Kyle Rader

May 30, 2010

Trinity Sunday

Texts: Prov. 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

We have this tradition at the Divinity School that for our last Wednesday lunch of the year, we have a barbeque outside, and we book a bluegrass band from downstate to provide music.  So we’re all sitting around on Wednesday eating and having a good time, and occasionally somebody got up and sang along with the band.  Towards the end, they started playing some old time religious songs.  A good half the people there weren’t religious, but they’re fun songs.  So they start playing “I’ll Fly Away.”  Now whether one is a Christian or not, whether or not one finds the theology of that hymn problematic, I consider it immoral and impious not to sing along with it.  When someone starts playing “I’ll Fly Away,” whether you’re in church or anywhere else, it is your categorical duty as a rational agent to sing and preferably to stomp your foot.  So I start singing, the woman next to me sang, and one of our cooks got up and sand with the band.  And then I looked around, and saw that we were the only ones.  It was a disgrace!  While the song is still going on, I catch a rather cynical and somewhat snide discussion from the end of my table.  One woman is complaining to another about how alienating the experience is, and how hymns like this are so individualist, and how they celebrate death and hate this world.  And that’s when I realized something about many of my colleagues, something I probably should have known long ago.  Namely, these people just have something wrong with them.  I should be more sensitive, of course.  Who knows what experiences this woman had with religion or churches or whatever that made this an alienating experience for her.

But she totally missed the point!  Now, to be fair, she was right.  American hymns of the generation typified by “I’ll Fly Away” do indeed tend to have an individual and other-worldly focus in their lyrics.  But first of all, what that means in her context might be quite different from the context in which other people sing them.  And second, in any hymn, the words are only the surface of what’s going on.  Singing the hymn, if it’s a good hymn anyway, is one’s way of either expressing or getting into an experience that is not expressible in words.  It’s how one gets caught up in a… you could call it a current or an energy, though neither is adequate.  It’s a certain reaction to one’s not entirely conscious awareness of the depth of things.  The words of the hymn are certainly part of it, as are the beliefs they express.  But one could find the words problematic, and yet fully sing the hymn.  Now this depth of the hymn may not present itself to our awareness every time we sing it.  Sometimes it’s more like rote repetition, sometimes just an enjoyable community or individual experience.  But it’s a practice that sets the conditions for something to appear, though the appearance can’t be forced.

I’d try to speak of this with greater clarity or at greater length, but I wasn’t lying when I said it can’t be expressed in words.  Across the street at school this would be very bad form, but it’s the honest truth that you either know what I’m talking about, or you don’t.  And if you don’t, and you want to, the only way is to sing hymns.  Just as the only way to find out what prayer is about is to pray.  Sing and pray with faith if you have it, and with openness if you don’t yet.  I figure I’m mostly preaching to the choir here, but it’s often the same if you want to understand so called secular activities.  I used to never understand running, at least if no one was chasing me.  I certainly understood the physical benefits of it, but since I’ve always been in good health and had a high metabolism, it was unfathomable to me that anyone would enjoy this.  If you’re not used to it, you start going, and then within a few minutes, your legs feel like led, your chest is burning, and your gasping for air, and then you’re sore for the next 48 hours.  And people claim to like this!  They claim that it gives them energy.  They say it’s an almost religious experience, and sometimes they drop the almost.

I confess, I thought they were lying until I started doing it a little over a month ago and by some miracle have managed to stick with it.  And it got more and more tolerable, with some ups and downs, and then last night for the first time, I think I had one of those runner’s highs.  And it was pretty sweet.  I never got dancing either, until I was in Germany two years ago, and I fell in with a group of Spaniards who persuaded me to go with them one night to—well, I wasn’t all that clear where we were going, but it turned out to be this club.  Now I was terror stricken.  This was not my scene, I didn’t know what to do.  But there was nothing to do except get into it, “just dance,” as Lady Gaga says.  Since you can’t actually hear anyone to talk to them, and standing there watching is boring, I decided I was going to fake it.  So I had a beer or two and started doing what everyone else was doing, and within a few songs, I had forgotten I was faking it.  And it actually was a religious experience, because it was like there was some sort of rupture in space-time or something, and the place was infused with this primal energy, and I recognized it, because it was very similar to what happens when you sing a good hymn, and I realized dancing in this club in Germany with a bunch of crazy Spaniards, that this was what Proverbs 8 was about.

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,

the first of his acts of long ago.

Ages ago I was set up, at the first,

before the beginning of the earth….

then I was beside him, like a master worker;

and I was daily his delight,

rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in the inhabited world

and delighting in the human race.”

So you see that there are places where this power, force, energy, dynamism, whatever you want to call it really, shows itself and we get caught up into it.  And I believe Proverbs here has given us the vital clue we need to know that this thing originates in the very life of God.  Wisdom is God’s delight, God’s rejoicing.  God’s being is ecstatic.  But note that it’s a creative rather than a destructive ecstasy.  It’s somehow both ecstatic and rational.  It measures.  It builds.

So the being of God is ecstatic delight.  And it’s ecstatic because it’s relational.  Traditional Christian exegesis identifies this figure of Wisdom with the Son and finds here in Proverbs a revelation of the Trinity.  I can’t quite get on board with that.  But we can certainly say that believing in the Trinity as revealed in the incarnation of Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit, we can look at Proverbs and find that it takes on a new resonance.  The delight of the life of God is the delight of the Father begetting the Son, and the Father and the Son sending the Holy Spirit.

Our confession of the Trinity is our fullest verbal expression of what we experience God to be.  It shows up unnamed in German dance clubs and lunchtime bluegrass concerts, unanticipated and usually unrecognized.  Here it has a name, and a face even, in Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God, beheld though the medium the Holy Spirit in radiant darkness.  I say the confession of the Trinity, because I don’t mean just believing in it and occasionally thinking about it, but standing up every week and saying “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, etc.”  Or perhaps I should use the words of our hymn and say the invocation of the Trinity.  But of course the words, or even the beliefs they express, are only the surface.  We live in an openness to the life of God that forms us into God’s likeness, into the likeness of the ecstatic delight that created us.

