Clement in my chalice

St. Clement regularly appears in my chalice. With an altar facing east, the morning sun emboldens the martyred bishop of Rome whose stained-glass image becomes an icon upon the wine’s surface. Sometimes, especially at the Wednesday healing service, I will use the moments given to the Lord’s Prayer to look deeply into St. Clements’s face. His martyred destiny at the bottom of the Tiber becomes, through the consecrated elements, remembered within the water and wine, now the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation. St. Clement does not say a word - he has no need to speak - for the ringing alleluia of the fraction captures his voice along with the saints, living and dead.

It is tempting to give St. Clements’s image in the chalice a sentimental meaning.  We do this when we romanticize the suffering and death of the martyrs as a relic of antiquated history of an antiquated church. We talk of how heroic the martyrs were in their faithfulness to Christ and his church. Perhaps we unearth Tertullian in these moments and proudly declare that the church rests on the blood of those who died unrepentant to their trust in Jesus. Yet we fail to make any sense of martyrdom if our attention is given to the seemingly radical act that preceded their death, and not what their death means.

In his instructive work on the martyr-church, Craig Hovey contends that martyr’s did not die in order to make a point. They did not die for a cause or to prove their courage or to demonstrate just how evil the world is at times. It was not as though their acts lacked courage or faithfulness. In a world that treasures such virtue, when it comes to the martyrs, even these virtues lack the explanative power of what martyrdom might mean. In short, it is God who gives the only meaning to the martyr’s life and death. The meaning  of St. Clement awash in the ripples of the chalice is found in our confession of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The martyrs remind the church that as Jesus suffered and died, so might those who bear his title as Christians. This is not to say that Clement or any martyr is a mere cipher in the actions of God. It is to say, however, that Clements’s death did not put an end to his testimony to the truth of God; his death was part of his testimony.

Testimony to the truth of God goes beyond having all the right words about God. St. Clement was the bishop of Rome and therefore responsible as a preacher and teacher of the gospel. He wrote passionate epistles that instructed the emerging church in matters of doctrine and practice. He was not lacking words.   What mattered to Rome was how the gospel of St. Clements’s testimony challenged its hegemony. St. Clement was engaged in the task of making the story of God in Christ to be the fundamental story of our world. This sounds passé until we remember that the mythos of Rome was absolute and unwelcoming to alternative accounts of the world. In this context, the fledgling church preached and practiced the sovereign Lordship of Jesus and his peaceable kingdom. As such, St. Clements’s testimony to the truth of God found coherence in the actions of worship and service, and his teaching amplified the witness of the church. For this, he was a threat and for this, he inherited an anchor for a necklace and a river for a grave.

The body of St. Clement now appears splashed in vibrant blues and yellows against the deep red hues of the wine in my chalice. He does not appear on the altar at any other time. In that the church is made visible in our gathering, praying and sharing in the Eucharist, it makes sense that Clement appears in amidst the liturgical performance. There are other saints and martyrs in the surrounding windows, but it has been given to St. Clement to be illumined in the cup as a sign of the destiny of all who believe. The meaning of our lives and our deaths, like that of St. Clement, is found in the life and death of the One in whose name we gather, and in whom we have life because we share in his life.  St. Clements’s lips do not move but I am confident that each week he joins with us as we proclaim, “let us keep the feast, alleluia!”

Freedom and Law

Freedom and Law

 Out topic  is freedom and its relationship to law. In order to bring some focus to this topic, I am going to focus on what the OT calls Torah, or divine law. So I will not be speaking of law in general, even though according to the great 13^th century theologian and philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, all law, whether human or divine, ultimately points in the same direction; that is, all law serves the common good. When it comes to the Torah, Aquinas thought that, “The goal of the law is the love of charity, for all law aims at friendship of people with each other, and with God”. To speak of freedom in the same breath as law is, in the OT tradition, to simply describe what human life resembles when ordered towards the sharing of a common life with God and each other. Before I develop this line of thinking, I first wish to say something about Israel and the giving of the Torah, or divine law, at Sinai.

The 20^th chapter of the book of Exodus is where we find the first account of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from God after Israel’s exodus from slavery in Egypt. The first commandment goes something like this:

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. “You shall have no other gods before me.”

