommendation from the King of Aram.  Last week, in all the preparations for Super Bowl XLVI, I heard an NPR commentator recount meeting the New England Patriots quarter back Tom Brady.  He said that it was just impossible to stand next to Tom Brady and feel good about yourself.  Speaking of Brady he said ‘he has rugged good looks, he’s chiseled, he looks like a male model, he’s married to a super-model, he lives in a 200 million dollar mansion, he’s been incredibly successful in his chosen career.  You just can’t stand next to the guy and feel good about who you are.’  We may think of Naaman along these lines.  He was a great man, highly regarded, successful, rich, and well connected. 

“But he had leprosy.”  All of Naaman’s money and power, all of his social capital was worthless in the face of his disease.  He was mighty warrior.  Or at least he used to be.  When we meet Naaman he is dying both physically and socially.  Through the course of the story we come to see that Naaman’s power cannot heal him.  For from it, his power and might are the most significant barrier to his healing.  Though he has saved many and enslaved others, Naaman cannot save himself.

Naaman’s healing will not come by his own power but by the power of God.  That truth turns out to be a hard pill to swallow for man who is accustomed to saving himself as well as those around him.  Our first indication that Naaman’s healing will come by way of the God who “has brought down the rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble” (Lk. 1.52) comes through the testimony of a young girl, enslaved by one of Naaman’s great military victories. “If only my master would go to Samaria to see the prophet there….”   Her act of witness set off a chain of events in which the desperate Naaman acquires a personal recommendation letter from the King of Aram, loads his chariots up with silver and gold and heads straight to the throne room of the King of Israel.  Even though the young girl directed Naaman to the prophet, he has not yet realized that his salvation will not come through the normal channel of powers afforded to him by his status.  Naaman is more comfortable with Kings than he is prophets.  However, in the face of leprosy, the King of Israel is as helpless as Naaman.

We quickly see why Naaman prefers Kings to prophets.  Naaman’s visit to the prophet leaves him outraged.  The prophet sends a messenger (once more a word of salvation coming to the powerful through a servant) and instructs Naaman to “Go wash yourself seven times in the Jordan and your flesh will be restored and you will be clean.”  With his pride mortally wounded, Naaman storms away in a rage.

For a third time, a servant intervenes to save this “mighty man.”  In vs. 13 Naaman’s servants speak to him saying “Father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it?  How much more then when he tells you ‘wash and be cleansed’.”  The servants speak with the voice of reason urging Naaman to heed the prophet’s command.  After all, they suggest, it’s not like Naaman was asked to do something difficult.  The servants are wise and committed to their master but we have to wonder if they truly understood the prophet’s command.  Naaman recognizes that the prophet has indeed told him to something very difficult.  Naaman has been instructed to humble himself, to leave behind his identity as a mighty commander of the armies of Aram, and become a servant himself as he responds to the commands of the living God. 

This is a story of healing and transition, a story about a man who leaves behind who he was and in that self-emptying, he finds new life.  Naaman wades into the water and in that act of humility and obedience “his flesh was restored and he became clean like that of a young boy.”Over the course of the story Naaman comes to terms with who he is, leaves behind who he once was, and becomes someone new as his humility and obedience leads to startling cry of faith “Now I know!” 

In my small church we have been struggling to answer some hard questions about who God is calling us to be.  As I have listened with my small church for the call of God an even greater struggle has been the temptation to wield what power we can to save ourselves.  Conversations about who God is calling us to be often drift into conversations about raising more money, reaching new members, and re-branding within the local community.  As it turns out this is not just a struggle for my small church but a very real temptation for the larger The United Methodist Church.  In the face of institutional decline we are hesitant to wrestle with the question of who God is calling us to be.  We seem unable to fathom that perhaps God is calling us to leave behind the days of our youth when we were “mighty” and exercised a “commanding” presence in U.S. culture.  And so we call ourselves to action, strengthen our social  media presence and let the marketers and advertisers tell us how we might yet save ourselves. 