It does this by giving itself to us and drawing us into itself.  “Hope,” the apostle says, “does not disappoint us, for the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us.”  And that’s what this has all been driving at.  The love of God.  This rational ecstasy I’ve been talking about is love.  And maybe I should have just said so from the start.  The Holy Spirit is the love of the Father and the Son.  The Trinity is the love of God.  And this means that God is nothing other than the love of God.  No words or concepts can grasp it, our creeds and even our actions can only hint at it.  But what God is revealed to be, love, is all that God is, and what we are to become.

I said that the confession and invocation of the Trinity is the fullest naming of what God is.  And I think I’m right about that.  And like singing or running or dancing, it’s a practice that you have to actually do in order to understand.  But the only purpose of understanding it is to do it better.  And there is a little bit more to it than saying the creed. As part of that confession, if you want to understand the love of God, you have to actually love.  And you have to actually someone.  I can’t explain it any better than the greatest theologian of the church, St. Augustine of Hippo, so why bother trying.  He writes, and I ask you to pardon the gendered language:

“There you are, God is love.  Why should we go running round the heights of the heavens and the depths of the earth looking for him who is with us if only we should wish to be with him?  Let no one say ‘I don’t know what to love.’  Let him love his brother, and love that love; after all, he knows the love he loves with better than the brother he loves.  There now, he can already have God better known to him than his brother, certainly better known because more present, better known because more inward to him, better known because more sure.  Embrace love which is God, and embrace God with love.  This is the love which unites all the good angels and all the servants of God in a bond of holiness, conjoins us and them together, and subjoins us to itself.  And the more we are cured of the tumor of pride, the fuller we are of love.  And if a man is full of love, what is he full of but God?” (De trinitate VIII.11-12).

So that’s it then.  The Trinity is the love of God, and is the love with which we must love God by loving our neighbor.  There are plenty of details to be worked out, but this is a sermon, and not my dissertation.  And if you don’t get it yet, I’m not going to make you understand it.  I’m done.  Say the creed, sing the hymn, love your neighbor.  And then you’ll either get the Trinity, or you won’t.  Either way, you live in it, and will become it.  So glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.  Amen.

Caroline E. Perry

Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C, 2010

John 13:31-35

O God, Take our minds and think through them.

Take our lips and speak through them.

Take our hearts and set them on fire.

Have you ever had a moment when you realized the Bible wasn’t telling you what you wanted it to tell you? I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this Gospel reading. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Growing up, I loved this passage. It seemed to me that, in spite of all my doubts, Christianity got this part right in a way that most of the world didn’t.

And then, as I got older and wiser and angrier, I began to notice the hypocrisy with which this passage is so often deployed. What does it mean to proclaim the message of unconditional, self-sacrificial Christian love in a world where so many people live in conditions of terrible oppression, oppression sustained and even actively promoted by the very Christians who claim this Gospel of Love? “Do not rise up in violence. Love your enemy! Your reward awaits you in heaven. Be patient!” How empty the appeal to Christian love becomes when used in this way! Most of us cannot claim to have lived through the sorts of gross, daily assaults on our human dignity that a slave, for example, might experience. But smaller violations occur all the time, instances where the unjust actions of one human being lead to such intense and needless suffering for another that love, quite frankly, doesn’t seem like an appropriate response. Give me the choice between justice and love, and I’ll choose justice any day of the week. I believe in a Messiah who liberates the oppressed, feeds the hungry, and ultimately calls us into the co-creation of a more just world. Love is empty without justice, and how often the former is substituted for the latter when the demands of justice threaten the status quo.

This was the message I meant to preach today. I wanted to salvage the vision of Christian love, which is really quite beautiful if properly understood, showing that the New Testament God of Love does not replace the Old Testament God of Justice, but rather justice is the foundation of real and authentic love. Love means having the courage to speak out for what’s right.

But where is Jesus in all of this? Where is Jesus, concretely, in this Gospel reading? John tends to be very abstract, and we are in danger of reading him in the same way. But looking at this passage in context, it becomes clear that Jesus’s call to love is anything but abstract. John opens Chapter 13 of his gospel by saying, “Jesus, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the end.” Thus begins the story of the Last Supper, in which the reading we heard today is sandwiched immediately between two prophecies. The first is that of Jesus’s betrayal at the hands of Judas. The second is the denial of Peter, one of Jesus’s most beloved friends, at the time of Jesus’s greatest need. I can’t begin to imagine what it might have been like for Jesus to prophesy these things, even knowing that they were part of a larger plan. John tells us that Jesus was “troubled in spirit” at the moment he told his disciples, “Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.” The Jesus of John’s Gospel does not fear his own crucifixion. John paints the image of a Jesus always in control, marching boldly to Calvary, finding his glory in his death. John, at least, would have us believe that Jesus was not too troubled by the prospect of his own suffering on the cross. But betrayal and abandonment by the ones he loved the most . . . these caused him exquisite grief.

Have you ever been hurt so badly that there was nothing left inside you for love?  Sometimes it doesn’t matter what the offending party meant to do, or how or why it happened. The cold, hard fact is that forgiveness seems impossible and indeed unjustified, utterly incommensurable with the pain inflicted. At least, that was how it felt to me not long ago. I knew, maybe, that the person in question didn’t mean for it all to turn out exactly the way it turned out. And I knew that I still had obligations toward him because he is a human being. I couldn’t satisfy my thirst for pure revenge. There are ethical demands that must be met, and that whole “love your enemy” thing is important too. So, faced with these competing motivations, I, the philosopher, capable of self-righteously justifying almost anything, came up with a solution. I did not have to summon any manner of positive feelings toward this man. Inner hatred, even, was permissible. What was important was that I acted always in accordance with the concrete demands of justice. So long as I did not do anything objectively unethical, I was in the clear, and I could hold on to my righteous anger, too. It seemed sensible, and it worked for me, at least for a time.

But Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Jesus suffered more pain on account of those who were supposed to be his friends than I can possibly imagine. And he did not let them off the hook for their sins. Jesus prophesies the transgressions of Judas and Peter in very stark terms. The gravity of their sins is clear, and atonement must be made. But what does Jesus do then? He washes their feet. He calls them “little children,” τεκνια, the diminutive of a word for child that emphasizes natural birth. Like a mother, he calls them his own. And he dies for them. Jesus’s plea that his disciples should love one another conveys a certain urgency, and for good reason. He will be dead by late afternoon.