God announces himself above all else to be the God of freedom, the one who delivers the people out of bondage or slavery. The first characteristic of this God is that he is a liberating God. What seems strange is the first thing this liberating God does is lay a whole set of commands and restrictions on his people. One might expect the God of freedom to leave the people alone; to let them be free and make their own decision and run their own lives with whatever laws the people seem appropriate. Freedom, we might expect, would consist of people doing what they like as they please with the people of their own choosing. In theory, it is no doubt true to speak of freedom in this way, but it is equally true that Israel, as one people among many, had an uncanny ability to enslave themselves to other gods when given the chance. The important thing, we discover in this first commandment, is to be found by the right God – the God who frees the people from slavery – and reject and struggle against the others. For the OT tradition, the worship of any god other than the LORD was a form of slavery; “to pay homage to the forces of natures, to the spirit of a particular place, to a nation or race or to anything that is too powerful to understand or control” was, for God’s people, to submit to an inferior kind of human life and community. The only true God, Israel discovered, is the God of freedom. The role of Torah then was to define the sort of community Israel would be when they were living most free with their God and with each other. Freedom was not automatic; it depended on how people related to the common good; in other words, how they related to the law revealed by God to God’s people.

Freedom and law in the terms of the OT tradition – the tradition, by the way, out of which Jesus lived, healed and preached – looks and smells different to what  is generally accepted in our own society. I think it is fair to say that freedom for the modern West is a freedom from. There are many of us who think the kind of society in which there is freedom is one where the claims of society (or law) are a hindrance to freedom. The law exists to keep us from doing injury to each other, to protect us from the claims of others, and to guarantee a certain kind of limited peace.  Freedom in our society means doing our own thing as far as we are able with the recognition that we live under certain regulations. If only we could be free from constraint, free from the tyranny of the laws of others, then we could be truly free.  The assumption is that we have a certain sort of society because people just want to be free from each other. What we learn from the tradition of the OT and of Jesus is that we need a certain sort of society – one where we share a common life and strive for the common good – for there to be free people in any shape or form. Instead of freedom from, the witness of scripture gestures towards freedom for: free for God, free for neighbor, stranger and even enemy. 

As we discover throughout the gospels, the whole point and purpose of the Law was, and always has been, to define and maintain a certain way of living together, what the New Testament writers call koinonia, sharing a common life with God and each other. We agree to something less than worthy of a flourishing human life if we fail to subscribe to an understanding of divine law as preserving us and liberating us from captivity to the gods of place, nation, race or things. The way of living together that Jesus called love, heals and liberates our corrupted desires for total security and utter control by opening our hearts and minds towards a life of service and peace; a life partly defined by rejecting and struggling against the idolatry of work, an indifference to human suffering and the degradation of the very young and the very old. The point is not an illusory utopia, but the hope of human community that is learning to receive its life as a gift; a gift from God that matures through a life of friendship and gratitude.

It would be impious of me to allow this reflection to end with an extended platitude. To the unsentimental eye, any appeal to a community shaped by love and friendship is obviously rubbish.  To attempt to sustain a human community on the kind of thing we ordinarily think of as love or freedom or law is most clearly an exercise in futility. That is, of course, unless the kind of love, freedom and law is of a different sort. What was special about the kind of freedom God provided to Israel, the kind of law that God revealed in the commandments, and the kind of love that Jesus speaks in relation to society, is that none of it undergirds just another theory about how people should get along. What was special about what the God of freedom revealed through the given of the Torah and sending of Jesus, is that God alone is the source of the freedom and love that Jesus embodies and the church proclaims. The question we face is whether we are prepared to accept freedom as a condition for living in peace, whether we are frightened by such freedom, or whether we are prepared to risk a life shaped by the God of freedom.   

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On Wealth

Our topic is wealth. At the onset, I’ll admit to adhering to the first definition of wealth in the Oxford English Dictionary, namely, wealth as ‘the condition of being happy; wellbeing’. Though Jesus did not have the OED on hand, it is my contention that what is at stake in the parable he hear this morning is the question: what is true wealth? For Jesus, it is being rich toward God. I’ll come back to Jesus’ response in a moment. For the time being, I would like to suggest that we get very muddled when we apply ourselves to a kind of wealth – a kind of wellbeing – that that has as its goal the taking and use of possessions for control and security; and wealth or wellbeing that is aimed at the giving of life; for life is a gift and is meant to be received with gratitude.

It is sometimes thought, but rarely said in public, that Jesus hates rich people. Think of all the speeches and sermons you have heard over the years that pits the champion of the poor, Jesus, against all the greedy rulers and leaders of his day. What we miss when we read the gospels too quickly is the relationship of wealth to living well. In the tradition of the Old Testament, when it comes to living well, what we are talking about is wisdom.

