Destruction and Hope

     When Rosie and I were in Coventry, England, we went to the elegant new cathedral in that city.  The old one had been bombed and burned in 1940 during the Battle of Britain when the German bombers tried to destroy the industrial might of England.  Coventry Cathedral was incidental to that, but the destruction was total.  A charred cross was found by the dean the next day and erected amid the destroyed nave where people could come and see the damage, as well as the hope of the cross in the middle of the horror.  I was deeply impressed by what we found in Coventry.

They built a new cathedral adjacent to the old ruin.  The architecture is outstanding.  Above the altar and the choir is a brilliant tapestry of the risen Christ who looks out over the congregation through etched glass depictions of all of the saints at the western wall onto the ruin of the old church.  The theology is breathtaking.    Here is the risen Jesus focusing the congregation through the lives of the saints onto the destruction of the world.  It chokes me up now to think of it.

Coventry Cathedral has been a lively organization since the new building was built.  They have created an organization called the “Community of the Cross of Nails” that works on reconciliation throughout the world.  They have worked with the German church to open discussion with them on how working together for the good of the world is something that can heal the destruction caused by the two nations at war with each other.  They have worked with many churches in the world to speak of the hope of healing relationships and have done excellent work.

The Sunday that we attended church in that place happened to be Trinity Sunday.  As it seems to me is common in the church, the dean had asked one of his assistants to preach that day.  I understand that.  I always hated to preach on Trinity Sunday.  After all, who can explain the Trinity?

The assistant did a  good job that day.  He talked about mission and the hope that the church offers to the world.  In that geographical place, his words spoke volumes to me about how we can help the people around us have a sense of mission when all that they see around them is destruction.

I thought of how the church works around the world to help those in need and bring hope where it seems to be abandoned.  In Coventry, it would have been easy for the church to look at the loss of their cathedral to the bombing and to give up.  But they didn’t.  They built a new church with a mission focused on what had happened to them and they are making a profound difference in this world.  They are certainly a wonderful lesson for me about possibility instead of hopelessness.  Thank God for their example.

The Incredible Holy Spirit

       I remember when I was ordained a priest.  It was in 1975,  December 13,  at St. Philip’s church in Moon township.  I had a late calling to the priesthood, I spent some twenty some years in the broadcasting business.  When the station that I was working for basically went bankrupt and we were all laid off, I needed to find another job.  I had thought about ministry a number of times in my life, but I had always put it off.  I loved being in television, it was always challenging and the work was fun.  It was only when economic necessity forced my hand, that I went back to the idea of ministry.

The process was incredibly easy.  I talked to my rector, had an interview with Bishop Robert Appleyard and was enrolled in Virginia Seminary that fall.  Things were much less complicated then.  There was a shortage of clergy and there were not all of these modern day hoops to jump through.

My ordination was a great day.  Along with Bishop Appleyard, some twenty or thirty priests laid hands on me.  I will always remember the weight of their hands almost pushing me through the floor.  I was glad when it was over and the stole of my office was put over my shoulders and I was presented to the congregation for their applause.

It took years for me to sort out what happened that day.  Something in me had changed.  I discovered that my real education was just beginning.  I found that while my seminary had taught me theology, church history and much about the bible; how to be a priest was not one of the courses.  It was up to my parish to teach me that subject.  How to comfort, how to listen, how to lead.  That was the fairly complicated course that my two parishes taught me.  The Holy Spirit came to me through the people of the church, through their lives and their struggles.  They taught me what the church was all about.

One year, I had twenty-seven funerals, many of the people who had died were pillars of the parish.  I did all of the funerals, and spent a lot of time with the families.  Late in that year, on my way out of the church, after one of them,  I remember one of my altar guild members meeting me on the stairs.  “And how are you doing”, she asked me.   I burst into tears, all of the grief of that year falling out of me.   She brought me a great gift that day.  I was comforted and given strength in the middle of all of the pain that I had around me.   That’s how the Spirit works.

The experience of the disciples of Jesus after the resurrection has always fascinated me.  He comes to them in the upper room where the doors are locked because they are afraid and he shows them his wounds.  These disciples of Jesus were terrified because of their fear of the same people who crucified Jesus.  They all thought that they were next.