This is the kind of love we’re called to demonstrate. I don’t think it means we’re not supposed to get angry. There are times when anger is justified, and it can be transformative, both for the one who experiences it and for its recipient. It can force us to speak the truth in love, and to hear it. Certainly, it is better to give voice to anger than to stuff it up inside. But wrapped up in this experience is the possibility of genuine personal encounter. It means being able to see another person as a human being, as more than just his or her transgression, and to open oneself up to that reality. This is, I think, one of the most profound places of vulnerability in which we can find ourselves. Perhaps we will be challenged. Perhaps we will be transformed. Perhaps we will find ourselves facing the possibility of real repentance, μετανοια, which means most literally “to change one’s mind.” It conveys not just a shift in opinion, but rather a fundamental change in the way we view the world, ourselves, and on another.

I don’t know if you find this prospect as terrifying as I do. But I think Peter does. He doesn’t want Jesus to wash his feet, posing as a servant when he should be Lord. Similarly, in the reading from Acts, we find that he does not want to eat non-kosher meat, even at God’s direct command. In each instance, he first responds, “By no means.” Peter knows the rules. He knows how the world is ordered, and he’s comfortable with that. But the really wonderful thing about Peter is that even though he so doesn’t get it so much of time, ultimately he’s open to hearing the voice of God and proclaiming it. If he hadn’t been, the Gentiles might never have been welcomed into the Church. It is highly possible that they—excuse me, we—would never have had the opportunity to struggle with this text, to be confused and frightened and maybe even transformed by it.

I think I responded the way I did a year ago because I was scared. My response was to don protective armor that would shield me from further blows, from more pain that I just couldn’t handle. I was afraid to be vulnerable to someone who had hurt me for fear that it would happen again. And I was afraid that, if I let go of my anger, I would have nothing left. Appealing to the objective demands of justice was comforting because I understood clearly and logically what I had to do, and I could leave my emotions safely out of the equation. I don’t think I was unjustified in that. Please don’t think I’m telling you to be absolutely vulnerable all the time. Sometimes you must protect yourself as a matter of safety. But at the same time, I think it’s important, once you’ve gotten your footing in a place of relative security, to enter into that space of potentially transformative vulnerability, at least before God. For the past few weeks, I’ve been praying daily for this person who hurt me so badly. I’m still very angry. But I think that if I can at least begin to see him as a human being, as more than his transgression, that’s something. I am indeed finding myself open to transformation, to at least a hint of the repentance that leads to new life.

Has it happened to you?

“Little children, I am with you only a little longer . . . I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Amen.

Therefore let us proclaim the mystery of faith.

Christ has died.

Christ has risen.

Christ will come again.

On Good Friday we live in the first of these phrases. Christ has died. We approach the words with reverence and sorrow.

I want to talk about two things we do on Good Friday.

The first is this. We unpack the three simple syllables by telling the entire story. And not only do we tell the story, we cast ourselves in it. We say those uncomfortable words, Crucify him, crucify him, with the crowd.

And our sermons, our psalms and hymns, our tellings of the story, often cast us as one of the characters. We imagine ourselves as Pilate, as Peter, as Judas, as the crowd, and mourn all the ways we condemn, betray, and deny Jesus. All the ways we crucify him.

I think we do this for a few reasons:

One is that we want to experience what happened on that day, we want to insert ourselves into the story to experience it more fully, to make it more real We want to participate and understand its relevance for our own lives.

I think another reason we do this is the unmistakable humanity of the characters. They are timeless and understandable and unarguably human, and we almost inevitably see ourselves in them.

Which in many ways is what Good Friday is about. Being human. It is, after all, the day we remember that Christ died. In the story of the passion, we see the amazing divine in Christ – his unerring, unwavering forgiveness and faith. We understand that this is Godly. But Easter is when we celebrate Christ’s divinity. Good Friday is for recognizing and, I would argue, celebrating, with profound reverence, his humanity. Christ died.

The second thing we do on Good Friday is pretend. Each Good Friday we play this game of imagining the darkened world, all our wrongs and sins brought to bear in the death of our savior, hung at our hands on the cross. We imagine what would have happened if Christ hadn’t risen, we will ourselves to live in that unfathomable grief and despair of a world without resurrection.

But in doing this, we still define importance of crucifixion in relation to resurrection – defining Christ’s death by either the absence or presence of the potential for salvation. We seem to forget that entirely apart for the resurrection, it is important that Christ died, and that his very death should be celebrated. Rising from the dead proved at the last that Christ was divine. But it was in dying that he proved his humanity. It was in dying that the miracle begun by Christ’s birth was completed—the miracle of a God fully human and fully divine. Christ’s death on the cross is ultimately about his humanity.

Which sheds new light on the humanity portrayed in the passion story. Our humanity is proven in the story in addition to Christ’s and the humanity proven includes not only our fallible human nature but also our tremendous capacities. Because without hope of the resurrection, someone carried Jesus’ cross. Without hope of the resurrection, one criminal beside Jesus still begged, remember me when you come into your kingdom. In his last moments, when he had no reason for hope, he clung to belief and begged for redemption.

So let us remember to cast ourselves as these characters too. We can recognize ourselves in them. In addition to moments of betrayal and weakness, we are capable of moments of selfless strength, commanding faith, and incredible hope.

Christ was human at the last. Of course his death was necessary for the resurrection. But I think we can find redemption in the crucifixion for the sake of the death itself. Christ’s death was, after all, important for reasons other than the fact that we killed him. On Good Friday, let us remember the importance of Christ’s mortality. Let us remember that Christ’s humanity was equally as important as his divinity. That his ministry was carried out by a mortal, human being. His work on earth was not only about demonstrating the divine love for us, but also the capacity of the mortal, both in spite and because of our human nature. And we join him in this in as many ways as there are human beings.

The breadth of characters in the passion story bears this out. We are capable of all things, hope in spite of all things. While fallible humans nailed Christ, condemned him, denied his very name, fallible humans also helped him on his final journey, mourned bitterly at his passing, and found enduring strength and faith in his message beyond the point of all reasonable hope.