Recall if you will the story of the two brothers who come to Jesus seeking a judgment to their dispute over their inheritance. We find this episode in the twelfth chapter of St. Luke. In response to the brothers, Jesus provides the parable of the rich farmer who benefited from several good harvests which led to the building of ample storage facilities. Following the rich man’s announcement that life is pretty good, we read, “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”   Instead of giving a customary judgment, Jesus frames the concerns of the brothers within the deeper question of being wise before God. There is a way to live well and a way to live poorly, Jesus seems to be saying. The rich man lives poorly – he is not wise - because he asserts thankless control over what can only be understood as a rather gracious gift: a superabundant crop. This isn’t about God punishing rich people, notes Fred Craddock, there is nothing here of graft or theft; there is no mistreatment of workers or any criminal act. Sun, soil, and rain join to make him wealthy. He is careful and conservative. If he is not unjust, then what is he? He is a fool, says the parable. For his efforts he is visited by God who reminds him that his very life is on loan and maybe required of him at any time by the God who granted him life in the first place. Instead of wellbeing, the farmer settles for something less, a state not-quite becoming of a mature human person; he settled for what he has over who he is: a choice of possessions over being.  And this, Jesus declares, is not the source of true wealth.

To consider the contrast between possession and being is to recognize the difference between what you are and what you have. You are a body; you have a hat. Someone might want to say that we have a body, but it would be a curious usage of ‘have’ since I don’t think many of us would say that a body is something we put on or carry around or place on a rack, like we might a hat. Someone may give you a hat or you may purpose one; bodies are never purchased they are always given, a body, like life itself, can only be a gift.  Despite our best efforts, nothing can bring itself into existence. Always we receive life or our being from another. What this means is this: possessions are fine and good and necessary for human existence but to be wise, to seek wellbeing, is to recognize that who we are fundamentally is not able to possessed for the sake of control or security. Who we are is a matter of gratitude, of learning to see that the very fabric of our being is a sheer gift.

When we consider the giftedness of life, then we can better understand what Jesus is getting at when he speaks of being rich towards God. This, supposedly, is wisdom. Being rich towards God, I suggest, is not doing anything for God as though God needed our help. God has no needs, for God is eternal and changeless. Being rich towards God is recognizing his gift to us, recognizing ourselves as his gift, thanking him. If this sounds rather pedestrian, then well and good; it’s meant to be a lesson in wisdom, in living well, not the uncovering of some unheard of teaching that up until this moment has been buried in a cave. In being rich towards God we are acknowledging that what matters first is what we receive and not what we have through our efforts, or what we desire in order to take the world for our own use. What matters first is that we are loved. To receive life and being from God is axiomatic to a Christian understanding of love.  And love is always a gift.

One question still remains: how has any of this got to do with wealth, with wellbeing? The human animal, and human society in general, flourishes, not to the extent that is possesses riches like the man in the parable, but to the extent that we give life to each other, to the extent that we imitate the creativity of God who is the source of all life and being. To think in these terms is to understand how bizarre it is that the word ‘market’ is often used as a metaphor for human society. Don’t get me wrong, markets are surely a good and necessary part of living together, as are law courts and a nice cup of coffee; but none of these are a useful model for what human society essentially is. If the church has anything to say about human society it is this: we do not live well by building ever more secure fences of possessions around ourselves, but by giving to others space to live. In our attempts to give space for others to live, we imitate our God who gave us life and showed us how to live by sending his Son, Jesus to live a human life in all its fullness. That fact that Jesus ended up murdered by the government is a reminder that living well, loving fully, just might get you killed.

To accept the giftedness of life, and see this as preceding any attempt to define human living as the accumulation of stuff, even good stuff, is to begin the journey towards wisdom. No amount of good will come through speaking about life as a gift if it isn’t accompanied by a certain form of life. The Austrian-born philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once remarked to his friend Drury that, “if you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different.” The difference when it comes to wealth comes through supplanting our incessant need to congratulate ourselves for being rich or powerful or clever, with a manner of life that reflects gratitude. Gratitude is an opening of life to God and each other that recognizes that human flourishing is not a gated community but a community center; human flourishing is not interiority but exteriority; human flourishing is being rich towards the source of all goodness and mercy and love. This might sound like more pie-in-the-sky idealism. On the contrary, I dare say it is the difference between living well and barely living at all.

On Faith

Our topic is faith. For some, faith is a kind of test. Thinking about faith as a test goes something like this: the church proposes certain teachings that are difficult to believe or understand, and the whole point of faith is that we accept these teachings as a way of showing our loyalty.  This kind of faith is what authors like Dan Brown and Philip Pullman find easy fodder for novels and diatribes, and writings which purport to be a novel or a diatribe but which are often neither. The religious beliefs which we are asked to take on faith come from secretly corrupt authorities who use faith as a smokescreen to disable independent thinking. In the 21^st century, this just won’t do, so Brown and Pullman write about faith like it’s a kind of suspended childishness. If only we would grow up.