Even after his appearance, they were still afraid.  John’s gospel talks about Peter leading them all back to the Sea of Galilee, where they simply went fishing again.  It is only when Jesus appears on the shore that Peter scrambles out of the boat to come face to face with him, where Jesus forgives him for his denial of him and sends him to feed his sheep.

In Matthew’s Gospel, there is another wonderful incident where the eleven remaining disciples go to Galilee to meet the risen Jesus.  The Gospel says poignantly:

                                         Now the disciples went to Galilee, 
to the mountain to which Jesus had directed 
them.  And when they saw him, they worshiped
him, although some doubted.

Although some doubted! These followers of Jesus were still not convinced of the resurrection. As Jesus tells them in John’s Gospel:

                                       I still have many things to say to you, but you
                                   cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth
                                   comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he
                                  will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever 
                                  he hears, and he will declare to you the things that
                                  are to come. 

The incredible part of the Easter story is that the disciples were not at all  convinced by the fact of the rising from the dead by their leader.  It took the coming of the Spirit to bring it home to them.  How the Spirit came to these fearful followers is detailed in the Acts of the Apostles, the second book that Luke wrote about the incredible ministry of Jesus and the beginnings of the church.  In the second chapter of Acts, there is the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit on these people, and the phenomenon of the listeners to them hearing what they said, each in their own language.  After that powerful event, there was no doubt among the disciples.  They went about building the church in full confidence of the truth of the reality of the resurrected Christ.

That Spirit is still with us.  In subtle, sometimes silent ways, the Spirit of God empowers the church to be the hand of God in this world.  That’s why we do what we do and how we are led to show the truth of the Risen Christ to the world.  The Spirit is how I was sent to seminary, and how this church was started.  God bless us in our continuing journey.

The Problem of Our Guilt

        I’ve always been astonished that there aren’t any St. Judas Episcopal churches. Certainly, Judas is someone that we can identify with.  He was the betrayer of Jesus to the Pharisees and the Roman soldiers with a kiss.  Judas is probably more well known than any of the other disciples of Jesus.  We know him by his reputation for being a traitor.   We have all done worse and we know it.  That is why we spend so much time being guilty.

As a matter of fact, guilt seems to be the name of the game in religion.  We are such horrible sinners that we cringe before God constantly.  Many of our religions have made a cult out of our guilt.  Sermons in some churches preach hellfire and brimstone to the congregation and make them cringe in their pews.  Jonathan Edwards preached a fiery sermon to his congregants in Northampton, Massachusetts called  Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God.  The sermon detailed the destruction waiting for those who don’t follow God’s word.  The legend is that the people in the pews in the middle of that sermon ran from the church in great fright. This was at the time of what is called The Great Awakening, and fundamental Christianity was in great demand.   One of my professors in seminary pointed out rightly that the point of Edward’s sermon was not the destruction that made up such a large part of his discourse, but instead it was the thin, spider-web line that held all of humanity up out of the fires of hell.  That thin line is God’s infinite Grace.   That was, unfortunately a subtlety lost on the members of his congregation, and it is also a subtlety that is mostly lost on us.

      The Roman Catholics go to confession constantly, confessing even minute sins in order to satisfy the need to be purified before receiving the sacrament.  There is a certain sense to confession, in that having conversation about our misdeeds with a caring pastor is an excellent way to get past them and come to some kind of understanding of what the reality of forgiveness is.  The problem is that we often establish this kind of thing as a ritual that frequently has no meaning at all.

What this produces is that we remain in our guilt and even enhance it every time that we fall short.  Guilt produces all kinds of behavior that isn’t helpful.  We lash out at one another in anger, we blame others, we retreat from each other.  None of these things help in the establishment of community, and community ought to be the foundation of our religion.

       Fortunately, God has given us a solution to this.  Jesus took our sins to the cross with him, giving himself up for our salvation and for our eternal life.  Forgiveness is the mission of God to all of us.  He long ago recognized the problem that we have with our guilt and our constant sin and decided to do something about it.  Finally, Jesus was sent to be God in our midst, to live life as a human and to come to an understanding of what human living involves, and the horrible mess that we have made of the world because of the selfish way that we have lived it.

            Uniting us to God with forgiveness is the great gift that we have received because of Jesus’ death on the cross that we created and his resurrection from the dead that we didn’t create, yet we celebrate at Easter.  What greater gift could we all have been given than the forgiveness that has come to us because of this powerful gift that has come from the hand of God.  Forgiveness is the key to our lives.  It is the way that we can remove from our lives the guilt that sin produces.  Always, we are forgiven by our loving God of all that we have done so that we can be effective disciples to tell the world the wonderful news of what God has done for all of us.