In crowds, or given power, or subjected to fear, we are prone to error, the gospel story tells us. We enact Pilate, Peter, and the crowds to remind us of this capacity for evil and sin we all share. We mourn Christ’s passing. But as individuals faced with the suffering of another or with a final chance at hope, a final opportunity to believe and ask for mercy, we are capable of good.

We are, in our final, solitary hours, human. And so is our beloved Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Let us give unending thanks, on this Good Friday, memorial of Christ’s death, for that assurance.

In the name of the Father, son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Barnaby Riedel

Just before dinner, after she served him his nightly cocktail, the writer Joan Didion’s husband of forty years suffered a massive heart failure and died. Having returned from the hospital just two hours later she penned the lines that would open her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking:

Life changes fast

Life changes in the instant

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends

The question of self-pity

Now a play at the Court Theatre, Didion’s book chronicles the difficulties of letting go. And a metaphor that runs through it is that of learning to exit a coastal cave where she and her husband used to swim. The only way out, they found, was to let go of the rock wall and trust the retreating swell to carry them through to the other side, ocean side. Always scared she’d get the timing wrong, her husband would encourage her to feel the swell change. “You have to go with the change,” he would say.

Didion’s book is a memoir of letting go, not so much of her husband, as one might expect, but of what she calls the “magical thinking” – the thinking that acts as if time can be reversed, accidents avoided, pasts revised and made right; the thinking that refused to dispose of her husband’s shoes months later, that raked over the details of his death, looking for a clue that might be out of place, and with it, a chance to bring her husband home alive. Magical thinking did not deny her husband’s death, it denied her own, for with his passing, parts of her also had died, were dying. “I could not count the times during the average day,” she writes, “when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.” Her dying was not, obviously, a physical death, but one far more ambiguous and inconclusive; a spiritual death, or perhaps, a soul death, a dying of those myriad associations and habits that once constituted her life and sense of self.

The worst kind of death is the one we live through; that leaves us with all the attachments of our former life intact but absent the cathected object – a loved one, an imagined future, a picture of ourselves – scholar, boyfriend, wife, athlete, healthy. Life seems to be far more the artist with these forms of death, which can never be reduced to the singularity of bodily arrest – heart failure. Instead, we die such deaths countless times and in ways endlessly diverse in magnitude and form –from the embarrassments of an artless comment, to events that devastate our life-world. Mothers and fathers grow old, fall ill, die. Husbands walk out, wives walk out, divorces happen. Friends fail us when we most need them. We fail them. Accidents and afflictions of spell-bounding variety happen. It is a feature of life that it changes in the instant and magically we don’t expect it. Loved one’s die, love dies, jobs disappear, even God’s die, as our tradition well knows. And parts of our selves die beside them. “It will happen to you,” Didion says. “You too will go through this.”

Life changes fast

Life changes in the instant

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends

The question of self-pity

On Ash Wednesday we meditate on death and the sins of self-importance that spring from our denial of it. We spread ashes on our faces. We ask for forgiveness. We look forward to Lent and the wisdom of the desert. But make no mistake about it. This ritual takes our physical death not as the only real thing, but also as metaphor and koan of the countless metaphysical deaths, soul deaths, life will (already has) confronted us with. “You too will go through this,” Didion reminds us.

Today we struggle to make real our bodily death, life’s fragile impermanence, symbolized by the ashes, in order to kindle and set aflame those parts of ourselves that need to die – the parts that prevent us from giving ourselves over to God’s wild and uncanny immanence. Today we struggle to let go of the cave and trust the swell. For the swell is God, both as ebb and flow, the growing and the dying. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” it says in the book of Hebrews – fearful, yes, but transformative and life giving. The swell brings us into the cave, but it can also bring us out, out of the darkness of our Janus-faced satisfaction and self-pity, beyond the magical thinking which says rather self-confidently, “Everything is going to be okay,” as if it were up to us to make it so, as if we had that power. Soul deaths are also the provocations of God, asking that we trust our lives to Him, that we let go, that we go with the change. And the fear that we feel as we fall into His hands is just this – the birth pangs of new life shaping us to be less ourselves and more a part of everything else, ocean-side. Amen.

Taking a closer look at the context of the passage, however, might help with this. We’re told at the very beginning that Peter has just acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah; in fact, Peter’s confession serves as a reference point for dating the events of this passage. In between Peter’s confession and the events on the mountain, however, something else important has happened: Jesus has predicted his own death, a point to which I’ll return later. For now, though, the important thing is that the disciples have already recognized that Jesus is the son of God, at least in theory. I still think that seeing him transformed in divine glory would have been a bit frightening, but the text seems to suggest that they’re able to take that step. It’s hearing the voice of God confirming Jesus’ divine identity that’s finally too much for them: perhaps the cloud that envelops them at this point is, like Moses’ veil, God’s way of shielding them from a more direct experience than they’re ready for.

The epistle reading further elaborates the theme of transformation, this time bringing all of us into the picture: Paul says that we, too,  are being transformed into the image of Christ. When I think of transformation, one of the first things that comes to mind is fairy tales: no, not the Disney versions, but the older, more complex, often terrifying ones. Many of these stories involve dramatic transformations. One of the ones that I find most fascinating in this respect is “Donkeyskin,” a story that’s usually not included in the canon of fairy tales that people read today because of its disturbing content. It starts with a king whose queen is a legendary beauty. On her deathbed, the queen makes the king promise that he won’t marry anyone less beautiful than her, hoping to prevent him from remarrying. The king, however, comes to the conclusion that the only person who fits that description is his daughter. The princess manages to stall for a while, but eventually she has to escape to another kingdom, using the skin of a donkey as a disguise. The rest of the story reads more or less like “Cinderella”: the princess gets a job as a kitchen maid, but manages to interest the local prince by going to several balls dressed as a princess. Eventually, he figures out who she really is and they get married. There are several different versions of this story, and several variations on how the princess’ secret is revealed. For me, whether or not a particular version resolves the princess’ fate in a satisfying way depends on how the prince finds out who she is. In some versions, she has to tell him, which seems totally inadequate to me, because if he’s unable to identify the woman he has allegedly fallen in love with even in the most grotesque disguise, then what hope is there for a happy ending? In my favorite version, the climactic moment of the story arrives when the prince puts all of the clues together and literally pulls off the cloak of animal skins with which the princess has disguised herself (she’s wearing a ballgown underneath, of course). Though there’s still plenty in the story that’s problematic from a feminist point of view, I still think that there’s something extraordinarily powerful in that moment of recognition and unveiling, the moment at which the main character is able to become her true self because someone else has seen through her disguise. I think it’s important, too, that the transformation that has occurred in the course of the story is a mutual transformation: the prince has to learn to pay attention to the world in a new way so that he is able to recognize the princess. This theme of mutual transformation emerges even more clearly in “Beauty and the Beast.” Yes, the Beast’s transformation happens first, because his true self is inadequate and needs to become something else; but the focus of the story, in my opinion, is not on his transformation but on Beauty’s. She has to change in order to see the person that he’s become. In some of the early versions of the story, in fact, the Beast doesn’t change back to a man at the end, because his changing back isn’t the point: the point is that she has learned to love him the way he is.

