What makes us human?

The other day in our Education for Ministry (EfM) group we did one of the exercises known as “common lessons.” The exercise asks each of us to write our own creed by answering a series of questions.

The questions are as you might expect – who is God? Who is Jesus? Who is the Holy Spirit? All rich questions for thought and conversation.

I’ve done this exercise many times before in EfM groups. But there was one question this time around I found most intriguing:

What makes us human?

We had many answers, starting with the obvious: our DNA. But what else makes us human? What connects us as human and makes us different than any other living creature on this planet?

We had many answers.

Is it human intellect? Not all humans have intellect.

Is it technology? Other primates make tools.

Is it language? Chimpanzees and whales have language.

My answer: Humans have story.

A wise sage once said there is no past and there is no future. There is only the present. We give the past and future shape by the story we tell, and how we tell the story.

We certainly have secular stories and call it history. The story of wars, heroes and villians, national myths and traditions. Science itself is story by the selective examination of the facts that science discovers. The fact of the cosmos – the stars and planets and this earth, our island home – is a story.

Quran, 11th century, North Africa
British Museum

Our stories connect us as human because at some level each of us become part of the story.

Human religious traditions are essentially story, whether it is the Hindu saga of many worlds, or Moses leading the exodus out of Egypt, or Muhammad’s prophetic vision, or Jesus Christ dying on the Cross.

Each of the religion tells the story its unique way.

The Christian story is a continuum connecting the people of God to the primal story of creation, to the desolation and redemption of the Jewish people, to the story of Jesus of Nazareth and his Resurrection, and to the people of God who came after living into the hope and promise of salvation.

Baptism is story.

When Christians are baptized they enter into the story and thereby continue the story of salvation into the next generation and beyond.

It is true that there are many things going on in baptism – the initiation into the Church and the outward and visible sign through symbols of water and words of the inward grace of the Holy Spirit present in the person being baptized. All that is true.

Yet there is something more to baptism that makes it completely human: When we are baptized we enter into the great story of salvation history. The ancient story continues onward through us.

It doesn’t matter our age or intellectual capacity to understand because baptism brings us into the story. It doesn’t matter that we fall short, or whether we are a sinner or saint or combination of both. We continue to write this story of baptism the rest of our lives.

It is no accident that Christians use the Apostles’ Creed at baptism. Unlike the Nicene Creed, which is an abstract (and hard to access) statement of the definition of the Trinity, the Apostles’ Creed is a story. It isn’t abstract. Hear the Apostles’ Creed again, and hear it as a story without an ending:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth;
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit
and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

+ + +

This Lent I am offering a special course for adults who have not been baptized or confirmed in the Church. The course, entitled “Journey of Faith,” begins this Sunday at 11:30 am at St. Paul’s, and will continue for seven weeks. All you need to do to get into the class is show up.

Even if you have been baptized or confirmed, the course is a good way to explore your faith, your doubts, and this great story we share together as the people of God. Come ask the hard questions of faith and life and meet fellow sojourners on the path.

For those adults who are interested, the course leads to baptism at the Great Vigil of Easter on April 7 at 7:30 pm. We are also offering baptism for babies and children on the following Sunday April 15, and for information on that please contact our office.

For those who are interested, the course leads to confirmation or reception as an Episcopalian at a special service Wednesday April 18 at 5:30 pm with Bishop Shannon Johnston.

You can still take “Journey of Faith” even if you aren’t interested in receiving any of these sacraments. I hope you will join me beginning this Sunday.

Wearing a hijab this Lent

One of our former parishioners has decided she would wear a hijab -- a head scarf -- as a response to the Congressional hearing into Muslim influence in our country, and is writing about her experience. She's had some interesting responses, to say the least, and so she is writing a blog about it, which you can read by clicking HERE.

That may sound odd to wear a Muslim scarf as a Lenten devotion, but by doing so she is walking the path of a marginalized group of people and experiencing the prejudice they experience. I find that Christ-like. And perhaps all of us might learn something about ourselves from her experience this Lent.

Remembering September 11, and giving thanks for St. Paul's Chapel in New York

Today we remember the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington DC, and Flight 93 over Pennsylvania. For many it is as raw as it was that day.

Since then, nothing has been built at "Ground Zero" in New York to replace the twin towers, and the site is has taken on the trappings of early church shrines to martyrs. It is sad but not surprising that the proposal to build an Islamic Center two blocks from the site has taken on major religious and political baggage for so many.