         That forgiveness is a constant is shown in Jesus’ life.  After Peter denied Jesus three times after his arrest, following his resurrection, Jesus met Peter on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he forgave Peter three times by asking him, Peter, do you love me?     When Peter answered that he loved him, Jesus told Peter to feed my sheep.  He asked him this three times for each of Peter’s denials.  This was an incredible display of forgiveness on the part of the risen Jesus.  It is only a foretaste of what God has in mind for all of us.  Forgiveness is ours to relieve all of the guilt that we have built up.  It is also our gift to give to the world.  It is our mission to show the world the elegant news of God’s forgiveness and the possibility that we can get on with our eternal lives in the freedom that we so fervently desire and to feed God’s sheep with the great gift of forgiveness and love.

Abiding in Love

      Rosie and I have moved 27 times in the almost 57 years that we have been married.  First, I was a radio and television personality and it was necessary to change jobs to get a better situation.  We would pile everything into boxes, put the kids in the car and move house when a better job came along.  Then there was the army when I was drafted and we moved according to my orders.  My television career ended in 1972 when I got the call to ministry and entered Virginia Seminary.  After that the moving slowed down a bit.  After graduation, I only had two churches.  At the last one, I stayed for 18 years before I retired in 1999,  but the moving wasn’t over.  We went to a place in the West Virginia mountains that we had bought and stayed there until I got bored with playing golf and reading and wanted to go back to work.  The Diocese of West Virginia used my talents as an interim rector in three parishes for about a year and a half each.  The last one was St. Mark’s in St. Alban’s, West Virginia.  After that, we moved back to Pittsburgh, anxious to be near our daughters and our grandkids.  It has been a migration of sorts.  We have been gypsies, but we have been overjoyed at the travel and the people whom we have met and the places that we have been.
 
I bring all of this up because of the curious word abide that is a part of the Gospel lesson in the 15th chapter of John.  Jesus uses this word many times in talking with his disciples:

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; 
abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, 
you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my 
Father's commandments and abide in his love. 
I have said these things to you so that my joy may 
be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
                                                                                            --John 15: 9-12

Abide is a word that I have always thought meant “a way of living.”  The dictionary classifies it as archaic in that sense, but I still think it has meaning about the way that we live.   I think that is what Jesus is getting at here.  “Live in my love“, he says.   A way of life.  I think that is one of the hardest things that we ever do.  To make loving and living the same thing.  It is obviously the problem with all of us.  Our inability to love one another is what is wrong with the world.  Abiding in love, living in love, is the solution to all of that.  Making love our way of living.   It would certainly change the way that we talk to each other.

Our political campaigns have become times to impute the worst to our challengers.  It was fascinating to see the two candidates for the democratic nomination to congress in this area appearing together and the loser endorsing the winner.  That would be a wonderful thing except for all of the things that each said about the other during the campaign.  Why is it that we so quickly resort to negativity when we campaign for office?  The reason is that it works.  We all respond to negative advertising better that we do positive.  The old saying that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes is certainly true.  But negativity is not loving.  It is the opposite of that.  It produces hatred.  That is why our political campaigns have reduced us as a society to such a terrible state.  The problem is our inability to love.  To abide in our love.  Instead, we empower the extremes and accuse those who don’t agree with us of being outliers.  That is not what Jesus had in mind for us when he spoke about abiding in his love.

We have many issues that divide us in this country.  Respecting those who disagree with us is the first step in solving them.  Reducing our governing to what our extremists have in mind for us will keep us in a constant state of turmoil.  All of that might sound obvious, but is isn’t obvious to those who are vying for political office.

Loving is the answer.  Abiding in the love that Jesus has for all of us.  Including everyone around us in whatever solutions that we suggest for our problems is the key.  If we can do that, we will return this society to one that produces the light for the world.  That light shines only through our love.  It is the light of God.

Voting and Religion

      We went to vote in the primary last week.  When I got to the polling place, I was asked for my drivers license as a form of identification.  This will be mandatory in the general election, but it was started in the primary as optional.  I offered the observation that is was a shame that we  have to show our pictures in order to vote.  One of the poll watchers seated at the table said to me:  “This is because there are so many people who look like the president.”  I was appalled at this remark and I told him that I thought it was disgusting that he should say such a thing.