Given, then, that transformation seems to be a crucial feature of all three texts for today, how are we to understand each instance of transformation, Moses, Christ, and all of us? In the case of Moses, he muffles his transformation with a veil, choosing not to alienate a community that isn’t ready to see the glory of God manifested in him. Moses, however, takes the veil off when he’s actually speaking to God, remaining true to his transformed self while also displaying sensitivity to the reactions of those around him. Christ’s transformation and the disciples’ reaction to it presents more of a puzzle. Though the Transfiguration obviously reveals Christ’s divinity in an overwhelming way, it seems to me that perhaps what he’s trying to teach his disciples through this experience is not how to recognize his divinity—they seem almost too comfortable with that—but how to recognize his humanity. He has, after all, just predicted his death for the first time, and in that context Peter’s suggestion that they remain on the mountaintop reveals a striking failure to recognize the fullness of Jesus’ identity. To return to the example of the fairy tale, the disciples had to learn both to see the princess in the kitchen maid and to see the kitchen maid in the princess. They had to recognize and accept that the glorious Son of God that they were just beginning to know was also the suffering servant who was going to die, whether they wanted him to or not. I don’t think it’s s coincidence that the story ends not with the voice of God thundering from on high, but with Jesus standing alone, or that a few verses later Jesus predicts his death yet again.

According to Paul, we, too, are being transformed into the image of Christ. What does that mean, though? I think that the idea of mutual recognition is important here. We cannot recognize Christ in ourselves without recognizing Christ in other people, and we cannot recognize Christ in other people without recognizing Christ in ourselves. Like Moses, sometimes being who were are in Christ means exercising sensitivity towards the community in which we find ourselves, a community which might not be ready to see us in a certain way. Sometimes, like the princess in “Donkeyskin,” we need a disguise in order to protect ourselves. It’s equally important, I think, to remember the disciples’ lesson, to remember that Christ is both divine and human, God not only in glory but also in pain. Seeing Christ in others, then, may mean experiencing divine love and compassion, but it may equally mean seeing Christ’s woundedness. More often than not, you might have to learn how to see both at the same time. I can’t say that I have any clear answers about how this works in terms of actual relationships: being true to one’s identity in Christ while remaining sensitive to one’s community is always a delicate balancing act. In preparing for this sermon, I’ve experienced that complexity in a personal way. I grew up in a denomination where women aren’t allowed to preach, and because of that I’ve had a difficult time seeing myself as someone who could be here, today, doing this, not because I agree that I shouldn’t be allowed, but because I’m simply not used to seeing that as a possibility. I needed this community to recognize that possibility before I could recognize it myself. It’s important to remember that Christ manifests himself not only, and perhaps not even primarily, in each of us as individuals, but in all of us united as his body. As communities, we probably manifest Christ’s brokenness at least as often as we manifest his love, but in learning to see him in each other we are each continually transformed into someone new, someone we could not have imagined on our own. Amen.

One of the most important things that religion offers us is the space and the time to remember.   There is a reason it is so hard to change a ritual here, a hymn tune there.  Religions are inherently conservative in the best sense of that word—even the most “liberal,” or “progressive” of them.  They conserve the past.  People in every age need to be reminded that they are not the first Christians who ever lived.  We are not the first to pose the hard questions, to try to make sense of theology in our own context, or to find creative, meaningful, and authentic ways to apply the Gospel to situations that we hadn’t accounted for.  We are not the first and we won’t be the last.  And this is very good news.

Today, the Feast of All Saints takes remembering a step further.  We remember, the few of us gathered  in the quiet of this basement chapel, that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses to the presence and power of God revealed in Jesus Christ, and in the lives of Christ’s followers.

Though the date and the emphasis has shifted over time, a feast day to celebrate all those whose lives and especially whose deaths manifested the love of Christ can be traced at least as far back as the Fourth Century.  The Feast of All Souls came into being about the 10^th century as the way of remembering the rest of the faithful departed, the junior varsity Christians who still needed tidying up a bit in the fires of purgatory before they could see God face to face.  But, let’s not say much more about that here since, after all, one person’s cherished dogma is another person’s “fond thing, vainly invented and plainly repugnant to Scripture.”  Rather let me suggest that we remember, on this day, not only the “official” saints, but all those whose lives manifest to us, personally, the love of God revealed in Christ—especially those whose deeds may be thankless and whose names will never appear on the calendar of Saints.  Then tomorrow, we remember those whom we have lost, for a little while, to the greater embrace of God.

Today we remember.

Especially since this is a university, I remember a professor.  His name is Herbert Strainge Long.  Classical languages and literature had begun to fall out of favor in universities in the 70s and 80s, so Mr. Long usually found himself with less than a handful of students after their first year of Greek.  But I remember how this man, no matter how large or small the class, taught his subject with unqualified enthusiasm.

On one particularly frigid winter day, when the North wind crossed lake Erie, gathering the moisture and then blowing the snow outside the window of Mather Hall, I sat alone in a classroom except for Mr. Long, an anxious nineteen year old lumbering through the elegant Greek of Luke’s Gospel.  The only sound in the room, besides my halting voice, and the hissing and banging of the radiators, was an occasional “um hmm” from the professor.