What many don't know is that there already is a house of prayer -- a church -- at Ground Zero, St. Paul's Episcopal Chapel. It is called a "chapel" because it is satellite of Trinity Episcopal Church, Wall Street, probably the wealthiest church in the country because it owns much of lower Manhattan.

St. Paul's Chapel, opened in 1766, is the oldest building in continuous use in New York. A prominent landmark, the chapel was dwarfed in the 1970s by the World Trade Center just across from the graveyard.

When the towers crashed, and other buildings collapsed, the graveyard was covered with debris and the pulverized remains of those who died in the towers -- but somehow St. Paul's Chapel remained standing. To read more about St. Paul's Chapel, click HERE.

In the days following 9/11, St. Paul's

Chapel became a staging center and resting place for rescue workers and those digging out the dead. The work went on for months.

Lori and I spent a day at St. Paul's in April 2002, a few months after the calamity. The work of digging out was still in full swing.

Outside and inside, people built shrines to the dead. The nave was stacked with palettes of bottled water, rescue workers napped in the pews, food was served in a corner. The daily Holy Eucharist went on at the altar amidst everything else.

I wrote this in my notebook on April 26, 2002, the day we were at St. Paul's Chapel:

"St. Paul's was overwhelming, with a shrine to the dead in one corner, and banners on every wall and cards hanging from every pew. Firemen and cops and construction workers were sitting or milling about or eating lunch or catching a nap on a cot. A priest was just beginning the noon Eucharist. The noise was layered and awesome...

The sounds of machinery outside came through the walls. And many inside seemed just very, very weary. Some slumped in pews, some praying, some looking at the ceiling. A group of firemen in full battle gear came in to get water and looked briefly at the prayers then departed...

The sights of hope were everywhere, bursting through and covering walls with banners and signs and cardboard colored paper signed and colored by children from all over the U.S. It was awesome and overwhelming and humbling."

St. Paul's was a holy place filled with holy people. It didn't matter if they were Christians, Jews, Muslims or nothing at all. Religious labels were irrelevant. St. Paul's was a place of prayer, a place of sanctuary and a place of rest for everyone who entered.

A number of my clergy friends took a turn spending a day or a week at the chapel.

Today, let us remember those who died nine years ago; let us remember those who worked tirelessly to relieve the pain of the victims. Let us give thanks for St. Paul's Chapel and all who came through those doors.

And may we have as much charity and equanimity in our hearts for people of all religions as we did then.

Photos from the St. Paul's Chapel website.

Jesus and the hard way of discipleship

My sermon today is based on Jeremiah 18:1-11, Psalm 139:1-5, 13-17, Philemon 1-21, and Luke 14:25-33.

Tribes

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children cannot be my disciple.”

What?

Yes, you heard that right.

And if you feel like you just heard this not long ago, you are correct. We heard a very similar passage three weeks ago.

We could turn to the other lessons today, but they don’t seem much better, and let me remind you again that I don’t pick the lessons.

It is tempting to avoid them – this one from Luke is known as one of the “hard sayings” of Jesus, and with good reason.

But let’s see what we can do here. First, I want to underline an obvious truth: How we tell our stories says a great deal about how we view ourselves, and how we view our relationship with God.

Second, I want to underline another truth that is less obvious: How we listen to stories – how we hear each other – also says a great about us and how we view our relationship with God.

I make those two observations to further point out that how we hear these ancient biblical stories says a great deal about us and how we view our relationship with God.

We can hear these stories at least two ways.

Here is one way: From the Prophet Jeremiah, we are told that God will bring evil against you unless you “amend your ways.”

From Psalm 139: “Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!”

You didn’t actually hear those words this morning because the drafters of the lectionary edited that part out. But, trust me, the slaying of the wicked is in the psalm.

Then to Paul’s Letter to Philemon: it doesn’t seem to fit much of anything, so we are going to leave aide for now and go straight to the Gospel of Luke:

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother…”

Then take up your cross and get ready to be crucified.

The image we get is of a wrathful, vengeful God who only allows a tiny number of worthy people to be admitted into his holy club. If you mess up, even a little, you are out.

That is the way much of our culture – and much of the religious world in general – hears these biblical passages, and then uses these passages to build religious social structures that divide people into the worthy and the unworthy, the elect and the non-elect.

But maybe there is another way of hearing these biblical passages that get closer to how Jesus intends us to hear them.

But be forewarned: this way of hearing the gospel might prove even more unsettling than the other way because it might push us out of our comfort zones.

From Jeremiah, we hear how we are like a piece of clay. God is the potter molding us into a beautiful jar. We are shaped, but we are not the shapers.