It got me to thinking about how prevalent racism is in our society.  The Jim Crow culture was challenged by the Civil Rights movement in the sixties and many of the overt laws that separated the races were swept away and many of our places of education were integrated, but we still have the nagging, constant problem of unstated racism that still lives in many, if not most of our hearts.  That is what I experienced at the polling place last week.  A not-so-subtle racist remark from someone who ought to know better, and also an unmasking of the reason for the imposition of picture identification at the polls:  an attempt to discourage minority voters from exercising their franchise.  It is supposed that many of them will vote to support the president.

The lesson from the eighth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, where Philip is told by an angel to go to the chariot where an Ethiopian eunuch was riding and reading a passage from the prophet Isaiah.  Philip joined the eunuch in the chariot and explained to him how the Isaiah passage was a prophecy about the coming of Jesus and his crucifixion and rising from the dead.  The eunuch was impressed by this and wanted to be baptized.  They stopped where there was some water, and Philip baptized the eunuch.  This story impressed me because it is a story about two races meeting one another and sharing the story of  Jesus life, death and resurrection.  How powerful this is when we think of the pervasiveness of whiteness in our culture.  How black congregations are looked at as anomalies, or are caricatured as people who are always singing spirituals and listening to fevered preachers.  There are certainly congregations like that, but there are also many African-American people who worship in other congregations with other traditions.

I served as an interim rector at an  African-American church in Charleston, West Virginia for a year and a half.  These were some of the finest Christians that I have ever met.  They had become a Jubilee congregation in the Diocese of West Virginia because of their wonderful outreach programs.  A small congregation that did excellent work in taking care of the poor and the outcast in their city.  I was proud of them and glad to be able to use my talents to lead them in their work.  It is galling to me to think that these people would be targets of disenfranchisement at the polls.  True, they aren’t in Pennsylvania, but the principle is the same.  I know that the people in that congregation, and the myriad of other minority voters across the country will do what all of us do at the polls:  vote for the people whom we think will do the best in our government for all of the people.  That isn’t a racial thing at all, it is simply what we all want in our democracy.  Isn’t it interesting how we try always to limit our democracy to those to whom we think are entitled to it?  That would be the wealthy, the educated  and the talented.  We will find ways to limit the participation of others who don’t quite qualify.

That is what is so disgusting about the “voter identification” law.  It is an attempt to limit participation in our government to those whom some people think will vote in the “proper” way.  That flies in the face not only of our constitution, but also of our bible, where all people are accepted by our God because of the unlimited love that is expressed through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  We all  participate in that love,  regardless of our race, our level of wealth and education or any other limiting categories.  Thank God for that love that trumps all of our prejudice and selfishness and gives us finally the gift of each other in all of the ways that we show up.

The Truth about Resurrection

       This political season has produced a number of candidates who claim to be Christian and trumpet that above everything else.  Like their faith covers over all of the defects that seem to trouble their candidacy.  It doesn’t take me long to get very tired of listening to them.  When Christianity’s proclamation becomes essentially self-righteousness, it loses most, if not all of its appeal.

Jesus resurrection is an incredible event.  It is no wonder that the disciples had a hard time believing it.  Jesus shows up on the road to Emmaus and talks to two strangers who were simply on their way.  By, as the Gospel says, “opening the scriptures” to them, he convinces them that he is somebody special.  When he breaks bread with them when they invite him to dinner, they recognize that he is the Jesus who was crucified and died on the cross, but who has come back from the dead and has been with them on the road.  He then appears to his disciples and shows them his wounds and eats some fish in their presence.  This is an astounding account of the resurrection with Jesus offering proof of his existence.

Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of scientific evidence before us to prove the resurrection beyond argument.  We are stuck with the problem of faith in simply believing in the truth of Jesus’ resurrection without anything but the accounts in the scriptures to bolster our faith.  I know that there are many, many Christians who have a problem with this and who wonder over and over again at the possibility that the resurrection of Jesus may not have happened quite as we have heard.  This leads us to a shortage of faith when death and loss catch up with us in our lives.  How is it that we reconcile the death of a loved one with the shortage of proof of resurrection in our feeble faith?  What is it that we need to do to see new life beyond the grave?