I also remember the sneeze.

Now there was noting extraordinary about a sneeze on a winter day in Ohio–except that it echoed in the nearly empty classroom and I was unprepared for what happened next.  I excusing myself.  Mr. Long put down the magnifying glass that he used to read the fine print of his New Testament and turned to me with a quizzical look and said,  “Mr. Charles, are you keeping warm enough for the winter?”

Now you have to understand that to a nineteen year old black kid from East Cleveland who grew up with too much drama and too little money, the very idea that someone old enough to be my granddaddy, a white man, a full professor, with more degrees than I had siblings would take the time to care about my well-being was beyond my imagination.

He was too important to care.  So when he did care, a flood of stories gushed out, of Miss Fannie Moore’s attic where I lived in the hope of finding a little peace of mind; of the gas space heater that only warmed the place to 55 degrees; of the trips to the stove to soothe hands that stiffened whenever papers were typed on the cold steel of that gunmetal gray Royal Standard typewriter that I had purchased for $33 dollars earned from my high school paper route; of working late nights earning barely enough money to buy books and eat in the same week; of the…

“No, Professor Long, I am not keeping warm enough for the winter.  Thank you for asking.”

Mr. Long nodded, scribbled something on his note pad, retrieved his magnifying glass again and replied, “Verse number four, Mr. Charles.  Please continue.”

I soon learned that the although the aging professor strained to read the apparatus in his Greek New testament he had a keen eye for the people around him. I also learned that he was the beloved treasurer of the tiny Presbyterian church where he was a dedicated member because he had a keen eye for finding long forgotten funds in the darndest places.  Mr. Long found the scholarship, long forgotten, that paid for my final two years of college.  I bought a new heater and finished my degree.

When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, the most important words he said were to his friends—and to us—unbind him and let him go.   I am resurrection, I am life, yes, and you have a share in the work.  Set the dead free, make my love concrete, be the Good News.

This homily is unfinished.  It is unfinished because I have decided to take remembering a step further and contact Mr. Long who is, by now, 90 years old and living in Ohio if my Googling hasn’t failed me.  It doesn’t matter whether he remembers me.  I remember him, his kindness, the matter of fact way that he made his faith real to me.  If I am too late in my quest and I find that he has already passed to that distant shore where he rejoices in an even greater light, so be it.  I remember him.  And God will remember long after I am a memory.

This homily is incomplete because there are still more saints to be made, more deeds to be done that witness to the presence, the power, the love of God revealed to us in Christ Jesus.

This homily is unfinished because I need you to finish it.  Share your saints with one another.  Tell the stories of those who called you out of the darkness, untied you, and loved you back to life again.  Offer up a name.  If there is silence, then fill in the blanks with your memories so that when we stand and proclaim our faith, then gather to keep this Feast of all the Saints we will remember who we are, whose we are, and who Christ is inviting us all to become…

November 8, 2009: Ruth

Good morning. My name is Jack Clark. I’m the other seminarian here this year. And I’m at All Saints because I went to Notre Dame. Some people think Notre Dame- Touchdown Jesus. But we’ve got another icon, too. The golden statue of Mary on the dome. Notre Dame is Latin for “our mother”- Mary. And its where I reconnected with my faith. At Notre Dame, belief inspired action- like volunteering, or social justice work. Faith was dynamic and made a difference. That faith made sense to me.

But Notre Dame wasn’t all pigskin and incense.  For three years, I performed in the campus production of The Vagina Monologues. It wasn’t just a play. It was the only women’s organization on campus. And became a community. It was a space to talk about things like body image, sexuality, discrimination and sexual assault. Notre Dame was a pretty patriarchal place. There are plenty of examples. Low rates of tenured women, priests- effectively men- in important positions, and rules applied differently in men’s and women’s dorms.

Through the play, we were trying to fight sexism, many of us acting as women of faith.

How should I say this…our efforts weren’t universally appreciated.  The opposition censored the word “vagina” from front page rants in the paper.  They prayed outside of performances. The bishop condemned the play. And one priest told the women at Sunday mass that everyone involved with the play was going to hell. The play, they said, was about voyeurism, promiscuity, and abortion. We were mad. We were furious. But mostly, we were hurt. We thought their concerns were totally unfounded. But, we tried to address them anyway. We wrote our own monologues. And we called it “Her Loyal Daughters,” referencing Mary, and talking explicitly as women of faith.

Then, the University President sided with them. The Vagina Monologues, he said, threatened the Catholic Character of the University. What about the skits about rape and virginity conquest performed by men? Oh, those, he said, they were just entertainment. But the Vagina Monologues were dangerous. So, he relegated our performances to a classroom. Worse, he made us rename our play. If we spoke about sexuality in a morally neutral way, it would seem intentionally offensive and blasphemous to Catholic who revere Mary.

Mary wasn’t up for our interpretation. We couldn’t try to understand her through our own experiences. The cleaned up, tamed official interpretation was preserved in that golden statue. Mary was the mild, obedient, virginal ideal for all of us women to imitate. But we didn’t quite buy that interpretation.

This feminine ideal isn’t unique. Not to Notre Dame, or to academia, not to the Catholic Church or any other denomination. It’s in this made up Mary, in women’s roles in Hollywood, and in commercial for laundry detergent. It’s everywhere.

That is why it is good to be at All Saints, and good to stand in this pulpit.

This is also why I love our first reading, why I love Ruth. She, and Mary, are among the biblical women who fight this ideal- if we let them. We know about them because they were bold. And because God acted in and through their boldness.

At the beginning of the gospel of Matthew, there’s a genealogy- a long list of begets. It traces Joseph’s ancestors. And it mentions four women. There’s an adulteress. A prostitute. A woman who dresses like a prostitute and sleeps with her father-in-law. Ruth. And of course, Mary. It’s crazy that women get a mention at all. And then these women with strange sexual histories. Yet, also, the foremothers of Christ.

Let’s talk about Ruth. Ruth is a Moabite. There’s a famine in Bethlehem, so Naomi’s family flees to Moab. Ruth marries Naomi’s son. Then, he dies. And Naomi’s husband, too. Both are widows. Naomi goes back to Bethlehem. She tells her daughter-in-laws, “Go back to your families. I’m a widow. I’m not gonna bear any more sons for you.” But Ruth refuses. She says,

Do not press me to leave you, or to turn back from following you.