Naaman could not save himself then and my church cannot save itself now.  We will either come to terms with the fact that we have already been humbled by disease, listen for the voice of the prophets, and obey the word God has for us, or we will die struggling against the God of life, and health and new creation.  Jesus Christ humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  Eventually Naaman humbled himself and became obedient to the point of life, even life in the dirty waters of the Jordan.  Perhaps the text this week will help our churches face the question ‘ will we die as commanders or be reborn as servants? ‘

 “If only my master would see the prophet…..”

Isaiah 40:21-31

Psalm 147:1-11, 20c

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Mark 1:29-39

In this election year, the headlong scramble for power is front and center. Candidates, political parties, and super PACs climb over one another to gain access to the levers of power.

Could it be that the church is little different in its craving for potency? Waning influence in American culture, declining membership, or just the plain desire for some kind of noticeable impact on our communities makes us long for the capacity to make stuff happen. If only we had more money, more influence, more people, more resources, our congregations could really execute on our mandate to be the church.

At first glance, Jesus’ ministry looks emblematic of the kind of ministry we wish we could have. Jesus exercises the kind of power that changes lives. Jesus heals the sick and liberates the demonized. He “gathers the outcasts of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:2-4).

And people stand up and take notice. Mark tells us that “the whole city was gathered around the door”—something we wish could happen in our ministries. If only we had that kind of “juice”, we could really make a difference.

The fact that we don’t have it sends us off in search of the missing ingredient. We need the right methodology, the right practices, the right theology, more of the Holy Spirit. The Lord “is abundant in power” (Psalm 147:5). Therefore, we assume we need power to reflect God’s supremacy in the world. Simon and the other disciples are certain that’s what is needed for the Kingdom of God party to succeed. They hunt for Jesus after he goes AWOL one morning because “everyone is searching” for him after witnessing his deeds of power. Simon and company are sure Jesus needs to exploit this political opportunity and cannot fathom that Jesus’ ultimate political triumph will come through weakness.

Lost in the hoopla is the vignette about Simon’s mother-in-law. Her healing is what triggers the whole outpouring of enthusiasm, but it is soon forgotten in the rush to harness Jesus’ growing political capital. She was in bed with a fever, and they tell Jesus about her. There is no spell, no incantation, no show. Simply taking her by the hand, Jesus lifts her up and delivers her from her deadly fever.

Then in a move sure to raise red flags for us, Simon’s mother-in-law gets up from her sickbed and starts serving them. How predictable! No sooner is the woman healed, but she is required to get up and start serving the men-folk!

But stepping back a bit, we see that this is not at all what is going on. Women in Mark do far better than their male counterparts. The men-folk, with Simon as their standard-bearer, are constantly blurting out the wrong things and misunderstanding Jesus to the point that they run away and are nowhere to be found at the climax of the story. But beginning with Simon’s mother-in-law, women consistently do what is commendable in Mark. (Okay, they do run away at the end, but they must have eventually spread the news of Jesus’ triumph offstage or else we wouldn’t have heard the gospel.) The service of Simon’s mother-in-law reflects the kingdom. She mirrors Jesus, the one who came not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).

What then is the community of Jesus to think of power, especially in a time when it seems it is scarce and we have great need of it?

Paul commends the politics of weakness to the power-enamored church in Corinth. Derided for not flaunting his authority as they thought fitting for real apostles, Paul instead touts his weakness as his only credential. Weakness is not just a posture. When Paul says that he became “as one under the law” to those under the law or “as one outside the law” to those outside the law, he is neither trying on identities in search of himself nor pragmatically crafting a ministry that will appeal to the largest constituency possible. Paul knows who he is. Paul knows whose he is. “I became weak,” he says, not “like the weak” or “as the weak.” No, Paul says he actually became weak.