Death is not only physical death, but it also devastates life in other ways.  We become addicted to alcohol, drugs or the making of money and become lost to each other because of our behavior.  When these things happen to us, we sometimes become  estranged from each other and we need to be resurrected back into human community.  Encouraging resurrection is what I believe to be the function of Christian fellowship.  To do this, we need to keep track of each other, to know when lives are going off the rails and without harsh judgment to be present with each other to offer a way back to life when the real nourishment of life seems to be lost.

What really annoys me about the Christians on the campaign trail is the way that they ignore Jesus’ call to compassion and caring for the poor and the outcast in favor of the rich and the secure.  It is easy to court the votes of the rich, who will supply the candidates with needed money.  It is harder to be cognizant of the sometimes extreme needs of the poor who not only have no money for the candidates but also do not have enough for themselves or their families.  I understand the desire to cater to the rich.  They provide good things for those who care for them; but  to ignore the poor is not only a problem for the poor, it is a problem for all of us.  Jesus asked us to care for them because nobody else will.  That is the essence of Christianity and it is also a guide to resurrection.  When we help people out of poverty and need, we provide a way for them to celebrate life.  What better mission can we have?

The Wonder of Forgiveness

       What a wonderful Easter we had.  Our kids, our oldest grandchild and our great-grandchild were here with their spouses.  Rosie cooked a spectacular leg of lamb, everyone brought something for the dinner, and we enjoyed each other and celebrated the day together.

We got to church in the morning and celebrated the day of the Resurrection.  I’ve always been astonished at the large turnout on Easter.  I think mostly it is people coming back for a second look.  Maybe I’ll hear something this time that catches my spirit.  Easter is such a mysterious holiday.  We all yearn for resurrection, but we don’t really know very much about it.  An article in Time this week talks about heaven and how we all look at it, but the article is simply a encapsulation of the views that we have all had of the afterlife since the beginning of time.  None of us really know anything at all about it.

The spectacular news about Jesus’ resurrection is the intensity of the surprise of the women at the tomb, and later the apostles themselves.  They were all genuinely changed by this event, and that is probably the best proof that we have that Jesus rose from the dead and came back to them.   When he appeared to the disciples in the room that they had locked in fear, they were astonished.  He gave them his Peace and the Holy Spirit, and then his commission:  to go and forgive sins.  That is it in all simplicity.  This is the risen Christ with his continuing mission for the world:  the forgiveness of sin.
 
I have found that guilt and forgiveness are the biggest part of ministry.  I have spent hours counseling people who simply couldn’t give up their guilt for whatever it was that they had done.  I have seen others who were so consumed by their guilt that it changed them into difficult, cranky people who had a hard time getting along with anyone.  No wonder Jesus sent his disciples into the world to forgive sins.

When I did my ministry at Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, I had a group of men, all of whom had killed someone.  Over the years that we were together, I heard their stories.  Often the killings were perfectly understandable.  One of my inmates killed a man who was in the process of killing his best friend.  “I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” he said.  Forgiveness wasn’t what he was after.  He wanted understanding and he wanted out of jail.  He got the understanding of the group and eventually he got his freedom, also.  But most of them wanted forgiveness for what they had done.  They understood that their prison sentence was just, even if the experience in prison was worse than anything that they could have imagined.  Over the years, I helped several of them to come to terms with how God saw them and what forgiveness meant.

One man in my group had come to prison at the age of seventy-five.  He had been a brown-bag drunk in his little town, had fallen in love with a local bag woman, who then threw him over for another woman that she knew.  His puritan spirit was outraged by this.  He went back to his room, got the gun that he always kept under his bed and went and killed both of them.  He then ran away to the west coast where sheriffs’ deputies found him and brought him back for his trial.  He would listen to me when I talked about forgiveness, but I could always see him shaking his head.  He would come to me after the group and say “that doesn’t apply to me padre, there are two people in the cemetery because of what I did.  God will never forgive that”.  I’ll never forget the moment when he finally “got” it.  There was a light that came from his face and he relaxed beyond belief.   He was in his late eighties when he died, but the last few of his years were elegant ones.  They would bring him from his hospital room in a wheelchair across the yard for group.  When he was in the yard, other inmates would crowd around him.  They saw what he had been given and they wanted it also.  I know that this is what Jesus had in mind when he sent his disciples out into the world with their simple mission.  Simple?  Hardly.  It is the most important thing in the world.