Then from Psalm 139 we hear about God who is with us from the time we are in our mother’s womb, who knows us in our sitting down and our rising up, in our journeys and in our resting places.

We hear about God who never gives up on us.

Then we get this extraordinary – and brief – letter from Paul to Philemon. The letter has no outward theological content, but don’t let outward appearances fool you. Paul is writing to a slave owner, Philemon, pleading with him to legally free his slave, Onesimus, who has escaped.

Paul sends Onesimus back to his owner, and Paul asks the owner see his slave as a “beloved brother” – to treat his slave as an equal – and then free him. Paul wants both slave and owner to be liberated from the brutal economy of humans owning other humans.

By the way, it is thought that this letter was kept and cherished by the early church because Onesimus was, in fact, freed from slavery, and went on to become a bishop.
And then we come to Jesus and his teaching to “hate mother and father.”

This really is not a recipe guide for creating a dysfunctional family. Rather, Jesus is attacking head-on the most violent social structure of his time – the allegiances of tribe and family that lead to blood feuds and endless cycles of retribution.

Think of the present-day tribal violence of Iraq and Afghanistan, and you get the idea. Jesus implores his people – his tribe – to abandon this way of thinking because it possesses them, strangling them.

You can’t be my disciple if you are going to keep living that way.

Such social structures are not so far removed from our own world, though sometimes they are more subtle.

Last Sunday, we heard University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, in this pulpit, talking about how “humans take differences among people and translate those differences into enduring inequalities.”

In our daily life, we deal with social distinctions created by race and class, educational degrees, family connections, religious affiliations, gender, sexual orientation, just to name a few. Some of these social distinctions help us to maneuver through a complicated world.

But some of these social distinctions are unhealthy. There one distinction I particularly want to talk about today: the anti-Muslim fervor loose in our land.
We’ve seen a number of flash points recently, for example, in the debate over a proposed Islamic Center a few blocks away from “Ground Zero” in New York.

Or in Florida, there is a supposedly Christian pastor promoting the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks as a day for mass burnings of the Quran.

And my email burns with proclamations that President Obama is really a Muslim, and was not really born in the United States, and wants to impose Islamic law on the United States.

Let me be clear: I am not going to suggest to you how to vote, nor am I going to suggest how to write an immigration law or a zoning law in New York, or an arson law for that matter.

But I want to tell you that these are not just political issues; they are spiritual issues because they place us onto the uncomfortable ground of social distinctions based on religion.

And when we get onto that uncomfortable ground, we again hear Jesus telling us to upend social structures that lead to hatred and violence. Let them go; don’t let them possess you.

As Christians, we need to understand that there are people in this world who understand God very differently than we do.

What makes us think God can’t reach all people everywhere, in every language, and every culture? Are we so arrogant as to think only we hear God’s voice?

To be a follower of Jesus Christ requires setting aside our own tribal prejudices, and embracing all people with compassion, especially the poor, the immigrants, the weak, and the people who are not like us.

You can’t be a follower of Jesus while embracing religious and racial bigotry.

To be truly a disciple is to take the hard path of the Cross, to sacrifice for others, to live in community with people you may not like, and to commit daring acts of kindness, service, and humility, and then to worship together every week.

There are questions that should come out of this for each of us today: Can we free ourselves from the captivity of our human distinctions so that we might truly see each other as beloved children of God?

And can we trust God enough to trust each other? Can we see in each other the face of Christ, no matter our differences, our arguments, our politics, our outward appearances, and truly become the One body of the Living God in Christ?

What kind of disciples will we be?

We get a lifetime to answer. AMEN.

Our Christian response to the proposed Islamic Center near Ground Zero in New York

I've been asked by a few parishioners about the proposed Islamic Center near "Ground Zero" in New York. One parishioner asked me "What should the Christian response be?" I would like to share with you today the gist of my reply:

Our Christian response should always be guided by compassion, love and striving to understand "the other."

In Leviticus 19:33-34, we are admonished: “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land.”

On Sunday, we shall hear the Letter to the Hebrews 13:1-8: “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels.”

We should never be guided by prejudice or election-year fear-mongering. Partisanship of any stripe should have no place in our response.

A few facts you should know: First, there is no mosque planned for Ground Zero. The proposal is for an Islamic Center several blocks away; it contains a prayer room. But there are already two mosques in the immediate vicinity, including a mosque a half-block away from the proposed center.

There are also churches in the vicinity, including our own St. Paul's Episcopal Chapel which is right there at Ground Zero and was used as a rest during the aftermath of the collapse of the towers. I think it would be a great gesture toward tolerance and peace to have all of the world's religions represented near the site of this great calamity.