Although he is an apostle, he does not exercise full use of his rights (exousia), power, or authority, but instead makes himself a slave to all. For Paul, the goal is not to acquire power, but to lay it down. In doing so, Paul patterns his life after what Michael Gorman calls the “master narrative” of the gospel Paul proclaims: Though Christ was in the form of God, he did not regard his status as something to be exploited, but emptied himself and took on the form of a slave (Philippians 2:6-7). Likewise, though Paul is free with respect to all as an apostle, he does not make full use of his exousia, but makes himself a slave of all. In doing so, Paul is not abandoning his identity as an apostle but is in fact demonstrating what apostleship truly looks like, just as Christ did not give up being God in becoming a slave but revealed who God truly is by emptying himself in love.

So long as we grasp after power for the sake of having (Christian?) influence in the world, our congregations will be singularly unable to bear witness to the Kingdom. Conversely, serving all as slaves of Christ and putting the interests of others ahead of our own are within the grasp of all of our congregations, great and small.

The humble vignette of Simon’s mother-in-law gets lost in the hoopla of the healings that follow. But she is not lost to God. She is known to the Almighty God who “determines the number of the stars,” “gives to all of them their names,” and “not one of them is missing” (Psalm 147:4; Isaiah 40:26). Such servanthood is often lonely, exhausting work performed in obscurity. But it is not lost from God’s sight. “Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord?…He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless….those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” When Simon’s mother-in-law serves, she images the Servant of the Lord. Her weakness is a true reflection of God’s politics.

Here we are, halfway through this Epiphany season. In perusing through some of the Revised Common lectionary texts I noticed for the first time that we, the church, spend nearly this entire seven week season of Epiphany in the first chapter of Mark’s gospel. For a gospel that is very much about being on the move – forty times in sixteen chapters the Greek word for immediately/at once/then occurs – this seems counterintuitive.

It is not, though, if we consider that Epiphany is the season for the church to try and get its head and heart and life around just who Jesus is and what is the good news he heralds and (spoiler alert!) is. It’s all there in the first chapter of Mark, so it is here we sit and ponder for a while.

Halfway through Chapter One, we’ve already seen John’s prophetic preaching, Jesus’ baptism, Jesus’ temptation in the desert, John’s arrest, the beginning of Jesus’ ministry with the announcement on which everything turns, and the calling of the fishermen disciples, Simon (Peter), Andrew, James and John. Now, be prepared to be amazed and astounded. Not in the ways that parlour tricks elicit but in the “Holy crap!” evoked by an encounter with the living God at Horeb (Deut.18:16, Exodus 20:18-19).

Now the voice of the LORD and that great fire are distilled into Jesus whom we can barely bear, striding amongst us. With his as yet incomplete band of disciples, Jesus goes to the town of Capernaum, teaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath. The people are astounded by the authority with which he teaches. The living embodiment of the Word has no need to reference earthly authorities: he is the Authoritative Source. People take note, heads are turned, a man with an unclean spirit cries out…

Unclean spirit: What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.

Jesus: Be silent [a.k.a. “Shut up”] and come out of him!

And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.

All are amazed. At once his fame began to spread, a fame he will race to stay ahead of, so he can accomplish what he came to do before it destroys him (though, as we know, it doesn’t end there).

The unclean spirit immediately I.D.s Jesus. If we were watching this as a movie (an action one of course, given we are in Mark), we would move in slow motion through the last words spoken by the unclean spirit: “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

“I know who you are…” This is where the North American church is called to linger, because to know who Jesus is is to know the good news that he himself announces. Jesus is the Holy One of God, speaking the Truth to the whole world that it might be free. Later, in Jesus’ Resurrection, comes the resounding answer to the unclean spirit’s question, “Have you come to destroy us?”…YES! – and the power of death too while he is at it.