Another way of thinking about faith is that of wishful thinking. Thinking of faith in this way goes like this: the church proposes certain teachings that are difficult to believe or understand, and the whole point of faith is to embrace the absurd, otherworldly character of this teaching and rely on this as a kind of reason why the teachings are to be followed. Having faith, in this instance, is like a test, but is more closely related to a kind of protest that requires courage. Writers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett find this approach to faith very lucrative. As unofficial representatives of the fashionable locution, the “New Atheists” (what’s wrong with the “old” atheists like Bertrand Russell?), Dawkins and Dennett seek to dismantle faith as courage by pointing out that faith, in this sense, is based on nothing solid at all. It is wishful thinking that has led to a great many atrocities.  One does not need courage to accept the teaching of the church, one needs therapy and, like faith as a test, a great deal of growing up. What is seen and studied in the lab is what’s really real; everything else is a meme gone mad.

Faith as a test and faith as wishful thinking are both ways at looking at the subject. Neither are particular good ways of speaking of faith, but sometimes something is better than nothing. This morning, I wish to speak of faith as the author of the book of Hebrews talks about faith. This approach is very different to what I’ve recalled thus far, because according to Hebrews, faith is about trusting and trying to understand. It has to be with what we do not yet see; yet which draws us to seek after what is over the horizon. Faith is about not being content to understand the things that are obvious, the things we can already see. It is a journey of exploration. I am aware that this sounds remarkably like faith as wishful thinking. The writer of Hebrews counters this charge through recalling the story of Abraham.

Abraham’s is not a tale of accepting the absurd or getting caught up in a series of trials; it is a tale of discovery: a discovery of who it is that summoned him, and a discovery of the promises that God gives. The first thing we hear of Abraham is not that he accepted a series of propositions about God and then journeyed on with all these propositions tucked securely away just in case he ran into a skeptic along the way. Instead, he made a journey into the unknown based on a promise.  The promise of a people and a land would take countless generations to receive a noticeable shape and form, but Abraham believed, he had confidence, that his journey would reveal the One who sought to secure the joy and fulfillment of a chosen nation. Abrahams’ is a story about families, arguments, property and even a miracle. In other words, it is a human story; but a human story interpreted to reveal God’s plans. This is why I suggest faith is a kind of trusting and understanding, for it involves the faculty of reason and the benefit of memory to take the history before us and see the workings of God.

It is important to pause here for a moment in order to say something about the relationship of faith and reason. Notably, faith is not additional reason nor is faith in opposition to reason. It is not as though Abraham got so far with his reason and then had to wait until faith kicked in and carried him that extra bit to the end of his journey. As I mentioned earlier, faith is a seeking of understanding, a yearning for what’s over the horizon. We can do a great deal of thinking and planning using all our human faculties. When we starting speaking of faith, what we saying is that the life that awaits over the horizon, the understanding that we hope for, yearn for, can only come through a gift from God, because God is the source of the divine life of joy and fulfillment that complete us as humans. We yearn for many things, some very good things, but as St. Augustine opined, our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee. Human reason means that we can speak, pray and sing of what we desire; faith means that we can see in the darkness before us the promise of human wellbeing in the light of God.

‘It is not reason that is against us’ said Cardinal Newman more than a century ago, ‘but imagination.’ “The ways in which we ‘see’ the world, theologian Nicholas Lash has written, its story and its destiny; the ways in which we ‘see’ what human beings are, and what they’re for, and how they are related to each other and the world around them; these things are shaped and structured by the stories that we tell, the cities we inhabit, the buildings in which we live and work and play; by how we handle — through drama, art and song — the things that give us pain and bring us joy.” What God gives us in giving us faith is imagination capable of trusting, to have confidence in, the God who has made everything; a God who has no selfish purposes (for what would could the source of everything want?); a God who has made visible through human history his goodness in the story of Abraham and the chosen people of Israel, and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. To begin to understand how this changes everything - how it is a kind of revolution to the selfish and violent ways of our world - is to grasp the significance of faith.

One last thought on the matter.  I have said nothing of faith as the acceptance of certain beliefs that we find, say, in the Creed. What are we to think about the Trinity, the virgin birth and the life to come? Learning requires good teaching as trusting requires the security of loving people. We get pretty far in matters of belief when the church strives to be a good teacher and a loving community. But something else is required of us in order not to fall into the critique of skeptics who claim religious people are in a perpetual state of arrested development. There lies before us the realm of imagination that shapes the way we see the world. As long as we see, as the early Christians saw, a decisive moment of divine revelation in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus - God saying who he is - and as long as there are those who journey confidently under the promises of God, then our own journey can be defined by the choice to trust the voice of God as revealed in scripture, in the creed and ultimately, in the breaking of bread.  Perhaps this sounds like wishful thinking, but I would want to add it is a variety of wishful thinking that shuns not debate or argument, but rather understands that we have faith within reason and we can therefore give an account of what we believe to those who don’t.