Where you go, I will go;

Where you lodge, I will lodge;

your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

Ruth has every reason to turn back. Her whole life has been in Moab. She doesn’t know anyone in Bethlehem. Historically, the Jews are not big fans of the Moabites. She’s got no money, no property, can’t earn a living. And Naomi’s in the same position. But Ruth sees that Naomi is grieving, alone, and poor. Ruth has compassion. And with loving boldness, she sticks with her.

Now, when they get back to Bethlehem. Ruth toils to pick the grain left behind by the reapers, so that she and Naomi can eat. She gleans in the field of Boaz, Naomi’s relative. And Naomi thinks, maybe Boaz could marry Ruth. He could be her “redeemer,” and save her from destitution.

And that’s where the reading picks up. It’s also where we hear about Ruth’s ambiguous sexual history. Ruth sneaks in to the threshing room, and when Boaz lies down, uncovers his “feet” (an ancient euphemism). He wakes up, surprised to find her there. And she asks him to marry her and to buy the family land. Again, Ruth is bold. Her actions are bold. And Boaz judges them to be loyal and righteous. By choosing him, she chooses security for Naomi too.

Boaz is called the “redeemer” in this story. But Ruth is the true source of redemption. And Naomi is the chief recipient. At the beginning, Naomi loses everything. But through Ruth, there’s a kind of restoration. Naomi is childless. But she grows to call Ruth daughter. She’s worth, the women say, seven sons. Naomi is a widow. But Ruth provides the security of a husband through Boaz. And Naomi is without progeny. But Ruth bears Obed, and the women say, “a son has been born to Naomi.”

Ruth redeems Naomi, but she also redeems us. Ruth mothers Obed, who fathers Jesse, who fathers David. And Matthew traces this all the way to Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. The unusual fact that Matthew includes Ruth means something. He’s connecting her to Mary. Both these women resist the mild, obedient feminine ideal. Their stories are scandalous:  Mary, with her extramarital pregnancy, and Ruth, making the moves on Boaz. Matthew connects them to reassure us that the scandal of Mary has precedent in this other bold women generations before. He shows us that God works through the loving boldness of women. This was true many generations before Mary, and is true many generations later.

Amen.

Michael J. Mols
Protean Denial and Consideration in Bibfeldt Studies
Franz Bibfeldt Symposium
April 1, 2009

Colleagues, esteemed and otherwise,
I come before you to present my exhaustive knowledge of our most eminent protean theologian, Franz Bibfeldt.  Yet it has been said by many but heard by few that any attempt to exhaust a subject will inevitably exhaust an audience.  Today, I would like to exhaust nothing as it goes against the delicacy of my constitution and it strikes me that this tactic succinctly describes the very essence of Bibfeldt’s oeuvre.  Indeed, nothing is enough to satisfy my curiosity on this very topic, for it contains more nothing than I have ever encountered before.  As I began my research on Bibfeldt’s life and work, I was pleased to discover vast areas of nothing waiting to remain undiscovered.  I am loath to leave a place without improving it, and I shall endeavor to leave this topic even more vacuous than when I found it.  So I shall draw from as much research as I was able to do in as little time as possible since as a Divinity School student I have a customarily large number of incompletes to avoid completing and a great deal of self-loathing to accomplish.  Suffice to say that I know very little about our supposedly esteemed theologian, which makes me eminently qualified to talk about him.
For the purposes of this lecture, in lieu of actual research I will utilize a new method I am developing from my lackadaisical observation of how most in the academy advance from the early stages of overeager condescension to the apex of apathetic avuncularism.  This method, greatly enhanced by my appropriately brief foray into Bibfeldt studies, is something I call the “Lengthy Consideration” method, or the “Long-Con” for short.  Specifically, the practitioner of the “long-con” ingrates his or herself into the academic community by entrenching their research in the most obscure area possible in order, through the efforts of “lengthy consideration,” to comment on areas or thinkers that seem to have no relevance to the original area.  In order to be most effective, the “long-conner” must avoid any but the most cursory of research into the topic, and must avoid primary source contact at all cost lest they drift from the methodology of employing the “con” altogether.  A master practitioner of this technique may even succeed in disjointing her or himself from their original area of entrenchment altogether, thereby becoming a “jack of no trade and a master of all.”  At that point the “long-conner,” by virtue of their powers of consideration above their command of texts and facts, will no doubt be granted a New York Times Op-Ed position.

Aside from its propaedeutic nature, I believe that tediously outlining my methodology eats up a good deal of the time I am contractually obliged to fill in order to receive my honorarium.  But I believe that Bibfeldt would approve—with as little enthusiasm as would be required—of the approach of speaking at such length on something so short on substance.  Therefore, in the remaining space of this essay, I shall use my vast lack of knowledge and the full powers of the “long-con” to fabricate a heretofore unrealized aspect of Bibfeldt thought: his apophatic roots.  By examining these roots closely enough, we shall see that the peroxide of cataphatic theology isn’t fooling anyone, and to perform such a blatant and ineffective cover at his age might result in permanent scalp damage.

The “long-con” method requires the scholar to begin where facts are least available but opinions proliferate nonetheless, so I turn to what is lacking in his curriculum vitae, a document that is entirely nonexistent.  According to the dust jacket of no less than one book, Bibfeldt began his studies in Switzerland at the University of Bern.  But according to a tertiary source I obtained through Wikipedia, Bibfeldt completed his studies at the University of Worms in the late 20’s, receiving his Doctorate of Digressive Theology or D.D.T. in the midst of an otherwise silent spring.  Yet we must ask, if Bibfeldt intellectually sprang from the loins of Bern and overcame the obstacles of Worms with his D.D.T., why did he not complete the traditional European circuit by seeking out at the University of Paris a Doctorate of Sacred Theology or S.T.D.?