This is a knowledge the church is called to steward and live by in the love and humility that Paul advocates in I Corinthians 8. It is intriguing – and hopeful – that in the gospel of Mark, it is the unclean spirits and people who immediately identify who Jesus is and what that means. The disciples don’t get it, possibly even in the end (if you go with 16:8 as the end of Mark) and yet, the church exists. When we lose our way – The Way – there are those who can help us find it again. God has promised to never leave us alone, for the sake of the world God so loves.

In the Pacific Northwest – the most secular part of North America – in Canada, I have participated in the life of a congregation, facing impending death, which took as its theme song Psalm 111: “…to give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart, in the company of the upright, in the congregation.” Having dwindled to only a small gathering in a cavernous sanctuary built for so many more, the congregation decided to return to its roots. They sold their building and began, as they still do, to rent worship space out of the seminary from which it had been born. Then they decided to focus what energies and resources they did still have on the worship and praise of the God revealed to us in Jesus the Christ.

This might not be surprising for a Roman Catholic or Anglican congregation but was, you must understand, a radical move for a congregation of a denomination that prides itself on its work in social justice and who once easily had the ear of the national political leaders (so much so that it is called the United Church of Canada rather than, say, “in Canada”). In focusing on worship, University Hill congregation had gone back, not to the roots of its former recent glory, but to its roots in the psalms, in the praise and worship of God and God’s great saving acts. There are children there now and the promise of a future. With them, the congregation is seeking to learn who and whose it is through the stories of our shared faith. It is discovering its true life, living in the recognition of who Jesus is – the Holy One of God – and may yet proclaim the good news to the very seminary that hosts it, which now faces a state of financial exigency.

Jonah 3:1-5,10
Mark 1:14-20

Only one time in each three-year lectionary cycle do we get a chance to read the prophet Jonah (twice if you’re Episcopal or Catholic and following the lectionary). The entire story takes only 48 verses to tell, but by the time it’s done the reader has been taken on a whirlwind tour of the ancient world, explored the character of God, watched Israel wrestle with its calling to be a conduit of God’s grace for all of the nations rather than its terminus, and felt both sympathy and anger towards a self-centered prophet more concerned with his public standing as a prophet than with the destiny of an entire nation.

For Jews, the entirety of Jonah is read out publicly in the synagogue each year on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. The Day of Atonement is that day when Jews gather to pray for their own lives and those of their beloved friends and family, to make personal atonement for their own sins, and is a time for making commitments to holiness in the year to come. In this context, Jonah appears to be a very strange selection even with the theme of repentance present in both places. Perhaps it is that after wrestling privately with God about the condition of their own souls, the people must repent of their failure to live into their calling to be a blessing to all nations. Perhaps it is simply that after having repented, like Jonah spat back upon the shores of Assyria, the people are then prepared to accept the yoke of heaven once more and go in God’s mission to the world.

It’s not dissimilar to the call to repentance issued by Jesus in the gospel lesson for this Sunday. As we have seen from the beginning of Scripture, the central mark of faithfulness is responsiveness: Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the Ninevites are only a few of those who are blessed by their willingness to respond to the call of God. The problem that Jonah faced as did most of the faithful Jews that Jesus encountered was their unwillingness to believe that their enemies and those most despised were the ones at the other end of the fishing net God placed in their hands.

As ones who have responded to Christ’s invitation to “Follow me,” Jonah is a good place to begin when considering what and to whom our mission is this Epiphany season. Though Israel was and is God’s chosen people, though the church has been grafted into that chosenness by the grace of God, God’s love and concern seem to remain throughout the tale on those who are not yet insiders. God does not save us for our own sake alone but for the sake of others. Like Jonah, we in the church are often quite content to stay comfortable with our own electedness and miss both the urgency and the scope of God’s mission.

Jonah and the four fishermen of Mark 1 are reminders to us that the call of God on our own lives might mean some suffering, a surrender of pride, and rejection by those who would keep God’s grace in a box that can be managed. I vividly remember wrestling with one of my Presbyterian friends in seminary whose ordination vows would include the question: “Are you willing to be damned for the glory of God?” Theological differences between Christians aside, for all of us professing the Lordship of Christ, God does demand a willingness to sacrifice personal agendas and comfort, reputations, and an openness to be called into situations where the folks turning back to God will defy the hardness of our heart and expose the wideness of God’s mercy.