Faith, Fr. Herbert McCabe, OP, once said, “is exploring into what people could never achieve by themselves. Faith is the mysterious need in us to get to where we could surely never go. Faith, in fact, is about what we call God." We begin in faith with trusting the promises of God, most importantly, the promise that we are loved and that there is nothing God will not do or face to secure our joy and friendship. What we discover along the way is that the first moments of faith reveal a glimpse of faith’s end: the vision of God, the life of beatitude, the culmination of human history. Jesus called this the kingdom.  We were made for this kingdom, and it is God’s good pleasure to make it our home.

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Missing Jesus

The crèche was set, the children were present, the carols were sung but we were missing baby Jesus. Our porcelain set of Mary, Joseph, Shepherds and animals filled the manger scene awaiting the final crowning occupant. A few moments earlier the “star” had refused to come on. The bulb had burnt out at some point prior to the service. What’s a priest to do? Fake it, that’s what. I switched on some lights reserved for concerts and plays to compensate for the failed heavenly light. Wow! The Manger lit up like the sun; however, the babe was nowhere to be found.

Were we a parish in a southern state this scene might have made a lovely tale of genteel church humor. Imagine:  the local parish priest searches diligently for the baby Jesus encountering along the way all sorts of quirky locals and chuckle-inspiring church traditions. Or imagine this: a cheesy detective story complete with a charming but slightly unstable choir member who steals the baby Jesus in order to wreak revenge on a sour-puss choir director whose expectations for Christmas Eve had driven the choir to zany acts of kleptomania. Were we in Mitford then the missing Jesus might have made for a best seller. Alas, New Jersey is not North Carolina.

The search party following the early Christmas Eve service uncovered nothing new. This didn’t stop our investigations and some tongue-in-cheek alternatives. At one point the crib contained a plush kangaroo, at another, a plump plastic baby who loomed like a giant over the other manger participants. These moments of silliness helped pass the time as we searched, but in the end the crib lay naked bathed in the now restored light of the star. There would be no Jesus on Christmas this year.

The incomplete crèche was a little embarrassing; yet the scene also invited reflection. What does an empty crib suggest? What, if anything, is at stake with a manger layout with all the characters but one? Drawing on John of Damascus, St. Thomas Aquinas spoke of the mystery of the incarnation as making known at once, “the goodness, the wisdom, the justice, and the power or might of God”. Looking at the other figurines surrounding the crib, we might imagine that we have a sufficient display of God’s goodness and power already. Didn’t Mary, Joseph and the shepherds receive visitations from the angels? Did not the stars and heavens display the glory of God’s actions? Isn’t Mary alone with her song of humility enough to show us God’s justice? The wonder in all these episodes is without question. To have Jesus absent, however, is to forfeit how the world and humanity have been taken up into a new relationship with God. In the Word made Flesh, Jesus, all creation has been saved, healed and enhanced. All our talk about God coming to us is fine; the real marvel is how we are elevated to God. Mary, Joseph, the animals and even the angel alone could not get us to that point.

 Aquinas goes on later to consider whether God needed to do anything for us. Yes, God could have “zapped” us and made as whole, healed and the rest; however, it was more ‘appropriate’ or ‘fitting’ (conveniens in Latin), says Thomas, that God send Jesus because, among other things, in doing so we received “sweet faith” in God speaking to us through his Son. Likewise, through the incarnation, God lifted our hopes, set an example before us of living life well, and God brought us to the trust and happy goal of life, that is, to a full share in God’s own divine life. God needn’t have sent his Son to bring about God’s ends; the point that Aquinas stresses is that all creation is better off because he did.

There is now a creeping mood of acceptance around the loss of Mary’s ceramic babe. Reflecting on the meaning of a missing Jesus does not replace the importance of his absence in our manger scene. Once the humor of it dissipated, several parishioners informed me of their concern. This is no laughing matter, they announced, what is a manger without the baby? The whole episode does stray into the realm of “Mitford” every now and then. No matter.  The empty crib teaches us something of how the incarnation is central and fitting to how we are reconciled and healed.  Some of us will continue to search and until then, we will rest in the bold assertion from one of our carols that invites us each year to sing, Joy to the world, the LORD has come.  Come, Lord Jesus, come.