As everybody knows, a great constructive thinker must of necessity begin as a poor student of history, so Bibfeldt must originally have been interested in ecclesiastical history, but gave it up early in his career.  This can be explained by a poor reception into the field of medieval studies, a common occurrence reported by everyone who has ever attempted to enter that most venerable field.  Bibfeldt wrote an essay in which he claimed that the Investiture Controversy between Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII resulted in a massive unregulated credit default swap that undermined the usury market to the point that a hodium of flax couldn’t fetch 20 Byzantine hyperpyrons.  Although his claim was controversial at the time, we now know that this might have been the first and possibly last example of Bibfeldt’s Ouroborian-historicist method whereby the theorists remains behind the current ideological fad in order to stay ahead of the scholarly pack.  With this new approach, he was well equipped to be a man not only of his time, but also of no time, a reputation he maintained for the rest of his career.  But this ouroborian method also lead to his infamous reputation for chasing tail; which returns us to the subject of his S.T.D.-free theological training.

Bibfeldt was, then, a man vested with an appropriate semblance of historical understanding and nothing more, so much in love with the progress of time that he sought its complete lack for his dissertation on the paradox of the year zero.  Dionysius Exiguus, the monk who developed the BC/AD system without so much as consulting Google calendar, fascinated him.  It is said that Bibfeldt admired this man so much that he sought to emulate him in name and obscurity, calling himself Exiguus, which lead to his reputation of being egregious due to a transcription error in its Anglicization. Once completed, this work was not well received by the academic community and his project was rudely rejected by a number of leading vanity presses.  However, rumor has it that a printer of questionable repute disseminated the tome with moderate success under its alternative title, Unleashing the Mysteries of the Big O.

Around the same time Bibfeldt developed what can only be describe as a stunning malady: a life outside of his studies.  Several Bibfeldt scholars, whom I refuse out of principle to read, lest they mar my analysis with insight, chronicle a debilitating injury received as a result of his diversions.  Bibfeldt suffered an unmentionable disgrace in a duel at swords.  It would later be the occasion for a surprisingly well-received essay on Jewish-Christian relations, “Empathy With the Circumcised.”  But because of this missed parry, Bibfeldt lost the vigor and skill of his thrust.  This unfortunate incident also explains why the Bibfeldt chair has never been well endowed.  It is also rumored that the dueling incident is why master’s graduation ceremonies at this fair school proceed without hoods.
Now, the mystery of the missing S.T.D. from Paris can be solved in conjunction with the revelation of his apophatic leanings.  In Bibfeldt’s obsession with and subsequent rejection from and of church history, and bearing in mind the gelding he received one is reminded almost immediately of that city’s esteemed and ancient eponymous university by way of its famous and troubled alumni, Peter Abelard.  For it was Abelard himself who began the tradition of traveling to Paris, eagerly pursuing any opportunity to obtain an S.T.D., although such aspirations were, for him, cut short.  Abelard also faced rejection from medievalists, although at that time they were confusingly not called such.  And Abelard also researched his own Dionysius who, thanks to this study, we now know by his first name, Pseudo.

With these parallels and a lack of recourse to facts, I claim that Bibfeldt posited himself as the Pseudo Dionysius of his own time.  By evacuating his identity and adopting the moniker of his influential teacher (a practice emulated by almost all doctoral students) and living in the paradox of the year zero, which is the negation of time, and refusing to complete his studies in Paris, Bibfeldt clearly demonstrates his masterful command of the apophatic approach by not commanding it at all.  It is perfectly natural for him to have forgone the S.T.D. and remained content with Worms, for by not pursuing this mark of distinction it paradoxically took hold of him anyway, for the core of apophasis is not denial, but excess.  And in the excess of my own ignorance, utilizing the lengthy consideration method, I hope to remain vehemently opinionated about Franz Bibfeldt for many years to come.  Thank you.

Someone told me one time, “I’m glad you found Brent House.”  And I  told him, “No, I’m glad Stacy found me.”  I would not have known about Brent House were it not for Stacy’s tabling at the Graduate Student Information fair.  Unlike most students who have figured out their preference in religion by the time they reach grad school, I had not figured it out yet.  Stacy seemed nice, and I had already been told that I would enjoy the Episcopal church by a friend of mine.  I had been  going to another church on campus, and there was hardly a community there.  When I went to Sunday Eucharist at Brent House for the first time, I remember staying after the service for dinner, and I talked with Nina and Entzu, who were very welcoming and with whom I had good conversations about this-that-and-the-other.  I decided to try it out for a while.  The week after, I met Bishop Persell.  Then a couple of weeks later, I met (or at least saw) the Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, speak at All-Saints, Ravenswood.  I made a lot of friends, and it made Brent House seem more like home than like church.  I was instant messaging a friend online from Wednesday afternoon tea (because like all cool churches, Brent House has wireless internet).  He asked me where I was, and he was so confused as to why I was “at church” in the middle of the day on a Wednesday.   Brent House is a cool place to be, and there’s always food no matter  what’s going on — something that will get any grad school student out of the office and to church!

–Beverly Lau, Graduate Student, Medical Physics

Baptism.  After months of catechism mentoring, agonizing questions, Lenten discipline and fervent prayer, it is Easter vigil and I am standing at the altar of St. James’ Cathedral in downtown Chicago saying my baptismal vows.  “Wash me clean, dear Lord,” I whisper.  “Take me, broken as I am.”  And suddenly I am walking to the back of the cathedral, tears I didn’t know I’d been crying streaming down my face.  Stacy grasps my hand and somehow we make it to the baptismal font.  I am baptized and the lights in the cathedral go on to peals of Hallelujahs and Amens and I take communion, Christ’s holy body and blood, to the cheers of my Brent House sisters and brothers.  God’s grace reaches far beyond the night into the blessing that Brent House and Stacy’s loving guidance have been in my life these past months, the excitement and love that the congregation showed me in this growth of knowledge and love of God.  Forty people greet me at the end of the service; my parents and brother who are staying at Brent House, Ian, the peer minister who has guided me through my preparation, the other members of the Brent House community and friends from my dorm and track team for whom Stacy and the interns have kindly provided transportation.  We celebrate the blessing of new life, Christ risen and grace as we celebrate everything at Brent House – with food!  A community of all the people I have come to love in all aspects of my new life at the University, gathered at table together, Christian and non-Christian alike, to share food, thanksgiving, fellowship and love.  Thanks be to God!

–Laura Eberly, College class of 2010