1 Samuel 3:1-20
John 1:43-51

I wonder what a rewrite of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad would look like if the setting shifted from punk rock and public relations to church and public witness. What if someone could draw the unforgettable characters in ecclesial matters that Egan does with musicians? (They might have to tone down the bohemian debauchery a little bit).

In Egan’s novel, the Bay Area punk band member confesses that her cohorts live privileged lives in houses of “Easter-egg colors,” but “the second Scotty lets the garage door down, we’re suddenly enraged.” In the rewrite, you’d have the honest soul who admits to the details of a bourgeois life and to becoming righteously indignant about the Sudan only when the Bible study starts or the blogging begins. Instead of the record producer with the gifted ear for “the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room,” but who must work feverishly to churn out products popular in a market he labels the “aesthetic holocaust” of digitalization, you’d have the worship leader who has to turn up the speed and volume to drown out the gnawing in his gizzard over doing what you have to do to keep them coming.

In his review of Egan’s novel, Ted Peters points out how the rhetoric of “authentic counterculture vs. sold-out mainstream,” of “starting pure and selling out vs. staying pure without counting the cost” shapes “the imagination of Egan’s characters, even as the ironies of their lives tie these stories into knots.” (The Christian Century, 10/18/2011, 51). Who’s a mere paid parrot, and who’s real? Who’s to say?

One of the motifs in this script is that the characters grow up knowing they’ll get old too and sell out – or that they’ll die young. That’s why I’m sure a rewrite would include a chapter on Eli the priest, “whose eyesight had begun to grow dim,” but who could probably see not only the sorry lives of his priest sons, but also the compromise and corruption of his own ministry. “Time’s a goon,” says one of Egan’s characters, and, nearing the end, Eli knows he’s been visited by the goon squad. Maybe he was gutting it out until his 401K clicked in, when he could get really prophetic. Maybe he just grew weary in well-doing, like the inner city policeman who once told Chris Hedges, “I came here to help these people; now I do it to put bread on the table.” (Losing Moses on the Freeway, 34)

Whatever the reason, “the word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” But then… but then – since God’s creation is not an enclosed echo chamber or a soundproof recording studio – the Voice came to Samuel by night. Samuel ran to Eli, who eventually perceived what was happening. The message the Voice announces is that God is about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle. God will raise up prophets, beginning with Samuel, who will speak God’s truth in such a piercing way that the Lord will be with them and none of [their] words fall to the ground.

The Voice… Sometimes through unexpected channels.

Dorothy Day heard it, even as she fended off Eugene O’Neill’s amorous advances, befriending him instead, to the point of putting him into his own bed following his drinking bouts at a New York bar called the Hell Hole. In his drunken state, O’Neill was fond of quoting Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven,” oblivious to how deeply those words were shaping the character and direction of Dorothy’s life (Ethics, James McClendon, 284).

Sometimes the Voice comes through sources so obvious they are easily ignored. Baptist prophet Carlyle Marney sent to his mentor W.O. Carver ten years worth of writing in his struggle to understand the Church. 84-year-old Carver read all 280 pages, marked them and sent them back “scalded with his own concerns of over 60 years,” and added, “Go on with your work, in a passionate evangelizing of this meaning of Church, but do not forget the bent knees and loyal spirits of those who can never understand.” (quoted in Marney, Mary Kratt, 90).

One day John the Baptizer, the greatest of the truth-telling prophets, watches Jesus walk by and exclaims, “Look, here is the Lamb of God.” Word made flesh. Voice and Vision. Two of John’s disciples follow Jesus, who turns and asks them, “What are you looking for?” They answer with a question. “Rabbi, where do you abide/stay/continue/remain?” (a word that reverberates with multiple meanings throughout John’s Gospel). Jesus invites them to “come and see.” As they come to abide in and with Jesus, they join the chorus of witnesses, even cynical Nathaniel, who talks at first like a descendant of Eli.