Second, I think it is crucial that we as Christians understand there is no monolithic Islam, just as there is no monolithic Christianity. The Islamic Center is being proposed by Sufi Muslims who are mystical, peaceful and oppose the Islamic extremists at great risk to themselves. Why is it the media rarely mentions them? If we say we want to promote a moderate peaceful Islam, then we should be going out of our way to support this sect, not lumping them with Osma bin Laden. It would be the same as saying there is no difference between me and Jerry Fallwell.

Let me recommend this op-ed piece in The New York Times which goes into further detail about the sect that has proposed the center. To read it click HERE.

Also, The Right Rev. Mark S. Sisk, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of New York yesterday called for a "civil, respectful discussion." To read his remarks, click HERE.

Reading your Bible less like a cookbook and more like a prayer

I've not met Barbara Crafton, but I feel like she is an old friend, probably because I hear from her every day via email (and such is the power of the internet to create community and even friendships across vast distances).

She sent this item the other day about the controversy over the invitation to a Pentagon prayer breakfast to Franklin Graham, the son and successor of evangelist Billy Graham.

Franklin Graham, as he has in the past, made some recent remarks about Islam being evil that caused the military to withdraw the invitation.

I find Barbara's comments thoughtful, and they move beyond merely reacting to Franklin Graham but to how we read the Bible as prayer:

AN UNINVITATION

Oh, dear. A prominent evangelist, the son of an even-more-prominent evangelist, has just been uninvited from a prayer breakfast at the Pentagon after it was discovered that he had made some ignorant comments about Islam, calling it "a very wicked and evil" religion. This was a problem -- there are many Muslims in our military. Some of them work at the Pentagon. He elaborated -- he thinks that observant Muslims have to kill their children if they engage in premarital sex. They are slaves to their religion, he says. You couldn't practice Islam here in America, he says, because killing adulterers is illegal here. He seems unaware that millions of Americans do practice Islam here and don't kill their children or their wayward spouses.

I know Christians who are slaves to their religion, too. Religious fundamentalism of any stripe enslaves its adherents to the past, forcing them to see all the customs of their ancestral cultures as permanent, forbidding them to do what people of faith must always do: wrestle with the world as we find it in light of what we know it to have been when the sacred texts we love were written down. All of history is held in God's hands, but fundamentalism seeks to imprison God within history, powerless to do anything besides what he did thousands of years ago. God, the elderly curator of Museum Earth. God, who conceived the universe but hasn't had a new thought since.

A Christian or a Jew who followed everything in our Holy Scriptures would be a pretty violent person, too. Adulterers would be stoned by the community. Fortunetellers would be executed. So would people who cursed their parents. Men might have multiple wives. Men would have to marry their deceased brothers' wives. Slaveholding would be acceptable. Life would be absurd.

And so we don't live that way. Nobody does -- fundamentalists may think they do, but they also interpret, elevating some scriptural values over others, choosing Jesus over Leviticus in some cases and not in others. We do live within our tradition, but we live there in our own time. We acknowledge the march of history, and the reality of change. We don't assume that everything that happened in ancient times was better than what happens now, nor do we assume the reverse. We think. And we acknowledge the possibillity that we may be wrong and have to change our minds and our behavior. This is not a modern failure of nerve or a moral defeat. It is what religious people have always done with respect to the conduct of their lives.

When the Massachusetts Bay Colony came to these shores, everyone in it assumed that the conscious experience of being saved would be a universal one in the community -- that, or you would have to leave. But something happened: the children of that community, some of them, could not produce a moment in their lives when they knew for certain that they were saved. They'd been raised in their faith: they didn't have a "prodigal son" moment, one in which they knew themselves to have been lost, but now found. The rules of the community were clear: they needed to leave.

But love won out. The elders created what they called "The Halfway Covenant:" You could stay, in anticipation of a future moment in your life which would surely come. We would depend on the nurture of the community to guide you there. We wouldn't have to give you up. Because we just couldn't do it, we loved you so.

We need to let love win out more. I suppose some of our noisier pundits will seize the opportunity for a rant about how anti-prayer-breakfasts the government is. But no -- the prayer breakfast will go on, with a different speaker. There has got to be a better reason to be a Christian than that other religions are evil and wicked -- if you can't think of one, try reading your Bible less like a cookbook and more like a prayer.

Art work from the St. John's Bible, a handwritten illuminated Bible being created by monks in Minnesota that you can view by clicking HERE.