What does a witness look and sound like? Wittgenstein says, “Tell me ‘how’ you seek and I will tell you ‘what’ you are seeking.” Epiphany concerns the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what.’ This weekend we bless the memory and give thanks for the life and witness of Martin Luther King, Jr., a life that revealed the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of abiding in Christ.

In The Preacher King, Richard Lischer makes the crucial insight that while King never departed from practicing love as nonviolence, he did make a pivotal turn from “identification” (the persona many, if not most, will memorialize this weekend) to a largely unacknowledged prophetic rage, “mediated to him by generations of angry [black church gospel] prophets” (35). During the last three years of his life, King pronounced fierce judgments, sounding like a Samuel who was under heavy obligation to hide nothing of God’s message. The sermon that was scheduled but unpreached due to his assassination was entitled “Why America May Go to Hell.”

But judgment was not the only note in King’s witness. His inherited formation in the redemptive mission of the black church opened his eyes to deep truths. Lischer puts it powerfully:

In the beginning, King spoke of the necessity of accepting suffering as a tactic for shaming the opposition, but as he was drawn into the vortex of the Movement, the moral-influence theory reverted to something more real and terrible, something that Ghandi or the Social Gospelers did not divine, namely, the necessity of conforming one’s own suffering to the twisted agony of the crucified Christ (54-55).

Because King transposed the realities

“of love, suffering, deliverance and justice from the sacred shelter of the pulpit into the arena of public policy…[t]here was always something more, some message from another realm – a spiritual standard that informs and judges the world and ultimately promises to save it from corruption.” (3-4).

This “message from another realm” embodied in the witness of Dr. King may even be a word for Eli. I’m paying more and more attention to characters like him who grow old and apparently sell out. But I also notice something else. Eli still had enough priestly discernment and knowledge of the tradition to enable a young prophet-to-be to hear and respond to the Voice of God. Christ’s invitation to ‘come and see’ is perennially fresh – even for a goon priest.

First Sunday after the Epiphany

The Gospel of Mark opens with a brief telling of the story of John the Baptizer. What are we to make of this crazy fellow who lives out in the wilderness, wears clothes made of camel hair and eats locusts and honey? For the first century readers of this Gospel, this language with which Mark describes John conjured up images of Elijah. “Just as a gaunt bearded face and a stovepipe hat would immediately conjure up the image of Abe Lincoln for those socialized into modern American mythology” writes Ched Myers, “so would John’s garb have invoked the great prophet Elijah for Mark’s readers.” John is a prophet in the same vein as Elijah, humble, far removed from the halls of power in his day, and yet God used him to prepare the way for the Messiah through whom all creation would be reconciled.

Perhaps the most relevant aspect of John’s story is the place in which we find him, the wilderness.

Throughout the history of God’s people, the wilderness has been a place of repentance, formation and preparation – from the exodus of Israel from Egypt, to Elijah, to John the Baptizer, to the temptations of Jesus, to the Desert Fathers and Mothers and beyond. What are we to learn from this wilderness history? Where are our places of wilderness today? In our increasingly post-Christian world, I wonder if our church communities are one of the primary places of wilderness for God’s people today. First, our churches are largely off our culture’s highways of power; they no longer hold the cultural sway that they did in the Constantinianism of previous centuries. Furthermore, there is an austerity to our calling. Our calling might not be to camelskin, locusts and honey as John’s was, but we have been called – as Jesus’s disciples were called later in Mark’s Gospel (8:34) – to deny our selfish desires and follow in the cruciform way of Jesus. The wilderness also has been a place for abiding with God; just as the minimal distractions of the wilderness allowed the saints of ages past to focus on repenting and abiding with God, so likewise the gathering of our church communities is the space in which set aside the distractions of the day and learn to abide in the presence of God and of our brothers and sisters. It is in the wilderness that God forms us into people who can bear prophetic witness in their time, just as John did, and for which his life would eventually be taken.

At the start of another new year (on both the church and the cultural calendars), let us reflect on whether we take our calling to our local church communities seriously as a sort of “wilderness” calling. Do we prepare ourselves for the austerity of the self-denial to which we are called? Do we set aside our distractions and prepare to meet and abide with God in the midst of our gatherings? Do we discern together where God is leading us as a people and the relevance of our calling to the wider culture?

As we set aside the distractions of modern life and submit ourselves to God’s formation in this wilderness to which we have been called, I have no doubt that – like John – our faithful obedience will prepare the way for the presence of Christ in our own particular places.

“Caro cardo salutis”
(The body is the hinge of salvation)
– Tertullian

The tragically divided trinitarian churches find it difficult to definitively name this Sunday. The Orthodox, as well as some Anglican and Lutheran churches, celebrate the Feast of the Circumcision. So did Catholics until the 1960s, when the day transformed into the Octave of the Nativity and the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. Those using the Revised Common Lectionary celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus or the First Sunday after Christmas Day.

Perhaps the kindest way to understand this confusion is that the mystery of the Incarnation is far too vast for human comprehension. After celebrating, as best we can, its totality on Christmas Day, we who stand on this side of the grave enter the abyssal mystery further only through glimpses and reflections, hoping not to absolutize any partial vision, lest we fall into heresy, from the Greek, hairesis, “a choice.”

All these glimpses lead into a paradox that borders on the monstrous: that the Creator of the Universe enters into Creation as a one of us, decisively bridging the gap between spirit and matter we so desperately struggle to maintain. The fulcrum upon which this mystery pivots is the body, and the visions celebrated on this day all emphasize that saving carnality.

Even commemorating Mary as the Mother of God, which may seem problematic to many Protestants, is profoundly incarnational. “Mother of God” is, after all, an imprecise rendering of the Greek theotokos, “God-bearer,” a title dating at least to the mid-third century and very likely earlier. Against Nestorian claims that God and man could not have united in Jesus (a dispute that could have been resolved with more grace and less division), the Third Ecumenical Council, held in Ephesus in 431, declared that Mary truly bore in her womb the union of Christ’s human and divine natures in one person, Jesus.

All of this might seem little more than a quaint historical and linguistic exercise were twenty-first century Christians so hell-bent on ignoring its implications. Most of us partially apprehend, if not yet fully embrace, the idea that the Lord’s face truly shines upon us. We even dare to now call God “Abba,” by virtue of Christ’s self-emptying into human form. But our Sunday gatherings and daily lives too often suggest we find the ideas and words sufficient, that the Word made flesh is neatly reduced to a personal message to which the mind and, we hope, the spirit, assents.

Yes, the Incarnate Lord is calling us an intimate relationship with his person, but “Jesus and me” theologies all too readily collapse into an obsession with keeping all the right ideas in one’s head. In appropriately fleeing from the error of works righteousness, even an astonishing number of Catholics and Orthodox, who typically claim otherwise, stray into the error of “thoughts righteousness,” as if Jesus were a Gnostic savior who redeems the mind and tosses the body into the pit.

But here is where Mary, a first century Palestinian peasant woman, leads us back into the mystery of the Incarnation. (Perhaps an increased interest in Mary among some Protestants – see, for example, this – signals a recognition that, in her, lies a way back from this modern dead end.) Mary’s response to Gabriel’s preposterous announcement goes far beyond intellectual assent; her “let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38) welcomes the Creator of the Universe into her body, into the flesh of her womb.

In today’s gospel, we hear that after the wonders of Jesus’ birth, “Mary treasured all these words (rhemata = acts of utterance) and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19). The location is key. Luke could have said “in her mind” (rendered in Greek by that slippery term nous), her soul (psyche), or spirit (pneuma), but he insists she pondered everything “in her heart” (kardia), echoing the wording in Luke 2:51 in case we weren’t paying attention. Mary’s response, after concluding her body’s role as the first home of the Incarnate Lord, is to resist turning her experiences into disembodied memories. Rather, she holds them in the flesh of her heart, remaining actively faithful to the son she bore even after his death, resurrection, and ascension (Acts 1:14).

However else our varying traditions and theologies understand the person of Mary, her embodiment of Christ’s mystery shows us the clearest, most embodied response to Incarnation in the gospels. (Luke 8:19-21 and 11:27-28, while seeming to dismiss Mary, invite us into the saving mystery as doers of the Word, and those tempted to quote Philippians 2:5 should remember that what the NRSV renders as “Let this mind be in you…” contains the Greek word phroneite, from the root phren, “diaphragm,” which the Greeks understood as the bodily seat of understanding.) If we are to ever discern the body Christ gathers – something Paul says we must do or else eat and drink condemnation upon ourselves (1 Corinthians 11:29) – we will surely have to discern and welcome the Incarnate Christ in our own bodies.

Through Mary’s witness, we learn that Christ is visible not only in our well-ordered theologies and good reputations, but also in our flesh, even in those unwelcome extra pounds we gained in the past week. Even more surprisingly, Christ is visible in our wounds and bodily weakness, examples of which Christ himself displayed in his glorified, resurrected body to an uncertain Thomas (John 20:27).

But all these are mysteries even a lifetime of pondering can’t begin to fathom. All we may hope to do is enter what our minds can’t begin to grasp, pondering such enormities in our hearts, just like the Jewish peasant woman. Perhaps that’s why traditional icons of the theotokos often show her with one hand supporting the Christ child, while the other simultaneously draws Him closer to her heart and beckons the observer deeper into the mystery.

All these passages and images plead with us to free Christ from the prison of our minds, to welcome Him into our redeemed and beloved flesh as an inexhaustible mystery that, as grace would have it, transforms us into communities of witnesses before a watching world.

For those few who have followed me this far through a whirlwind tour of New Testament Greek, I have one last linguistic card to play. Many early Gnostics who, among other things, found the Incarnation a ghastly notion, made much of the Greek word nous, usually rendered in the New Testament as “mind.” Such Gnostics saw nous, unsullied by gross matter, as beckoning those privileged with sufficient knowledge to certainties beyond the fickle body.

Through great effort and centuries of prayer, the Christian East reclaimed the word from Gnostic captivity, rendering nous into the faculty by which humans perceive God and intuit God’s will. Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware calls nous, “the intellective aptitude of the heart.” However nous apprehends God’s presence, it does so in the flesh of the human person who apprehends, somewhere between head and heart.

So, to conclude this overlong reflection on Mary’s response to the mystery to the Incarnation, here’s an appropriately titled poem by Scott Cairns:

Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous

You could almost think the word synonymous
with mind, given our so far narrow
history, and the excessive esteem

in which we have been led to hold what is,
in this case, our rightly designated
nervous systems. Little wonder then

that some presume the mind itself both part
and parcel of the person, the very seat
of soul and, lately, crucible for a host

of chemical incentives—combinations
of which can pretty much answer for most
of our habits and for our affections.

When even the handy lexicon cannot
quite place the nous as anything beyond
one rustic ancestor of reason, you might

be satisfied to trouble the odd term
no further—and so would fail to find
your way to it, most fruitful faculty

untried. Dormant in its roaring cave,
the heart’s intellective aptitude grows dim,
unless you find a way to wake it. So,

let’s try something, even now. Even as
you tend these lines, attend for a moment
to your breath as you draw it in: regard

the breath’s cool descent, a stream from mouth
to throat to the furnace of the heart.
Observe that queer, cool confluence of breath

and blood, and do your thinking there.